EP 534. Moonshine Creek, NB

Ramsey Russell: Welcome back to Mojo’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast, where today, I am in, I guess the middle of New Brunswick. I’ve never been to New Brunswick before, and today’s story starts as a change of fortunes because six, seven, eight weeks on the road, I wake up late. I don’t mean a little late, I mean a lot late. Hey, heads up, Apple, iPhones do not always flip over to the time zone. Mine did not. So I was an hour behind. My host is out in the field setting up decoys. He calls, “Are you on the road?” No. Yeah, I was an hour late, but I got there before the ducks did. My buddy Greg Mula was hanging on for dear life. Trust you me, we were going down the highways at the speed of light. We got there in plenty of time. And then we strike one, strike two and I can’t remember strike three. We went to see the world’s largest covered bridge. It’s closed, but that’s where a change of fortune happened because we would have crossed that bridge and gone on back another way. But instead, we backtracked and started coming. We got to a stop sign, and there’s a sign up the hill that says, “Distillery, Distill, Ratchet.” And Greg says, “Go check it out.” Heck yeah. So we go check it out. I want to introduce you all to my new friend, Jeremiah Clark from New Brunswick, who runs Moonshine Creek Distillery. I’m gonna say there’s a dozen and a half flavors and bottles up here. Greg and I have sampled them all. And Jeremiah, how the heck are you today?

Jeremiah: Doing great.

Ramsey Russell: Were you born and raised here in New Brunswick?

Jeremiah: Yeah, right here. Probably 5 km from the distillery itself.

Ramsey Russell: Really? What’s it like growing up in New Brunswick? This is my second day in New Brunswick.

Jeremiah: Well, very rural.

Ramsey Russell: Very rural. I surprised.

Jeremiah: Yeah, you gotta like outdoor sports and things like hunting and skidooing sled stuff like that, yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Skidooing?

Jeremiah: Yeah, skidooing. I mean, what do you call it? We call it skidooing here.

Ramsey Russell: You all play hockey?

Jeremiah: Oh, a lot of hockey.

Ramsey Russell: “Moonshine Creek isn’t just a hunt—it’s a pilgrimage. The cold air, the silence, the way the ducks slice through the fog… it’s pure wilderness.”

Ramsey Russell: It surprised me because I’ve spent the last six weeks or so out in western Canada, the provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, hunting big water over around Lake Erie in Ontario, and wow, 14 hours later, I’m in mountains. I did not expect mountains. I did not expect rolling mountains driving by clear cuts, pulp plants, logging. Logging is a big thing here.

Jeremiah: Yeah, forestry is huge. Yeah, a lot of rolling hills. There’s a bit of the Appalachian range through here too. You’ll notice if you head north of where we are about 30 minutes, you end up in an area called Perth Andover.

Ramsey Russell: Yep.

Jeremiah: Very reminiscent of being down kind of in the Smoky Mountain area.

Ramsey Russell: Matt told me that the AT Trail comes through here. It almost ends right up in here. The AT Trail is that Appalachian Trail that goes all the way down to the Carolinas.

Jeremiah: Yeah, that’s true.

Ramsey Russell: And also it starts at Mount Katahdin, which is formerly in Maine. But he told me on a clear day, you can see it from here.

Jeremiah: Oh, yeah, we’re right on the border. If you’re up on one of these ridges here, you can see Maine clear as day. I mean, it’s that close.

Ramsey Russell: Really?

Jeremiah: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Somebody told me this morning the reason my alarm clock was late and my phone had not checked over to New Brunswick time, which is Atlantic Time, was because somewhere there’s another time zone. And I must have been reading off of that tower, and they said it’s not far. He said, sometimes when he drives around, boom, his phone swaps over to that tower, and he’s an hour behind everything.

Jeremiah: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: That’s crazy. It’s like a time warp. It’s like the land time forgot right here in New Brunswick.

Jeremiah: Oh, yeah. I used to say to people, I moved around, lived a few places. I lived down in Pennsylvania for a year. And yeah, I mean, you come back and everything’s right where you left it. Things don’t change much here.

Ramsey Russell: What did you do for fun growing up in New Brunswick, like when you were a child, I’m thinking when you were a kid, when you were baby-gun age, what did you do in this part of the world for fun as a child? How did you entertain yourself?

Jeremiah: A lot of stream fishing, hockey in the winters, and, I mean, building forts in the woods. You gotta get out in nature here to entertain yourself. Keep in mind, when I was a young man, we didn’t have cell phones. I mean, you’d be lucky if you had a Nintendo at a house. So we weren’t playing video games.

Ramsey Russell: Life was better back then. I think it was.

Jeremiah: I agree.

Ramsey Russell: I couldn’t live without my cell phone today. That’s my lifeline to the outside world. It’s how I make my living. But, boy, I’m glad we didn’t have it when I was a kid.

Jeremiah: Yeah, I hear you.

Ramsey Russell: What did you think you wanted to be, Growing up, like we all in grade school and middle school, get asked the question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” What did you think you wanted to be when you grew up? A moonshiner?

Jeremiah: Well, I wanted to be a businessman. Yeah, my family growing up, that’s what you aspired to be as a businessman. And you know, my grandfather was always an entrepreneur, and my uncles.

Ramsey Russell: What did they do, Jeremiah?

Jeremiah: Well, my grandfather, he had a farm. They lived out in a rural area here called “the Back,” sitting right on the border. Like, you walk through the woods in 10 minutes, you’d be in Maine.

Ramsey Russell: Maine.

Jeremiah: Yeah. So that area. 10 kids in my mother’s family, that’d be on my mother’s side. He’s a Henderson. And he was paralyzed from the waist down. He had a tree fall in the woods. He was felling trees and it fell on him.

Ramsey Russell: Wow.

Jeremiah: And this was after he never got deployed in World War II, but he was training and training others for tanks and stuff. And anyway, so he was back, and a tree fell in the woods. They had to airlift him to get him to a hospital to help him out. But after that he had to do what it took to keep the family going. So they had a farm. He’d still butcher. He’d cut people’s hair and be the barber. And it wasn’t long before he figured out he could make a few dollars bootlegging too.

Ramsey Russell: So he did bootleg?

Jeremiah: Yeah, he bootlegged. And see, at that time, this is the Bible Belt of New Brunswick this area.

Ramsey Russell: It’s the Bible Belt of Canada, would you say? I’m from Mississippi. We’re the buckle of the Bible Belt.

Jeremiah: That’s what they say. This area right here, Carleton County, this would be the buckle of the Bible Belt. So you go to other parts of New Brunswick, people will say this upper part of the St. John River Valley where we are, they’ll say that’s the buckle of the Bible Belt. You go to these towns here, you’ll notice, a town of a thousand people, it’s got five churches. You know, that’s not uncommon. Even these rural roads have their own churches.

Ramsey Russell: Really?

Jeremiah: Yeah. Things are changing a little bit. I mean, I don’t know if people are getting God online now or what, but, I mean, they’re building more of the mega-churches you would see kind of down south. Like, we’re getting more of those amalgamated churches. One really large one, fewer smaller ones now.

Ramsey Russell: People hate this joke back home, but I can’t help but tell it. You know, back home, we’re in the Bible Belt also, in the state of Mississippi. Heck, we still got dry counties. And you put four Baptists in a pickup truck, what else you got a fifth. It’s probably rolling around under the seat somewhere.

Jeremiah: Yeah, and that’s here, kind of what led my grandfather to bootleg a bit is. Well, he had a car. Not everybody had cars, obviously, back in the 1960s and 1970s. Still, a lot of people without cars, you might have a horse or just wait for someone else to give you a ride to town. He found himself taxiing a lot into town to get liquor for people, and he got tired of that and figured he could make a few bucks just if he already had it at the house. Before he knew it, he was also picking up the liquor for the other bootleggers. But they liked to drink. My grandfather didn’t drink.

Ramsey Russell: He was a runner.
Jeremiah: Yeah. So he was picking up. They were doing runs.
Ramsey Russell: What car did he have?
Jeremiah: Oh, he was always big into Buicks.
Ramsey Russell: Big old battleship Buick.
Jeremiah: Yeah. And then my mom tells stories. Dealerships would drive the cars out to him so he could try it because, keep in mind, paralyzed some ways down. But he could press on his legs enough to hit the gas and stuff. So that’s how he had kind of some control over the brake and the gas a bit. But she said that the dealerships would drive out, let him go for a test drive.
Ramsey Russell: Buicks had a big old motor. Was he like a chill driver, or was he on them back roads hauling tail?
Jeremiah: Oh, no, he took his time. Yeah, he was pretty safe about it.
Ramsey Russell: So he would go down to the States and bring it back?
Jeremiah: Yeah, that’s right. So he’d find himself going over to Holton, Maine.
Ramsey Russell: Was he bringing back labeled whiskey?
Jeremiah: Yeah, but he’d put it in the vehicle. My mother would say he’d hide it in the carburetor and places like that. He’d bring it over, pour it into Canadian bottles, and then bootleg it to people. I hear stories even today. People say, “Oh, your grandfather, he’d sell liquor to me but not to other people.” They always made it seem like you had to have a close relationship with him to get it. I always found it comical, but they’d say the bottles were always cracked, though. They were never, you know, that tamper seal was always broken. They figured he was watering it down. But really, what he was doing was pouring it over from the American bottles to the Canadian ones, so people wouldn’t know he was getting it cheaper over there and selling it here.

Ramsey Russell: “Sink boxes here demand respect. You’re not just hunting—you’re part of the landscape, invisible until the moment you pull the trigger.”.

