Home Fires: The State of Home Distilling in the US

Lew Bryson, editor at Whisky Advocate, asked me write about the current state of affairs for home distilling in the United States. A blanket federal ban on the practice is in place, but a few states are bucking those laws with more permissive laws and regulations of their own. Regardless of the laws, sub rosa distillers from the East Coast to the West are making an awful lot of homemade liquor for themselves, their families, and friends. No, I didn't forget you, Alaska. In fact, I'd be surprised if we don't see a new reality show called something like Alaska Bootleggers or Ice Road Moonshiners in the near future. From the Fall 2013 issue of Whisky Advocate, here's a piece originally titled Home Fires.

Casual observers often assume that home distilling, like wine making or beer brewing, is legal in America. Zymurgy Bob knows better. According to federal law, distilleries are never permissible in homes. His advice? “Do everything you can to reduce your visibility to the law,” he exhorts. “Conceal what you are doing.” The pseudonymous author of Making Fine Spirits, a guide to building and operating home-scale stills, closes his introductory chapter with modern home distilling’s most ironclad commandment: Thou Shalt Not Sell.

Alcohol distillation in the United States is highly regulated and federal judicial code is uniformly severe with those who skirt the rules. Once federal prosecutors bring charges against a suspect for illicit distillation, they are forbidden by law from dropping the case without express written permission from the Attorney General. If found guilty, violators could face up to five years in prison and be fined $10,000. Because illicit distillation, the argument goes, is a tax dodge, those who defraud the United States of tax revenue through such clandestine distilling shall forfeit (not may or might — shall forfeit) the land on which the distillery is located as well as equipment used to make spirits and all personal property in the building and yard.

Running off a few liters of whiskey or ultra-pure vodka in the basement may seem a harmless pastime to some, but are they perverse enough to risk losing homes, land, and nearly all their possessions by actually firing up a still?

For thousands of Americans, the answer is yes. Across the country, hobbyists buy and build small stills for making spirits in secret. Profit is beside the point; these distillers do not sell their products. Compared to the output of Chivas or Beam, their covert batches of gin, rum, seasonal brandies, whiskey, and hausgemacht absinthe are miniscule. Tuthilltown Spirits alone loses more in angel’s share than what most hobbyists produce in a year. Their enthusiasm, however, burns no less brighter than that of professional — and legal — craft practioners.

One California hobbyist, Navy Frank, grows wormwood in his yard and keeps glass jugs of homemade spirits in his dining room. Home distilling, as Frank describes it, is a facet of a larger DIY ethos. “It’s a maker mentality that drives people to make homemade cheese or beer or build something with their own hands or garden. There’s all this wonderful cross-pollination. If you sketched the connections of what people like us get excited about, they would form the most overlapping Venn diagram ever.”

Frank — not his real name — is a Navy veteran and an engineer by trade. In his cellar he makes rum, neutral spirits, absinthe, honey distillates, and a peated single malt. “That’s probably my favorite, but after sharing, and sampling, and more sharing, I’m down to just one bottle.” His modular distillery system uses three separate pots that can be rigged with different heads and condensers that vary with what, and how much, he is making. The largest boiler could hold a child. The smallest, no bigger than a rice cooker, is for extracting botanical essences.

I mention a New York distiller who created a flavor library of over 200 botanical extracts, including angelica seed and rare agarwood. “Oh,” he smiles. “Ramón!” Despite the continent between them, the two distillers know each other through online hobbyist groups. In this, they are typical. Hobbyists regularly turn to online forums such as Yahoo Distillers and Artisan Distiller for guidance. Like Frank and Bob, Ramón prefers a pseudonym, but because he works in the distilling industry, his concern goes deeper than their straightforward desire to avoid legal attention. While it’s not uncommon for craft distillers to have learned the basics of their trade at home, and even continue to refine it there, the majority who do so will not admit that on the record. Like them, Ramón assumes investors, concerned that federal liquor violations could ruin a licensed distillery, might jettison a partner or employee accused of illicit distilling. “If TTB keeps making it easier to open distilleries,” he muses, “then maybe the hobby side of the equation could finally become legal. I’d happily pay for a permit to make ten gallons or twenty each year for myself. I bet 90 percent of home distillers would do the same.”

