SHORT MOUNTAIN DISTILLERY Tall Tales from the Short Mountain Written by LISA TRUESDALE /// Photography provided by SHORT MOUNTAIN DISTILLERY
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ooper Melton wasn’t about to let something like Prohibition stop him from doing what he wanted to do. Once a legal whiskey-maker in Cannon County, Tennessee, he didn’t give up on his craft, even after it became illegal in 1920. Using his vast array of trusty distilling equipment — and enlisting the help of his 20 children — he continued making moonshine on Short Mountain for the next 12 years. His ’shine, made with fresh, limestone-filtered water from the nearby cave springs, was legendary for miles around. It eventually caught the attention of gangster Al Capone, who reportedly dispatched caravans of employees from Chicago to pick up booze to supply his hundreds of illegal speakeasies. Decades later, the sprawling, 400-acre property about an hour southeast of Nashville caught the attention of Billy Kaufman, a California native who was anxious to leave behind the glitz of Beverly Hills for a quiet, rural life in the Tennessee hills. Kaufman already had a few homesteading friends in the area, and some family ties, too; his great-grandfather Jesse Shwayder was the founder of Samsonite, and his grandfather Louis Degen helped open a Samsonite factory in nearby Murfreesboro in 1960.
Kaufman longed for the homesteading life his friends had; a distillery wasn’t in his original plans. “I just wanted a big organic farm,” he said, “with a CSA [community-supported agriculture] endeavor.” He got right to work on that, yet he couldn’t help but be fascinated with all the moonshine stories he kept hearing about his new property near the town of Woodbury. “Pretty much everyone in Cannon County is related to a moonshiner,” Kaufman said, perhaps even kin to Melton himself, since he fathered such a large brood. Two of Kaufman’s new friends, old-time moonshiners named Ricky and Ronald, taught him how to distill, and he enjoyed practicing it as a hobby while developing his new farm, never dreaming that he would one day have his own legal distillery there. That all changed in 2009, when the state deregulated alcohol production, legalizing it in all Tennessee counties and not just the three where it had been legal before. “I thought a distillery would be a great way to utilize the property,” he said, “to support the culture of the area, and to carry on the traditions.” Wanting a family-run business just like his great-grandfather’s (and like Melton’s, he realized later), he called on his two brothers, David and Ben, to join in, and they agreed.
“I thought a distillery would be a great way to utilize the property to support the culture of the area, and to carry on the traditions.” — BILLY KAUFMAN
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