Moore: Summer can be a time of relaxation. It can be a time to just let some steam off. Grab a drink. Enjoy yourself. Here to help me do that, metaphorically speaking, is Jared Phillips. Jared, thank you for coming in today. Appreciate it.
Phillips: Yeah. Anytime.
Moore: We are going to talk about the history and the Ozarks around booze.
Phillips: Yeah. So it's a long and convoluted history. So we're just going to talk about a little bit of it today, and maybe later on we can dive more into it.
Moore: Yeah.
Phillips: And when we think about the history of booze in the Ozarks, most people think about moonshiners, right? Hillbillies and moonshine. And we are going to talk about some moonshine here in a little bit. But before moonshine became the iconic thing for us, we actually had wine and beer. So I know everybody gets excited about all the microbreweries that we have around here right now. We'll talk about those too here in just a second. We actually had a pretty healthy brewing culture and winemaking culture even before we became a state.
Moore: When we think about making wine here in America, there tends to be a certain kind of climate that's needed to have actually really good wine. You have the grapes, the ability to grow the way that they need to. We think of, of course, we think of Napa Valley and California. There's areas in Missouri that are really good at growing grapes here. We think about Arkansas. Is that really something that happens?
Phillips: Yeah. Arkansas, as some of the listeners probably know, Arkansas has had a long and storied wine history here. And we kind of think about it in two different ways. So first off, wine has been in the region pretty much since white settlers started to show up. So it mostly becomes a winemaking, and beer making as well, is going to come with German or with Catholic settlers, right? And so we have our first records of winemaking is going to start to show up probably around the 1830s. And so we have records out in Batesville of a wine operation out that way. And then in Hermannsburg, which is also known now today as Dutch Mills. So in the southwestern part of Washington County. There was another winery out there in the 1830s, but the boom for winemaking is really going to begin after the Civil War.
And really, there's two hubs for winemaking in Arkansas that we kind of think about today. So one is Altus. And so by the 1870s in Altus, we're going to see the establishment of what's going to become the Post and the Wiederkehr wineries, which are still with us today, still very active members of the southern Ozarks, central Arkansas communities. But then also we're going to start to see in Tontitown by the end of the 19th century a very strong Italian Catholic wine community, right? But with that creation of these wineries out there, we're also going to see Arkansas and some of our compatriots up in Missouri as well. Arkansas grape growers and wine aficionados are going to become regionally and nationally known for the grape varieties that they're trying to breed, to make grapes work, make wine grapes work in our climate, because we're a little off. But people figured out how to make pretty interesting wines.
Moore: So let's talk about this idea of moving from alcohol being a thing you produce for yourself to a thing that you make money doing.
Phillips: Yeah. Well, and again, Arkansas is a weird place for this. So at the same time that the German and Catholic immigrants are providing wineries for us, they're also putting together commercial breweries. And so one of our first major commercial breweries would be down in Fort Smith. And that's actually, Fort Smith is kind of an interesting catalyst or hub for a lot of the commercial-style beer production in Arkansas. Probably the first or at least best known brewery in Arkansas would be the Joseph Knoble Brewery, Knoble with a K, down in Fort Smith. And it's the same time period as these wineries, so 1840s through the 1880s.
But Arkansas is an interesting place for alcohol because by 1915, so this is before Prohibition starts officially nationally, Arkansas has become a dry state. And we have absolutely ended the production of alcohol for sale and even home production, right? So this is the great era of people chopping whiskey barrels with hatchets and that kind of stuff. And the reason we see this occur is by the end of the 19th century, people aren't as worried about wine production and beer production, though there is some ethnic stereotypes along Italian immigration or German immigration and alcohol consumption. But people are really getting worried kind of nationally about the amount of alcohol that the average American is consuming, right? And there's all these interesting studies about how many gallons of hard alcohol versus wine versus whatever the average American is drinking at the time. And it is stunning when you go and you look at it.
And so all these temperance leagues start to pop up in Arkansas, and the Ozarks, as most of us know, has always had a really engaged and active religious community. And one of the things they were worried about at the end of the 19th and the early 20th century is the impact that alcohol abuse was having on home life. So there's a huge temperance movement, right? And it's everybody, churches, newspapers, social clubs, grocery stores, everybody's involved in it. Everybody, for the most part. It's hard to find publicly people who are pro alcohol consumption. So by 1915, we end up as a dry state, right?