While it’s true that several hundred American craft distilleries have opened in the last decade, the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) does not issue permits for home distilling for any price. Some states, though, allow noncommercial production to varying degrees. Alaska, for instance, excludes “private” manufacture of spirits from its alcohol control laws...except in quantities that exceed federal limits. In other words, Alaska allows zero liters for home distillers. Missouri is more explicit, asserting that “No person at least twenty-one years of age shall be required to obtain a license to manufacture intoxicating liquor...for personal or family use.” Such use in the Show Me State, it may be noted, is up to 200 gallons per year. Go, Missouri. Arizona expressly permits personal distilling of spirits such as brandy or whiskey if owners register their rigs with the state’s Department of Liquor Licenses and Control. According to DLLC, however, none has done so.

Mike McCaw, distillery consultant and publisher of Zymurgy Bob’s book, argues that as governments are forced to examine all spending, “We may, just may, be at a political inflection point where [legalizing home distilling] could happen...it is simply not cost effective to chase down people with ten gallon stills.” Bob himself is less sanguine. Speaking by phone on his book tour, he says that pursuing people with ten gallon stills “does make sense if they’re selling it and there is tax evasion going on. And that is one of the main points of the whole “do not sell” prohibition. There is no money and so no tax being evaded there.”

“I hope — I hope — that’s giving me a margin of safety.”

I hope so, too. Good luck, Bob.

Goes well with:

• First things first. If you have legal questions about distilling in your country, state, or province, please get in touch with consultants and/or attorneys who know your local laws. The discussion forum of the American Distilling Institute is a good place to start. In the UK, check in with the Craft Distillers Alliance. 
• The business about unregistered distilleries and distilling with intent to defraud leading to forfeiting  one's property in the United States is addressed 26 USC § 5615. The full text is here. 
• Zymgurgy Bob's book, Making Fine Spirits, is available here. Mike McCaw, distillery consultant, still designer, and publisher of Bob's book, can be reached through The Amphora Society. 
• Whisky Advocate magazine is here. An earlier piece I did on white whiskey — and what to do with it — for the magazine is here. 
• Even the Ten Dollar Whore Sneered at Me, in which a New Orleans...ahm... independent contractor disapproves of me.

Winners of The Drunken Botanist (with Five Recipes)

“Do you know of this?” my friend EJ emailed. 

“I just stumbled upon it and think I am going to pick one up.” 

The link in his note was for Amy Stewart’s new book 

The Drunken Botanist. 

Within seconds I typed back: 

“Buy it immediately.”

Last week, I heaped a bunch of plaudits on Amy Stewart's new book The Drunken Botanist. Her publisher, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, offered to send five copies of the cook to readers of the Whiskey Forge. Rather than simply send a copy to random commenters like those who flock to any and all online giveaways, I put a twist on the rules and stipulated that those who wanted to throw their hats in the ring must also provide recipe in the comments to qualify. To keep it, in other words, among us booze geeks. I want to read about, I wrote,

...your favorite alcoholic drink that relies on plants to give it some distinguishing character — a cocktail, a homemade cordial or bitters recipe, your grandmother's amaro or your college roommate's homemade absinthe. Whatever. But it's got to have booze, beer, or wine (nothing against tea, but tea hardly makes botanists drunk) and it's got to demonstrate some distinctive plant characteristic. What that means is up to you: I want to see what you've got.

The results are in. Thank you everyone who sent in recipes — I'm working all weekend, but my mind keeps coming back to the new drinks I want to make. Five comments (selected using The Randomizer) came up winners. Those five should email me (moonshinearchives at gmail dot com) with mailing addresses ASAP.

First up is Sam K with his recipe for the Pennsylvanian/Lithuanian specialty, Boilo:

Always served warm, it is a soothing companion on a cold winter's night.

4 oranges, peeled
2 lemons, peeled
1 cup honey
4 cups water
1 cup raisins
1/2 tsp cloves
1 Tbsp caraway seed
1 Tbsp anise seed
4 cinnamon sticks
2 750 ml bottles decent blended American whiskey (Four Queens if you can find it)

Take all ingredients except whiskey and bring to a slow simmer for about a half hour. I prefer to peel the citrus to avoid leaching the more bitter oils into the potion. Allow to cool slightly and strain. Add the blended whiskey just before serving.

