"When are moonshiners in the hills and hollows of Kentucky and the Carolinas going to get some love from The New Yorker? Hint – not in a very long time."

Said Comanche Voter in comments on the post about the New Yorker article about making Mezcal in Oaxaca. That sounded too knee-jerkily cynical, so I did a search of the New Yorker archive, and I found a few things. The best was "Moonshine" from August 19, 1985 (click to enlarge):



There was also "Moonshine Kingdom" from August 27, 2012:

As a boy, during summer visits to his grandfather’s house in southwest Virginia, Matt Bondurant was drawn to the rusty object that hung beneath the gun rack: a set of brass knuckles. He’d stand on a chair to touch them, imagining how it would be—If you are still alive when I run out of bullets, I will pull this hunk of metal off the wall and pummel you into unconsciousness—but never daring to slip them on. “They scared me,” Bondurant said recently, over a glass of corn whiskey at a Manhattan restaurant called the Tipsy Parson. “My grandfather was the kind of guy you didn’t mess with.”

The Bondurants were ornery giants; Matt, who is six feet two, was picked on by his cousins as the runt. Though Bondurant’s father had moved away from hardscrabble Franklin County and Bondurant grew up “citified,” as he puts it, he was fascinated by the knobby roots of the family tree, and in 2008 he published a historical novel, “The Wettest County in the World.” It is the Depression-era tale of how the Bondurant Boys—Bondurant’s grandfather, Andrew Jackson Bondurant, known as Jack, and Jack’s older brothers Forrest and Howard—ran moonshine and beat the bejeezus out of everyone with those brass knuckles....

And I know this doesn't count but "Kings County Distillery" from July 6 & 13, 2015:

Outside, one recent afternoon, Hank Williams, on the stereo, lamented, “My bucket’s got a hole in it / I can’t buy no beer” as people at picnic tables sampled honey moonshine (flavored with honeycombs from the Brooklyn Grange’s apiaries) and bitter chocolate whiskey (infused with Mast Brothers’ cacao husks). The sun had set on what the Times dubbed the “golden era for the bold and buoyant brigands” with their “mountain dew,” but it still shone upon those playing corn hole and sipping mercifully legal Manhattans.