SOCR037- Jason Justice- "Family Traditions"

My grandfather is Jackie “Papaw” Justice, my father is Jack Justice. My grandfather was a moonshiner on and off from 1937 to 1955 he enlisted in the Army around 1947 at 17 years old and finished his commitment as an airman as the Army Air Corps split and officially became the Airforce. He made it through the Korean War in the Navy and shipped to the Vietnam War with the Marines as a Corpsman. He didn’t practice moonshining anymore after Vietnam but he passed much of the knowledge to me through stories and taking me to these places and meeting the friends and family that were all part of this real cultural period of Americana. They saw two world wars, survived the Great Depression and Prohibition. It was amazing, meeting these people and hearing the stories for an 8 year old it was like stepping back in time. They were war weary, had a certain distrust of the government and literally were reduced to surviving off the land and many did not survive the period. The Justice family primary occupation before the period was being judges, lawyers and lawmakers. Prohibition provided a means of much needed income to many of these people and entire families came together to form manufacturing and distribution of moonshine, it was an enterprise in and of itself. It wasn’t anything as sophisticated as the bootlegging operation of say, Al Capone but the stuff my grandfather made was all over the east coast and cutting as far south as Charleston, SC with the bulk of it ending up in Portsmouth, VA both places where family was living and would receive and distribute the moonshine.

I started the distillery in June of 2015 while finishing up my last military deployment in Sinton, Texas. It was a disaster response mission; I was the commander of the transportation company responsible for moving any assets West of the Mississippi River. I purchased a 6,000 square foot facility; it used to be a lumber yard, then RadioShack and finally an 8-liner game room until they were outlawed in the county. It is on a good cross road between I37 and I35 right off I77 in South Texas so it is a regular detour between those main thoroughfares. The distillery gets its primary grain, corn from the local grain elevator; B&P Elevator in Sinton that produces mainly deer corn and we get sweet corn from an organic farming operation; Picha Farms in Robstown, TX. We started out making moonshine and several flavored variations of it from the deer corn and sugar from the Rio Grande Valley. As it stands today, we source all of our spirit ingredients from within the state of Texas and are registered with the Texas Department of Agriculture’s GO Texan program which promotes Texas made and sourced products.

We have expanded nearly 300% since opening, today we utilize a large 250 gallon cast iron boiler with copper stack; that creation is about 20 foot tall at least. Our spirit still utilizes a 100 gallon stainless boiler with a 9 foot copper stack; it’s a cross between a reflux column and pot still that I’ve created. That’s another great thing; we’ve dramatically cut our overhead on equipment by making most of it ourselves. My father helps me refine and construct most of the equipment. For example, I wanted large open fermenters for volume fermentation so we framed in some areas in the warehouse and stretched some pond liner and in the space where only 3- 100 gallon fermenters were working before we are now able to ferment 1,000 gallons. We have 3 of these now, with another 2 nearing completion at the fraction of the cost and room of a large manufactured fermenting vessel.