“You hardly ever saw Granddaddy down here
He only come to town about twice a year
He'd buy a hundred pound of yeast and some copper line
Everybody knew that he made moonshine"
                    ----- Steve Earle, “Copperhead Road”

Although it is likely that the production and distribution of unlicensed, high-proof alcohol has probably has always existed in the United States, from its earliest days as a country until today, so-called "bootlegging" operations experienced a surge after the passing of the 18th Amendment in 1920, which prohibited the production, importation, transportation, and sale of alcoholic beverages in the U.S. until being overturned by the ratification of the 21st Amendment in 1933. While often associated with the Appalachian Mountains, bootlegging is referenced by several interviewees in the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle Rockies (LAMR), and perhaps due to the clandestine nature of the activity, the question "What do people call unlicensed alcohol here?" elicited a wide range of responses in the survey, as shown in the figure below:

As the figure shows, moonshine is clearly the preferred variant by respondents in the collection, followed by the competing variants whiskey and bootleg, and then a bevy of terms, including white lightning, booze, and hooch, as well as the obligatory hapax legomena, which include bathtub gin, firewater, rotgut, and white mule.

Running the LAMR responses that have a high likelihood of referring to "moonshine" on the Google Books Ngram Viewer for print publications from 1800 to 2008 (which means omitting responses such as whiskey and beer in the search, as they have a high likelihood to refer, in fact, to legal alcoholic beverages in the collection), we find the following distribution:

As illustrated, the distribution is similar to that of the LAMR responses in that moonshine, bootleg, and hooch are found relatively frequently; however, white lightning does not hold the status (in terms of ranking) in Google Books that it does in LAMR. It can be observed that moonshine, bootleg, and hooch all peak in use at the height of Prohibition in the late 1920s to '30s, which makes sense given coverage of the issue by the media at the time, but each term is also to have experienced an increase in usage in recent years. While results of the Google app are not transparent (which is why words like whiskey and beer were not included, given that what they are referring to in the collection could not be verified), there are a couple possibilities that are worth considering: For bootleg, it is possible that its use has spiked in recent years not in reference to illegal alcohol but to the act of illegally copying the creations -- often artistic -- of others, such as bootleg recording, bootleg DVDs, etc. As for the recent surge in the use of moonshine in the Google Books collection, there may have been an increase in discussion about the activity/product leading up to its legalization, as well as an increase in trade names including the word moonshine. 

Here are several excerpts from the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle Rockies in which interviewees discuss the production and sale of unlicensed liquor in their communities. Lake City and Lamar are in Colorado, and the interviews were conducted in 2001 and 1990, respectively; Maeser is in Utah, and the interview was conducted in 1991.

I close with two of my favorite recordings about moonshine. If you have any terms for unlicensed liquor that weren't mentioned in the post, please submit them to me in the comments section below.

If you would like to do a word search on moonshine variants in LAMR, click here.

*As reported in earlier blog postings, interviewees could provide more than one response to a question in LAMR and some provided no answers at all to specific prompts; although in some studies such nonresponses can be informative and are thus represented in figures, for the sake of simplicity nonresponses are not represented in figure 1.