This is how we make the moonshine.
Say so, love.
Say so, love. He's a legend in his own time.
I mean, boy, hero moonshiner.
He goes back almost to prohibition.
I mean, this guy, he's seen more stuff than we could even begin to think about.
Cecil Love is an icon.
You know, he's 95 years old.
He's a moonshiner.
All his life, he's lived it.
He's breathed it. He knows all about it.
Cecil, his family, they got this 75 acre track up in the mountain was there a couple
years ago. And we saw all these old stills man deteriorate and fall into the ground.
We didn't think a whole lot of it at the time, but a few weeks ago they put the farm
up for sale. I want to get permission for him to go in there and save the relics.
Save the relics, man.
And so down with that.
I love. I love that.
Telling you it's going to be too cool if he'll let us do it.
There are so many steals there in this one place, and I intend to talk, Cecil about
going ahead and preserving as much as that as I possibly can.
Cecil Hey.
How you doing? Say so.
Cecil, this is Josh Owens.
How you. Doing? Cecil, How you doing?
So you've been doing okay?
A lot of liquor was made in Franklin County, and you was right in the middle of all of it.
You all he loves.
Where.
Where my older brother got caught twice.
My dad got caught once and wife said, You go get caught one of these days.
I said, Well, maybe so.
Next day they did catch me.
A legendary figure in Franklin County.
Cecil Love began his moonshining career in 1940 at the age of 12, when he chanced upon a
bootlegger whose car had broken down and helped him carry jars to the still site.
Cecil put moonshining on hold while overseas serving in the Korean War.
After earning the Purple Heart during combat, he returned home and got back to
making corn liquor in the woods.
His operation soon grew so successful he would run as much as 600 gallons a day,
bootlegging as far north as Maryland and as far south as Florida.
Evading the law for over 60 years.
He was finally caught in the act at the age of 83.
In 2011, a judge issued a 12 month suspended sentence on the condition the lifelong
moonshiner stopped producing liquor, ending one of the longest spanning outlaw distilling
careers Franklin County has ever seen.
Listen to me. Talk to you about your home place up there.
Can you tell us what's at that steal site?
Well, it's a stainless steel layer.
I think it's three copper steel, two galvanized little, little bit of steel.
I said let me ask you.
I want to go up there and dig up a couple of those and preserve them with your name on it.
So in the future, other people will be able to walk up and say they will see some loves
outfit. You okay with me doing that?
Yeah.
Get all you want.
Yes. Put a put a plaque out there with your name and all that.
Loves to be recognized, especially Cecil, for what he did in this site.
Cecil, good talking to you.
Yeah, We're going to get on over the road here a little bit.
Been good to be your friend.
See you.
And he did amazing stuff at this site.
I'm excited about this little dig.
It's a few hundred yards out here to the actual steal site.
That's what we're looking for right here.
Yeah. That's a relic.
Yeah, it's a relic. It's probably five foot long.
Four foot wide. 400 gallons.
But now look right here. You see it galvanize.
It got to a time. Years and years ago, you couldn't get copper or aluminum.
They had to rock and roll what they had.
You might throw galvanize on it.
They'd get a few runs off of it.
But if you use this for a while, it'll start to rust in your damn liquor, start turning on
you. But if you come in like somebody make 2 or 3 runs with it and they discard it before
it started rusting.
Yeah, that's so wild.
They had to improvise, do whatever the hell they could.
You know, you got to make a dollar.
All them old boys did whatever they had to do to survive.
You see, the.
Family need the family, man.
You got to feed the family.
Let's check yourselves out. Yeah, See what else?
See what else we got here? Watch your step, man.
Broken up, jaws all in here.
When they when they come in and cut up a steel sight.
They busted the damn.
Liquor. Busted damn jaws.
He went. They'd even cut a hole in bags of sugar and pull it out.
When I look at this graveyard, this grave site, I see stuff that's just amazing to me.
I see a couple over here. A couple over here.
You see us over here? What we got in me?
We ain't never done no patching like that right there.
Hell, man.
