‘Moonshiners’: Mark Ramsey & Eric ‘Digger’ Manes on Season 16, Distilling and Dolly Parton

God bless America and the return of Moonshiners. Season 16 of the boozy Discovery Channel series sees the beloved Appalachian distillers kick off their latest adventures on Tuesday, September 29 in the spirit of “Life, Liberty, and Tax-Free Liquor.” The dynamic duo of Mark Ramsey and Eric ‘Digger’ Manes take a gamble during the premiere in the form of 20,000 bushels of corn with hopes of emptying the grain silos within a tight 60-day deadline.

It’s not the first time the wily Tennesseans have taken a big risk. The popular show staples traces their friendship back 45 years, getting in their share of mischief along the way. They’ve also worked together on ventures including partnerships with Sugarlands Distilling Company, based out of Gatlinburg, Tennessee.

We caught up with the pair to talk about the patriotic new Moonshiners season, their bond, and Dolly Parton connection.

You’ve been at this a long time. How has it been inspiring others through your efforts? 

Eric “Digger” Maines: Well, I guess the inspiration factor we didn’t see coming, but I take a lot of pride in the fact that people out there actually emulate what we’re doing. Even though it’s illegal right now, there’s a lot of liquor stills out there with folks in their garages and backyards, and basements. Yeah. I mean, I’m proud that we can motivate people to do a craft that is really rewarding.

Mark Ramsey: When we started this thing, honestly, we didn’t think this show would last over five or six seasons at the most. But it’s pretty humbling. We have a lot of fans, a lot of people come up to us. We do meet and greets and it’s very humbling when they tell us that they’re trying to make a little liquor and they’re experimenting and we love that. Maybe we encouraged them a little bit. 

Given the risks, what keeps you going in terms of allowing cameras to follow all your activity?

Digger: I’ll have to say the fans probably keep me coming back more than anything else. It certainly ain’t the hard work and aggravation. Making homemade liquor is hard work. Making TV while making homemade liquor is 10 times harder. 

As you alluded, there is a lot of physicality and endurance that can come with this type of work. Anything you do in terms of health and wellness as you get up there in age?

Digger: Just so you know, folks in TV land, you’ll never see me and Mark doing a commercial for a gym. I forgot to go to the gym this morning, and that makes…37 years now. We’re by no means health freaks by any means.

Mark: We have slowed down. We tortured ourselves pretty hard back in the day when you’re young and feel indestructible anyway. But we’ve slowed down and curved our drinking considerably. The lord let us live this long to get this old.  We figured we might try to take a lesson or two and take a little better care of ourselves. I just turned 67 years old and feel pretty good. 

Digger: I’m on the verge of  63 and can have a day when I don’t feel so good. It’s common knowledge I have chronic lymphocytic leukemia. It’s not deadly until it turns into something else. It makes you slow down and pay a little more attention to your world. Get a little closer. 

Mark: I know what he doesn’t know. You can’t kill him with a stick. 

Digger: It has been tried. 

Does this season feel especially meaningful given it’s during the America 250 celebration? 

Digger: The show should have been tied to it from the beginning. George Washington was one of our first moonshiners. He was also our first revenue agent. He implemented the first whiskey tax to pay for the war debt. That caused the first uprising, the Whiskey Rebellion. So, all the people didn’t just start. 

Mark: George Washington had all the bases covered, The fact that there are very few civilizations that last 200 years. The fact is the United States is 250 years old. Digger and I are very patriotic people. We stand for the flag, kneel for the lord and support our country. 

Digger: I wear my Folds of Honor pin everywhere I go. 

Mark: To be part of it, this was a good season for us because we got to do something to strictly pay homage to our country, our veterans, our 250th anniversary of our country. We’re proud to do it. 

Digger: Moonshiners by no means were hellions. Ninety percent of the time, they were upstanding pillars of the community. I tell people all the time. If you’re in a church built in this county prior to 1985, there is liquor money in the walls of that church because the men that made that liquor were the ones that had money and were church going folks. And we’re in church going folks ourselves. 

At the start of the season, you’ve acquired 20,000 bushels of surplus corn. And then you have a tight deadline that forces you to run 24/7. What can we expect here? 

Digger: Let that set in for many because I just had one of those nauseous feelings I had way through that buy. That was a feat to say the least. 

Mark: Yeah, 20,000 bushels of corn. It doesn’t sound like that much, but we sold and gave corn away. We made all the liquor we could possibly make out of corn. It’s one of them where we let our mouth write a check basically that our butts couldn’t cash. 

What goes into your decision-making process? Do you both have to agree when it comes to something like shelling out $70,000 worth of corn hoping it pans out? 

Digger: Well, I think I was the one that jumped in there knee deep right off the bat. To tell y’all how our decisions work, we don’t let petty stuff get between us. We let that go. Even with the money we make on this show. If I make an episode and he doesn’t, we split the money. Everything we have is 50/50 like a marriage. As a matter of fact, we’ve been friends longer than both have been married, combined with all my marriages. 

Mark: Honestly, it’s just another decision. We make them every day. I’ve had bad ideas that Digger went along with, and we followed them through. He’s had bad ideas. You don’t know it’s a bad idea, regardless of how you feel about it, till you do it. So, we backed each other up. We got each other’s back, and we’ve been friends for so long now. The joke is we have to stay friends because we know where all the bodies are buried. 

