Episode 114: Moonshine’s Legacy With Howard Conyers

We’re kicking off our coverage of the 2025 Imbibe 75 list of people and places to watch by talking with Howard Conyers. Trained as an aeronautic engineer and with a résumé that includes work with NASA, he’s also a barbecue pitmaster and now a distiller at his family’s Backyard Distillery in Manning, South Carolina. For this episode, he shares the story behind his multifaceted career path, and the significance of moonshine and barbecue in rural and Black communities in the South.

Radio Imbibe is the audio home of Imbibe magazine. In each episode, we dive into liquid culture, exploring the people, places, and flavors of the drinkscape through conversations about cocktails, coffee, beer, spirits, and wine. Keep up with us on Instagram, Threads, and Facebook, and if you’re not already a subscriber, we’d love to have you join us—click here to subscribe. 

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Paul Clarke 

Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Radio Imbibe from Imbibe magazine. I’m Paul Clarke, Imbibe’s editor in chief. And after a short break for the holidays, we’re back with our first episode for 2025, and we hope your new year is off to a great start. 

Of course, it’s not only the beginning of a new year, but it’s also time for our annual Imbibe 75 list of people and places who will change the way we drink in the year ahead. Our January-February issue with our full Imbibe 75 coverage is out now, and to get this year’s Imbibe 75 coverage started, for this episode, we want to introduce you to an individual who has many interests and areas of expertise, from  rocket science to barbecue and more recently, moonshine.

Howard Conyers is from Manning, South Carolina. An interest in science and technology led him to a career as an aerospace engineer for NASA, and his rural roots also sparked a passion for the art of barbecue, leading Dr. Conyers to become a barbecue pitmaster, as well as host for Nourish on PBS. More recently, this background has led him down the moonshine path as founder and distiller for Backyard Distillery in his hometown of Manning. But barbecue and moonshine are much bigger topics than simply meat and alcohol. So for this episode, we’re chatting with Dr. Howard Conyers about the significance of these things in Black and Southern culture and about his own life story. 

[music]

Dr. Conyers, welcome to Radio Imbibe. 

Howard Conyers

Thanks for having me, Paul. 

Paul Clarke 

Great to have you on. You know, I appreciate you taking the time to talk to me for this. And I’ve wanted to share your story with our audience for some time now. Imbibe, of course, is a drinks magazine, and this is a drinks-related podcast. So let’s get this connection out of the way at the start. You and your family own and operate Backyard Distillery in South Carolina and have done so for several years now. And at your distillery you currently make one spirits category and that is moonshine. And you make several varieties of it. I want to get into the specifics of your moonshine here in a few minutes. But before we do that, I need to ask why is moonshine where you’re applying your attention and why is moonshine of such importance to you and your family? 

Howard Conyers 

That’s a great question. I believe one, moonshine is the most forgotten spirit in the spirits category. Two, moonshine has a various assortment of definitions. There was a moonshine craze a few years ago where a lot of large distilleries were making moonshine. But when you think about what some people back in their backyard, backwoods was doing, they were using a moonshine, but it wasn’t a grain neutral spirit. It was a spirit made with grain, sugar and water. And that’s what most people thought of moonshine. And so when people went into the liquor stores to get moonshine, they drank what was in the store and they’re like, Oh, this is not what I’m familiar with. And so for me, I wanted to focus on moonshine. And the final reason was moonshine was such a part of our culture in the American South. When you look at like three events in American history from the end of World War I, the Great Depression, and Prohibition, that intersection is where moonshine actually took a big rise in the American South. They helped save a lot of farmers, families, farming communities. 

Paul Clarke 

And that’s where you’re based. You’re based in an agricultural region there in South Carolina, correct? 

Howard Conyers 

Correct. We’re based in a little small town, based outside of small town of Manning in South Carolina, in a community called Paxville. 

Paul Clarke 

And think it’s fair to say that you had an indirect way of coming into your career as a distiller. You grew up there in South Carolina on a farm, in a farming and agricultural family and community, but you didn’t follow that path directly into agriculture. You took a different exit. How you became a rocket scientist. How did that happen? How did that career path take place for you?

Howard Conyers

Okay, So, like, as a farm kid, the farm is nothing but math and science. And that is what led me into engineering. Like just in sheer love of math and science led me into engineering. Seeing the upside of it on the farm, on a daily experience, went to college for actually went into agriculture, ag and biosciences engineering, or some people knew it as bio environment engineering. But then I went for a master’s, a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering, that is how I got the segue to going into rocket science, rocket propulsion testing for my career early on. But there’s this distilling thing is really almost part of like my community, also part I’m like, well, upbringing in a way. It just indirectly. I wasn’t involved in making liquor as a child, but I was involved in the actual occasional grinding of corn. Well, not occasionally, quite a bit grinding the corn for a lot of the moonshiners that our community. 

