Run by moonlight the old hill-country way, with a Detroit hot-rod heart.
Small batch · coming soon
The Still
White lightning, clear as a cold spring running out of a West Virginia hillside, and made the way hill folk have made it for two hundred years: corn, a copper still, fire and patience.
Proof
By the run
Base
Corn
The Lineup
Every vessel holds the same white lightning. What changes is what you take home.
Everyday
XXX Jugs
Stoneware-style ceramic jugs stamped XXX, with a handle. Pint, fifth and half-gallon.
Small batch
The Cask Series
Glass blown into a form, in short numbered runs. Close cousins, never quite twins.
One of one
Masterpieces
Blown freehand from a gather of molten glass by a master glassblower friend. Each one is a sculpture that happens to hold white lightning.
Sculpture
Chrome & Glass
Bottles built into car parts: pistons, valve covers, spark plugs, velocity stacks. Half bottle, half engine bay.
Limited · it glows
The Glow Series
Uranium glass that glows green under a blacklight. Our founder had a good career in nuclear power, from Fermi 2 outside Detroit to Oyster Creek on the Jersey Shore. This one is for the plant crews.
On the Shelf
One-of-one Masterpieces and Chrome & Glass pieces show up here as they come out of the shop.
Nothing on the shelf yet. The first pieces are in the works.
Foraged Runs
The white lightning comes plain or steeped with something dug, picked or cracked in the hills. Each run is small and seasonal.
Berries with a peppery, citrus bite. Mountain allspice.
More runs as the seasons turn. Y’all come back now, and we’ll holler when a new batch comes off the still.
The Chase
A black turbo Pinto with a red interior, an intercooler poking through the hood, a ported Ranger head and a Ford 9-inch rear with 4.11 gears on fat slicks. Dad drives: seventy-some years of beard, half Santa Claus and half hill country, and a better mechanic than any revenuer on his tail. Chief Wiggum, the family’s black Guinea Hog, rides shotgun with the jug and has clearly been into it.
Coming to YouTube
The Ridge Runners
A cartoon about a Santa-bearded hillbilly, his drunk Guinea Hog and a turbo Pinto, outrunning the revenuers from the West Virginia hills to the streets of Detroit.
Episode ideaThe Jailbreak
Episode ideaRevenuers on the Ridge
Episode ideaWiggum Takes the Wheel
Episode ideaDetroit or Bust
Spin-offs are in the works too, including Wiggum’s Love Line.
The family story says one of ours landed in a West Virginia jail early last century for moonshining, and a relative broke him out. He ran north to Detroit, went to work in the auto factories, and the law never caught up with him.
Reenactment. Some details may be exaggerated.
Our grandparents kept driving back down to see kin in the hills. Somewhere along the line, our generation lost touch. Someday we’d like to find the family still down there and make the story whole.
Detroit Iron
Once he got to Detroit, the family went to work for Ford, the company that built the moving assembly line at its Highland Park plant on Woodward. One great-grandpa put in more than forty years at Ford and retired with the company’s long-service cufflinks. Grandpa followed him onto the line. The family settled in Berkley and Ferndale, just off Woodward Avenue, M-1, where the first mile of concrete road in the country was poured in 1909.
Dad never worked the line. He became a mechanic instead, the one who rebuilds engines, transmissions and anything else that needs it.
The turbo Pinto was a father-and-son build. Our founder found it in New Hampshire and hauled it home to Michigan through Canada during the SARS outbreak. While studying electrical engineering, he got the electronics working and welded up a new intake around the vane air flow meter, and Dad handled the heavy mechanical work. In 2004 he left for Honda R&D outside Columbus, Ohio, then went on to an engineering career in nuclear power and related fields. The Pinto stayed home with Dad, who took it over and is now teaching himself MegaSquirt fuel injection and everything about turbochargers.
Spark plugs, gears and chain welded into critters and whatever else comes out of the shop.
Glow
Bar neon
Real glass neon, bent by hand, plus a lower-cost LED rope version.
Keepsakes
Souvenirs
Shirts, stickers, shot glasses and XXX jug keepsakes.
Accepted payment
Monero or Blood
$ USDUncle Sam’s dollars are no good here.
Still Log
The lineup grows: XXX jugs in three sizes, the Cask Series, one-off Masterpieces, Chrome & Glass, and the uranium-glass Glow Series. The Ridge Runners cartoon is in the works.
Page is up. West Virginia × Detroit direction set. Foraged runs (ginseng first) in development. Ceramic XXX jug picked as the core bottle.