Rowley's Whiskey Forge: Alcohol was a Factor

Sunday, June 19, 2011

Alcohol was a Factor

An older story from Alaska just caught my attention.

Seems that young moonshiner Frank Cleveland lost his goddamned mind, took a chainsaw to family door, got arrested, broke the jail cell light, lit a blanket on fire, urinated on the cell wall, and punched a state trooper. "Alcohol" the report notes, "was a factor."

Yeah. I figured.

More details from The Arctic Sounder here.

No comments:

Rowley Who?

I'm Matthew Rowley. I wrote the book on moonshine. No, for real.

I'm a contributor to Whisky Advocate, contributing editor for Distiller magazine, a former board member of the Southern Foodways Alliance, and an erstwhile museum curator. After a life of living in bitterly cold and unspeakably hot places, I'm lucky enough to be working my tail off in southern California. Can't beat that with a stick.

Email me: moonshinearchives (at) gmail (dot) com

My day job is freelance writing for business, government, and academic clients. When I’m not helping others get their stories out, I’m eating and drinking, planning to eat and drink, or, relying on my training as an anthropologist and museum curator to reflect on what I’ve eaten and drunk. I travel whenever I can, visiting distillers, artisan food producers, secondhand bookstores, and farmers’ markets. Sometimes I manage to write about it here.

Since 2001, I've traveled around the world interviewing extra-legal distillers to debunk the notion that moonshining is a dead or dying craft. You can check out the results in my 2007 book Moonshine. For fun, there are plugs and interviews at the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Publishers Weekly, the Los Angeles Times, and Wired.

It's warmed my heart that modern "very small batch" distillers, far from being a dying breed, continue to send and bring me bottles and jars of hand-cranked whiskeys and brandies.

Click here for my disclosure statements and directions for sending samples.