LeNell Smothers, owner of LeNell's: A Wine and Spirits Boutique in Red Hook, on the industrial fringe of Brooklyn, N.Y., is a native of Alabama, a lithe woman with a caramel accent. She's the kind of retailer who displays gin bottles in a claw-foot tub and sells copies of Mixologist: the Journal of the American Cocktail by the register.

Expatriate Southerners rifle her shelves for Kentucky treasures like 18-year-old rye from Black Maple Hill and 23-year-old bourbon, cosseted in a velvet bag, from Pappy Van Winkle. Not to mention curiosities like Isaiah Morgan Rye, an unaged whiskey from West Virginia, and Old Gristmill Authentic American Corn Whisky, a moonshine-style spirit from the Hudson Valley of New York.

Smothers built her business stocking hard-to-find artisanal American spirits, ranging in price from a low of, say, $25 a bottle to more than $100. Her customers are not swillers.

They are aficionados who endorse William Faulkner's belief that "civilization begins with distillation." And their numbers are growing, as a new generation realizes that liquor is more than mere fuel for a buzz.

"I like to drink the good stuff," Smothers says when asked how she came to be a curator of craft distillates. "Plus, owning this place keeps me out of bars." (In Atlanta, where no retailer claims the quirky depth of LeNell's, it's a little harder to stay out of the bars. Indeed, the best places to draw a bead on these spirits are bars ensconced within upscale restaurants like Repast, Restaurant Eugene and Trois, which stocks a selection of rye whiskeys that even Smothers would covet.)

Smothers' inventory reflects a renaissance in craft distilling, which, by the way, is the prevailing term used to describe quality-focused operators who often work smaller, copper-pot stills instead of giant, columned rectifiers.

"After the microbrewery boom, small distilleries are the next step," says Bill Owens, president of the American Distilling Institute. "More are coming on line. A lot of it's happening beyond the South. Oregon, Michigan, they're going great guns. In the South, there's real opportunity. Southerners have always appreciated good whiskey."

The renaissance, it seems, is not restricted to whiskeys. Along with various liqueurs and brandies, the lady from Alabama stocks Prichard's Fine Rum, an artisanal spirit from Tennessee that may come as close as any Southern spirit to marrying the ideals of the 18th-century farmer-distiller with a 21st-century connoisseurship of handmade goods.

Regional flavor

Phil Prichard, proprietor of Prichard's Distillery, is a 67-year-old former dental fabricator who favors a rakish green felt hat and cultivates a gregarious personality. He does business in Kelso, Tenn., near the Alabama line, down the road from the famously dry hamlet where Jack Daniel's is made.

He knows his region, his place. When a conservative Christian preacher questioned how he rationalized his vocation, Prichard responded by citing Proverbs 31:6: "Give strong drink unto him who is about to perish. ... Let him drink and forget his problems and remember his misery no more."

Prichard anticipates a future when distilled spirits will once again reflect local crops and local tastes. (The last time that was the case, moonshine — covertly distilled, under cover of night, from field corn — was the Southern spirit of record.)

"Our first rum went in barrels in 1999," Prichard says as he troops from the paint-stripped wooden schoolhouse that serves as his office, through the basketball gymnasium that is his warehouse, to what might best be described as a shed out back where he works a copper pot still. "We wanted to make traditional American rum. The idea wasn't to run Bacardi out of business.

"I just figured that if we made something hand-distilled and hand-bottled, people would pay more for quality," says the man whose products are sold in 30 states. His goods — an amber-hued rum that spends three years in charred oak barrels and recalls a young French brandy, and an unaged white rum that smacks of butterscotch Lifesavers — make strong arguments for those possibilities.

Art, and craft

Prichard is an artisan. Increasingly, advocates use that word when talk turns to craft distilling. The choice is apt. Artisanship resonates with Southerners, who in recent years have rediscovered the people behind the generations-old work of ham curing and the hand-me-down knowledge of preserving jams and jellies.

