Tennessee whiskey. Photo: Flickr / jpenglert

Tennessee whiskey, which has long been the exclusive province of Jack Daniels and George Dickel, may soon be welcoming some new faces to the fold.

The Tennessee legislature this month passed a law permitting the distillation of spirits in 44 counties instead of only the three in which it is currently legal. It's a move some legislators say should generate needed tax revenues for the state and new jobs for its residents.

Artisan distillers predict the relaxed restrictions could also spur a Tennessee whiskey renaissance. The term "Tennessee whiskey" denotes whiskey filtered through sugar maple charcoal, a step known as the "Lincoln County Process" in honor of the county where Jack Daniel pioneered it. In addition to Lincoln, Moore and Coffee are the other two counties where distillation has long been legal.

While the new law allows distillers to produce any sort of legal liquor they choose, Andrew Webber, owner of Kentucky's Corsair Artisan Distillery, suspects many of the dozen or so artisanal spirits makers reportedly eyeing the Volunteer State will experiment with Tennessee whiskey.

Moonshine and more after the jump.

The nation's best-known moonshiner has died just days before he was to report to federal prison.

Marvin "Popcorn" Sutton, 62, died Monday in Parrottsville, Tenn., of an apparent suicide from carbon monoxide poisoning. His fourth wife, Pamela, told the Associated Press that he was supposed to report Friday to federal prison to serve an 18-month sentence.

Legal or not, Popcorn -- who got his name by destroying a bar's 10-cent popcorn machine with a pool cue -- practiced an artisan's craft producing thousands of gallons of white dog in handmade stills hidden in the hillsides of North Carolina and Tennessee.

"He was one of a kind," documentary filmmaker Neal Hutcheson tells Slashfood. His latest film, "The Last One," featured Popcorn in action.

Read more about Popcorn and see him make a still after the jump.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a review of Vlada, a New York bar that specializes in infused vodkas. As I mentioned in my post, my experiences at Vlada had made me nostalgic for the moonshine that I had once enjoyed in Southwest Virginia. Back in the day, I used to buy 'shine by the gallon and infuse it with fruits, herbs, honey, and other ingredients, producing a wide range of aperitifs. While I'm a huge fan of store-bought liqueurs, I have yet to meet the mass-produced tipple that can rival the blueberry-infused moonshine, moonshine-based absinthe, or moonshine krupnikas that I once made.

The more I thought about it, the more I decided that the time had come to restart my experiments in fruit infusion. I had a half bottle of Everclear in the liquor cabinet, which I quickly determined was still relatively fresh and potent. A trip down to the farmer's market gave me a couple of pints of fresh blueberries, which I washed, dried, picked over, and packed in mason jars. I covered the fruit in grain alcohol, closed the lids, and set them in the back of one of my kitchen cabinets. Apart from giving them a daily shake, I was content to let time and the 190-proof alcohol do their work.

A week later, the alcohol was stained a deep purple and the berries were gray. A quick taste assured me that the grain was still mighty strong, but was now infused with a nice blueberry flavor. Wanting something a little more intense, I let a second batch of berries steep for a week in the alcohol. Afterward, I had a very alcoholic, very intensely flavored blueberry liquor. I also had a second batch of slightly sour-tasting blueberry alcohol that I got from running the leftover blueberries through my fruit juicer.

There are some people who it is just plain good to know. When you're in college, for example, the guy with a truck is incredibly helpful, and when you go in to business, the understanding accountant and the slightly unethical lawyer are almost necessities.

A few years ago, my friend John became one of these fabulously helpful people. A lifelong resident of southwest Virginia and a trained chemist, John had a skill set that was uniquely wonderful: he knew how to get hold of moonshine, and he knew how to test it for impurities. While the grain liquor (or "likker," if you prefer) that I got from John wasn't all that cheap, it was completely flavorless, and I soon discovered that it made the perfect carrier for various fruits. Within a couple of months, I had a collection of incredibly delicious infused cordials that I would mix with seltzer or tonic water to produce light, moderately alcoholic spritzers with insanely pure tastes.

I'm talking about alcohol.

I am about halfway through this book called The Devil's Picnic by Taras Grescoe (which I got as Christmas gift and am just now getting to). Though it is not specifically labeled as a food book, the way Tony Bourdain's books are found near the cookbooks at Barnes and Noble, The Devil's Picnic is about the author's journeys through several countries where certain foods are prohibited: poppy seeds in Singapore, imported raw-milk cheeses in the US, and in the first chapter, hjemmebrent in Norway.

"Hjemmebrent" is the Norwegian word for moonshine, which if you're not up with your illegal vernacular, is the term for whiskey or other alcohol that has been distilled illegally, and typically, at night, under the light of the moon (thus the name). Now there may be nothing particularly interesting about moonshining, since we have quite the sordid history of it here in the United States during the Prohibition era, and even today (wine and brewing beer excluded of course). However, in Norway, hjemmebrent is distilled to 96%, making it, as Grescoe says in his book, solely for the purpose of getting completely drunk. "You were sober then you were drunk. It was grim, goal-oriented, and a little sad. And the hangover was like no other."