Mark: He is right. We all make bad decisions, but you have to think about things. Anything that comes up and becomes a problem and creates frustrations for somebody else, me and him are going to come up with a way to make it funny. 

You know how to make good TV.

Mark: We appreciate that comment. Me and Digger back in the day will say, we never was pretty. We’ve always been pretty ugly men. And if we never would have been a little bit funny, we never would have a date. 

By the teaser, it looks to be a pretty wild season. What else can you tease? 

Digger: I think you already mentioned our biggest conundrum, and that was 20,000 bushels of corn. Other than that, we don’t know till we see what the other teams do, what their issues and their problems are. We don’t stay in touch with them.

Mark: We don’t even know what content of errors they’re going to air. Whether it’s me knocking my brains out on a tree limb or whatever. We don’t know what they’re going to show

Digger: We just keep waiting for the blooper reel to come about one of these days. That would be a marathon.

Mark: There’s some things that we did this season that we are very proud of. We’ll leave it at that. 

Digger: It could be the 251st anniversary of America, and we’re still going to celebrate it. I think people will really be amazed at how we honor our country with our part on this show.

What’s business like for you? 

Mark: Business is good. Business is really good. Like everything else, it has its ups and downs. It has its moments. We’re maintaining an even keel, ain’t we, boss? 

Digger: Yes, sir. We have a pretty. pretty vast following. We certainly feel blessed for that. And we’re loyal back to them.

Dolly Parton recently passed. How did you take in the news given how much she impacted that local community in Tennessee? 

Mark: Oh, Lord. Dolly was an international treasure. Honestly, my heart was broken when Dolly passed. I still find myself missing her and tearing up a little bit about her. I loved her. The way she carried herself, ran her life. I think she should be nominated for sainthood. 

Digger: A hundred percent. I was just being quiet until I could get my composure. People out there don’t have a clue just how kind Dolly is. The things that are going to happen as acts of kindness with her passing, they are going to keep coming. We were filming when I got the text that Dolly had died. I had to walk off. I walked off and saw Mark, and he was in the same shape. 

Mark: The things and acts of kindness. She was a blessing to East Tennessee. She never forgot her home. She never forgot her people.

Digger: Touching on that, that tells how big of a person she was. She was bullied in school, made fun of, and the people of the town didn’t treat her as kind as they could have. She was the bigger person. She didn’t go to Los Angeles or Nashville and look back and say, “See, y’all shouldn’t have made fun of me.” She came back and did the right thing. She was not only the bigger person. She was the biggest person.

And you’ve had past interactions with her, right? 

Mark: We spent some time with her back during the fires of 2016 that fire that destroyed so much in Gatlinburg where people there lost homes. She did a telethon for them. Digger and I were allowed to help and answered phones for the telethon. She just gave people so much just give, give, give. She said that she had a thousand times more than she ever needed, and there were people out there that needed it. 

Digger: The building we’re standing in right now is my building where my wife’s accounting office and her little boutique are in. And we were devastated by the flood that came through with [Hurricane] Helene as well. And my two businesses in this building got $8,000 because of Dolly Parton. That paid to replace the front of my building.

Mark: But I remember we took her some liquor to the event. She said, “Oh God, boy.” She said, “I don’t drink, can you imagine this mouth all liquored up?”

Wow, that says something right there. Her niece Danielle is in the distillery business as well. 

Mark: Yes, we love us some Danielle. Let me tell you, speaking of the 250th birthday of our country and the way we love veterans. Danielle is almost the spitting image of Dolly when you look at her. Danielle just retired. She’s a lieutenant colonel in the Air National Guard. She flew C-130 cargo planes in Afghanistan. She’s also a commercial pilot now. She’s also a commercial pilot for American Airlines now. She owns the Shine Girl Distillery, but Danielle’s another one. Like Dolly, she doesn’t take no crap from nobody, but she’s very kind. 

Digger: Yeah, that’s what I was going to say. Not only does she look like Dolly a lot. She also emulates her interactions, She’ll put you in your place if it’s needed. 

Mark: Dolly loved dirty jokes better than anything. But she was just so fast thinking and Danielle inherited that from her  

Man, it sounds like we need a new cast member here on Moonshiners.

Digger: She has been on a few episodes. We’d welcome her back in a minute if she didn’t find us so trifling, I guess [laughs]. 

What’s an experience you got to do thanks to your celebrity? 

Mark: This also happened because of Sugarlands Distilling that we’re a part of. We got to meet 37 Medal of Honor recipients. And you know that in itself, I was just so humbled to be in the room with these people, knowing what they’ve done.

Digger: I’d try to talk to them, and I’d be squalling for them. They’d say, “Look, don’t cry.” I said, “Guys, you don’t understand.” They said, “Look, we were just doing our job.” They are so humble. 

Mark: Some of the young fellas weren’t wearing their metals and we’d ask them why. They’d say, “We don’t feel worthy of them. One of the young gentlemen told us this was missing an arm. So, meeting these people, these are the real heroes of our world. It isn’t the NBA, NFL or the rock stars. These people are the true American heroes. 

Digger: People of this country can set their successes at their feet. If  it weren’t for these men that had lost their lives or got wounded, men and women, we wouldn’t be free today. 

Mark: Me and Digger when asked what I can do for a veteran. It’s just simply being a good American worth dying for. 

Moonshiners Season 16 premiere, September 29, 8/7c, Discovery Channel