University of Louisville English professor David W. Maurer traces how Kentucky’s legal and illicit whiskey trades grew up side by side after the Whiskey Rebellion sent distillers down the Ohio River to the state’s limestone spring water and cornfields.
Written with a linguist’s ear and a tongue-in-cheek tone, the book documents the moonshiner’s craft and colorful vocabulary — terms like ‘puker’ and ‘weed-monkey’ — as a slice of Kentucky folk life now mostly gone.
Published 2003
156 pages