Kenny May works in the agriculture business, drives a pickup truck, chews Red Man and makes whiskey.
Just like his daddy did.
One big difference: Kenny’s daddy, Clyde May, went to the federal penitentiary for his whiskey.
Kenny May hopes to do better.
Using the old family recipe, he is marketing what he calls “Alabama-style” whiskey, modeled on the moonshine that he helped his father cook up in the woods near Union Springs years ago.
His whiskey, however, is legal, and available on the Internet and at 160 package stores in Alabama.
A 90-proof amber lightning known as Clyde May’s Conecuh Ridge Whiskey, the smooth potable has already won some admirers. This month, the Alabama legislature passed a resolution naming it the official “state spirit” of Alabama.
But not every Alabamian is toasting Kenny’s brew.
Republican Gov. Robert R. “Bob” Riley vetoed the resolution when it first crossed his desk. Within a week, both houses whomped up a two-thirds majority and overrode the veto.
To the chagrin of Riley’s camp, the spirited exchange attracted national attention. Canadian radio interviewed legislators, May was featured in news stories from Boston to Oregon.
“I don’t know if it’s the kind of attention we craved,” said Jeff Emerson, a spokesman for Riley.
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Surprised by his situation
May was surprised by the controversy. A midsize, barrel-shaped country man with the engaging manner of a born salesman, he has spent most of his business life peddling forage seed, mostly fescue and Bermuda. His territory extends from Texas to Virginia, and he puts a quarter-million miles on his Ford every three years.
Shortly after Clyde May died in 1990, Kenny began dreaming of a way to pay the man honor. “My initial gut reason for starting this out was a tribute to him,” Kenny said, “’cause I thought he was the finest thing that ever lived.”
He decided to make a legal version of the whiskey that his father had perfected. The 53-year-old now works full time promoting Conecuh Ridge and expects to add barbecue sauce and other products to his line. He recently visited Greenville, Ala., scouting a site near Interstate Hwy. 65 for a distillery that would become both a tourist stop and the state’s first liquor manufacturing facility.
Last week he visited Cuba, where Fidel Castro is reportedly a fan of Alabama-style tippling.
Conecuh Ridge is actually made in Bardstown, Ky., by Kentucky Bourbon Distillery, using a bourbon mash that detours from Clyde’s original formula. Instead of rye and sugar, they use a more high-toned mix of rye, corn and malted barley. To keep it real, they “cut” every batch with Alabama water.
He won’t say whether he thinks his whiskey is better than his dad’s — it would be disrespectful — but he thinks it’s “close.” At $34.99 for a 750-milliliter bottle, it is considered a premium whiskey and is priced above Woodford Reserve and Knob Creek. (It’s also significantly pricier than the $20 his dad might have charged for a gallon.)
Kenny May expects to make about 4,000 cases this year, and is struggling — through the arcane liquor laws that govern each state differently — to find a national distributor.
“He’s a hard-working young man,” said Thomas Allison, a retired agent with the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms. “He has gone a long way with this legal liquor.”
Allison also respected the father, even though he was the agent who eventually caught him and put him behind bars.
He chased some of the largest producers in the country during his years in charge of the Montgomery office, many from Bullock County.
Conecuh Ridge (it’s pronounced con-NEK-uh), is a raised spine that snakes through the middle of the county and was once known nationally for its homemade liquor.
Clyde May, however, was small potatoes.
The father of eight row-cropped a 300-acre spread in the Almeria community, southeast of Montgomery, and, from the 1950s through the 1980s, never made more than about 300 gallons a week. He concentrated on quality, not quantity, and made just enough to augment his earnings from his day job at the Bonnie Plant Farm.
When Kenny was in junior high, he and his brother Charles (whom everyone calls “Spooky”) began helping out, carrying 112-pound sacks of rye and 60-pound bags of sugar into the woods, and hauling five-gallon jugs of white liquor back out. (They carried by hand to avoid leaving tire tracks pointing to illegal cookstoves.)
Their dad usually placed his stills along a creek, near the mouth of one of the many sand-filtered springs that spangle the ridge, feeding the rich black-belt country to the north and the poorer sandy-soiled land to the south.
“I have carried bushels of rye many miles in those woods,” said Kenny, as he steered his pickup through the empty territory between his Troy offices and his Bullock County birthplace. (Of the eight offspring, he moved the farthest from home when he resettled in Troy, 20 miles to the south.)
He pointed out the Almeria Club, a white-clapboard, tin-roofed building in the middle of nowhere. Originally an elementary school attended by his father, it became a community center where Hank Williams Sr. once performed.
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At the former Bullock County jail in Union Springs, which is being refitted as a museum, May examined one of the exhibits, a copper still, with a distinctive rectangular condenser. His dad designed the condenser for better whiskeymaking. The still may be one of Clyde’s — federal agents seized or chopped up many of them — but Kenny isn’t sure. The innovative design indicates Clyde took his whiskey preparations seriously, Kenny said. He washed his drums thoroughly between batches, avoided lead-based solders in his copper stills, and sealed the cap and pipes to the cookstove with a biscuit-dough mixed from White Lily flour. Clyde chose White Lily because, as far as he was concerned, White Lily was the finest.
He put up a portion of his whiskey in charred oak casks and aged it at least a year, with a few dried Washington Red apples thrown in for flavor. This “Christmas Whiskey” went only to the most deserving customers. He kept none for himself, because he didn’t drink.
Whiskey making is a familiar part of Alabama history. Some Alabamians think it’s an episode best left in the past.
Riley was also concerned about the legislative resolution’s serving as an endorsement of a commercial product.
Nonsense, said Rep. Alan Boothe, a Democrat representing Pike and Coffee Counties. The state endorses other commercially available products, and “this is the first Alabama-style legal whiskey in the state. I say legal, because there’s a lot of whiskey made illegally, Alabama-style.”
Not as much as in the old days, however. Today, federal agents are more concerned about methedrine labs than whiskey stills.
Nonetheless, in the waning days of moonshining, Clyde May was sentenced to 18 months “in the custody of the Attorney General of the United States,” and in the summer of 1973 went to a minimum security facility at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery. The family visited every weekend.
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In the spring of 1974, May was released after serving about eight months. Shortly thereafter, former Atty. Gen. John Mitchell was incarcerated at the very same facility, after his conviction on charges stemming from the Watergate coverup.
Clyde, who kept moonshining even after he paid his debt to society, was amused by the coincidence. “I got the last laugh,” he told his son. “I might have been in his custody for all that time, but when I left he took my bed.”