Ramsey Russell: Did you ever hear of legit stories over here of real moonshiners?
Jeremiah: Yeah, you hear about them a little bit, but it wasn’t that big of a problem here. I mean, they used to confiscate stills, but no one was ever charged for it. Not a lot. I mean, post-Prohibition, which was 1917 to 1927, after that alcohol was pretty easy to get, so there wasn’t a lot of need to moonshine.
Ramsey Russell: But as I recall my history, you all wasn’t going through Prohibition during American Prohibition, right? I think a lot of bootleggers were coming up here and bringing Canadian whiskey back.
Jeremiah: They were, yeah. It was a shorter period of time for us, and ours was looser. You could go to the doctor and get a prescription for alcohol. For the longest time here, they even had a daily ration they thought you should have. They called them talcum powder pharmacies. You’d walk in, see all the talcum powder, and then go up and ask for a prescription for, you know, “Oh, I got a toothache.” “Well, you need some whiskey.”
Ramsey Russell: In the free state of Tallahatchie County, Mississippi, very remote duck country in the state of Mississippi, to this day, there are still 55-gallon drums. I walked out through the woods duck hunting and walked up on 55-gallon drums with hatchet marks in them. One of the biggest businesses on Highway 32 that runs up through that remote area were stores that made their living just selling sugar. That’s what they were there for. They were sugar distributors for those moonshiners.
Jeremiah: The problem up here was that the Canadian government didn’t want Prohibition. It was one of the few sources of taxes, even back then, and they didn’t want that messing with their tax revenue. So they didn’t really want to pull Prohibition because there were only so many industries they were taxing. Liquor taxes really built our democracy and universal healthcare.
Ramsey Russell: Same taxes?
Jeremiah: Yeah, even to this day, they do.
Ramsey Russell: Was it always as highly taxed in Canada as it is now? I mean, it’s pretty high. I’m thinking tobacco, buddy, I would not be a tobacco user in Canada.
Jeremiah: As long as I can remember, it’s always been cheaper to buy it in the U.S.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah, really.
Jeremiah: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: That’s all show No Canadians down on drinking beer and liquor now.
Jeremiah: No, I mean, you’ve got to do something on a cold night. But I’ll tell you, for a barrel of whiskey sitting there, I owe the government about $1,500 for every barrel that’s there. Now think of the scale of some of these larger producers.
Ramsey Russell: How much is that barrel of whiskey worth without taxes?
Jeremiah: Without taxes, it depends how much you sell a bottle for. But let’s say, you sell a bottle for $60.
Ramsey Russell: Does that $1,500 represent 50% of the cost in tax per bottle?
Jeremiah: You could say that’s 15%. You’re probably going to gross $1,000 once it’s bottled sold. That’s just the federal government’s taxation portion. The provincial tax is probably going to be $5,000 of that $10,000.
Ramsey Russell: Wow, that’s a 20% tax.
Jeremiah: Yeah, it compounds. When I package something, let’s say I have a bottle for $30, I sell it to the province to sell in their liquor stores here for about $12. Out of that $12, I owe the federal government $3. That leaves me with maybe $9 to try to make a profit and reinvest. Everything above that $12 to $30 is the province’s markup and taxation. They say that pays for a lot of public services. Some people worry they’ll go the way of cigarette packs and put warnings or pictures of cirrhosis of the liver on bottles. I don’t see that happening, there’s too much taxable revenue off alcohol in Canada. We wouldn’t have healthcare without it.
Ramsey Russell: Do you think that’s why Canada federally legalized cannabis, to get that sin tax?
Jeremiah: Oh, for sure.
Ramsey Russell: To finance social medicine and social programs?
Jeremiah: Oh, definitely.
Ramsey Russell: Wow. Has that put a dent in the liquor business?
Jeremiah: A little bit. The younger generation is more health-conscious. I see them leaning more towards edibles, like marijuana gummies and such. You go over to the reserve here in town, geez, you can’t throw a stone without hitting a couple of pot shops. They’re everywhere. They’re pretty industrious, set up like lemonade stands. I kid you not.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah.
Jeremiah: You’ve got to see it.
Ramsey Russell: You started off as a bartender. How long did you bartend?
Jeremiah: Geez, I think on and off from the time I turned 19, which is the drinking age here.
Ramsey Russell: Nineteen is the drinking age?
Jeremiah: Yeah, 19.
Ramsey Russell: Today?
Jeremiah: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: Okay.
Jeremiah: But I always worked in kitchens when I was younger, dishwasher, and server. When I got old enough to start slinging drinks, I finally could. Here, it’s a gig economy. You’ve always got two or three jobs, always a gig to go to. So I’d be painting houses, laying floors, trimming out kitchens or something, and bartending as well. Didn’t matter what you did. I always had a side job as a bartender.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Were you ever a full-time bartender?
Jeremiah: Oh, yeah.
Ramsey Russell: Oh, yeah.
Jeremiah: Yeah, that would’ve been my main job for nights. I’d do that maybe five days a week, and in the mornings, I might be painting and crack-filling walls in a house or something.
Ramsey Russell: Describe some of the bars. Was it more like “Cheers,” or was it more like a hole in the wall, more like a roadhouse?
Jeremiah: A working man’s bar. That’s what we’d call it, a working man’s bar. You’d get a mix of all sorts of people. They weren’t the real la-di-da higher class. You’d get blue-collar guys, their families, coming in. On a Friday night, maybe you’d have a little music, supper, and a couple of drinks. Keep in mind, bars here close at 2 a.m. Everyone’s out by 2:30. The younger crowd comes in at 11, already liquored up. You get the responsible crowd until about 9 o’clock, they clear out. Then you get the younger, wilder crowd you’ve got to contend with.

Ramsey Russell: I’ve always thought bartending would be an interesting job. I mean, cause it’s fun, it’s people-oriented. You probably hear a lot of stories. What’s some of the crazy stuff you experienced all these years? You’re in your 40s now, you started off at 19, so half your life you’ve been in this business. What was it like being a bartender? You’re bound to have some good stories about being a bartender. You’re bound to have. I mean, look, you take female hormones and male hormones and emotions and mix it with, infuse it with alcohol. Oh boy.

Jeremiah: Oh yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Everything from fistfights to tears. I mean, you’ve heard, seen it all. You’re bound to have.

Jeremiah: Well, it’s a small town, I’ll tell you for one. So it’s interesting, you know, everybody out there. You’d watch marriages form and unfold in front of your eyes. I mean, a lot. And you know, again, pretty salacious stories. And I’m not too proud to admit I probably played, you know, my hand in a few of those breakups myself because, small town and bachelor. But there’s not a lot to entertain yourself like, say, here. So I mean, you find a form of entertainment, but it is very small. And you know, you could be the center of gossip if you wanted to be. But we always called it kind of our bartender’s credo, you don’t tell.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, because a bartender, now if you think about a small community, a bartender, I mean, you could be like a gossip column in a newspaper if it wasn’t for the bartender’s creed.

Jeremiah: Yeah, that was pretty much it. I’d have to remind the new guys there if I was training them about, you know, you can have your fun stuff. You just don’t tell anybody. If you watch other people having their fun, you still don’t tell anybody. Because first of all, we’re not inviting drama into this bar. You know, you’re not gonna have a job very long if people won’t come in here because you don’t know how to keep a secret, for one. So I mean, that was a lot of it in a small town. A lot of it’s just salacious stuff. I mean, that’s mainly when people ever.

Ramsey Russell: Get like, just come in whatever order, like I say on TV, order another drink and order another drink, and before you know it, they were just spilling their guts to you, and you had to just sit there and listen to it whether you wanted to hear it or not.

Jeremiah: Oh yeah, yeah. I’d say some of the worst ones that, in my memory, that would happen when you’d get. That would actually be the local RCMP officers. The police officers would come in. I mean, those guys, pretty isolated community for them. And I remember one of the local bars that’s burned down now, with one of the local bars here. We had a guy and geez, he had a few drinks in him and man, the mouth. He would locker room talk beyond locker room talk, but he just wanted to vent and he just wanted to be one of the boys and geez, you’d hear some of the things.

Ramsey Russell: Were those guys Say a lot.

Jeremiah: Yeah, they do. I’ll tell you though, what happened. There’s one particular fellow that, you know, comes to mind, we’re talking about it. It wasn’t long after he’d come in and do that, that there was a pretty much a bust of RCMP officers that were out fooling around with a high school girl. He was one of the guys, he got run out of town. Yeah, but he, man, the way he talked and stuff is that, you know, it was interesting. But I wouldn’t hear the regular blue-collar guys talk like that.

Ramsey Russell: But there’s nothing more honest they say than children and drunks. I mean, you’re at a bar, you’re the bartender, you’re serving them up and serving them up and serving them up. I mean, people just, they talk, man, people talk, their real personality comes out. You may know a guy your whole life and then, then you go climbing a duck blind with him or go to a bar with him. Wow, I didn’t know that.

Jeremiah: Yeah, it was some revelations for sure. Revelations. And I think sometimes, if we’re talking about the local RCMP and drinking and driving being a problem here. Everything’s very rural. So I mean, that’s a big thing here for them to keep an eye on that. And I find sometimes I’d be leaving the bar and I feel like maybe they said too much, so they’d pull me over from time to time just to remind me that.

Ramsey Russell: Would they really?

Jeremiah: Oh, yeah. Just remind me, that maybe I should be quiet about some things.

Ramsey Russell: Really?

Jeremiah: That’s why I always felt that way because, like, what other reason would you have to pull me over? You know, I’m the bartender. You know everybody’s vehicles here. It’s not a mystery who’s driving, you know, that Tacoma or something.

Ramsey Russell: Drinking and Driving is a big deal in Canada.

Jeremiah: It is.

Ramsey Russell: It’s a big deal everywhere. As a daddy and a husband, I don’t want, nobody drinking and driving. But up here, it’s a fellow. Like, I’ve had clients and friends get to the Canadian border. They got a DUI back in college or something, and it’s just, it’s a misdemeanor back in the day. They come up here to the Canadian border to get turned back, and it’s a felony. You’re not welcome.

Jeremiah: Yeah, it’s a big deal. They really crack down on it. You know, I’d say my industry, it does make it challenging to run a bar these days because, we’re too small for Ubers. We don’t have public transit. Good luck biking home at 2 in the morning at minus 20 degrees Celsius. I mean, I would sometimes do the right thing and offer someone a ride home. Even that would get me in a bit of trouble. They didn’t like that either.

Ramsey Russell: Do you ever do as a bartender? Do you ever have to cut somebody off?

Jeremiah: All the time.

Ramsey Russell: Like, what’s the telltale sign?

Jeremiah: Well, usually slurred speech is a big one. But also, too, that’s the tough thing here, is someone could show up with a few drinks, and we have something called duty of care. I have to determine how much they’ve had to drink, how much I can serve them, and I have to cut them off. It’s hard in a small town because a lot of the bar owners want you to keep pushing drinks. They need to be open, so you have to make a judgment call a lot of times. So it’s not uncommon for the local bartender to say, hey, if you want to keep having drinks, give me your keys, we’ll sort out a ride home. And, you know, they try to do kind of a civil duty of sorts and help you out in a small town. So, I mean, we’re very courteous and look after one another. Every once in a while, you get the occasional jerk who just, you can’t say no to, and it turns into a big ordeal. And I always found here you didn’t need bouncers in bars. I mean, if that’s your local bar, they look after it. The patrons do. I never really had to kick anybody out. You know, guys at the end of the bar are going to take care of it.

Ramsey Russell: Really, the Patrons take care of it.

Jeremiah: That’s right. Because they’re not going to let you come into their bar and cause a problem. I mean, they’re not looking for trouble, but they want to make sure they’re keeping the peace here.

Ramsey Russell: That’s what they go to relax, like you said earlier, nobody wants drama.

Jeremiah: No, that’s right.

Ramsey Russell: You’re there to relax and escape drama.

Jeremiah: That’s right. And you’re going to see this fellow again when you’re gassing up or at the grocery store or something. I mean, you’re going to see each other again, and you just kind of treat it as water under the bridge. You don’t hang a hat on it and make a deal. And you don’t want anyone to get a DUI either. I mean, they’ve got to get to work somehow, and they’ve got to earn a wage. Again, you need a vehicle here. So, I mean, very rural area. You notice here everything is, I’m talking kilometers, I guess, here in Canada. You know, everything is 30 minutes apart. I mean, I’d say.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Well, I’ve noticed that here. Everywhere I go is 30 minutes.