And so all the commercial breweries, all the commercial wineries and illicit moonshine production (moonshine had almost always been illicit), they have to go underground, or they change. So the wine production shifts to sacramental wine for religious services. We get grape juice out of it. So if you've never had cold Post grape juice on a hot summer day, that's something we all should take part in today. I was not paid for that programming, by the way.
But this is from 1915 on, until Prohibition ends in the United States, there's a push in the state to try to figure out how we manage alcohol production and sales. And after alcohol becomes legal again nationally, Arkansas is going to put in place what we affectionately call a sin tax. And so basically, it's more expensive to buy booze and cigarettes, as the law has evolved over time. But booze is what it hits for the heart for the longest time. And it makes it really hard because it just makes the purchasing of alcohol, the production and purchasing of alcohol, that much more expensive, which makes it that much harder for commercial operations to start. And so really from the '30s until the '80s, there's kind of a wilderness in the state for a lot of stable, solid alcohol production. That changes in the 1980s and the 1990s, though.
Moore: What's the catalyst for that change?
Phillips: Well, a couple of things really. One, we start to relax some of the sin tax stuff. Two, the population in America just kind of changes a little bit. I know there's a lot of conversation in the 1980s about what substance abuse looks like, but most of that is going to focus on drugs as opposed to alcohol. And so that kind of makes it a little bit less of a big deal. But then honestly, people just start to invest in it in the 1980s, in wine production and in beer production. And beer, in particular, is going to be our main opening into kind of the new era of commercial alcohol production in the state.
And again, we're going to go back to Fort Smith. So there's going to be another brewery that opens up in Fort Smith. It'd be Weidman's Old Fort Brewery that opened in 1992. It only lasts for a few years, about five years. But that's the brewery building out of a home brewing tradition, building out of some of these other stories that we don't have time to get into today, that paves the way for probably the most well known early microbrewery in the state. And that's Diamond Bear out of Little Rock, right? So this is Russ and Sue Melton. They start this in Little Rock, and it goes. And brewers in the state are going to be encouraged by this, because they're not just a hit or miss little brewery. They become really successful as the 20th century kind of dawns, and it's going to push, by 2003, a change in the law and how we think about the taxation of production and consumption of brewed alcohol here in the state.
And so in 2003, the Arkansas Native Brewery Act is going to be passed. It makes it easier to sell craft beer. And that right there kicks off the whole big craft brewing kind of avalanche that we see here in the regions. And that gives us all the brands that we love today. So people think about Crisis just down the hill, which has an affiliation with KUAF, so everybody should go support Crisis, but also all the other breweries that do such good work around the community, right? So Ozark, Fossil Cove, even breweries that are now just in fond memory, like Tanglewood, that was down on South School by Farmer's Table, Ivory Bill, that had been out in Siloam Springs, all these different breweries that have kind of come and gone and helped to anchor this culture that's done a lot to also help revitalize the feeling of neighborhood and small communities become places. It's not just where you go buy a beer, it's where you go and you connect with your community, right? And that was the hope of many of these places, that they would help to rejuvenate this kind of an idea.
Moore: You talk about the temperance movement that happened in the early 20th century. There are still elements of that happening here in Arkansas today. My in-laws live in Faulkner County, which is a dry county.
Phillips: Dry county.
Moore: There are plenty of dry counties across the state of Arkansas. One of the ways that we see an impact on the production and distribution and sale of alcohol still today is that there are places like, they live in Mayflower, right across the border on the Pulaski County-Faulkner County line. There are three package stores, and there is a lot of lobbying happening by those industries who are saying, we don't want this county to go dry because it will impact our sales.
Phillips: Yeah.
Moore: Can you talk a little bit about just kind of the history of this dry, wet county element, and what kind of role has that played, not just on residents who want to buy alcohol, but really on economies too?
Phillips: Yeah, that's a great question. So the dry county movement, when Arkansas goes dry for years before the Prohibition act comes into being, the way that we renegotiate what legal drinking looks like when Prohibition comes down is that the state essentially is allowed to say, to give the counties the authority to say, well, you can have alcohol sales and consumption, and in what way you can have it, right? So not all wet counties are created equal, right?
