The story doesn't begin with whiskey. It begins with two ears of corn and a dying tradition that nearly slipped into history without anyone noticing.
When Ann Marshall and Scott Blackwell opened High Wire Distilling Company in 2013, they were chasing a straightforward goal: make exceptional whiskey using South Carolina's best ingredients. They weren't thinking about agricultural preservation or saving endangered crops. They just wanted their bourbon to be different from everything else on the shelf.
What they stumbled into was something much bigger than craft spirits.
A Grain That Time Forgot
Jimmy Red corn once grew across Appalachia like kudzu on a fence row. Throughout the early 1900s, farmers planted it everywhere, and the variety eventually spread east into South Carolina. People used it for everything—moonshine, grits, livestock feed. The corn had a nutty, sweet flavor that made it versatile, and its high oil content meant it packed serious energy for farm animals.
But industrial agriculture changed everything. As farming became more mechanized and efficiency-driven, Jimmy Red couldn't compete with newer varieties bred specifically for mass production. The Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity noted how quickly the corn fell out of favor as other types took over commercial fields.
Part of the problem was Jimmy Red itself. The crop demands attention most modern farmers can't afford to give. As an open pollinator, it can be fertilized by pollen from other corn varieties, which threatens to dilute its unique characteristics. That means it has to be pollinated by hand—a labor-intensive process that doesn't fit neatly into industrial farming operations.
According to Blackwell, the corn also has another quirk: deer and raccoons find it particularly appetizing. Farmers faced a choice between babying a finicky crop that wildlife loved to raid or planting something easier to manage.
By the end of the 1900s, the choice seemed obvious. Jimmy Red was dying out.
Two Ears and a Second Chance
The last commercial farmer growing Jimmy Red passed away around the turn of the millennium. When he died, only two ears of the corn remained. He left them to Ted Chewning, a fellow South Carolina farmer who had built a reputation for rescuing endangered plants.
Chewning wasn't just another farmer. He was a seed enthusiast who had already saved nearly extinct varieties of corn, beans, heirloom radishes, watermelons, and field peas. When those two ears came into his possession, he saw an opportunity rather than a relic.
He planted them. Then he waited. Then he planted the harvest from those plantings. Year after year, Chewning worked to increase the seed stock, building back from nearly nothing.
Word eventually spread about what Chewning was doing. Chefs across South Carolina started hearing about this forgotten corn with the distinctive flavor. It wasn't long before Jimmy Red began appearing on menus throughout the state.
Chef and restaurateur Sean Brock became the first to feature Jimmy Red in his kitchens. He used it at McCrady's, where he worked as partner and executive chef, and at Husk, which he founded in 2010. Nearly a decade after Husk opened, Brock appeared in an episode of the Netflix series Chef's Table. The show focused on his commitment to celebrating Lowcountry cooking, and Jimmy Red corn played a central role in that story.
But while chefs were exploring Jimmy Red in their kitchens, nobody had tried using it to make bourbon.
Looking for Something Different
Marshall and Blackwell knew from the start they couldn't compete by making the same product as everyone else. "You can't outdo Maker's Mark," Marshall says. "And we didn't want to."
As they developed the concept for High Wire Distilling, they rejected the idea of using Dent corn—the standard variety most whiskey distillers rely on. They wanted something that would set their bourbon apart from the beginning.
They reached out to Glenn Roberts, founder of Anson Mills, a company specializing in heirloom grains. Roberts arranged a tasting of more than 20 corn varieties. He saved Jimmy Red for last, introducing it with a prediction: this was the one they'd use for their whiskey.
Blackwell was skeptical. "When Glenn gave us this little bit of red corn, I was like, 'How does this guy know anything about how the whiskey is going to turn out?' He does grits," Blackwell recalls. "We were still pretty early on, so I was like, I'll just use a cupping method to give me a glimpse of what's going on with this corn."
Testing Corn Like Coffee
Blackwell brought an unusual background to distilling. He'd worked for years in the coffee business, and he adapted coffee testing methods to evaluate corn for whiskey production.
The process, called cold cupping, is similar to how coffee experts identify the characteristics of different bean varieties. Blackwell would steep the grains in water, creating something closer to porridge than anything drinkable. "It's not something you'd want to eat," he says. "But it's good for identifying the right characteristics for a good whiskey."