Jeremiah: Yeah, that’s right. We talk distance in time and not in direction or kilometers or miles.

Ramsey Russell: Well, something else about New Brunswick. Say I’ve been out west, and, you know, you go two clicks and make your way by clicks, miles. You all ain’t got that here. There’s no section-line road through here that I’ve seen. It’s like Mississippi. It’s just wrapped around and curvy every which ways.

Jeremiah: Yeah, here you’ll see that river. Everything is upriver, downriver. That’s a sense of direction. So, someone’s gonna tell you 30 minutes upriver, an hour downriver. They might say this side of the river, the other side of the river. You know, they’re not really saying much about north, east, west, or south. Everything is in terms of proximity of the river. Yeah. So, I mean, that’s kind of it here. I always say we’re riverbillies.

Ramsey Russell: Riverbillies.

Jeremiah: Because everything’s about that river, you know, and that’s been kind of the lifeblood of New Brunswick, your proximity to the St. John River.

Ramsey Russell: Really?

Jeremiah: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: That’s it, isn’t it? You know, it just occurred to me, if I did have a few too many beers at the bar out in western Canada, all I got to do is go straight and then do a 90-degree turn every now and again. But here, it’s like a roller coaster, some of the roads we’ve been on.

Jeremiah: Yeah, I guess service roads and farm roads that have been turned into actual paved roads at some point. That’s why they don’t make a lot of sense.

Ramsey Russell: Change the subject. Oh, I got one more question about you being a bartender and now the owner of Moonshine Creek Spirits. Do you drink yourself?

Jeremiah: Yeah, yeah, I drink in moderation.

Ramsey Russell: Moderation.

Jeremiah: I drink in moderation.

Ramsey Russell: Was it always that way? No, I just remember, I can remember one time knowing somebody that worked at Baskin-Robbins, the home of 33 flavors of ice cream, and they said every kid that showed up, you could eat all you wanted. It was just a perk of the job. Eat all you want because, sooner or later, you were sick of it, and you never ate ice cream again. You were just sick of ice cream. And I just wanted to ask, being a bartender, spending half your life in this industry, do you still like to drink alcohol?

Jeremiah: Yeah, I do. I find now, I treat it with a different respect where it’s a profession, you know. Especially now that we’re distilling and making whiskey and rum.

Ramsey Russell: A lot of it had to do with age, too. I was intemperate in my youth, and I would drink. But now I know. You know what I am saying?

Jeremiah: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: One or two drinks, boom, time for bed. Well, that’s my third or fourth drink. I wake up in the morning regretting it.

Jeremiah: I hear it. That’s my problem. I’ll go 0 to 60. I say only one speed, so I have a little tipple here and there. But, I mean, if I do much more than that, it’s going to be a long night to an early morning, you know, and I don’t want to sleep on the couch for a week.

Ramsey Russell: I had to ask that question, you know, occupational hazards of being around it all. But I’m glad to know, I mean, I don’t know how you could have such an impressive lineup that Greg and I have sampled. I don’t know how you could have such an impressive lineup without tasting it yourself, developing it. It’s got to reflect a lot of your personal taste.

Jeremiah: Yeah, it’s true. I mean, being a bartender, well formally, we do a bit of it now still. But just growing up in a household, too, where liquor wasn’t taboo like in a lot of houses here. So, you get to taste quite a bit. My parents liked to have company.

Ramsey Russell: When you were a bartender, did you ever have to wing it? Would anybody come in and just ask for some off-the-wall drink you’d never heard of? You just wing it?

Jeremiah: Yeah, I mean, I was had a cocktail book with me. A lot of times, people would come in, ask, they already know what’s in it. But it got to a point where people wanted to stump the bartender. And that’s part of why I thought to myself, I gotta be really good at this. I don’t want to be the stumped bartender.

Ramsey Russell: Right.

Jeremiah: If you come in and ask me something, not only do I want to know about it, but I’m gonna give you an information overload.

Ramsey Russell: Do you have one in a shaker cup? Do you have a little technique, shaking that cup over your head, being all decorative and stuff?

Jeremiah: A little bit. I used to do it a bit more than I do now, like practice the flare, bottle flips, and stuff thinking I was you, Tom Cruise Cocktail or something.

Ramsey Russell: What I was thinking, yeah.

Jeremiah: Collar and stuff. But, I mean, those days are kind of behind me now.

Ramsey Russell: Is there a big difference in what kind of cocktails women ordered versus what men ordered?

Jeremiah: Yeah, I used to always say, you know, a man will come in, so, a girl will get a sweet drink, something really easy to drink, and a guy would get a really stiff drink. She’d be done with that really sweet drink first. Before he’s done with the stiff drink, she might have a second one. She goes to the bathroom, and he drinks her sweet drink before he finishes his stiff drink. I see that a lot. People come in, and it’s just kind of that masculinity part of it, they’ve got something to prove. Same when you’d be at a party. A girl walks in with Twisted Teas or something, you know, and a guy walks in with a bottle of Jack. And, you know, you leave the party, and it’s pretty much a full bottle of Jack. But all those Twisted Teas are gone, and she barely drank any.

Ramsey Russell: If you had to say there was a definitive drink for a woman, what would it be?

Jeremiah: In these parts here?

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Jeremiah: Oh, geez.

Ramsey Russell: It’s bound to be the same cocktail they drink somewhere else.

Jeremiah: Yeah, they have one they call the Porn Star. It’s not like the European Porn Star. Here, it’s like Sourpuss and Bols Blue and Sprite and Grenadine or something, maybe lime. Anyway, just sugar on sugar. Both those liqueurs, I think, are not over 17% alcohol. By the time you dilute it with the pop and everything, I mean, it’s like 3% alcohol.

Ramsey Russell: That versus a European Porn Star?

Jeremiah: European Porn Star is, it’s got passion fruit, vanilla vodka, and they do a little sidecar champagne with it or sparkling water. It’s a little more high-end and elegant. But here, it’s just a mess of sugar. I barely call that a cocktail. I mean, it’s just drinking soda with more sugar in it, is what it feels like to me.

Ramsey Russell: Well, the problem with all that sugar, it fills you up. It’s like dessert. You want a little bit, not a lot.
Jeremiah: Yeah. I think too. Here in these parts, I find people drink to get drunk. They don’t drink to enjoy the drink and stuff. So whatever does the job and makes it painless, that’s what they want.
Ramsey Russell: Takela shots, baby.
Jeremiah: Yeah, those ones, I don’t do so much anymore, but I could sit and easily drink pretty much a bottle of scotch in the evening if you just gave me a bag of ice, and I’d sit and just drink a few ounces at a time.
Ramsey Russell: That’s right.
Jeremiah: And I mean, that often gets me in trouble.

Ramsey Russell: To this day, I’d say my favourite is, my buddy, I don’t know what the formal name is, My buddy called it Woo Woo, and it was cranberry vodka and peach schnapps. That’s it. Just no recipe to it. You know, the women, it seems like, wanted heavier to the peach schnapps. Men wanted heavier to the vodka. But they go down way too quick. I said, “Well, where’d you come up with the name Woo Woo?” He said, “Man, my buddy told me about that, and I made some at the house. And my wife, well, I knew it was on. She was on our kitchen counter waving her bra, yelling Woo Woo.”
Jeremiah: I think they call that a Sex on the Beach, though. It implies the same thing, I think.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah, I guess it does. Woo Woo, baby. Yeah. All right, so now I want to ask you about Moonshine Creek Distillery. And I asked you today, how long you’ve been doing this?
Jeremiah: Well, I’ve been doing this six years legally.
Ramsey Russell: Legally?
Jeremiah: Making moonshine yeah. I mean, I did it several years before that. Just kind of tinkering around. Like I said, I wanted to be a really good bartender if I was going to do it. And I wanted to know more about those products behind the bar if someone would ask me. So I thought I’d just start replicating them at home, and then I’d put them in little fancy bottles.
Ramsey Russell: Not replicating the Cocktail-like, no, heck no, replicate the spirit.
Jeremiah: The spirit itself.
Ramsey Russell: Where did you start? Like, what was your first experimentation in spirits?
Jeremiah: Just straight moonshine. And then we’d do apple pie moonshine. Everybody, I find, starts there.
Ramsey Russell: Heck yeah.
Jeremiah: Everybody does apple pie.

Ramsey Russell: “Conservation here is a quiet fight. Every blind, every decoy, every shot has to honor the land and the ducks.”

Ramsey Russell: So how did you start? Let’s just start with the regular moonshine. What is moonshine? How do you make it? What is it? And then, I kind of know what my version of apple pie is, but then how did you gravitate to it?
Jeremiah: Yeah, I’ve just found over time that moonshine is a slang term. Like, anything you make illegally is moonshine. I mean, it’s kind of a broad term, you know. And I found what you’re making it from, whether it be corn in the southern Appalachia, you know, up here, it could be maple syrup. And we do one like that. We ferment maple syrup. You just need sugar to make alcohol. So, it’s whatever you have access to geographically, that’s what you’re making your moonshine from.
Ramsey Russell: So did you start your first incarnation of spirits was maple moonshine?
Jeremiah: No, the first ones, believe it or not, we made from horse rations.
Ramsey Russell: Horseradish?
Jeremiah: Horse rations. So you’ve got grains and molasses all in there that you buy from the feed store. It’s for horses. So we wanted something that had sugar in it already.
Ramsey Russell: Sweet feed.
Jeremiah: Pretty much, Yeah. So we’d just get one of those big Rubbermaid garbage bins, and we’d just open it and ferment it in there.
Ramsey Russell: Take me through the process. For somebody that’s never done this or seen it, I’d love too. You go to the co-op, you buy sweet feed.
Jeremiah: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: You get a rubber tub. Now what?
Jeremiah: Well, you want to boil the water and put it in there.
Ramsey Russell: So I pour my sweet feed in the bucket, boil my water, and pour it on top?
Jeremiah: Yeah. Let it cool down to about room temperature. Then we’d put our yeast in it. I’d always go to the wine store here and buy champagne yeast. I’d get a bit higher alcohol content with that.
Ramsey Russell: It’s just open in a tub?
Jeremiah: Yeah, I just let it open.
Ramsey Russell: Cold water, sweet feed, yeast, and something reacts. What’s the yeast and sugar doing?
Jeremiah: So the yeast is a microorganism, and it eats the sugars in there. It creates ethanol and some other by-products.
Ramsey Russell: Alcohol is the by-product of yeast consuming sugar?
Jeremiah: That’s right.
Ramsey Russell: Oh.
Jeremiah: Yeah. So ethanol and water make alcohol.
Ramsey Russell: Wow.
Jeremiah: And then, when you’re making beer or wine, it’s all the same kind of thing, you don’t want to get a lot of foreign bacteria in it. If you’re going to make beer or wine, it needs to be good to drink. You don’t want it to turn into vinegar on you or something, and you get an upset stomach from the wrong things. But when you go to distill it, it doesn’t really matter. I just want high alcohol content in that fermentation. I don’t want it to be 6 or 7%. I want it to be 10 or 12% or higher, if I could. Because when you go to distill it, you’re just refining that ethanol portion out of it.
Ramsey Russell: Okay, so how long did you let that tub, how long did you let that yeast consume the sugar?
Jeremiah: It depends.
Ramsey Russell: We talking a day or a week?
Jeremiah: We used to say it was time when the flies were dead in it. But, you give it about a week.
Ramsey Russell: About a week?
Jeremiah: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: Then what?
Jeremiah: Then you start loading it into your still. Now, I’d make the stills by stealing kegs from the bar I worked at. I’d pop the tops off and put a 2-inch diameter copper pipe in it. I liked the Stella Artois kegs for the second thumper keg because they were a half-size keg. So you’d run the pipe up and over into that, and you’d fill that one with what we call our back end. So you need something. When you’d distill, you have a portion that comes out in the beginning, your heads.
Ramsey Russell: You heat the first keg?
Jeremiah: Yeah, heat the first keg on a turkey burner.
Ramsey Russell: Then it starts to boil off?
Jeremiah: That’s right.
Ramsey Russell: And a lot of that distillate is running through the copper pipe into the catch keg?
Jeremiah: That’s right, because ethanol will boil at 78.5 degrees centigrade. Water boils at 100 degrees centigrade. So anything you start to boil off between that temperature point up to 100 degrees, if the water’s boiling, there’s alcohol coming out.
Ramsey Russell: You kept a thermometer on it? Did you try to keep it down to below that water boiling?
Jeremiah: Yeah. I mean, the first stills we bought, we didn’t have anything like that. We were just boiling it and seeing what would happen. And I wouldn’t drink that stuff now. We used to drink it, but God, I wouldn’t drink.