This will keep for some time. The blended whiskey is the main traditional ingredient here, really, and though I've read that the cheaper it is, the better, that's crap. There really is a substantial difference between, say, Fleischmann's and Four Queens (which has a slightly higher percentage of actual whiskey and is bottled at 100 proof). I know...I've ruined en entire batch by using Fleischmann's.

I suppose you could do even better by using three parts vodka and one part bourbon, but the miners always called for blended, and who am I to argue with tradition? That, plus they'd kick my ass! Second, Nick in Chapel Hill gives his take on a jalapeno honey-spiced Brown Derby:

1.5 oz rye (Knob Creek rye)
1.5 oz of fresh grapefruit juice
.5 oz jalapeno honey (To make: combine 14 oz local NC honey with fresh sliced jalapenos (2) - lightly sauté to release oils. Combine seed and fruit into honey in mason jar; let sit for 5 days prior to use)
.25 oz simple syrup
Splash soda water (or more, depending on tolerance for spice!)

Add rye and honey. Stir to loosen. Add grapefruit. Shake. Serve with crushed ice in rocks glass OR in chilled champagne coupe. 

From the cane fields of south Louisiana, John Couchot contributes his Rum Rickey Gone Local. the flavors of US sugarcane, he writes, "truly shine in this combination."

1 shot Rhum Agricole
1/2 shot of Louisiana made small batch cane syrup
fresh squeezed lime juice
splash of soda
garnish with a lime twist

Sylvan presents a slight twist on Sam Ross' new classic, the Penicillin Cocktail. This is my variation on Sam Ross' wonderful 'cold Scotch toddy'. "I never have 'ginger-honey syrup,'" he writes, "so I usually make honey syrup to order (no need to let it cool) and muddle fresh ginger."

Fresh ginger
2 ounces blended scotch (typ. Famous Grouse or Ballantine)
3/4 ounce fresh lemon juice
3/4 ounce honey syrup (1:1 honey/water)
1/4 ounce smoky Scotch (such as Laphroaig)

Slice a few (to taste) 1/8" slices of ginger and muddle in a mixing glass. Add blended Scotch, lemon juice and syrup, fill with ice and shake well. Strain into an ice-filled rocks glass or a chilled cocktail glass and float Islay scotch on top.

Finally, Lucas chimes in from snowy Toronto with his Garden Caesar (that's a Bloody Mary with a dose of oyster liquor or clam juice to us Yanks). He eyeballs the proportions.

Homemade vodka infused with Persimmon Tomatoes (using ISI Whipper)
Tomato juice (boughten is fine)
Oyster liquor
dash or two celery bitters
Fresh grated horseradish from the garden.
a couple of drops of homemade chili oil.
Rim the glass with lime and serve with a plate of oysters.

Setting aside the ambiguity of whether the vodka itself is homemade or just the final infused product is, I like the way you think, Lucas. Not just that ambiguity and the plate of oysters, but the nitrous-charged tomato vodka. This is a technique that didn't start getting traction until the last year or so, although it's been known for several years. Lucas uses the technique laid out in the Cooking Issues blog, but explains further:

I do a rough dice with the tomato, making sure to add the juice to the whipper as well. Seal it up, pressurize with two cartridges, wait a minute, depressurize and strain. I like the persimmon tomatoes because they have tons of flavour and live about ten steps away from the bar.

Cheers! Remember, you five, to email me with a shipping address for your copy of The Drunken Botanist and I'll pass it on to the publisher.

For the rest of you, a lot more recipes (worthy entries, one and all) are here in the comments section. Although the giveaway is closed, feel free to chime in with your own, even if they involve frozen squid swizzle sticks (ahem, Greg).

Bookshelf: The Drunken Botanist (and a giveaway)

“Do you know of this?” my friend EJ emailed. “I just stumbled upon it and think I am going to pick one up.” The link in his note was for Amy Stewart’s new book The Drunken Botanist. Within seconds I typed back: “Buy it immediately.”

