Last summer, Greg Furness noticed his home’s cedar-shingle siding, bright yellow and white like a daffodil, was lined with gray and black spots. He had never seen anything like it in his nearly 40 years living in the town of Moriah.
Other town residents in the Grover Hills neighborhood of Mineville near WhistlePig Whiskey’s almost 100,000 square-feet of barrel storage warehouses had complained of a black fungus on houses, fence posts, cars and traffic signs. Furness lives further out, about three quarters of a mile from WhistlePig and the Moriah Business Park.
On Nov. 9, the state Department of Environmental Conservation collected samples from the homes of Furness and three others in Grover Hills and one from WhistlePig Whiskey’s barn-red warehouses.
Residents suspected the black sooty substance was whiskey fungus, or Baudoinia compniacensis, a fungus that is naturally occurring in the environment but feeds and grows off of ethanol vapors. Distilleries call the vapor the “angel’s share.”
Four months went by, and residents had no results. Furness grew tired of waiting. He collected his own samples for a private lab to test. It cost about $500. The retired historian was determined to get to the bottom of this, he