Ramsey Russell: What was it like?

Jeremiah: “New Brunswick’s tidal flats are a puzzle. You’ve got to read the water, the wind, and the birds like a map. It’s not for the impatient.”

Jeremiah: Oh, Jesus, it tasted like pink dinner. I mean, it was awful stuff. God, I wouldn’t drink that now to save my life. We weren’t very smart in the beginning, but you’ve got to start somewhere, right?

Ramsey Russell: Where did you go from sweet feed paint thinner to the next incarnation?
Jeremiah: Well, then I started just buying apple cider from the orchard, and I’d make more or less.
Ramsey Russell: Like apple juice.
Jeremiah: Apple juice, yeah. And I started doing it from that.
Ramsey Russell: Apple juice has sugar.
Jeremiah: Yeah. You’d still add a bit of sugar to it, but you get some nice apple flavors in there. A little bit easier to drink that than when you made it.
Ramsey Russell: Okay, so I buy me some nice apple cider, add some sugar to it.
Jeremiah: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: Boil it off.
Jeremiah: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: But now, like I noticed today. What do you call that?
Jeremiah: The high test.

Ramsey Russell: huh?
Jeremiah: High test.

Ramsey Russell: High test.
Jeremiah: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: But you showed me the back of the bottle of it. You had all kinds of molasses or different stuff.
Jeremiah: Yeah, depends what we’re doing here. Because we’ll make whiskey from rye grains or corn. We’ll make rum from fancy molasses, and we’ll make the spirit. We call it Canadiana, but it’s by fermenting maple syrup. And then we also ferment apple juice and make a brandy. So all that stuff, though, like, when I say making whiskey, rum, brandy, you gotta barrel age that in Canada before you can call it whiskey, rum, or brandy.
Ramsey Russell: Well, how did you go from sweet feed, apple cider. How many incarnations? How long did the process, was it before you began to, obviously, it started as a habit. It started as, “I’m just gonna perfect these spirits, and be a better bartender.” How many incarnations before it turned into something you go, “Ooh, this is good”. And what was the secret ingredient? What was the magic, the aha moment that it went from paint thinner to something good? And then first, that question.
Jeremiah: Well, I’m gonna be honest, I think it didn’t really get to that point until I went legit and could buy the right equipment.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah.
Jeremiah: And stuff. Because I found making it from beer kegs and 2-inch copper pipe with, you know, you’re just packing it with like a, with like a rye flour mixture around there so you don’t get the gas leaks and stuff around, you know, the boiling alcohol. I mean, at that point, I didn’t even know how to properly clean the equipment. I’ll be honest. I mean, we were drinking stuff I probably wouldn’t drink now. And I’ve had people bring me stuff with that kind of setup, and you taste the sulfurs in it and you taste everything that.
Ramsey Russell: The impurities.
Jeremiah: The Impurities. And I wouldn’t have known the difference unless I got a proper setup like I have now.
Ramsey Russell: Kind of what you described, the archaic beer keg versus what you’ve got back here now, it’s kind of like I’m thinking about Breaking Bad, you know, Walter cooking with high school lab equipment in a van to, Boom. Going down beneath the basement, down there beneath the laundromat. And having that state-of-the-art.
Jeremiah: Yeah. And that was a big difference for me too, is I got trained by a chemist at some point.
Ramsey Russell: Oh, you did?
Jeremiah: Yeah. So we went and looked for help.
Ramsey Russell: You started off doing this paint thinner, da-da-da. At some point in time something clicked that you went out and said, “I’m gonna get even better at this.” What was that point that you went and met with a chemist? Just like a legit chemist with some hill gaming with a corn scale pie?

Jeremiah: Legit Chemist.

Jeremiah: Okay.

Jeremiah: “The elders taught us to hunt with humility. This creek isn’t ours—it’s a privilege to share it with the ducks.”

Jeremiah: Legit chemist. We were pretty lucky, there’s a college close by and they have a team of food scientists and stuff. They do a lot of research. This is potato country and maple syrup country. So they’re doing a lot of food research for these people on how to grow better crops and how to process into a better french fry or, you know, to make maple syrup and granulated maple sugar. Or maple butter or something. So anyway, that team, they also help with breweries a lot and cideries. And, you know, I just had caught wind they had a program up there. So I placed a call and I said, “Hey, you know, this is my plan. I’ve been making moonshine, and I feel pretty confident. But, you know, if I go legal and I want to go legit here, I don’t want to fool around. I mean, I’m going to be taking money from patrons at the bar. They’re going to invest in me. I don’t want to lose their money. I’d have to move out of town, you know, if I lose their money.” I mean, again, small town, so, I mean, I probably have to leave the province. But anyway, so I want to make sure we weren’t going to harm people and stuff. I mean, we’re going to be serious. I got to be serious about it. So he made a little curriculum for us. He came in and trained us as if we were junior chemists, more or less. And that kind of gave me the understanding of the chemistry behind it and what lens to look at this through. You know, not just treating it as, “Hey, we’re just cooking something in a beer keg, and what comes out, we’re gonna drink.” It’s treating it like, you know, understanding the boiling points of all the liquids in there and, you know, what’s safe to consume and what’s not. Maybe what’s a good flavor, what’s a bad flavor? And just, you know, starting to get serious about it. I guess that’s the thing. Like, because, you know, it might have taken me years to figure that out. That was just a crash course and got me there. But, yeah, it’s just because, I mean, the big catalyst to decide to do this legally is my wife got pregnant and I said, like, “You know, I don’t want to be bartending, gigging around as much. I need, you know, if I’m bringing this baby boy into this world, I got to have something solid.”
Ramsey Russell: How old’s your kid now?
Jeremiah: He’s gonna be nine on Friday.
Ramsey Russell: Okay.
Jeremiah: Yeah. Coming right up. His name is Sonny, and, yeah, I mean, that’s he’s been probably the best thing that ever happened to me. I mean, I wouldn’t have done this business.
Ramsey Russell: Best thing ever happened to anybody.
Jeremiah: Yeah, that’s right. Yeah. And I mean, you wouldn’t know it until you have one. And that was the thing. That’s been my motivation. I do stuff for him I wouldn’t do for myself. And that was the big motivation here, was, you know, I need to provide for him, and I wanted to also help out other people in the community. You know, I brought in some friends and family involved in this too, and attempted to kind of see that everybody was gonna profit or benefit from something like this in the community. Because, I’m gonna be honest, a lot of places you could operate this business, probably denser population, way more people come to the door. I mean, we’ve been talking here for 30 minutes, has a person come in this door.
Ramsey Russell: Right. You’re kind of on the outside of a very small town.
Jeremiah: That’s right. When it gets slow around here, it’s slow. Like, summer months are busy. You got tourists coming from Quebec, Ontario, Maine, up the I-95.
Ramsey Russell: How do you all advertise?
Jeremiah: A lot of it’s through, like, Facebook and Instagram. And then customers come in, we have a great conversation, and they tell a friend who tells a friend.
Ramsey Russell: Heck, yeah, they do.
Jeremiah: That’s been really the best thing we’ve had going. But that kind of falls into why we’re popular, growing to this size. Like, for a craft distillery to be here and be this size. The reason we got popular kind of leads into a product we were talking about earlier called chicken bones liqueur.
Ramsey Russell: Say that. We’re going to get into your product lineup, I promise. But I want to go back to the rudimentary because I’m learning a lot about distilling and moonshining. All right, now, you can take anything. Sugar, maple syrup, the yeast, the sweet, the distill, boom, the alcohol, it burns off, you catch it. But when does it become a whiskey versus a rum versus something else versus a moonshine? How do you break all that out into flavors? Because it sounds like it all starts the same.

Jeremiah: Yeah, a lot of it comes from government regulation that actually tells you what you can call something, what process. And it’s different in every country. So, in Canada, it can’t be called whiskey unless it’s fermented grain. So it has to be made from grains.
Ramsey Russell: Okay.
Jeremiah: Kind of cereal grain. You have to distill it. You have to put it in a barrel for a minimum of three years.
Jeremiah: That’s all they ask. And then you can’t sell it under 40% alcohol.
Ramsey Russell: Does it have to be, like, charred or anything on the inside, or does that do something for you?
Jeremiah: You want it to be charred, and we use toasted barrels too. But it wouldn’t be like, say, in the U.S., the bourbon guys, their regulation has to be a brand-new charred barrel. They can’t use a barrel a second time and call that bourbon. If you use it a second time, I think they call it American whiskey, but you can’t call it bourbon. But they also, they could put it in a barrel for a day and call it bourbon. If you want to call it straight bourbon, though, it’s two years. Bonded bourbon is four years, and you can’t sell it beneath 50% alcohol. So they have their own regulations too. Every country does. But bourbon is a geographic indicator. That term is owned by the U.S. In Canada, we just have these, you know, really, I almost say, boring names. We just call Canadian whiskey.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah.
Jeremiah: Rye whiskey. But in the U.S., bourbon is an American corn whiskey.
Ramsey Russell: Okay, so I get bourbon. I know bourbon.
Jeremiah: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: Tell me about Canadian whiskey. How you all would store it and make it whiskey in a barrel? Any kind of barrel?
Jeremiah: Well, Mary, it’s always American white oak. And I’ll tell you, the barrel, the cooperage industry here is dead. We get all of our barrels from the U.S. I buy barrels.
Ramsey Russell: Really?
Jeremiah: Yeah, I get them.
Ramsey Russell: That shocks me. I mean, we’re right in the middle of lumber country.
Jeremiah: Yeah. It’s not a lot of white oak, though, I mean, here you’ll notice a lot of monoculture. They’re growing a lot of fir trees.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah.
Jeremiah: Like, a lot of pine, a lot of spruce because of our lumber industry, where they make a lot of two-by-fours, things like that.
Ramsey Russell: What do you think it is about white oak? Why not poplar or hickory or something else?
Jeremiah: So white oak is actually the perfect wood as a hardwood. And it has antifungal properties and anti-pest properties. You know, it’s very hardy.

