Top Shelf Distillers Reunion Moonshine
Moonshine is often one of the first spirits to flow from the stills of new distillers. The benefit that moonshine is ready as soon as it is produced means quick sales and much-needed cashflow during lean start-up times. And with no regulations to define it, some of these distillers are using their creativity and ingenuity to refurbish moonshine’s name. Its surging popularity at the hand of talented distillers often turns what began as a cash-generating necessity into a core distillery product. This is exactly what has happened at Top Shelf Distillers in Perth, Ontario.
Canada has a long tradition of covert moonshiners. Long before Confederation, as wealthy industrialists from abroad developed a flourishing distilling industry here, tiny backwoods stills quietly converted sugar, fruit, grain, potatoes, animal feed and anything kicking around the pantry into potable local alcohol.
These two distilling streams never really crossed paths and after 1890, when the Canadian government decreed that whisky must be aged for two years, any home distillers with aspirations to distil legally simply disappeared. It wasn’t until a decade ago when legal microdistilling emerged as a movement in Canada that moonshine could be found in the same places where we buy our big-brand liquor.
During my childhood in BC, and in Eastern Ontario, stories of moonshiners were common, and bottles of a clear liquid that we were not to touch – if you did, you’d go blind – sometimes appeared on a friend’s kitchen shelf. Surprisingly, his parents didn’t wear glasses and more often than not, the jars that lined the shelf were not clear, having been augmented with flavourful fruit, herbs, honey and spices.
Top Shelf Distillers has renewed a local legal distilling tradition that had ended with the Ontario Temperance Act of 1916. John A. Stewart who operated two Perth malt distilleries at the time, closed both and converted the stills to making medical alcohol for another of his enterprises, Wampole Drugs. Although the end was already in sight for Stewart, as rye whisky displaced malt, The Temperance Act had no impact on moonshiners who continued to operate out of sight in sugar shacks and square-timber barns.
So, when Top Shelf opened in 2014 and began distilling, they didn’t so much revive moonshining in Eastern Ontario, as bring it into the open. To the original all-grain (rye, corn, barley malt) Reunion 100-proof Moonshine, at 50% abv, they have since added Maple, Buttertart, Apple Pie, Wild Blueberry, Raspberry, Ontario Cherry, Irish Cream and Gingerbread Moonshines in strengths ranging from 23 to 30% (20% for the Irish Cream). They also make gin, vodka, mint liqueur and some stellar whiskies.
Tasting notes for Reunion Moonshine 100 Proof.
Clean and somehow creamy aromas of unripe and recently harvested grain (green wheat for example), malt, new make whisky and hints of earthiness. Some nose tickle precedes a sweet, hot and peppery but not blistering palate that shows restrained herbal notes and a vague citric bitterness. More grain emerges as you swallow, along with hints of grain dust – like a sack of chicken feed. Unflavoured moonshine is not meant to be rich in flavour, and this one, though reminiscent of clean grain reminds me of the sweet malty clearic that malt distillers in Scotland are said to drink. The sweetness lingers on a medium finish with tickling white pepper and earthy herbal tones. By morning, all that remains in the empty glass is the aroma of air.
