Moonshine returns
The fabled liquor of outlaws and gangsters is making a comeback with craft distillers. Too bad it's still illegal.
Standing in the middle of the room at the Sweetwater Distillery in Petaluma, Calif., Bill Owens held a feedbag full of stale donuts high in the air. With a crowd gathered around him, he dumped its contents -- chocolate glazed, jelly-filled, iced with sprinkles -- into a tank filled with hot water and plunged an industrial mixer into the liquid, splattering warm, sticky bits onto anyone who stood too close. A dog wandered up and began licking the floor.
Owens is the president of the American Distilling Institute, an organization devoted to educating people about the art and science of distilled spirits. His audience was a group of about 25 who'd come from as far away as Maine and Tennessee to spend a week learning the basics of making whiskey, from developing a mash and running a still to bottling the alcohol and testing its proof.
Whiskey, it's worth noting, is usually made from grain. But Owens, a natural showman, was taking advantage of the fact that you can create alcohol from any ingredient that contains or breaks down into sugar, from meal to fruit to, yes, doughnuts. After adding yeast -- which digests the sugar into ethanol and carbon dioxide -- you run the fermented mash through a still, which uses heat to separate and collect the ethanol. Owens was confident that the breakfast pastry mash would produce alcohol. The question was: What would it taste like?
Like unaged whiskey with a hint of doughnut, it turned out. But I hadn't come to Owens' workshop for cruller whiskey, per se. I was there to learn more about homemade hooch. As anyone who's recently attempted to smoke their own bacon or pickle their vegetables can attest, America is in the midst of a do-it-yourself craze, inspired partially by the recession, partially by the local food movement, and partially by the same culinary derring-do that brought us the turducken. So why not homemade spirits? Most commercial distillers focus on the basics, like vodka and whiskey, but there are countless other distillations waiting to be made, from applejack and peach brandy to tangerine schnapps.
I'll tell you why not: Distilling homemade spirits is a felony. Unlike wine or beer, which you're allowed to make at home for personal use, making any sort of untaxed spirit on an unlicensed still remains very much illegal, punishable by a federal fine of up to $10,000 and five years in jail for each offense, plus state penalties. Bill Owens was getting away with his jelly doughnut whiskey because he was making it on a registered still. But if I were to do the same thing at home, I'd go from making whiskey to making moonshine.
Moonshine. The word evokes visions of a 1920s gangster with a gun in one pocket and a flask in the other, a hillbilly whose backwoods still is decorated with Confederate flags. Both images have truth, but moonshine itself is not particularly sinister -- while it most often refers to whiskey, it's just a catch-all term for any spirit that's untaxed and illegally distilled. The word comes from the ideal conditions in which to make it: A moonlit night just bright enough to see what you're doing but dark enough that it's easy to hide.
The laws against moonshine might be a vestige of Prohibition, but the most likely explanation for the government's recalcitrance is taxes: It collects $2.14 per 750 milliliter bottle of 80 proof alcohol, versus only 21 cents for the same size bottle of standard wine and a paltry 5 cents per can of beer. Getting a distilling license can run into the tens of thousands of dollars, and requires so much hassle and paperwork that few individual distillers find it worth the effort -- after all, they just want to drink the stuff, not sell it (which would turn them into bootleggers). So instead, they just make 'shine.
We usually associate moonshine's heyday with Prohibition -- but the biggest moonshine bust in the United States actually occurred in 2001, when an eight-year crackdown called"Operation Lightning Strike" resulted in the arrest of more than two dozen people in a corn liquor operation that stretched from Raleigh, N.C., to Philadelphia; the group had dodged almost $20 million in taxes on 1.5 million gallons of alcohol. (Unaged whiskey frequently ends up in inner-city bars.) Just last month, a man pleaded guilty in a federal court to running a moonshine still on an undeveloped island in the middle of the Pasquotank River in North Carolina. And this July, a Virginia man was sentenced to four years in prison and ordered to pay $217,795 in federal taxes for making about 16,000 gallons of moonshine -- enough to fill a 14-by-28-foot swimming pool more than 5 feet deep with booze...