Ramsey Russell: Look tannic acid.

Jeremiah: It does have some tannic acid. The good thing about it, though it has something called tylosis happen in it. So, between your sapwood and your heartwood, you’ll get a crystallization of the sugars in there. It’ll make it non-conductive, so liquid can’t, you know, it doesn’t go all the way through the wood and absorb into it. It can only penetrate to a certain layer. Now, when you char that front layer, that hemicellulose, you get these flavor formations happen. You get a lot of vanillins in it. American white oak, you get coconut, spices and so, you know, when we talk about making whiskeys, the barrel is a big part of it.
Ramsey Russell: Okay.
Jeremiah: Oddly enough, you’ll hear a lot of people in Canada say, “Oh, you got to use ex-bourbon barrels if you want to make a good whiskey. Can’t use a new barrel.” I was like, “You can’t use a new barrel? Then why is bourbon booming, and why does everybody love bourbon if you can’t use a new barrel?” We use brand-new barrels here, like the bourbon guys. When I refill the barrel, I’m going to let that whiskey sit, like, right now, we do three to five years in that brand-new virgin oak barrel, a lot like the bourbon guys. Yeah, we get charred barrels or toasted barrels. But when I refill it, I’m probably going to let it sit seven, ten years. It has to sit longer to get that kind of color maturity in it. So a lot of guys will swear up and down you need an ex-bourbon barrel because there’s less barrel influence in that second fill. So you get a more balanced whiskey. They’ll say you’re gonna taste more of the grain, the yeast, the distillation approach, the terroir of the region. If you’re next to the ocean, you’re gonna get, I don’t know, briny air or, you know, whatever they want to say. I mean, a lot of it’s marketing.
Ramsey Russell: So your high-test, straight grain alcohol straight from the barrel? Straight from the moonshine distill?
Jeremiah: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: Straight run from the, that’s the distillate?
Jeremiah: We call that raw spirit moonshine.
Ramsey Russell: And I store it in that white oak barrel, and for a certain period of time, yada, yada, and I start getting my Canadian whiskey?
Jeremiah: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: What is rum?
Jeremiah: So rum has to be made from sugar cane or a derivative of it. So molasses.

Ramsey Russell: Molasses.

Jeremiah: So here, we’re pretty lucky. Here in New Brunswick, we’ve got an importer called Crosby’s. They own 95% of the molasses share in Canada.
Ramsey Russell: Wow.
Jeremiah: 150-year-old company, you know, well-respected in this province. And we all grow up on fancy molasses. I mean, as a kid, you have biscuits and molasses after supper, like it. Molasses is on every table.
Ramsey Russell: Oh, yeah.
Jeremiah: You see less of it now. But growing up, I mean, we didn’t go out to eat with family or have people over where there weren’t biscuits, butter, and molasses for dessert always there. I mean, my grandfather would, jeez, he’d have lobster with molasses on it. I mean, like, he put molasses on everything. He put it on his eggs in the morning and stuff. Like, it was on everything. It’s a big part of the culture here in Atlantic Canada.
Ramsey Russell: Where does maple syrup come in?
Jeremiah: Well, we have a lot of maple trees, obviously. And you get, you know, that freezing of the tree, and then that sap comes out. People boil it down. They would have learned this practice from the Indigenous here at one time. And there’s a big industry here for it. More up in the northern part of the province, you have more maples. Bit of a, it’s a higher, you know, they’re a little bit higher above sea level up there, you know, so higher altitude. It gets a bit colder up there. So for maple syrup to flow, you pretty much need the tree to freeze at night. You need to warm up in the morning, so it flows. It needs, if you get a warm night, you’re not gonna have those trees flow.
Ramsey Russell: What do you make with the maple syrup? Anything?
Jeremiah: Well, for us, yeah, we do a bit, which is we people here are kind of tired of maple. I mean, we take for granted.
Ramsey Russell: Whiskey comes from grains. Rum comes from molasses.
Jeremiah: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: Do you all make a vodka? Because you got a big potato industry. I don’t seem like a natural. Tater juice.
Jeremiah: Yeah, we get, because there’s a guy in the province who does potato vodka. They do it so well, we don’t bother with it. And to be honest, we’d have to be a potato farmer for it to make sense. Like, it, not a lot of fermentation yield in potatoes. And you can only make vodka from it.
Ramsey Russell: I see.
Jeremiah: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: Now, let’s run down your lineup because now Greg and I come in, our eyes were wide like we’re kids in a candy shop. Like, wow. Because it’s a nice little space you got here. It’s beautiful. It’s a nice bar. You got all your product lined up. What’s that a dozen and a half flavors sitting on the counter right here?
Jeremiah: Yep. Yeah, there’s gonna be, what, 16 or so there.
Ramsey Russell: What was your first one? The high-test?
Jeremiah: Yeah. Well, I guess inadvertently high-test. White Pop was the first one we did. So White Pop was my moonshine of 40%. That’s the closest thing I do to a vodka. Then we did Apple Crumble, and that’s our version,
Ramsey Russell: Apple Pie?
Jeremiah: We call it Apple Crumble here because people eat more apple crumble than apple pie.
Ramsey Russell: And Apple Pie is going back, that’s more of your straight distillate made with apple cider?
Jeremiah: Well, we add apple juice to it.
Ramsey Russell: Okay.
Jeremiah: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: You all get some cinnamon flavor, stuff like that, to make it more like an apple pie?
Jeremiah: That’s right.
Ramsey Russell: Now I’m going to tell you what I know about apple pie. Apple pie I make at home, and I cheat. But the thing about it is, boy, you want to talk about something good as apple pie. Real apple pie, moonshine. And you put it in the freezer, and it won’t freeze completely get slushy. You pour it over two scoops of ice cream.

Jeremiah: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: He sits there in that stadium cup, and you eat it. When you hear your spoon hitting the bottom of the cup because it’s empty, you pull your hat down. You’re gonna sleep right where you are. Good. But go ahead.

Jeremiah: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: That was your first big one.

Jeremiah: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Pull your mic up.

Jeremiah: High test came not long after that because when we opened here, the locals came in and said, “40% Amy, I know you got that high test out back. Sell me some of that high test.” And I said, well, I said, I don’t know how high I can sell it. But we thought that was comical. So I asked the province, how high can I actually sell something like, we’re just selling. I can distill 94% alcohol with that still I got. So I said, how high can we sell? And they said, in this province, the highest you can sell is 70%. So 140 proof. We don’t do 151s here. You don’t have ever clear.

Ramsey Russell: Wow.

Jeremiah: And there are problems. And they won’t sell that in the liquor stores. They say it’s socially responsible to sell it.

Ramsey Russell: Depends on who you ask.

Jeremiah: Well, as I said, I could buy three bottles of vodka. Nobody’s saying that’s socially responsible. Geez, even they got the pot shops right outside the liquor stores. Like, walk across the street. But, I mean, it’s subjective who you ask. But, you know, it’s me. But. Yeah. So that’s why we started selling that. For us, it was a bit out of humor. People kept coming in saying, “Where’s the high test?” I said, well, we’ll make it a high test. So that’s why we do that one. But then after that, we did get pickled.

Ramsey Russell: So you all were selling the apple pie, the apple crumble, you call it.

Jeremiah: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: But people wanted straight. “Hey, I want to try. I’m gonna try the straight stuff you got.” That’s what they were calling it, high test.

Jeremiah: High test. Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Okay.

Jeremiah: I was thinking I made moonshine for a while. I never called it high test.

Ramsey Russell: Son, It was smooth. A glass of water. I took a shot of it earlier today when we stopped by, and it was smooth. It was nice.

Jeremiah: Good. I’m glad you like it.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, I did. I mean, for straight grain alcohol, you know, I don’t know why a guy wouldn’t just order that if he’s not there to socialize, he’s there to get drunk, like you said in the bar.

Jeremiah: You sit at a bar, it’s the price. Taxation’s high on it.

Ramsey Russell: Well, you were talking about that. You were talking about how, like, running down your lineup. We’re going to talk about them all in a minute. But you got the different proof.

Jeremiah: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: And it’s like the higher the proof, the more the tax.

Jeremiah: That’s right. Yeah. So that federal piece of taxation in there is based on the alcohol content and the volume.

Ramsey Russell: Wow. The one that caught my eye when I was sitting there studying all your stuff this morning, the one that caught my eye and caught Greg and my eye was something you call chicken bone.

Jeremiah: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: And I’m like, what the heck is chicken bone? I mean, that is a cool name, first off, for a liqueur. But now, what the heck is chicken bone?

Jeremiah: So that chicken bone is a chocolate and cinnamon liqueur, and it’s named after a bit of a colloquialism here. So we have a really popular candy in Atlantic Canada, and we eat it during the holidays. Christmas. It looks like a little chicken bone. It’s a pink stick and cinnamon-flavored outside, a bittersweet chocolate inside. And yeah, really popular during the holidays, 150 years old, and because it’s so popular now.

Ramsey Russell: 150-year-old candy.

Jeremiah: Yeah, 150-year-old candy here.

Ramsey Russell: It’s a New Brunswick thing. I’ve never heard of it.

Jeremiah: Yeah, very much New Brunswick. They do it in all of Atlantic Canada. And so now what happens is people now, if they’re describing something chocolate and spicy, they’re one of the things they’re going to say to describe to you is, “Oh, it reminds me of a chicken bone,” and it’s like a chicken bone flavour.

Ramsey Russell: Wow. So I would not have gotten that if I’m from Mississippi. Somebody told me something tastes like a chicken bone.

Jeremiah: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: I’ll be thinking fried chicken.

Jeremiah: Yeah. I lived in Ontario for a bit. It’s not a thing there. Central Canada. It’s more Atlantic Canada. I was there, someone gave me cayenne. I was like, cayenne pepper and chocolate. And I said to someone, “That remind you of a chicken bone?” And they said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” They’re like, “Actual chicken bones?” And I said, “No, the candy. You don’t know the candy?” And they didn’t know. That blew my mind. So when I moved back here, I spent a couple of years in Ontario, you know, young man exploring the world. And when I got back, I always remembered that. And I knew when we did this here, I said, “We got to do a chicken bone liqueur.”

Ramsey Russell: Was that one of your first liqueurs?

