lasting impression. It was Vickers who first came up with the idea of opening a distillery. The two had met in college in Tennessee. After school, they began homebrewing together, and the hobby took. A civil engineer by trade, Eidam was feeling burnt out professionally by the late 2000s. The friends looked into opening a brewery, but at that time the brewing landscape was already heavily saturated. When Vickers’ work as a developer in Gatlinburg brought him to the lot where Sugarlands now resides, he proposed a different idea: why not a distillery? Startup was slow going, with many variables to parse out, but one element that was never a question was what Eidam and Vickers would produce. Appalachia was, after all, a “Moonshiner’s paradise,” according to acclaimed American travel writer Horace Kephart. It had a long and established history of spirits distillation in place. Hundreds of years ago, immigrants from Scotland and Ireland settled the area because “the land, the ruggedness
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of the country, this was very similar to them,” explains Eidam. “It was just like home, so they naturally migrated into this Appalachian region.” Sugarlands gets its name from one such community profiled in Kephart’s book. The people that landed there were primarily from farming towns where distillation was an essential tool to preserve leftover grain at the end of the season. The resultant spirit could then be stored without risk of spoilage or transported to market where it would be bartered or sold to provide for the family. In the early 20th century, state and local governments began to ban distillation. Instead of wasting leftover crops, the farmers packed up their stills and headed for the backwoods, where they would make their spirit by the light of the moon. Starting a fire to cook the grain risked capture, so the moonshiners began supplementing raw sugar into their wash with a small portion of cracked corn to begin the fermentation. Those ingredients would be dissolved into a barrel of water and allowed to ferment before racking off some
of the liquid, adding in more sugar, and keeping that going in a process analogous to sour mashing in bourbon production. Sugarlands’ first product, the Silver Cloud Tennessee Sour Mash Moonshine, is an homage to those early innovators. “When we decided to open a distillery here we thought it was very important that we tell the story of the history and how moonshine originally was made and were true to that process, which is why we started with that Silver Cloud Moonshine,” says Eidam. Of course, not all moonshine was created equal, especially the kind made before pH meters or hydrometers were widely available, so flavoring emerged as a way to mask inferior product. Though the overall quality has improved significantly over the last hundred years, additions to the spirit became customary. Today, Sugarlands has over 15 varieties of moonshine, many of which utilize traditional flavors like blackberry, peach, and southern sweet tea. But Sugarlands did not just stop at moonshine; they have experienced
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