Paul Clarke

Right. Right. And, you know, even though you could have disappeared in the in the space, basically, and in engineering and into that side of things, this kind of agricultural side of things and the cultural side of things still pulled at your attention. Can we take a little side tour just for a moment and talk about barbecue? Because I understand that that is more than a passing interest to you. Why is barbecue held such interest to you over the years?

Howard Conyers 

So barbecue was one of those things I learned on the farm growing up. And what people fail to realize in a rural community, like I’m from in South Carolina and maybe as well as parts of like North Carolina, barbecue, actually, moonshine has a very interesting parallel. They go hand-in-hand. You can’t separate the two. And when we was growing up, I was cooking the hogs with my family where there was nothing for a gallon of moonshine to come up to be at the occasion when the man was outside gathering, cooking the hogs all night. So they was always together. I think what I really, was intriguing to me about cooking the hogs was just a fellowship and camaraderie that are brought together. And yeah, we were cooking the meat, but it was really more the conversations. 

Paul Clarke

Right. Right. And, you know, that was part of what I was curious about and part of my next question, because I want to know, what is it about these things, barbecue and moonshine that make them interesting for you on a level beyond just simply it’s barbecue, it’s moonshine, it’s delicious. These have kind of a deeper rooted interest for you. 

Howard Conyers 

Barbecue to me was a learning class. It was a fire hose of information. A lot of times a conversation. It was mentorship. It was the way I learned history of my community, a lot about life skills. The barbecue was really secondary. I mean, like the actual cooking, learning how to cook barbecue was really something we did, but it wasn’t really something my father sought out to teach me per se. And so you had him, I guess you would say, a methodical process of cooking barbecue. And it took a lot of patience as now that I’ve gotten older and now I’m on the moonshine side of it, or the distilling spirit side of it.

What intrigued me about this is is has a very deep cultural and community feel too. But the science and engineering is very much appealing to me is probably much more appealing to me than barbecue. It may be hard for people to grasp that I actually like the distilling side more than the barbecue, and I know that might get me in some trouble in some ways. But the art of distilling from fermentation all the way up to the end steps of just actually bottling, is much as a science. When you’re proofing, when you mashing, when you experiment with different things. Also, we, I guess I’m an engineer too, so we took it a step further. We actually built, my father and I, we built the stills that we use. We designed and built the stills with you use in house. So it has everything that really is near and dear to my heart, being an engineer. 

Paul Clarke 

And that’s something that fascinated me about your career and the different paths you follow because you have these aspects that are different and seemingly disparate subjects. You know, engineering, history, agriculture, southern culture, culinary culture. How do you keep your focus and keep pursuing these different topics and finding those interesting intersections between all of them, I guess I should say? 

Howard Conyers 

When you really boil them down, Paul, they all relate to one thing. They relate to farming in the American South. This is a podcast. People don’t know I’m a black person, a black individual in the American South. They all go hand in hand. And so it just was a natural fit, is probably they don’t it don’t make sense to be together. But through my life story and my life work, as people learn more about my story, it would just be a natural segue way of like, Oh, they are the three, the common thread, and it always goes back to farming. That’s the commentary of cooking whole hog. You have to have a farm to get the hogs. Making moonshine or any spirits, you got to have a grain. So you raising the grains to process into spirits. So it is also the thing about those two is almost like a zero waste principle. Cooking barbecue, use the whole animal. Distilling grains, that was a way for a farmer to get the most from his his grain product.

Paul Clarke 

And there’s an intersection between those as well, because you have the spent mash after distillation that you can then use as animal feed. Is that correct?

Howard Conyers 

That’s correct. So a lot of it, we’d use it, we would give it to, early on we gave some to a cow farmer. We started raising hogs again to put to give some spent mash to the hogs. And occasionally we have given some to some deer hunters. Deer hunters loved it.

Paul Clarke 

I bet. I bet. And you know, you’ve been operating this distillery with your family for several years now, selling directly from the distillery. Let’s explore the spirits in a little more detail. Tell us a little bit more about what goes into making them, the raw materials that you’re using and how this connects with some of the bigger interests that we’ve been talking about here.

Howard Conyers 

So we we focus on moonshine and we start out with a traditional corn-based moonshine that was coming to my community. But my love of, I guess you would say, intersection of culinary, I have been exposed to various grains. So and being a sciences and distilling is an art form. I had a creative like distilling as a way to express creativity in a bottle. And so some of the spirits we have, we have use other things that was found in our community to distill spirits. I’m a see one or two of the last but has distilled some from rye. We have distilled some sweet potatoes, and the ones we distilled from sweet potatoes, we did that because my father has been growing these our heirloom sweet potatoes for about 35 to 40 years. And we only do very small batches of that in a pot still, we use a pot still.