Jeremiah: Yeah, it was. And it was so popular. We were barely open a year, and we came out with that, and people lined up around the liquor stores at Christmas. It went viral.

Ramsey Russell: It went viral.

Jeremiah: It went viral, and it built our company to what it is. I knew, like, anything Tickle Me Elmo wasn’t popular.

Ramsey Russell: That was one of your breakout products. You all make chicken bone. Kaboom. You’re on the map all of a sudden as a small batch boutique.

Jeremiah: Yeah. Oh, yeah, for sure. It changed the company. It grew into what it is. And I knew, like I said, I knew it wouldn’t last forever. So that’s why we invested in rum and whiskey because I knew that’s gonna fade out somewhere. It’s gonna plateau. And by the first few years, people were fighting over it. They were reselling online. And the province was contacting me, saying, If you see someone selling online, let us know because they shouldn’t be bootlegging that and stuff. And I thought, “I’d love to see that on the front page of the paper.” I’d frame that on the wall. Someone gets arrested for bootlegging chicken bones. But anyway, it was a big deal. And, yeah, like, we couldn’t believe it. The response to it was huge. And then, you know, of course, everything fades over time, but it’s still a favourite. You know, it’s a way to kind of enjoy that.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, Greg and I are both going home with a bottle. It is fine. Yeah, it is really, really good. And it’s not a, I think it’s like 25 proof or something.

Jeremiah: Yeah, 50 proof. Yeah, 25 proof.

Ramsey Russell: 50 proof. 25%. So, I mean, it’s got a little bump to it. You were showing me one of your brown water drinks that was recognized. It puts you on the map in terms of a true craft bourbon or bourbon, true craft whiskey. What was it?

Jeremiah: “You’ll never see a bigger Canada goose than the ones that ride the tides here. They’re ghosts until they’re right on top of you.”

Jeremiah: The single grain rye. So our whiskey portfolio is called Downriver, and that won Canadian Whiskey of the Year at last year’s Canadian Whiskey Awards for our category, which they call mixed mash grain whiskey, that American style.

Ramsey Russell: Did you ever think when you were sitting on your back porch drinking paint thinner, that you would be the Canadian Whiskey of the Year? Did you ever dream that?

Jeremiah: Oh, no. It was an upset. I went out to those awards the first time we entered it, but I figured I’d go out to network. I said, “Hey, if we win awards, great.” I’m sitting at a table with the Beam Suntory crew. So Jim Beam, you know, they were Suntory, a Japanese whiskey company, and they own Alberta Premium as a big company in Alberta, Alberta Premium Distillers. And anyway, we’re sitting there just chatting. They’re buying drinks. So I’m having a great time. Jesse Arnon. And anyway, they called my name, said we won. And I said, “Won what?” And they go, “You got a Whiskey of the Year award.” And the lady next to me turned, and she goes, “You know, that’s our award.”

Ramsey Russell: And not anymore.

Jeremiah: Yeah, anymore. And then I found out later, you know, we beat people at Crown Royal. I didn’t really even understand how big of a deal that was.

Ramsey Russell: And why do you think you beat them? What is it about that rye whiskey that was so good?

Jeremiah: Well, it has a banana note, which people really like. Mind you, some of those Jack Daniels, like some of their private barrel, select barrels they do, have that note. And that year, it must have been just a popular flavour or like a note in it because we don’t add anything. The flavour just comes from the yeast and stuff. But yeah, it put us on the map. And now we have a hard time keeping that whiskey in stock. We come out with it. We do like four types of whiskey, but that one’s always hard to keep in stock.

Ramsey Russell: Jeremiah, we’re back. We were talking about you all’s rye, single-grain rye whiskey. When a lady comes in and she’s come all the way from Edmonton, Alberta, on vacation, and she walked in with a grocery list of you all’s stuff. Are you used to that yet?

Jeremiah: Yeah, that’s generally what happens. People come in and say, “I’m picking up for a few friends,” or “I’m just driving by.” I find that in craft culture, whether it be craft beer or craft distilleries, you have a crowd of people, and that’s what they do. They know a friend is going by and say, “If you’re stopping in there, get me something too,” because they understand that these products are hard to find in a local liquor store.

Ramsey Russell: Right.

Jeremiah: And they know it’s a bit of a treat. So, I mean, they see an opportunity to get it. They know it’s great for gift-giving or just showing off to friends.

Ramsey Russell: She had the same idea I did. She picked up some stuff and it was the same one I had in mind. We were talking about the chicken bones, taking it home for Christmas gifts.

Jeremiah: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: You know, it’s that good.

Jeremiah: Yeah, a lot of people do. I mean, again, that’s a big holiday item, chicken bones. Like I say, we eat that candy during the holidays.

Ramsey Russell: I can see why.

Jeremiah: If you like eggnog, I’d say put it in eggnog. Oh, it’s top-notch.

Ramsey Russell: Okay. So you never dreamed making paint thinner that you were going to have the Canadian Whiskey of the Year. What did that do to your profile, your company profile?

Jeremiah: Well, I think a lot of people thought it was a fluke, to be honest. But I’d say the reason we got there is we’ve always treated this very seriously. Like I say, even getting into it, that’s why I contacted that chemist to train me and stuff. I didn’t want to just leave a lot of things to chance. So before we ever released our whiskeys, we held focus groups. We invited the community here. We had people come in, and I let them try whiskey in different styles.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, yeah.

Jeremiah: And I got their feedback. I asked them, I said, “Tell me which ones you like better.” And when they said they liked that flavour profile, that’s what we continued to make. They said that that one was the best one. We had a hundred people come here.

Ramsey Russell: Wow.

Jeremiah: You know, and we just gave them free whiskey and had a piece of paper in front of them with some questions. And we’ve always run the business that way. Like, I don’t want to pretend that I know more than the consumer. I want to make products for people. I want them to be happy. I don’t make them for myself. I mean, I enjoy making it.

Ramsey Russell: Greg and I walked in here wide-eyed, like kids in a candy store, and walked up to the bar and you were behind it. You walk right into this beautiful bar, and you’ve got, your whole lineup on the bar. And you say, “Well, you want to try something?” We’re like, “Yeah, we’ll try that one.”

Jeremiah: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: And I mean, it just sells itself.

Jeremiah: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: It sells itself. All you gotta do is take a swallow of that chicken bone. Like, I’m thinking about who I can give this to for Christmas and keep some for myself. Yeah. You all don’t sell in the United States.

Jeremiah: No, not yet. Working on something. We’re just finding that it’d be easier if we could package there. But I’d also like to set up something just like this here over there, in Maine, Aroostook County. Just because our culture is so synonymous here.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right. Northern Maine you’re talking about.

Jeremiah: Yeah, my sister, my brother-in-law, my nieces, they all live there. I got aunts and uncles. Like everybody here. A lot of people are dual citizens, or they got family split between the borders. I just see the same area. I mean, the only thing that’s really created a division was, you know, sadly enough, post-9/11 things changed. Prior to that, I mean, if I went through there very often, the guy who’s working the border went to the same church as my aunt. You know, he knew her very well, and he’d make a joke about, “You’re not smuggling Bibles, are you?” You know, things have changed a lot, sadly. But you know, that still, to me, isn’t lost, that it’s the same culture. It’s a very similar culture. I mean, you even look historically. When we took prohibition, it was right after Maine took prohibition. They were the first elective place in the U.S., I believe, to take prohibition. We were the first province in all of Canada to electively go dry.

Ramsey Russell: Wow.
Jeremiah: Always been synonymous, like whatever they do, we do. You know, the culture is very much the same. So that’s why I’d like to get our products over. I’d also like to make bourbon over there and send it here.
Ramsey Russell: Really?
Jeremiah: Yeah, just so I can call it bourbon. I already do the recipe here. I’d go over there and do it just so I can have it. And I could sell Canadian whiskey on that side. But really, that would be great. We get a lot of people reaching out who visit here as tourists or hear about us online. They’d love to have some of these products. Or they’re Canadians who live down there already. They know what a chicken bone is.
Ramsey Russell: There are a lot of people listening who’d like to have a lot of these products. I’m telling you that right now. I took a swig of your Canadian Whiskey of the Year, and it is smooth, boy.
Jeremiah: Thank you.
Ramsey Russell: That is good. I want to talk about some of your other product lineup. Let’s talk about Applejack. What is Applejack?
Jeremiah: So Applejack is really an American spirit. It doesn’t exist in Canada. We don’t have a term for Applejack. Applejack is like a slang way of saying apple brandy in a lot of ways.
Ramsey Russell: Right.
Jeremiah: So Laird’s in the U.S., they own distillery license number one. They say George Washington liked it so much that he took the recipe to Mount Vernon.
Ramsey Russell: Wow.
Jeremiah: Yeah. They say Abe Lincoln used to serve Applejack when he was a bartender.
Ramsey Russell: Really?
Jeremiah: Yeah. They say Johnny Appleseed used to spread the gospel.
Ramsey Russell: Abe Lincoln was a bartender?
Jeremiah: That’s what they said.
Ramsey Russell: I had no idea.
Jeremiah: That’s what Laird says. That’s what Laird says. I read up on the promotion. That’s what they claim.
Ramsey Russell: Maybe he was honest because he took that bartender code.
Jeremiah: Maybe. I don’t know. Yeah, that’s what they say, yeah, he worked at a bar and served Applejack. They say yeah, this is keep in mind, this comes from Laird’s.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah.
Jeremiah: Well, they say Johnny Appleseed spread the gospel and word about Applejack.
Ramsey Russell: Wow.
Jeremiah: But anyway, so Applejack’s like apple brandy. But once upon a time, they used to freeze the fermented cider, and then whatever didn’t freeze was ethanol. They’d drink it. But we know, that’s really unsafe. It’s riddled with all sorts of impurities that, you know, over 20 years, you’d probably get cirrhosis of the liver or something. But now it’s just become kind of slang for saying apple brandy.
Ramsey Russell: Okay.
Jeremiah: And the U.S. has Laird’s blended apple brandy, it’s essentially blended with a vodka. It’s a neutral spirit. I thought it’d be better here in Canada. A lot of people ask us about it, but we don’t get Laird’s here. They appeal to people asking about it. And I say, well, I can make something like that but better. I think I’m gonna cut it, instead of with vodka, cut it with a bourbon-style whiskey. And you’re gonna get those apple notes and the bourbon notes, those sour bourbon notes that people like so much, that iconic flavour. And that’s what we do. So it’s more of a sipping whiskey. It technically is Canadian whiskey. Canadian whiskey, you’re allowed to blend stuff into it and still call it Canadian whiskey as long as it maintains the character of Canadian whiskey.

Ramsey Russell: Which is?