He wasn't tasting for flavor exactly. He was looking for subtler indicators—minerality, the presence of mildew, texture. The high oil content that had made Jimmy Red popular as livestock feed turned out to matter for whiskey too. It coats the palate and creates a distinctive mouthfeel that other varieties can't match.
During a seminar on whiskey at the Food & Wine Classic in Charleston, Marshall explained what they discovered. "Minerality is the baseline that tells us it has the right starch content, that it's going to have a beautiful conversion," she said. "What we loved the most about Jimmy Red is that it's really sweet, but it's not a high-fructose corn syrup sweetness that you can get from a lot of bourbons. It's more like a nectar or honey sweetness."
Blackwell kept testing other varieties—yellow corn, blue corn, other red corn. He used Jimmy Red as the control in his experiments. "But it's so unique and it had that perfect minerality we were looking for," he says. "Glenn was spot on."
That unique profile—baking spices and caramel corn—gave them exactly what they needed to make something genuinely different. While most bourbons use a mixture of corn, rye, and wheat, High Wire's flagship bourbon skips the rye and wheat entirely. It's 100% Jimmy Red corn.
From Two Ears to 450 Acres
Marshall and Blackwell started with enough seed to plant two and a half acres. They partnered with Clemson University to get those first plants in the ground.
The expansion from there was gradual but steady. Today, High Wire works with four farms across South Carolina, cultivating 450 acres of Jimmy Red corn. In 2024, they filled their 5,000th barrel of whiskey.
The recognition followed. In 2018, High Wire won Overall Winner at the Made in the South Awards. In 2020, Marshall received a nomination in the Outstanding Wine, Spirits, or Beer Producer category from the James Beard Foundation.
The awards matter, but they're not the whole story. What started as an attempt to make distinctive bourbon became something larger—a successful effort to bring a nearly extinct crop back into commercial production.
"And just to think this all came about from two remaining ears of corn," Marshall says. "Such a big part of South Carolina's past is having a major impact on the state's culinary future."
What It Means
The Jimmy Red story isn't just about corn or whiskey. It's about what happens when commercial pressures push traditional agriculture to the margins, and what it takes to pull something back from the edge.
Industrial farming has delivered enormous benefits—cheaper food, more consistent yields, the ability to feed more people. But it's also created a narrowing effect, where the focus on efficiency leaves less room for crops that don't fit the mold. Jimmy Red couldn't compete in that system because it demanded too much attention and offered too little convenience.
What brought it back wasn't just preservation for its own sake. Ted Chewning saved the seeds, but Sean Brock and High Wire Distilling gave people a reason to grow it again. They found commercial applications that made sense—first in restaurant kitchens, then in whiskey production. The corn survives today not as a museum piece but as a working part of South Carolina's agricultural economy.
That's a different model than simple conservation. It suggests that saving endangered crops might require more than just maintaining seed banks. It might require finding new ways to make those crops viable in contemporary markets.
High Wire's success with Jimmy Red has created something of a template. Other distillers have started exploring heirloom grains, looking for distinctive flavors that can set their products apart. Chefs continue to seek out ingredients with unique stories and characteristics. There's a growing market for products that connect consumers to agricultural heritage in tangible ways.
None of this was guaranteed when Chewning planted those two ears of corn. He couldn't have known that a distillery would eventually build its flagship product around the grain he was nursing back from the edge of extinction. He just knew it was worth saving.
Marshall and Blackwell couldn't have predicted their search for a distinctive bourbon would turn them into part of an agricultural recovery story. They just knew they didn't want to make another generic whiskey.
Sometimes things connect in unexpected ways. Two ears of corn become a crop that grows across 450 acres. A search for a better bourbon becomes a James Beard nomination. A nearly extinct grain becomes a staple in South Carolina's culinary identity.
The Jimmy Red story is still being written. Every barrel High Wire fills, every acre planted by their partner farms, every bottle that reaches a customer's shelf adds another chapter. What began at the edge of extinction has found new life—not as a relic of the past, but as a living part of the present.
And it all traces back to two ears of corn and the people who decided they were worth saving.
