Moonshine!

[beans]

White lighting, apparently, is making a comeback!

"The golden age of moonshine is now," Webster said. "The government has quit hunting it. They took their manpower and started using it on firearms and explosives, deciding it was a waste of time to search through the hills for stills. As a result, you can get better moonshine now than you could during the Depression."

CNN story here.

Thinking about this, has anyone seen or tried this corn whiskey product? It's got the clever "packaging"/bottling to boot!

[cdh]

Thinking about this, has anyone seen or tried this corn whiskey product? It's got the clever "packaging"/bottling to boot!

Was brought to a party I attended as a joke. Tastes like alcoholic Fritos. Might be nice in savory drinks like bloody maries, but not good either straight or with fruit.

[Mayhaw Man]

Tastes like alcoholic Fritos.

And that's a bad thing?

[cdh]

Tastes like alcoholic Fritos.

And that's a bad thing?

Too much of a bite to drink straight, too corny to mix with juice. Tomato juice seems its only hope. Imagine unsalted Fritos... dipped in jam... that wrong.

Needs salt.

Edited January 11, 2004 by cdh (log)

[beans]

Tastes like alcoholic Fritos.

And that's a bad thing?

Too much of a bite to drink straight, too corny to mix with juice. Tomato juice seems its only hope. Imagine unsalted Fritos... dipped in jam... that wrong.

Needs salt.

[HeatherM]

Although I haven't tried that particular product, a friend of mine was given some moonshine that had grapes in it last summer. We both tried it, and decided that it was very good tasting, very smooth (kind of like port), and the best part was no hangover the next morning!

[hannnah]

Haven't tried the commercial stuff, but there's certainly some excellent production going on in the *ahem* traditional sense. We have some stuff through a friend of a friend of a friend that's copper-pot produced and cask-aged, and I'd put it up against any of the commercial small-batch bourbons that are on the market now. None of that raw-corn taste.

It's always amusing to take a look at the number of Mason jars that have been confiscated at Knoxville airport security - clearly there are plenty of folks with sources.

[cdh]

As a follow up to my musings above, I just made a bloody mary-like beverage out of the corn liquor... had to dig around in the box of party leftovers that I'd figured wouldn't get touched until the next big bash...

Anyway, it does sort of work in that context. The very grainy undertones work well with V8 and worcestershire and my bloody mary oil. Doesn't taste like a bloody mary (that could be the for lack of horseradish in my house), but it is not at all disgusting even without horseradish.

If you find yourself with a mason jar of the stuff, don't lose all hope.

[QuinaQuen]

No hills around here, so what do you call them...refinerybillies?

On a less ethno-taxonomic note, it's the easiest thing in the world to brew extremely small batches of moonshine out of anything alcoholic. All you need is a stovetop, a pressure cooker, some JB Weld, some copper tubing (plumbing grade, please! No automotive!), and a bucket (busket!) full of salted ice water. The ATF is very unlikely to bust down your door for this process, and it's even legal if you just ask the government to let you brew small batches for "scientific purposes".

It's a great way to experiment with distillations of already-fermented rotgut. Some of the best grappa I've ever had has been cooked up on my stove from Carlo Rossi jugs o'. The Marthas among you could even use it to constructively dispose of unsuccessful homebrewed beer and wine.

[Mayhaw Man]

QuinaQen-

it's the easiest thing in the world to brew extremely small batches of moonshine out of anything alcoholic. All you need is a stovetop, a pressure cooker, some JB Weld, some copper tubing (plumbing grade, please! No automotive!), and a bucket (busket!) full of salted ice water.

While this statement is kind of true, in the broadest sense, I would not ever tell anyone to try and operate a still on their stovetop. The first reason is that pure ethyl alcohol and particularly alcohol vapor is highly flammable. You could burn yourself or your house for something that is not likely to be anywhere near as good or as inexpensive as what you can buy at the Liquor Barn down the road.

The second reason that this is a bad idea is that distillation of any sort, by it's very nature, produces esthers and oils that are bad for you. THe primary reason that shine got the reputation it did (outside of disreputable producers using lead soldered radiators as cooling coils) is that many of the producers had no clue about the beginning and the end of a run of whiskey, when fusels were being produced in very large quantities along with the alcohol and these oils can cause devastating headaches (hence the term "pop skull)and other serious health problems.