Scroll down for a chance to score a free copy

The last decade has witnessed an avalanche of drinks books: encyclopedic cocktail guides; histories of various liquors; reproductions of early bartending manuals; buying guides; essay collections; paeans to bars from New Orleans to Wisconsin. Most are undistinguished. Many cocktail manuals in particular are interchangeable. Some released only in the last few years have begun to feel like remnants of trends not yet played out, already dated. Not Stewart’s.

The Drunken Botanist is the most useful and entertaining drinks book of the year and one of the most engaging of the last several years.

I've been to liquor stores with distillers, bartenders, and go-go boys but never a botanist. Until I manage that, this little green tome can serve as a crash course in what's actually in those thousands of bottles. Sure, cocktail recipes — good ones, too — are scattered throughout the book but those are not the reason I've been heaping plaudits on it. Rather, it's the unrelenting thoroughness of Stewart's writing that's so impressive. The book is an exploration of plants (and a few bugs and fungi) that contribute flavors, aromas, colors, tactile sensations, and base materials for fermentation and distillation.

Stewart frames the scope in her introduction:

Around the world, it seems, there's not a tree or shrub or delicate wildflower that has not been harvested, brewed, and bottled. Every advance and botanical exploration or horticultural science brought with it a corresponding uptick in the quality of our spirituous liquors. Drunken botanists? Given the role they play in creating the world's greatest drinks, it's a wonder there are any sober botanists at all.

Bartenders beware.

Since Caesar famously divided Gaul into three, authors have followed suit. Stewart breaks down over 150 plants we drink into three sections. First come plants that, when fermented (and sometimes distilled) yield beer, wine, ales, and various spirits. These include obvious selections like corn, apples, grapes, sugarcane, wheat, and barley as well as fermentable bases less often seen in the North America or western Europe such as tamarind, sweet potato, jackfruit, banana, and marula. Next are those used to flavor those spirits and low-alcohol brews: coriander, anise, meadowsweet, hyssop, wormword, fenugreek, vanilla, cinnamon, elderflowers, saffron, Douglas fir, oak, mastic, and dozens more. Finally, flowers, berries, herbs, and others added a la minute to drinks — think celery stalks in a bloody mary, cucumber in a Pimm's cup, and tiki drinks garnished with endless pineapple, mint, and cherries. They are all here, each backed up with horticultural, chemical, medical, historical, anthropological, and ethnnobotanical research.

The Drunken Botanist covers much of the same ground Brad Thomas Parsons reached for in his Bitters, but where Parsons stumbled, Stewart soars. Her graceful, easy style belies the sheer amount of facts and data packed into nearly 400 pages. Line drawings accompany many of the entries. Each plant entry starts with the common name immediately followed by its Linnean taxonomic designation and the family to which it belongs and then a page or more on its use in alcoholic drinks.

Take myrrh, for instance. Commiphora myrrha to botanists, it's in the torchwood family, more properly known as Burseraceae. Wait. WAIT. Do not let your eyes glaze over. Myrrh was one of the gifts of the biblical wise men. If Jesus was down with myrrh, you can give it a minute. Stewart writes:

Myrrh is an ugly little tree: scrawny, covered in thorns, and nearly bereft of leaves. It grows in the poor, shallow soils of Somalia and Ethiopia, where it is a gloomy gray figure in a barren landscape. If it weren't for the rich and fragrant resin that drips from the trunk, no one would give it a second look.

The rest of the entry concerns its use among ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans, including the Roman practice of blending it with wine to offer during crucifixions. Well, ok, maybe Jesus wasn't always a fan. We learn that in modern times it is a common ingredient in vermouth, bitters, aromatized wines, and cordials such as Royal Combier and that bartenders' favorite, Fernet Branca. The Fernet mention leads us to a discussion of aloe (also found in Fernet Branca), which is related to agave, and that brings us to tequila, and from there to Damiana whose supposed aphrodisiac qualities led one doctor to write in 1879 that it could be given to female patients "to produce in her the very important yet not absolutely essential orgasm." On and on they go, these analog hyperlinks, each entry suggesting another, like a Choose Your Own Adventure book for drinkers.