So for listeners that are not familiar, a wet county is a county where you can buy alcohol. A dry county is one where you cannot. And in wet counties, in some places you can buy alcohol on Sundays. In some places you can't. In some places you can buy all forms of alcohol at any establishment that sells alcohol. In some places you can't. So gas stations could have only beer, in some counties it can be beer and wine, beer, wine and hard alcohol, right? It just depends on how every county is set up a little bit.
And then within that, towns have a lot of leeway as well, right? So the town that I live in, Prairie Grove, there is a one-square-mile radius in the middle of town that alcohol sales of any kind are not allowed, right? And actually, in a lot of these different towns and counties, it creates some interesting development problems for us, because as towns grow, as bypasses move, things like that, that are outside of those restricted areas, if the county is wet, then you say, well, maybe I'm going to, or that part of this new growth is outside of the old law boundaries. You say, well, I'm going to move a restaurant from the middle of the town to the outside of the town, because we can have margaritas with our tacos there. You know what I mean? And that creates these weird push pull dynamics in towns and counties.
And so, and then like you were just talking about, we're going to see counties that are making a whole bunch of money because they're wet and the neighboring county is dry. If that county goes dry, they're going to lose sales tax revenue. In rural counties, 69 of our counties are rural, sales tax revenue, county revenue is a huge deal. It's how we maintain our roads, volunteer fire departments, county sheriffs, our schools. And so when those numbers change, it has a lot of impact. So you see a lot of negotiation and a lot of lobbying and fighting and a lot of sort of passive aggressive, bless your heart comments in the halls of Little Rock as these things are debated.
Moore: Yeah, there's a lot of elements to alcohol that are more than just the production or the consumption. We think, as we've just talked about here, there's legislation, there's morality, there's all these sorts of things. As we think back to those early days of home consumption to where we are now, do you see a common thread in how we still think about alcohol and liquor?
Phillips: That's a great question. I think so. And I think some of it we can actually think about moonshiners, right? I said I talk about moonshiners. Most historians of the Ozarks don't like to talk about moonshine a ton because everybody wants to talk about moonshine. But moonshine is an interesting way for us to think about it. So alcohol production, which is different than consumption, alcohol production is almost always, like I said a minute ago, a way to make a little extra cash, right? And so if we think about the mainstay of subsistence agriculture in the Ozarks in the 19th and early 20th centuries, corn is one of our most ubiquitous crops, right? Like any agricultural community. But corn prices then and now were low or highly volatile. And there's two big ways that you could make more money off your corn, feed it to a pig or a cow, take that pig or cow to market, which is also volatile, or turn it into an incredibly shelf stable product like moonshine, which has a pretty stable market value.
And there's a mythology that every moonshiner was making hundreds of gallons a year, and this is not the case. They're mostly for home and neighborhood production. But that drive for financial independence, I think we see that especially in the home brewing community, right? How many people do we know or have we heard of that started home brewing as a hobby in their kitchen, and then it moves to their garage, and like, man, maybe I'm going to make a little bit and sell, so to have a little side income, especially as we live in such volatile economic times, right? And then that grows into a Core or a Crisis or a Fossil Cove or whatever, right?
And it's this independent streak, I think, that's in us. But then again, Arkansas and the Ozarks were a state in a region that has a long history of being concerned about the impact of substance problems on our communities. And we're one that's still in the midst of an opioid epidemic. We still think about the impact of alcoholism on our communities, right? And so there is a push pull between the desire to, we want to, this is a viable product for us as a community to create something of value that helps to anchor us economically, but also recognizing this is a product that can also impact people's lives in a really negative way, right? And I think all the producers of alcohol would say, on the one hand, we want to be able to make a living, but also please drink responsibly.
Moore: Yeah, exactly. We thank you, Jared, as always, for your time.
Phillips: Yeah. Anytime.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a rush deadline and edited for length and clarity. Copy editors utilize AI tools to review work. KUAF does not publish content created by AI. Please reach out to kuafinfo@uark.edu to report an issue. The audio version is the authoritative record of KUAF programming.
