When The Beverly Hillbillies left their humble home and left for California they were filthy rich. They sold their oil soaked property for $25 million, according to the inaugural episode, which originally aired in 1962. The $25 million sale price of the Clampett’s property looks more like $200 million in today’s dollars, let’s be real, $200 million is a lot of dough, but what if The Beverly Hillbillies could have kept their land and made even more money… selling moonshine.

There’s $21 trillion sitting in vast, dark cellars in Kentucky. It’s not in the form of vaults full of cash, or secret-stashes of gold, but barrels of whiskey. Kentucky is in the middle of a “bourbon boom” and whiskey inventory is at a 40-year high for the state. If you counted up all the barrels of whiskey aging on the bourbon trail the total monetary value would add up to more than the entire GDP of the united states.

Comparing whiskey and oil only makes sense, they’re both liquid! And they both sit and rest underground, waiting to be tapped and consumed by the masses. The edge that whiskey has over oil is that it’s even more valuable per gallon, nearly 40 times more. Besides that it’s infinitely more drinkable than oil. If only the Beverly Hillbillies had the foresight to see the amazing opportunity that could have laid beneath their feet instead of the oil that already did.

Picture yourself a hillbilly, living in the Appalachian mountains of Kentucky in the 1960s. Your family has a moonshine recipe handed down from generation to generation and is regarded as the best moonshine in them their hills. You decide, as the family entrepreneur, to take that family recipe and turn it into a legitimate business. Well that exactly what did happen to Bulleit, a Kentucky bourbon company.

Come and listen to a story about a man named Tom Bulleit, a local Kentuckian, who rebooted his family’s whiskey brand “Bulleit” by recreating a whiskey recipe that his great, great grandfather made (and sold) in the 1800s. The company is now apart of a larger spirits company Diageo, which reported sales of over 750,000 cases of Bulleit bourbon in 2015 and revenues of $3.1 billion in 2016.

With the “bourbon boom” overall whiskey sales show no sign of slowing down anytime soon, in fact Bulleit has recently broken ground on a brand new distillery near Shelbyville Kentucky. This new distillery has the potential to produce 1.8 million gallons of bourbon a year.

If only the Beverley Hillbillies had stayed in the hills perfecting their hooch recipe in preparation for the “bourbon boom” of today. For one they could have kept their land, but more importantly converted their moonshining into a multi-billion dollar, family owned, company.