Jeremiah: That’s for everybody to decide. Right. It’s such a broad thing. That’s the kind of the weird thing in Canada is, well, you know, that’s a subjective thing to say. What is the character of Canadian whiskey?
Ramsey Russell: Well, I mean, Crown Royal is a blended Canadian whiskey.
Jeremiah: Yeah, that’s the weird thing.
Ramsey Russell: What’s it blended with?
Jeremiah: Well, it’s blended with its own whiskey. So traditionally in Canada, all whiskeys are blended whiskeys because that’s why you’ll hear them saying, in Canada, we have master blenders, not master distillers. So once upon a time, you know, guys that, if we’re talking some of the first distillers here, like Hiram Walker, big one, they’re the ones who do Wiser’s out of their place. And Lot 40, pretty big outfit. They’re owned by Pernod Ricard, you know, big, big company. Anyway, their head distiller and blender, Dr. Don Livermore, wrote a book, and he talks about some of the original recipes he’s got, like the ones they wrote down. They would blend wine into it. Molasses. Whatever they did, they always claimed part of Canadian whiskey’s culture was the blend. And typically what Canadian guys would do, it’s not like the American style. You throw all your grains into the same fermenter. You put barley in there, rye, corn, everything fermented together. That’s what we do, that’s American style. Canadian style is I would just ferment my barley, distill that, age it. I would just ferment my rye, distill it, age it, just do my corn. In the end, once its done aging, then I blend that together. That’s the blend. And that’s why they call Canadian whiskey blended whiskey. It’s not like outside of Canada, where blended whiskey implies you bought whiskey from somebody else and blended it into yours. So that’s kind of what’s different about Canadian whiskey. It also kind of gives us a, I’d say a bad rap in the global market for whiskey. People think that its whiskey bought from other producers and put in, but it’s really more of a localized term for historical practice.
Ramsey Russell: I’ll be darned.
Jeremiah: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: Very, very interesting. Moving up some of the line-up. You got one up there, kind of an interesting title, Get Pickled.
Jeremiah: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: What the heck is Get Pickled?
Jeremiah: So Get Pickled is moonshine infused with dill, garlic, and pickling spice. It’s essentially making pickle brine, but in lieu of vinegar, we’re using alcohol. And the reason we do this is for a Caesar, that’s Canada’s national cocktail.
Ramsey Russell: Really? A Caesar is a national cocktail?
Jeremiah: That’s right. A lot like a Bloody Mary, but we add clam juice in there.
Ramsey Russell: Clamato.
Jeremiah: Yeah, called Clamato, Instead of tomato,
Ramsey Russell: Clamato. You know, I’ve had, what’s the drink to have with Clamato juice and beer?
Jeremiah: Red Eye.
Ramsey Russell: Red Eye.
Jeremiah: That’s what we call that, a Red Eye.
Ramsey Russell: I don’t like it.
Jeremiah: No. I guess in Mexico, they call it, I think, Michalita in Mexico.
Ramsey Russell: You all just put some of the ingredients together in this Get Pickled thing, and that is a tribute to the national drink.
Jeremiah: It is the dill pickle cocktail version of the Caesar. It’s so popular, it’s now the standard. So what people would do when I would bartend in it, I used to, like, in the beginning, the end, it started to kind of irritate me. I’d make this beautiful Caesar, and someone would say, because you garnish with a pickled bean, now we don’t use celery anymore, there are more pickled beans and stuff, someone would say, pour some of that pickle brine in there. And I’d say, well, the portions are just right, you know. You want me to go and mess up that drink? I think you should try it the way it is. It would bug me. And I’d say, if all that flavour was just in that vodka, I could avoid this whole mess. They’d have a great drink. Now, to me, I was just getting a little, you know, too meticulous, I think, about the job.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah.
Jeremiah: But, you know, that’s what led to me doing this was, you know, if it was already in the spirit, all that flavour you wanted, then you wouldn’t be adding it. And then your portion control is out of place. Also, tomato juice is already acidic. You add pickle brine in there, it’s already acidic. If you’re like me and you drink a lot of coffee, you get heartburn pretty easy. I didn’t like that. Like, I want to enjoy more than one. I don’t want to have one and then, you know, be going for Tums.
Ramsey Russell: So what you’re saying is, it’s got a lot of the flavour without the pickle, without that brine.
Jeremiah: Without the dill. But once you put it in the Caesar mix, so that tomato juice, already acidic, it’s borrowing the acidity from that. You’re going to perceive it like pickle brine. There’s already an acid there now that’s completing that flavour. But you drink it on its own, its dill and garlic and spice, like it. There’s no vinegar in it. It’s got a kick. And I’ll tell you, you’d have a hard time getting it off your breath. I mean, it’s garlic.

Ramsey Russell: Are you ever just, like, I mean, how do you come up with these recipes? Are you just, like, sleeping one morning and go, aha, staring at your ceiling, and you say, I got the perfect idea for this?
Jeremiah: Pretty much. You know, I think a lot of it comes from a place of experience, like bartending for people so long and listening to them and making a drink over and over and saying, there’s got to be a better way to make this one, or just identifying, hey, this is a popular flavor. But I think what makes our distillery a little bit different than some of the ones here in this provinces. I’m not speaking, you know, poorly of our peers here, saying what makes ours different is we’re really focused on using real ingredients.
Ramsey Russell: Right.
Jeremiah: You know, so, like that chicken bone, that’s real chocolate in it. There’s no dairy in it. We actually make chocolate in our still. I get cocoa powder, chocolate liqueur, nibs, sugar. We make chocolate to do it.
Ramsey Russell: Well, we sampled that earlier today, and you said that it doesn’t have dairy. The creaminess is coming from the pure chocolate.
Jeremiah: Yeah. The chocolate fats in it. So, I mean, that’s what we’re always trying to do. Like, even whether it be that whiskey maple cream, real New Brunswick maple syrup in it, if it’s that ginger snap, that’s real molasses.
Ramsey Russell: Talk about the ginger snap. That was another one I was going to ask you about. That was a very, very nice little aperitif.
Jeremiah: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: Little liqueur.
Jeremiah: Yes. Yep.
Ramsey Russell: That’s an original. That’s a Moonshine Creek original.
Jeremiah: Certainly is. Yeah. So that’s a collaboration with Crosby’s, that major molasses importer. So when we had the success of Chicken Bone, they called me up and they said, we’d like to work on a project with you.
Ramsey Russell: Really?
Jeremiah: Yeah. And they had an idea. They said, let’s do molasses kisses, you know, those candies you get at Christmas. And I said, I think we could do better than that. I said, that’s just adding molasses to the liquor. I mean, that’s not much of a challenge. I said, and I kind of shot myself in the foot there, because I said, why don’t we do it with cream? I said, then it will be creamy. And I said, I think that would coat the mouth. And I said, why don’t we add a bit of ginger and call it gingersnap? Because they also do cookies. They have a brand called Grandma’s and stuff. And I said, well, tailor it after the flavor of your cookie. And I didn’t even think about the fact that molasses has a lot of minerals, and it doesn’t like milk, it wants to curdle it. So I had to call up that food chemist again who helped train us and ask him, how am I going to do this? We did a big research contract to find out how to add real molasses to milk without making it curdle. So it’s a lot involved to do something. It’s not simple. That’s why a lot of guys just wouldn’t do that. They would just get an extract and put it in there to taste like molasses but isn’t real molasses. But I thought we had to do it right. If we’re going to work with Crosby’s, it had to have their actual molasses in there. I also wanted a rum base that was made from their molasses to do it. So, you know, if we’re going to work with a company like that, I gotta, you know, I gotta do it right. Because they’re putting a lot of faith in us to make a great product, represent their brand. And it’s not lost on me. They’ve picked, you know, me from, you know, nowhere in this province to work with them. They’re a 150-year-old company that ships all over Canada. You know, that’s quite an honor. You know, in our camp here, that was a big deal. So, yeah, and it’s been a great product. We do it every, you know, fall we put it out. The label is a mashup of their labels over the last 50 years.
Ramsey Russell: It looks like a 1950s ginger snap box.
Jeremiah: Yeah. Kind of that Pink Panther type of printing on there and stuff.
Ramsey Russell: I love it.
Jeremiah: And they like it. So that part of it, you’ll see there’s kind of these 1950s cartoony adults on it. They put out a can of molasses in the 1960s, and it had, it was children like that. So I figured, oh, they’re all grown up now. And we put them on there. Like, we’ve been lucky to find good graphic designers and artists to help us. Like, I don’t do it all myself here. It’s a team of people.
Ramsey Russell: But you got the influence of it. How many people are here? I mean, it is, like you said your word, it’s a craft little boutique distillery. And how many people work here? Two, three, four?
Jeremiah: There’s five of us.
Ramsey Russell: Five of you?
Jeremiah: Yeah. Seasonally, it can be more or less, like,
Ramsey Russell: And you all can turn out all this product.
Jeremiah: Yeah, we give it everything we got.
Ramsey Russell: You got that one great big distillery in the back.
Jeremiah: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: So what do you, like every day you come in and do something, distill something different, then clean the vat and do something different?
Jeremiah: Yeah, pretty much. We run in cycles, so we’ll say, oh, well, right now is our molasses production time. So we might spend two months,
Ramsey Russell: And that’s why the high test. You may have the back of the bottle check. Molasses.
Jeremiah: That’s right. Because right now that’s the production we’ve been in. So here in another week, we’ll move into some rye for a bit. For rye whiskey.
Ramsey Russell: Okay.
Jeremiah: So we try to line it up. You’re always thinking three, five, seven years in advance in this industry because everything’s got to age. So when I make that moonshine, I put it in a barrel, and I want it to be rum.
Ramsey Russell: How long does it have to age?
Jeremiah: Rum is a minimum of a year in Canada.
Ramsey Russell: Okay.
Jeremiah: Called rum. So that’s why we don’t have really white rums produced by Canadian producers. Because you’d have to barrel age it. It would come out with color, be a nice amber rum or golden rum. And then you’d have to charcoal filter. Why, you’d almost have vodka. There’s no point in doing that. So that’s why in Canada we have Caribbean white rum brought up here and bottled.
Ramsey Russell: Okay.
Jeremiah: That’s why a lot of guys, that’s how I see it anyway. But we mean, we might try to do one at some point, but yeah, so even in that product, like the rum I used in that cream, I had to barrel age it a year before I used it for that product. To be able to call that rum in there.
Ramsey Russell: That’s fantastic.
Jeremiah: So that’s not just the moonshine; it’s actual rum.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah, fantastic. As I walked in, I noticed behind the bar, you’ve also got some of these pictures. You told a great story about this picture right here. I want to hear this story. Who are those guys?
Jeremiah: Nobody knows. Nobody knows who those guys are.
Ramsey Russell: There’s a couple of young men in a portrait, black and white, and they’ve got some spirits in between them on a table. They both got cigarettes hanging,
Jeremiah: That’s right.
Ramsey Russell: That ages it right there. That was way back.
Jeremiah: Oh yeah. Well, I mean, they’re not too different from the good old boys you’ll find around here now. I mean, these guys, I always say those are tailor-made cigarettes. These guys made some money. And we’re going to assume they’re bootlegging in the U.S. because this is about 1915–1920, this picture is taken. So first of all, I’ll say where we got it from. We got it from the Brunswick archives. This photographer was over in the Miramichi Newcastle area, part of this province. So that’d be kind of the eastern, more French, Irish influence part of this province, right?
Ramsey Russell: That’s why they look Irish.
Jeremiah: Yeah, they, I mean, I guess it would be hard to know for certain who they are. I’d love if someone had information on them. But this is a very iconic picture for me. And people come in here, they love it because, again, like I say, they don’t look too different from some of the guys you’ll see around these parts these days. And you’ll notice there’s a bottle of Moosehead Pale Ale on that table. So that’s New Brunswick’s probably most iconic beer. I’d say one of the most iconic beers in Canada. But that’s New Brunswick’s brewery. They’re the oldest independent brewery in Canada, right out of Saint John, New Brunswick. We worked with them. We made a whiskey out of their lager, sometimes called Moose Green here we call it.

