Clyde May's Straight Bourbon Whiskey

About Clyde May's

After serving in World War II, legend has it that Clyde May returned to his native Alabama to raise his eight children and tend to the farm that he had purchased before the war began. Like many farmers at the time, Clyde would distill the excess grains he harvested into corn whiskey — "branch-farming," he liked to call it. From the 1950s to the 1980s, May managed to produce nearly 300 gallons of whiskey a week just southeast of Montgomery in a still that he had designed and built himself. While much of May's whiskey was sold unaged, a portion of the whiskey he produced was aged in charred oak casks into which dried apples were dropped in order to enhance the flavor.

Always distilling whiskey outside the law, May was arrested in 1973 and served an 18-month sentence at the Maxwell Air Force Base. "He sure had a reputation for making fine whiskey," said Thomas Allison, a former officer with the United States Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Upon his release, May gave up his cell to the man who convicted him — Attorney General John Mitchell, who was convicted in 1974 on charges relating to the Watergate scandal.

After May's death in 1990, his son, Kenny, took up the family business and began working with Kentucky Bourbon Distillers to produce a whiskey in honor of his father. Using his father's recipe and water imported from Conecuh Ridge, May produced the first legal batch of Clyde May's Conecuh Ridge Alabama Stlye Whiskey over a decade ago.