Read entire article at Salon
Standing in the middle of the room at the Sweetwater Distillery in Petaluma, Calif., Bill Owens held a feedbag full of stale donuts high in the air. With a crowd gathered around him, he dumped its contents -- chocolate glazed, jelly-filled, iced with sprinkles -- into a tank filled with hot water and plunged an industrial mixer into the liquid, splattering warm, sticky bits onto anyone who stood too close. A dog wandered up and began licking the floor.
Owens is the president of the American Distilling Institute, an organization devoted to educating people about the art and science of distilled spirits. His audience was a group of about 25 who'd come from as far away as Maine and Tennessee to spend a week learning the basics of making whiskey, from developing a mash and running a still to bottling the alcohol and testing its proof.
Whiskey, it's worth noting, is usually made from grain. But Owens, a natural showman, was taking advantage of the fact that you can create alcohol from any ingredient that contains or breaks down into sugar, from meal to fruit to, yes, doughnuts. After adding yeast -- which digests the sugar into ethanol and carbon dioxide -- you run the fermented mash through a still, which uses heat to separate and collect the ethanol. Owens was confident that the breakfast pastry mash would produce alcohol. The question was: What would it taste like?
Like unaged whiskey with a hint of doughnut, it turned out. But I hadn't come to Owens' workshop for cruller whiskey, per se. I was there to learn more about homemade hooch. As anyone who's recently attempted to smoke their own bacon or pickle their vegetables can attest, America is in the midst of a do-it-yourself craze, inspired partially by the recession, partially by the local food movement, and partially by the same culinary derring-do that brought us the turducken. So why not homemade spirits? Most commercial distillers focus on the basics, like vodka and whiskey, but there are countless other distillations waiting to be made, from applejack and peach brandy to tangerine schnapps.
I'll tell you why not: Distilling homemade spirits is a felony. Unlike wine or beer, which you're allowed to make at home for personal use, making any sort of untaxed spirit on an unlicensed still remains very much illegal, punishable by a federal fine of up to $10,000 and five years in jail for each offense, plus state penalties. Bill Owens was getting away with his jelly doughnut whiskey because he was making it on a registered still. But if I were to do the same thing at home, I'd go from making whiskey to making moonshine.
Moonshine. The word evokes visions of a 1920s gangster with a gun in one pocket and a flask in the other, a hillbilly whose backwoods still is decorated with Confederate flags. Both images have truth, but moonshine itself is not particularly sinister -- while it most often refers to whiskey, it's just a catch-all term for any spirit that's untaxed and illegally distilled. The word comes from the ideal conditions in which to make it: A moonlit night just bright enough to see what you're doing but dark enough that it's easy to hide.
The laws against moonshine might be a vestige of Prohibition, but the most likely explanation for the government's recalcitrance is taxes: It collects $2.14 per 750 milliliter bottle of 80 proof alcohol, versus only 21 cents for the same size bottle of standard wine and a paltry 5 cents per can of beer. Getting a distilling license can run into the tens of thousands of dollars, and requires so much hassle and paperwork that few individual distillers find it worth the effort -- after all, they just want to drink the stuff, not sell it (which would turn them into bootleggers). So instead, they just make 'shine.
We usually associate moonshine's heyday with Prohibition -- but the biggest moonshine bust in the United States actually occurred in 2001, when an eight-year crackdown called"Operation Lightning Strike" resulted in the arrest of more than two dozen people in a corn liquor operation that stretched from Raleigh, N.C., to Philadelphia; the group had dodged almost $20 million in taxes on 1.5 million gallons of alcohol. (Unaged whiskey frequently ends up in inner-city bars.) Just last month, a man pleaded guilty in a federal court to running a moonshine still on an undeveloped island in the middle of the Pasquotank River in North Carolina. And this July, a Virginia man was sentenced to four years in prison and ordered to pay $217,795 in federal taxes for making about 16,000 gallons of moonshine -- enough to fill a 14-by-28-foot swimming pool more than 5 feet deep with booze...