Ramsey Russell: Wow.
Jeremiah: You can buy it in the US, I believe. But to see that bottle on there really kind of, you know, brings it home for us. And especially where we’re friends with the people over at Moosehead. We’ve always really liked having that up there and talking a bit about that history and the fact, you know, that’s how old that beer brand is here. If you think, I’d say they’re our version of Yuengling.
Ramsey Russell: Okay.
Jeremiah: You might get out of Pennsylvania and stuff.
Ramsey Russell: The thing I noticed, it’s a store-bought photo. They went and posed for this picture that they brought the spirits with them.
Jeremiah: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: And I guess they got dressed up, but they both got on logger boots. So those guys are loggers.
Jeremiah: Over Sure.
Ramsey Russell: And they’re lumberjacks, and I’m assuming different from somewhere up here.
Jeremiah: But they’d be over in the, so over there you get a lot of log driving and stuff. You have a healthy fortress industry all over this province.
Ramsey Russell: I’m like you. I don’t think they made their money off the lumber business.
Jeremiah: No. No. They say it’s been said that the loggers made the best bootleggers.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah.
Jeremiah: Because they’re always in the woods. They can walk across the border pretty easily. A lot of guys too didn’t take long to figure out, you know, make a buck a day or, you know, make several bucks a day by walking some liquor over that border and dropping it off. So I imagine they made some money bootlegging, decided they would get a fancy picture taken to kind of show off their spoils there.
Ramsey Russell: They did, didn’t they?
Jeremiah: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: Very definitive picture here. What are some of the other photos up here, and how does that relate to the war of 18? Almost war of 18-something.
Jeremiah: Yeah. So if you think about here, up here. So you had The War of 1812, of course, and New Brunswick shares a very vertical border. I think it’s the longest stretch of vertical border in North America, if not the world. It’s a straight line between Maine and New Brunswick. And so we almost had another war break out. I believe it’s called the War of 1836. They called it the Aroostook War. And it was they were fighting over determining where the line of Canada and the US began or ended.
Ramsey Russell: On the Maine boundary.
Jeremiah: On the Maine boundary, that’s right. Yeah. At this time, New Brunswick, I think, It was called New Ireland. They didn’t even call it New Brunswick at the time.
Ramsey Russell: Golly.
Jeremiah: Yeah, It’s part of Nova Scotia. Technically, it wasn’t even formed. It really is a province.
Ramsey Russell: Was that before or after this part of the world sent all of the French down to Louisiana?
Jeremiah: I mean, you’d be still in the same time because, keep in mind, also there’s a big French Acadian culture here in Maine in the northern part of the province. I mean, that’s where that kind of bootleg is.
Ramsey Russell: What year and war was that when the British and the French got into it over this part of the world, and the British, by gunpoint, loaded up a bunch of Acadians and dropped them off on the Gulf Coast of Louisiana? Had been around that same time in the 1800s.
Jeremiah: Yeah. I don’t remember the exact date. I mean, we will learn that in school and stuff.
Ramsey Russell: I don’t know what happened.
Jeremiah: Yeah. You know, as a Canadian, I’ll tell you, we know a lot more about American history than Canadian history.
Ramsey Russell: Really?
Jeremiah: Yeah, sadly, we talked about earlier. You know, a dog that doesn’t wag its own tail. I mean, I find Canadian culture to learn something, american culture. I don’t know if we’re just too humble or proud. We’d rather tell American stories than Canadian stories.
Ramsey Russell: Wow. Like what?
Jeremiah: Geez. I mean, you hear a lot of people talk about, If they want to talk about Prohibition and moonshine and stories here and stuff, they talk about the Appalachians or they talk about maybe the, you know, these organized crimes out of New York and Chicago and places like that.
Ramsey Russell: But it was all up here, too.
Jeremiah: Yeah, we had it all here. We had the, you know, the Whiskey King, Rocco Perry, in Ontario, in the Great Lakes. I mean, if I said that, nobody would know that. You say Al Capone, they know all about it. I mean, they’d rather talk about those stories, which has always been really odd to me. But a big part of it is you get a lot of movies, obviously, get Hollywood and the US, they’re better at telling those stories. But here, it’s this whole thing, like, we try to pretend like, oh, no, we didn’t do that stuff. For the longest time, it’s starting to change, people are willing to talk about some of these, less reputable points in our history, but they always like to pretend like, oh, no, we never did any wrong. That was all down there. Everybody here was upstanding citizens. But here, there’s another picture up on the wall. We talk about you see, it’s carrying out the Canadian Temperance Acts, the CTA in Moncton. So New Brunswick was like the first province to electively go dry. That had been outside of a courthouse, in Moncton, dumping out barrels of alcohol.
Ramsey Russell: Wow.
Jeremiah: Kind of state earlier, like, our influence with Maine, how it came here, and a lot of it. It’s was a very, very religious province, historically, and stuff. That’s a big part of it. So we had the whole temperance movement come up here pretty strong.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah.
Jeremiah: When it entered, yeah. So that’s really how that led to that. Yeah. I think they called it the Scott Act at the time. But, yeah, that also led to, in this province. Again, keep in mind, right now, we only have about 800,000 people living in this province.
Ramsey Russell: Wow.
Jeremiah: That’s highest we’ve had in decades since the confederation of this province, it’s the highest we’ve had.
Ramsey Russell: Still, it’s a big province. Not very many people.
Jeremiah: If you look at the map of it, you’ll notice all the little fort towns along that Maine border because they wanted to maintain that St. John River on the British side versus the U.S. side after the War of 1812. And that’s why that war almost broke out because the US wanted to claim that because it had a, When you landed in the New World, it already had a trail called the Grand Communication Line that ran across the Americas. And they wanted both sides wanted that on their side. That’s why all these little towns are set up along the US border. Here we have all these border towns. There were forts one time to maintain that line. And that Grand Communication Line later became our TransCanada highway across Canada.
Ramsey Russell: How big?
Jeremiah: That’s our main highway. So that’s like our I-90.
Ramsey Russell: Is that the Yellowhead Highway?
Jeremiah: Well, you call it the Number Two.
Ramsey Russell: Okay. Yeah. I drove on the Number Two a long way.
Jeremiah: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: Last couple days.

Jeremiah: Yeah. And that’s why they have it here. But that being said, you go up to the northern part of the province where the French culture is, and you’ve got it on both sides of the border there, like Van Buren up in northern Maine, and they get the gangster.
Ramsey Russell: When I first got here this afternoon, four guys came in, and they were all talking French.
Jeremiah: Yeah. We’re officially a bilingual province. We’re the only officially bilingual province in Canada.
Ramsey Russell: So we speak what in Quebec’s language?
Jeremiah: Quebec, Quebecois French.
Ramsey Russell: France it is.
Jeremiah: I’d say Quebecois, Quebec. Yeah. They speak Quebecois. But, it’s funny. So we just went over to Paris with a delegation of other New Brunswick food producers, and we were over there, and the fellow that works with me, he’s francophone. French is his first language. He was over there speaking the dialect from here to the Parisians, and they would say, “Just speak English.”
Ramsey Russell: They didn’t understand it really?
Jeremiah: They didn’t like it. It’s a different dialect. So I always consider it like King’s English versus American English. And they didn’t care for his accent enough.
Ramsey Russell: So maybe you got my English right.
Jeremiah: You know what I mean? There are dialects, and in this province, there’s a lot of French culture. But the northern part of the province speaks a different one than, say, the east-west corner of the province.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah.
Jeremiah: Yeah, it’s different. They’ve got their own dialect, so they call it Fringlish or Franglais in some places because it’s a blend of the two languages. But when I went to school growing up, six years were in English, six years in French.
Ramsey Russell: You’re kidding. You speak French too?
Jeremiah: A little bit, but it’s not great.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Do you all sell your spirits throughout Canada right now?
Jeremiah: We do, yeah.
Ramsey Russell: Mostly online sales or.
Jeremiah: Mostly yeah. We’re in Alberta. We’ve got a pretty good presence in Alberta now.
Ramsey Russell: Well, I could tell when she came all the way to get some stuff.
Jeremiah: Yeah. Again, that came from winning that whiskey award. It opened the door there. They’ve got a privatized system, more like the U.S. All the other provinces in Canada have a monopoly owned by the Crown. So we call them Crown Corporations. The province regulates the distribution and sale of alcohol. So every time I want to send it to a province, if I want to get in their stores, I have to apply almost like it’s a new country. That’s how I’ve always looked at it. That’s why I’d work on the U.S. If I’ve got to apply like it’s a new country, I might as well go to a new country.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah.
Jeremiah: But.
Ramsey Russell: Well, I’ve learned a lot today. Jeremiah, tell everybody listening how they can connect with Moonshine Creek Distillery. I know you all got social media.
Jeremiah: Yeah, we’ve got Facebook and Instagram, Moonshine Creek, Moonshine.Creek. It might show on there, but we’re also info@moonshinecreek.ca. That’s an email. You can always reach out to us there if you want to connect. But yeah, and if you’re ever in the New Brunswick area, we love having visitors. We would invite anybody to come in.
Ramsey Russell: It was the highlight of my day stopping by today. I’m not gonna lie to you. It was a change of fortunes. I was having a bad luck Monday. Yeah, it was like 1, 2, 3, and then I pulled up in here. My luck changed.
Jeremiah: All right.
Ramsey Russell: Very sure felt like it’s been a great visit. And I’ll post a link to you all’s website in the description down below. And Jeremiah, thank you for having us today. Thank you for taking the time out of your busy schedule, and when we get done, I want to take a tour and go see how this stuff works.
Jeremiah: Certainly. It’d be my pleasure.
Ramsey Russell: What’d you ever do with that old beer keg? You keep it for posterity? Put it in the museum one day or something?
Jeremiah: I think I gave it to another moonshiner who wanted it. Yeah, he wanted it. I don’t use it anymore, but if he wants to have a go at it.
Ramsey Russell: You all got a little bit better paint thinner now.
Jeremiah: That’s right. But you’ve got to start somewhere, like I say.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Thank you very much. And folks, thank you all for listening to this episode of Mojo’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast from New Brunswick at the headquarters of Moonshine Creek Distillery. Boy, what a change of fortune. You all check them out if you’re ever in Canada. Find a bottle or two. See you next time.