And the reason we use the pot still, because they say pot stills for premium flavor. We’ve experimented with muscadines, because muscadine is a grape that’s grown in the south, did small batches of that. That’s a lot of hardwork in that because you got a crush the grape, you got to de-stem it, and so hopefully the next time I distill that, I have a better way to distill that and instead of doing it manually. Not no foot stomping and all that good stuff, but hopefully I have a piece of equipment to make that easier. I have used rice, Carolina gold rice was what made the Carolinas rich, it also brought enslaved Africans to the United States with their rice-growing knowledge.

Finally, the one that I’m really excited about or have dabbled in a little bit is the one with Jimmy Red corn. We have done two heirloom corn, we have used cox prolific as well as Jimmy Red corn because prolific doesn’t yield that much on an acre basis for land. But Jimmy Red, the reason it was so interesting to me from a moonshine, is say those that particular corn it came from a bootlegger. The bootlegger was probably making moonshine and this is I want to make what I thought was our interpretation of what they were making in moonshine and not a bourbon or a whiskey. You have got loads of distilleries that I really like that work. They have salt and I really appreciate High Wire for being helpful at times. They use they use Jimmy Red corn, but I wanted to make what I thought was the moonshine that family use to save that seed. 

Paul Clarke 

Right. Right. And, you know, you mentioned High Wire. I’m a big fan of their Jimmy Red bourbon that Scott Blackwell and Ann Marshall there in High Wire make. And it’s fascinating that you’re going down that kind of similar direction, but aiming at the moonshine, aiming at the unaged side of it. So as you said, it’s keeping it kind of that historical connection with what had always kind of been done with the grain. 

Howard Conyers 

More and more, I think without even cox prolific I think a lot of these old grains that they’re starting to find their way into the whiskies, they was saved by communities due to moonshine production. I don’t think they were saved by communities to make whiskey. They were saved a lot of time by individuals who have moonshine, still probably illegal moonshine stills and that was a way to generate more income than the crops could generate by themselves because making grits is not a very profitable venture. 

Paul Clarke 

Right? Right. I would imagine, Yeah. 

Howard Conyers 

I don’t care what they say about stone-ground grits, they’re great, but I don’t think they’re as profitable as alcohol. 

Paul Clarke 

Yeah, well, that actually brings up another good point, because, you know, I talked to a number of small distilleries and craft distilleries all around the country. Hear all kinds of stories. For you, as the owner of a small independent distillery, family-owned distillery, what are some of the things that you’re running into that make it challenging out there? Some of the whether it’s some of the marketing, some of the profitability, some of the regulatory aspects, distribution. What are some of the things that that you’re encountering that come with distilling that pose a challenge? 

Howard Conyers 

As a co-owner of a distillery with my family, my father, one of the major challenges is distribution. People ask why we’re here, Why are you not in different stores? But you have to gain so much traction to get distribution. And if you’re a small distillery, family-held distillery like us, you’re not going to generate the volumes that the big players like, you know, Tennessee or Kentucky, who’s pushing out alcohol like it’s like as water, we may be putting out five gallons every 30 minutes they may be putting out a thousand gallons every 30 minutes or so. But that’s one issue, right? The regulatory, if we could ship directly to consumer, that would be different. That would, that would be a game changer for a lot of distilleries, where we could get the product directly from the distillery to the consumer. But due to prohibition and three tiered distribution in every state, that’s one thing.

Another thing I would I would touch on, Paul, in my community, in the African-American community, there’s also a negative stigma associated with alcohol. It’s just not one of those things that just some people are in favor of it. In the other other part of we in the Bible Belt. South Carolina is a Bible Belt. And it’s not just white folks in the Bible Belt. It’s black folks in it, too. So that’s a stigma associated with that. Three, with moonshine in particular, there is a there still is an underground market. There still is an underground economy that exists. So when you compete with the underground economy, it’s not really competing—they’re there.

If a customer can get a product for a lot cheaper, I’m not saying the quality is there or different things you could do in a manufacturing facility for as cleanliness, hygienics, what you’re running your stuff through. The underground economy makes alcohol a lot cheaper and they could do things that we can’t do. So when you’re competing with those type things, it drives the market. But I think the other thing is, I think the advantage we have is eventually we will start doing marketing and storytelling. I think a lot of times we think about moonshiners or moonshine in particular. You don’t think about a guy who looks like me. They may look more Caucasian in persuasion from the Appalachian region, but there really was a lot of black and white people in the moonshine equation in the American South. It was you really couldn’t separate the two, I think. 