When it comes to the South's native spirit, artisan also describes the men (it's almost always men) who designate single-barrel bottlings from larger distillery runs. Some, like the late Elmer T. Lee, the man behind Blanton's, which debuted way back in 1984 as the first commercially bottled single-barrel bourbon, plot barrel rows in rickhouses, the aging warehouses where, in contact with charred oak, clear corn and rye whiskeys take on distinctive red-brown color and sweet-spicy taste.

Lee and his inheritors have learned to manipulate a number of rickhouse variables, including stowage in hot spots — peripheries like outside walls and rafter niches — where whiskeys expand and contract more readily, penetrating deeper into particular barrels, resulting in distinctive bottlings that can be more complex, more nuanced than the norm.

More recently, others, like Julian Van Winkle of Louisville, Ky., maker of Pappy Van Winkle bourbon, have earned their reputations as — to borrow a term from the wine industry — negociants, seeking out older barrels of whiskeys that had been cast aside or tucked away. Thanks to their efforts, 15- and 18- and 20-year-old bourbons and ryes are no longer rare; they are, among an informed set, de rigueur.

Weight of history

All spirits, no matter their age, come with histories. Not all of them are pretty. Phil Prichard knows that. So does any thinking distiller. For starters, there are the addictive and sometimes debilitating effects of alcohol, which, common belief holds, are more vexing when delivered at higher proof. That's what Thomas Jefferson had in mind. In 1818, he wrote, "No nation is drunken where wine is cheap; and none sober, where the dearness of wine substitutes ardent spirits as the common beverage."

And then there's the less subjective stuff: Rum fueled the slave trade.

During the 1700s, merchants plowed profits from rum — distilled in New England from molasses (a byproduct of sugar refining) — into the purchase of enslaved Africans. Upon arrival in the American South and the West Indies, traders sold those men, women and children. With the proceeds, they bought sugar and molasses. When the traders returned to New England, they sold the sugar and molasses to distillers, completing the final leg of what came to be known as the triangle trade.

For these reasons, and a range of others including religious prohibitions, Southern distillation of craft spirits has lagged behind the rest of the country. That's changing, however, as home-brewers discover that corn beer is one step removed from corn whiskey and tinkerers like Prichard figure out that stills need not be gigantic Seussian contraptions.

Spirit of place

New Southern spirits now debut with some frequency. Many aim for terroir, for geographical and cultural specificity, but settle for solutions that are, at best, imperfect, at worst, gimmicky.

Firefly Vodka, sold out of Charleston, S.C., is distilled in Florida, where it's flavored with wine fermented from Lowcountry-grown muscadines. McKendric Mesquite-Mellowed Whiskey claims a birthplace in Texas but relies on a charcoal filtration and flavoring process popularized in Tennessee. Clyde May's Conecuh Ridge Alabama Style Whiskey is distilled in Kentucky and cut with spring water trucked in from somewhere southeast of Montgomery.

Distilling a spirit that is of a place and reflects local traditions isn't easy. Prichard knows this. He would like to use sorghum, a locally grown grass that yields thick syrup similar to sugar cane molasses. But government regulations stipulate that all rum must be made from cane. Prichard assents, buying his cane molasses from Louisiana. But he doesn't like it.

"I've got a bunch of Mennonites over in Finger [Tenn.] who want to sell me sorghum molasses," Prichard says as he taps a barrel, transferring an experimental rum to a beaker, then to a snifter. "That would close the loop." That also might change how he markets his products. If Prichard gets his way, the coil on his still will drip not with great rum made in Tennessee, but great Tennessee rum.

Prichard understands the disconnect between what he preaches and what he distills. He recently began working with a Kentucky company to produce an unconventional twice-barreled bourbon, aged in oak for seven years at still proof and then an additional two years at a lower, bottle proof.

Although he wants to bring that process in-house and stoke his still with locally raised corn, so far the closest Prichard has come to making a truly local spirit may have been when he ran a private bottling of Volvka Vodka, distilled from castoff potato starch sourced at the nearby Frito Lay potato chip plant.