Things was tight. You had to do what you had to do.
Hell, if you had glue, if that would hold, would you use glue?
Normal man looks. All he sees is sheet metal laying there and rotted wood.
But I see the blood, sweat, the tears that these guys went through to feed their
families. Because I've lived it.
No way.
You ain't going to love this.
Out of all the fricking hundreds of steel sites that I've wandered into in my lifetime,
I've never found a cat.
Never.
Never. Look at that.
And it's weird as hell.
They must have had this around to keep it from falling in the steel.
They muddied the piss out of that bastard.
I've never seen anything like it.
Okay. Something over there.
Say something. Say something.
I don't know what it is. Barrel or something.
Oh, man. No way.
Damn.
I ain't even believe in this.
This rolling mob.
Damn decides in good shape.
Very rare to find a steel intact.
That never, ever happened.
I can't see any rotted boards on it.
I can't see any metal that's rusted.
It is looking extremely good.
This steel is a solid, great shape, Pretty damn good.
Shape.
We could use this steel, use it.
We could take this steel and fricking use it and pay homage to see some.
Oh, man, I like that idea.
What? One of his recipes.
I'm telling you. Let's make one of his freaking recipes.
Make a run for him.
I like it. I like the idea.
Let's do it to find something that's usable.
It's unbelievable.
Legendary, legendary steel, legendary MASH.
Bill, let's.
Drag this bitch out of here.
Let's set it up. Maybe wrap it, buddy.
I don't have a hammer that.
Big old spiders in there.
Majority. Easy now. This thing's got to suck out to you.
All right. Don't let any holes in it to me.
Cecil Tor anything up?
Cut me some slack. I don't believe we went and met a frickin bad ass fricking og
moonshiner legend.
We all think about this spot right here.
I think it looks good.
We got a steal.
We think. Perfect.
We got his recipe.
We're using the exact same creek bank.
We're making legendary moonshine.
We're making Cecil loves moonshine.
You got a lighter, don't you? Yeah.
Oh, fine. But we didn't come here 20 or 30 barrels.
We came here as one barrel.
We got Cecil's recipe for full grain corn.
We want to get it right.
One barrel. When concentrate on it, we can get the timeframes right on it to get it
exactly as close as I possibly can to cease scalding.
Hot at.
These scalding hot. We got four grains to go in here and each one of them has to be timed
to a certain point.
What is the MASH bill?
First off, a little bit of cornmeal, and that's a little mixed.
There's two different kinds of corn meal.
Yeah, that looks good, though don't that color.
He used a yellow and the other white.
Yeah. Boy, it smells good.
I love that smell.
This recipe Cecil gave me.
He uses a corn rye malted barley, wheat, bran.
But moonshiners use a lot of different grains.
It's one thing about the grains that go in here, but it's more to Cecil's mash bill than
just the grains.
It's the timing of each one of them between the application of putting the grains in
here. That's the key to his.
Okay. Putting this rye in here now.
Oh, hell, yeah. Rye always gets that.
Little bit of a spicy taste.
Helps it beat a little bit, too.
All right. Five minutes.
Cecil was very adamant.
Each grain has got to go in in line the way he said it.
Malted barley, baby.
That's some good tasting stuff right there.
Not just Jersey. Here's the grains.
Here's the steps that you take to cook them off with.
All of the wheat, son.
Ready? Yeah. God of Moses.
That smells good.
Yeah, that's all the sugar.
Normally they would put more sugar in it.
Cece was telling me this mash bill here.
They would make specialty mash bills to barter.
You couldn't trade a pint of liquor to a man with a ham and a hog up there that you needed
to feed your family if you just put all sugar in.
It just came out to be sugar lipid.
He said, You ain't get nothing.
They didn't want to add this recipe here.
It's the best of the best premium liquor.
This is Cecil Law's family recipe.
That's probably over 100 years old.
Oh, man. This is going to be amazing.
Hopefully it come out right because we're all dying to taste it.
But being we got Cecil's recipe and we're doing it exactly down to the fricking half a
minute, it should be perfect.