In Which we Visit the Southern Distilling Company
It was a refreshingly cool Fall day, and Lazarus had convinced me not to work on my day off.
¨Most people work four and a half days a week... if they have to,” he argued. “Why are you working six?”
So we were driving West, to Statesville. The weather was beautifully clear and I was wickedly enjoying going in the opposite direction of my daily commute. It felt as though I were escaping from a trap.
Statesville is located strategically at the intersection of important North-South and East-West transportation routes. Today, these are the major interstate highways I-77 and I-40. In the nineteenth century, they were the major railroad lines of the Atlanta, Tennessee, and Ohio (AT&O) the Western line (today operated by Norfolk and Southern). Thus, Statesville was historically an important distribution hub for tobacco, botanicals, and corn whiskey.
North Carolina farmers found, Lazarus explained, that it was more cost effective to transport their surplus corn to market as whiskey. By the 1870s, some 450 distilleries supplied five principal distributors in Statesville, and it became known as the “Liquor Capital of the World.” If our previous visit to Old Nick Williams had connected us to family business in the eighteenth century, a visit to Statesville was the next logical step.
The city isn’t far away, and soon Lazarus was directing me downtown, to see the Statesville Historical Collection. This collection is a labor of love by amateur historian and hometown boy Steve Hill. I was a hometown boy myself, but I had never imagined anything like this. For some forty-five years, Mr. Hill has scoured auctions, estate sales, garage sales, and antique shops for anything and everything related to Statesville. A part of his collection is housed in a bewildering, two-story rabbit warren of display panels and glass-front cases located in the old Gordon Furniture building. The rest of it is apparently kept off-site and can be seen by appointment.
Lazarus and I eventually found our way to a tall display case in the back corner labeled, “Alcohol, Tobacco, and Drugs: Statesville’s Unspoken History.” It contained several jugs and bottles labeled “Lowenstein & Co: Distillers and Rectifiers,” “J.C. Somers & Co.: Distillers of Poplar Log Corn Whiskey,” “Key & Co.: “Pure Hand Made Corn Whiskey,” and “Old Tar Heel Corn Whiskey.” The case was surrounded by enlarged black-and-white photographs of local law enforcement discovering and destroying bootlegging operations.
“The ‘Key’ of ‘Key & Co.,’ by the way,” Lazarus commented, “was a relative of Francis Scott Key… you know, of the ‘bombs bursting in air’?”
“Where do you get this stuff?” I asked.
“It’s a hobby,” he snickered.
After a leisurely ramble through the rest of the collection, which really has to be seen to be believed, we followed Sullivan Road to the Southern Distilling Company. A stack of oak barrels told us we were in the right place.
The facility was breathtaking. If Old Nick Williams was rustic and intimate, Southern Distilling is thoroughly modern and industrial. The spacious gift shop features a full bar, an attractive sitting area, and even an antique truck, while the distilling floor houses a 2,500-gallon mash cooker, four 5,000-gallon fermenting tanks, a pot still for running test batches, and a forty-foot column still for production. This last is unique: the tallest column still in North Carolina. Everything is spotless and the process is rigorously controlled.
For all that, however, the atmosphere is warm and friendly, befitting Statesville’s small-town feel. Tom, our tour guide, was an especially good sport: he took Lazarus’s barrage of questions in stride, as though he dealt with inquisitive opossums every day. Our timing had been good, and the highlight of the tour was a taste of an unaged bourbon distillate straight off the still. It was about 135 proof, and made Lazarus sneeze.
The erstwhile “Liquor Capital of the World” had been devastated by prohibition. Incredibly, Alston Davidson Watts (1867-1927), the NC Representative behind the Watts Act of 1903 (this was the act that outlawed rural distilleries, leading to the creation of “Williams, NC”) was a native of Iredell County, and later lived in Statesville. Statesville was voted dry in 1903, and state-wide prohibition went into effect in 1909. While it was repealed in 1935, two years after the Twenty-First Amendment repealed national prohibition, the sale of liquor remained illegal in Statesville until 1973. This was “by the bottle,” Tom explained. Liquor “by the drink” was illegal until 1985.
“On the bright side,” he added with a grin, “we got NASCAR out of it.”
Southern Distilling, established in 2013, was the first distillery in Statesville since 1903. Their signature product is Southern Star bourbon, which is sold in Standard, Single Barrel, Reserve, and Cask Strength varieties. They also offer a wheated, un-aged, or “white” whiskey (which I’ll discuss in a later post), and “Double Shot,” a coffee/bourbon liqueur.
“This is really exceptionally fine,” I marveled after the first sip of the Standard Bourbon.
“You like the spice notes?” Lazarus smiled. “This is a high-rye mash: about 36%, significantly higher than most of the common bourbons.”
“Yes, I like it a lot… and it’s so refined!”
“That would probably be the column still: it produces a very pure product…” Lazarus quivered with laugher and added in an undertone, “prodigiously productive and powerfully precise, it produces a positively posh product…”
He rolled over on his back. Tom motioned and asked, “Is he OK?”
“Perfect!” Lazarus hiccuped, and then quivered with fresh chuckles.
The Double Shot was also a treat. It has a velvety mouth feel and a luxurious flavor reminiscent of Irish Cream, but more chocolate-y.
“Why are you writing that?” asked Lazarus, looking at my notes. “This is better than Irish Cream!”
I finished the visit with the house Old Fashioned. I don’t usually drink cocktails, since they always seem to dilute the spirits too much, but I like the Old Fashioned. In this case, the spice flavors of the Southern Star bourbon perfectly complimented the citrus and bitters, and the drink was finished with bourbon-infused cherries (available in the gift shop). Between the refined elegance of Old Fashioned and Tom’s stories about Statesville, I was reluctant to leave. Lazarus was already nodding off, however; the 135-proof sample from the still had caught up with him.
As I put him in the back seat of the car, he awoke long enough to say, “Beats working, eh, boss?”
He had me there.
NB. Minor corrections were made to this article on 12/2/2019. Also, while Southern Star Straight Bourbon was made with a column still, it was not the still in Statesville. According to one of the founders, Vienna Barger, “they were distilled in Indiana, as identified on the label, and were carefully curated, warehoused, batched, and blended by the Southern Distilling Company. They are ‘small batch bourbons’ selected for the initial launch of our Southern Star Bourbon brand.” Bourbon and rye whiskeys distilled in-house are currently aging, and will be released when finished.