Moonshine, upscaled

Talk of distilling circles back, inevitably, to moonshine, scourge of revenue agents, catalyst of the stock car racing circuit. While it would be a mistake to argue that a new age of moonshiners is in league with people like Prichard, it wouldn't be a big mistake.

The best distillers of illicit whiskey, according to Matthew Rowley, whose history and practicum "Moonshine!" is forthcoming from Lark Books, are artisans, too. And, no, Rowley says, it doesn't matter if they're making white dog from refined sugar, corn whiskey from heirloom grains, rye whiskey according to 18th-century manuscripts, or rum from ribbon cane syrup.

Rowley believes the ranks of extra-legal distillers are growing. Some cook down grain mash to avoid taxes, he says, but an equal — and growing — number want to either "get in touch with their heritage" or revel in the "technical challenges of making better whiskeys."

He wonders if home distillers will follow in the wake of home-brewers. He believes a day may come when distilling for personal use is not a prosecutable federal offense. He, like Prichard, hopes that the age-old tradition of farmer-distillers will rekindle.

Rowley may be on to something. In 2005, West Virginia established the category of mini-distilleries, which produce fewer than 20,000 gallons of alcohol a year, and — this part is important — require that at least 75 percent of raw products come from the state.

'A taste of time'

Don't look for other Southern states to follow West Virginia's lead. Not this year, at least. For drinkers in search of distinctive spirits with Southern pedigrees, however, queer and lovely possibilities glimmer on the moonlit horizon.

Recently, Ted Breaux, a native of New Orleans, began distilling historical liqueurs in France. He ships genuine absinthe — the anise-flavored spirit spiked with the supposedly psychoactive wormwood — back to the States.

Instead of aiming for a taste of place, he aims for a taste of time. Reverse-engineered from a surviving pre-Prohibition bottle, his absinthe reflects a style popular in New Orleans in the 1800s. Cut with water, it clouds, then blooms with scents of camphor and mint.

Alas, Breaux's absinthe is not among the spirits you will find at a store like LeNell's, for, back in 1912, the U.S. Department of Agriculture banned distillation and sales of the drink. Consumption and possession, however, remain legal to this day, and a quick Internet search may allow you to take matters — and a bottle of craft distillate — into your own hands.

John T. Edge is director of the Southern Foodways Alliance at the University of Mississippi. To survey SFA oral histories or register for SFA events — including the April 20-21 Day Camp in and around Florence, Ala. — go to http://www.southernfoodways.com.

Things to know, spirits to seek

• Whiskey is made from three ingredients: grain, water and yeast.

• In the South, the primary grain is corn, used in combination with malted barley, rye and wheat. The prevalence of wheat, the style popularized by Maker's Mark, results in a softer whiskey. The prevalence of rye yields a raspier whiskey.

• Bourbon is whiskey made from at least 51 percent corn. To be called straight bourbon, it must be aged in new charred-oak barrels for a minimum of two years. Woodford Reserve is a widely available premium bourbon.

• Compared with bourbon, two things distinguish Tennessee whiskeys like Jack Daniel's and George Dickel: They must be made in Tennessee, and they must seep through a charcoal filtration system.

• Single-barrel whiskeys are just that, bottles of whiskey sourced from a single barrel, chosen by a master distiller for superior qualities. Blanton's was the first. Evan Williams makes a consistently good single barrel at a very favorable price.

• Small-batch bourbons are one-offs, small runs of special recipes done by larger distillers. Often a larger distiller will do batch production and aging for an artisan who lacks proper facilities. Among recent entries in this category are the Experimental Collection bourbons from Buffalo Trace, packaged as a set of three 375-milliliter bottles. The barrel in which the Fire Pot Barrel bourbon aged was heated to 102 degrees for 23 minutes to dry the wood, resulting in a whiskey with tobacco-y tannins.

• Rum is distilled from fermented molasses and, sometimes, sugar cane juice. In addition to Prichard's (available at Green's and other well-stocked package stores), another Southern craft distiller of rum is New Orleans Rum, makers of the Cane brand.

— John T. Edge