Paul Clarke 

Right. Right. Well, let’s follow thread that brought up just a moment ago of the different recipes and what you’re using there. 

Howard Conyers 

What I learned with being a legal distiller, and I really appreciate the regulations. Now, when I look at the bottle of alcohol that I read that label, for example. Right. That label means a lot to me as a distiller. It tells me and it should tells the customer, we know exactly what’s in that particular spirit. If they say distilled with natural flavors and ingredients, you know that everything is in there is natural. TTB will not allow you to put certain things in a recipe that is not legal and unsafe for human consumption. But if you buy this untaxed, illegal, illicit liquor, you don’t know what these individuals are cutting the liquor with it. The concern about methanol or they could certainly cut. I mean, I have recently listened to a documentary where they was cutting moonshine with embalming fluid. So you really don’t know what is going on.

And the other thing with some of these distilleries is the cleanliness of it. And most distilleries are very clean. And as a cook, you don’t like cooking in a dirty pot. Imagine cooking liquor in a dirty pot that you can’t clean. And some of those old stills how they were manufactured. There was no way to access those parts. So if you scorched liquor or burned a liquor, you wouldn’t able to get that out. You had to cook through it. Or if you cook in a pot 50 or 100 times without cleaning it, eventually your food will have that taste of 50 or 100 times. And so it’s not going to be the pureness of the spirit any more is going to be a dirty pot. You’re cooking it and all the time it kicks up, because would imagine, depending on how you do your mash and stuff, when you boil it in a pot, some of the mash bubbles off as steam and it sticks to the side of the walls. And if you can’t clean that stuff out, actually imparts the flavor into your actual final spirit. 

Paul Clarke 

Now at the time that listeners will be hearing this podcast and seeing the accompanying article in the magazine, it’ll be early 2025. What should we know about you and your family’s distillery as we look ahead? Are there particular plans or goals on the horizon for the coming year that we should bring up?

Howard Conyers

We’re not going to sell it for consumption on site, but I hope to better to eventually have a space dedicated to educate the public on like what people in the rural South, particularly South Carolina, my community, did their life experiences? I want to organize a barbecue and moonshine festival of some sort. That’s the goal in 2025. I think it’s important to do it so people see a hand in hand, side by side. I’m known for cooking a whole animal barbecue. And I think really in 2025, the biggest thing that people will get is I would like them to have an understanding of all people in moonshine and what it looked like more than just newspaper articles, and records showing men get locked up because they were being busted for stills in the woods. So hopefully in 2025 you’ll see more visual content that I will release of what it would look like in the pass.

Paul Clarke

We’re coming toward the exit here. Are there any final thoughts you’d like to share on your distillery, your moonshine, barbecue, or just your life and your work in general? 

Howard Conyers 

I really just hope to do my work in this. This will probably be lifelong work, even though I still love engineering and still practice it. This is just an extension, you can see how complex, but you also see the why education is the important. Fundamentals of education, also understanding the trades, how it go hand in hand in making distilleries. And I think the final point I would like to make is when people see big brands, they don’t realize those big brands start somewhere. And what I think we’re going through a Backyard Distillery is showing the origins in a modern time what it would take to build a distillery such as a 100-plus-year-old distillery during their infancy when they was making the stills in house before it was major manufacturers, whether they were coming out of Tennessee, out of Kentucky, or out of Germany for stills when they had to make everything in-house to make the product.

And then we have a deep appreciation for that going forward as the distillery grows, but we still want to try to stay true to our roots. So with us making moonshine, we hope to bring some more understanding to moonshine in America. Eventually, we will go to other spirits such as rum and whiskeys, but we want to focus on spirits that has an origin, a heart in the American South. They can be made from products grown in this area.

Paul Clarke 

Dr. Conyers, thank you so much for taking the time to share all of this with us. And I’m really excited to have the chance to talk to you. And I’m looking forward to sharing this with our audience. 

Howard Conyers 

Thank you, Paul. 

[music]

Paul Clarke 

You can find Dr. Howard Conyers on Instagram at howardconyers_phd and you can learn more about his family’s distillery at Backyard Distillery LLC.com. We’ve got links to those for you in this episode’s notes. 

And that’s it for this episode. Be sure to subscribe to Radio Imbibe on your favorite podcast app to keep up with all our future episodes. We’ve got plenty of articles and recipes for you online at our website ImbibeMagazine.com. Keep up with us day to day on Instagram, Pinterest, Threads, and Facebook. And if you’re not already a subscriber to the print and or digital issues of Imbibe, then here’s your first opportunity of the New Year. Just follow the link in this episode’s notes and we’ll be happy to help you out. I’m Paul Clarke. This is Radio Imbibe. Happy New Year, everybody, and I’ll catch you next time.