North Carolina Whiskey History: From Farm Stills to the Craft Revival

North CarolinaWhiskey History

North Carolina was a serious whiskey state long before it was a dry one. Hundreds of distilleries supplied the Carolinas in the 1800s, statewide prohibition shut them down in 1909, and legal distilling did not meaningfully return until the 2000s, helped by law changes in 2015, 2017 and 2019.

Whiskey making arrived with European settlement. Corn, a crop settlers learned to grow from American Indians, became the base for most local whiskey, while orchards in the western counties turned apples into cider and apple brandy. For a long time, most stills were single family operations.

Geography made whiskey good business: with poor roads and little rail, distilling corn paid better than hauling it to market. By the mid 1800s, whiskey was a major commodity in western North Carolina.

Railroads turned it into an industry. Statesville sat at the end of the western line and became the main shipping point for whiskey across the Carolinas. According to NCpedia, as many as 450 distilleries shipped through Statesville in the 1880s, and wholesale liquor houses there did steady business from the 1880s into the early 1900s.

A prohibition petition reached the General Assembly in 1852 and went nowhere. An 1881 referendum lost badly, 166,325 to 48,370.

The tide turned in the early 1900s. The Watts Act banned making and selling liquor outside incorporated towns, a measure aimed squarely at the county distilleries. The Ward Law extended prohibition to small towns, and by 1905, 68 of the state's 98 counties were dry.

Then came the statewide vote. On May 26, 1908, North Carolinians approved prohibition 113,612 to 69,416, and it took effect in January 1909, roughly a decade before national Prohibition under the Eighteenth Amendment. Legal commercial distilling in the state was finished.

Prohibition ended legal production, not demand. Illegal distilling and bootlegging carried on, and moonshine became a way of life in parts of the state, especially the western counties.

Wilkes County, in the northwestern foothills, is tied to that history above all through Junior Johnson. Born in Wilkes County in 1931, Johnson learned the trade from his father. In 1956 he was convicted in federal court of moonshining after being caught at his father's still, and he served eleven months and three days in a federal penitentiary. President Ronald Reagan granted him a full pardon on December 26, 1985.

The connection between illegal liquor and stock car racing is documented history, not just legend. Hauling illegal liquor called for fast, modified cars and drivers who knew the back roads. According to NCpedia, organized racing among moonshiners and others with fast cars started in the mid 1930s on rough tracks around North Carolina, and some early races pitted local moonshiners against law officers.

Racing became a legitimate sport quickly. NASCAR was formed in 1947 by William France Sr. and Ed Otto, and it held its first official event on June 19, 1949, at a dirt speedway in Charlotte. Junior Johnson became one of its early stars, winning 50 professional races including the 1960 Daytona 500, and he is credited as the first driver to use drafting successfully. The half mile North Wilkesboro Speedway, in his home county, hosted its last Winston Cup race in 1996.

The Twenty-first Amendment ended national Prohibition in 1933, but North Carolina stayed mostly dry until 1935. That year, the General Assembly let localities choose whether to allow liquor sales and created local Alcoholic Beverage Control boards to run the shops. The first ABC store opened in Wilson on July 2, 1935.

In 1937, a county option law made the ABC system statewide. Liquor could be sold only through government run ABC stores in places that voted for them, an arrangement that, in its basic form, still governs bottle sales today. Bars came much later. Brown bagging (bringing your own bottle to a restaurant and buying mixers) was legalized in 1967, and the first legal liquor by the drink sale happened in Charlotte in November 1978, with local voters deciding whether to allow it.

For how the system works now, see Buying spirits in North Carolina.

For most of the 20th century, North Carolina had no significant commercial distilling. Piedmont Distillers in Madison, in Rockingham County, had its first products in ABC stores in 2005. More distilleries followed in the early 2010s, including Broadslab in Benson in 2012 and Southern Distilling in Statesville, the first legal distillery in that old whiskey town in more than a century.

Early operators could offer samples but could not sell a visitor a bottle. The General Assembly changed that in stages:

• 2015: House Bill 909 allowed distilleries producing under 100,000 gallons a year to sell one bottle per visitor per calendar year, at the state ABC price.
• 2017: Senate Bill 155 raised the limit to five bottles per person per calendar year.
• 2019: Senate Bill 290, signed July 29, 2019, removed the bottle cap, allowed distilleries to serve mixed drinks made with their own spirits where local law permits, and allowed tastings in ABC stores.

By 2019, Saveur counted more than 50 distillers in the state. As of 2026, the distillery statute allows sales to visitors seven days a week, including Sunday afternoons.