Boozehounds, brewers, distillers, oenologists, sommeliers, bitters-makers, bartenders — even tea freaks and soda makers — will find this a timeless reference work for understanding not only what's in the spirits we drink, but perhaps ways to craft new ones. Her engaging prose and attention to detail all but assures that Stewart's latest book will remain a useful tool even a century from now for those who make drinks at home or work.

Amy Stewart (2013)
The Drunken Botanist: The Plants that Create the World’s Great Drinks 
400 pages (hardback)
Algonquin Books
ISBN: 1616200464
$24.95

Goes well with:

• My review of C. Anne Wilson's Water of Life, an exhaustive examination of the origins and progress of spiritous distillation. 
• A look at Brad Thomas Parsons' Bitters: A Spirited History of a Classic Cure-All, with Cocktails, Recipes, and Formulas. A qualified success, but still worth buying. 
• Volodimir Pavliuchuk's 2008 recipe book Cordial Waters: A Compleat Guide to Ardent Spirits of the World. 
• Do It to Julia! A look at pink cloves and gin as Winston Smith's habitual (I'll refrain from calling it his "favorite") tipple in Orwell's 1984.

How About That Free Copy?

Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, the publisher of  The Drunken Botanist, has offered to send a free copy of the book to five Whiskey Forge readers. There are only two rules: (1) winners must have a US or Canadian mailing address and (2) readers must leave a recipe in the comments below to qualify.

A recipe? What? Hell, yes. I want to read about your favorite alcoholic drink that relies on plants to give it some distinguishing character — a cocktail, a homemade cordial or bitters recipe, your grandmother's amaro or your college roommate's homemade absinthe. Whatever. But it's got to have booze, beer, or wine (nothing against tea, but tea hardly makes botanists drunk) and it's got to demonstrate some distinctive plant characteristic. What that means is up to you: I want to see what you've got.

Next Friday (April 26th), I'll post the names of five randomly chosen winners here.  Each will have until Friday, May 3rd to email me a shipping address.

NOTE: The giveaway is now closed and the winners (plus their recipes) are announced here. The comments, however, are still open. Please feel free to chime in with your own recipes. [edit 27 April 2013]

Bookshelf: Alt Whiskeys

...[T]he recipes in here reflect the last 3-5 years 

of tinkering with different recipes, techniques, and ideas 

in an effort to do one simple thing: 

expand the horizons of what whiskey can be. 

And, of course, have fun.

~ Darek Bell

Alt Whiskeys

A decade ago, fewer than a hundred distilleries supplied all of America’s domestic legal liquor supply. Today, we can boast four times that number. Well, “boast,” perhaps, is not wholly accurate. That growth has entailed missteps and occasional outright failures as this cohort of new distillers — who may have been hobbyists or working in wholly different fields five years ago — make the transition to more seasoned professionals.

But make no mistake: the transition is underway.

There’s an exuberance common among new distillers, a willingness to try unproven ingredients and techniques. Consider Chip Tate’s Rumble made from wildflower honey, turbinado sugar, and figs from Balcones Distilling in Texas or New Holland’s Hatter Royale, a barley spirit from Michigan finished with hops. Then there’s Darek Bell’s triple smoke malt whiskey that blends a bit of chocolate malt with a triple whammy of German-, peat-, and cherry-smoked malts.

Bell is the owner of Corsair Artisan Distillery. He’s also a hell of a distiller with the credentials to prove it. He trained at the Seibel Brewing Institute and is a graduate of the Bruichladdich Distilling Academy. His whiskeys have won numerous awards. His book, Alt Whiskeys, hit the shelves this week.

Tapping that fat vein of experimental distilling, Bell subtitled the self-published tome Alternative Whiskey Recipes and Distilling Techniques for the Adventurous Craft Distiller. Alt Whiskeys is a turning point in the literature of American distilling. There’s nothing else out there that captures, page after page, our modern distillers’ spirit of innovation with new ingredients, techniques, and equipment — or that reveals the deep connections between craft brewing and craft distilling, as evidenced by Bell’s thorough use of original and target gravities, fermentation temperatures, barrel notes, and other specific technical notes that read more like something from brewers' manuals than the recipes one usually finds for spirits.