Distillation can be done safely and certainly well on a small scale (and clearly is in many parts of the world), but as with most things that involve science and food, much concern needs to go into safety. As someone who has spent alot of time and money around distillation projects, I caution anyone who is thinking about this to look into it very carefully-do much reading and study before you get all cranked up, because this is a quantum leap away from soaking grain in 156F water and putting it in a carbuoy in your closet with a airlock on top.

QuinaQen

On a less ethno-taxonomic note, The ATF is very unlikely to bust down your door for this process, and it's even legal if you just ask the government to let you brew small batches for "scientific purposes".

Consult your local ATF agent with an anonymous phone call before you take this advice. While no one is going to get very upset by one of those table top distillation rigs that you can buy from Sharper Image, a few kegs welded together and properly set up with the right plumbing can yield a suprising amount of high quality entertainment and the way that the ATF calculates how much a still produces had NOTHING to do with how much you actually produced (scientific permit or not). Large quantities of untaxed liquor that you cannot prove you did not sell will at the very least make some law firm very happy and might land you in the pen for a short stretch. I have some very first hand knowledge of the enforcement methods and while the ATF is certainly more concerned with some clowns making meth, they are not going to pass up a good old fashioned shine bust. Think before you drink.

Safety lecture over. We now return you to our regularly scheduled program.

[beans]

I grew up on TV.

Every time I think of a still, images of the gizmo Hawkeye set up on MASH comes to mind....

[Mayhaw Man]

I grew up on TV.

Every time I think of a still, images of the gizmo Hawkeye set up on MASH comes to mind....

For those of you who are interested enough to maybe want to give distillation a try ( I would reccomend homebrewing first, they are not really similar except that you produce something alcoholic, but home brewing does require a fair amount of applied scientific method and is a fairly inexpensive way to find out if you have the patience for the hobby) this website is an excellent resource. When I first started looking into this there were no materials available to me (internet did not exist in a useful way 15 years ago) and we used lots of folkloric type material. In fact the first still we built was straight out of The Foxfire Book-Volume 1. We built a very nice, but highly improved, still based on the design in the book. It is a classic still and a great story in the book goes along with the building of it.

There are also a bunch of very safe, very small units that look much like the one that Beans remembers from TV. I believe that Sharper Image had one at some point, but the problem with distillation is that you are only going to get <10% alcohol out of whatever you distill (generally speaking it will be some kind of beer or wine or something else made from fermentable sugars) so those table top things are basically working you to death for a couple of shots.

[QuinaQuen]

I grew up on TV.

Every time I think of a still, images of the gizmo Hawkeye set up on MASH comes to mind.... 

For those of you who are interested enough to maybe want to give distillation a try ( I would reccomend homebrewing first, they are not really similar except that you produce something alcoholic, but home brewing does require a fair amount of applied scientific method and is a fairly inexpensive way to find out if you have the patience for the hobby) this website is an excellent resource. When I first started looking into this there were no materials available to me (internet did not exist in a useful way 15 years ago) and we used lots of folkloric type material. In fact the first still we built was straight out of The Foxfire Book-Volume 1. We built a very nice, but highly improved, still based on the design in the book. It is a classic still and a great story in the book goes along with the building of it.

There are also a bunch of very safe, very small units that look much like the one that Beans remembers from TV. I believe that Sharper Image had one at some point, but the problem with distillation is that you are only going to get <10% alcohol out of whatever you distill (generally speaking it will be some kind of beer or wine or something else made from fermentable sugars) so those table top things are basically working you to death for a couple of shots.

That's the genuine truth. Stovetop distillation really is more trouble than it's worth if you really just want to get f'd up, or if you even want to yield more than a few ounces. But it is fun and easy, especially if you go the MacGyvered route.

A certain degree of caution is always advised, of course, but the lower the yield, the lower the danger. Mayhaw Man makes a valid point about the flammability of alcohol. However, the ideal stovetop rig gets the distilled alcohol as far away from the flame as $10 at Home Depot will allow, which is quite a ways. Since the flame itself is tiny at best on a home stove, even if the hooch does ignite, it will not go any further than a flash in a saute pan. Alcohol burns fairly cold, too, so the danger of wood or paper ignition is infinitesimal as long as you're in the same room at the time.

Chemical compound cautions, however, are well worth noting. That's why I declined to describe the more detailed setup in my original post; you really should do a bit of research before setting up a pressure cooker still. That bit about going blind from bad moonshine? That's because some Sons of the Soil weren't particularly concerned about the sources of their hardware. Alcohol may not be the world's strongest solvent, but it sure can draw some wacky compounds out of contact surfaces.