“What’s wrong with whiskeys the way they are now?” Bell writes.

Absolutely nothing. As a whiskey geek myself, I am an avid whiskey lover. You might even say whiskey obsessed. BUT I do think whiskey could be better. Different. More interesting. Brewers have a palate of over 50 different types of malt at their disposal to draw from, while most distillers just use plain 2 row barley.

How could they be better, different, more interesting? The book gives ample suggestions and guidelines, starting with grains. American distillers are familiar with corn, wheat, rye, and barley, of course. Bell, however, explores alternatives; amaranth, quinoa, spelt, kamut, grain sorghum, millet, blue corn, tritordeum, and more. Buckwheat, even — not actually a grain, but it can be treated as one, as Bell demonstrates in his recipe for 92 proof buckwheat bourbon. More of them come into play in his seven- and eleven-grain bourbons.

Click to embiggen

Bell’s background as a brewer shines through across the pages. An oatmeal stout whiskey is an early tip-off, but he lays out his cards in two chapters devoted entirely to whiskeys inspired by America’s craft brewing beers. There’s the pumpkin spice moonhine, a riff on 1980’s-style pumpkin ales, and a mocha porter whiskey. Other whiskeys are based on witbier, Russian imperial stout, Octoberfest, dopplebock, American lager, Bavarian helles, and Pilsner.

But he really hits stride in the chapter on hopped whiskeys. “If whiskey is distilled beer,” Bell asks, “why has an element so critical to the history of beer never been used?” Well, it has been used, just not widely; hopped whiskeys are still a surprise even to many whiskey drinkers. Bell embraces the bitter flower cones with abandon.

Seven hopped whiskey recipes reveal multiple ways to get the hops’ nose, taste, and tang into the bottle. Some, such as dry hopping, are familiar to brewers, but hopping whiskey is not exactly the same as hopping beer. Distillers work with a sealed vessel, so there’s no just tossing in hops as brewers do during the cooking of the beer. Bell’s solution? A handmade double-valved hop insertion pipe for the still that allows distillers to add hops at particular points in the run. He also deploys hop backs, hop teas, and hopbursting, a technique that introduces massive amounts of hops late in the process that allows the distiller to amplify the hops aroma (and a bit of bitterness).

Another chapter explores alternates to hops, malt, and yeast. Wormwood wit whiskey, anyone? Chamomile wheat whiskey? How about an elderflower Bohemian pilsner whiskey, barley sochu, mint-chocolate milk stout whiskey, or cannabis moonshine? I’ve yet to taste a yeast-free [see comments below] whiskey made with Brettanomyces lambicus, so familiar to lovers of Belgian lambic beers, but Bell lays out how to make a soured barley example fermented with a lab-cultured strain from yeast vendor WYEAST.

And there’s smoke. The chapter on smoked whiskeys includes recipes, of course, but even more useful for the experimentally-minded distiller, guidelines for types of woods, how to smoke malts, and how changing the percentage of smoked grains in a mash bill affects the perception of smoke in the final product. Want to build a smoke injector? Learn how to make liquid smoke (even though Bell gives the stuff only qualified endorsement)? That’s here. So’s a corn cob smoked whiskey, inspired by a Tennessee meat-smoking technique.

About 60 recipes in all, rounded out with a chapter on cocktails from Josh Habiger.

Alt Whiskeys belongs on the shelf of every American distiller, legal, extra-legal, or simply aspiring. Whiskey lovers, see what’s going to be happening to your beloved spirit over the next few years — not just from Corsair,  but from distilleries across the country. The rest of you lot, if you want to understand why this is one of the most interesting and promising times for distillers in hundreds of years, get this book.

Then break out the whiskey.

Darek Bell (2012)
Edited by Amy Lee Bell, Photography by Pete Rodman, Forward by Bill Owens
Alt Whiskeys: Alternative Whiskey Recipes and Distilling Techniques for the Adventurous Craft Distiller
200 pages (paperback)
Corsair Artisan Distillery
ISBN: 0983350000
$29.99

Amazon sells it here.

Goes well with:

• Manual of a Traditional Bacon Curer. As I wrote two years back, "If you make sausage or cure your own meats—any kind, not just pork—don’t delay. Get a copy of Maynard’s book today. It’s the one we’ve been waiting for." Just so, Alt Whiskeys is the one we've been waiting for.

KABOOM! Ryan Chetiyawardana on High-Temperature Distillation

I do not own a rotary evaporator. Three possible reasons for this spring immediately to mind. To wit:

1. Rotary evaporators are effete affectations of so-called molecular gastronomists and have no place in a traditional kitchen such as my own.
2. Rotovaps are dangerous and those who would use them foolhardy.
3. They cost a lot of money

Rotary evaporators are ingenious industrial stills that have been around since the 1950's, no more dangerous than any other piece of kitchen gear. The sole reason I don't have one is the cost. Even a small, one-liter countertop model can run into thousands of dollars.

But not everyone is dissuaded by the cost. They've been showing up in forward-looking professional kitchens and the backrooms of bars that play host to experimental bartenders. In a nutshell, they allow low-temperature distillation of alcohol in very low atmospheric pressure. Delicate and ephemeral tastes and scents that perhaps could have been captured laboriously only en fleurage in past centuries can be, with a rotovap, cranked out on one's kitchen counter.

Rotovap: click to enlarge

In the latest issue of CLASS magazine, London bartender Ryan Chetiyawardana discusses his rotary evaporator. Specifically, he writes about the traditional low-temperature/low pressure technique for which the high-tech still is known and then, pulling a Father William, he turns it on its head, inverting the process to become high-pressure/high-temperature distillation.

Chetiyawardana writes:

One of the main culprits for this thinking was black pepper. I've always found it a very complex spice and found notes ranging from red berries all the way through to wood, tobacco and coffee. When run through a low pressure distillation, the delicate floral notes shine through. On trying pot still distillations, this yields some of the spice, but it wasn't until I ran a high pressure distillation that I finally achieved the wonderfully fragrant, oily and earthy distillate I wanted.

The still — for that's what a rotary evaporator is — has been dubbed Chetiyawardana's "Kaboom Still." Hats off to him for pushing distillation into new directions.

Goes well with:

• Chetiyawardana's article, The 'Kaboom' Still - High Pressure Distillation.
• Tap That CLASS, my take on Simon Difford's lushly photographed alcoholist magazine

Recent Projects: Malt Advocate

Just before the Memorial Day weekend, the new issue of Malt Advocate dropped in my box. Celebrating its twentieth year, the issue is replete with whiskey reviews, invectives hurled against garnishes and bloggers, industry news, projections, and interviews. As always, it's an entertaining read and a great look into the personalities, firms, and bottlings that make the world of whisk(e)y such a great place to spend time.

There, on page 28, is my contribution to the state of spirits in the US. As a guest writer for the Small Stills column, I posed a simple question:

The United States has seen enormous growth of new craft distilleries over the last decade. As encouraging as that growth is, formal opportunities for those who want to learn how to distill have not kept pace. This raises a straightforward question: where are these new distillers learning to make spirits?

Those who know me and know my line of research already know the answer: While some take weekend courses, university classes, and hands-on workshops, the simple answer is that many learn in their own homes. 

Interviews with John Couchot of Rogue Spirits in Portland, OR, Jim Blansit of Missouri's Copper Run Distillery, New York vintner Seth Kircher, and a couple of guys who prefer to go nameless. For more, pick up the Summer 2011 issue of Malt Advocate (vol 20, no 2). 

A Writer’s Guide to Moonshine, Part 3

The second part of As Surely as Thunder Follows Lightning, a talk on the nature and origins of modern American home distilling. The first section is online here. Download a PDF of the entire talk here.

---------

Even today, “secretive” remains the rule when it comes to unmarked liquor. But amateur distillers are far from isolated anymore. In less than a generation, they’ve learned to talk to each other, pool their knowledge, and ask ever-more nuanced questions about building and operating a range of stills.

Which all begs the question: Why? Why on Earth would you want to make your own spirits when decent liquor stores and online merchants can put the world’s liquors in your hands. And why now?

Part of it is this unshakable belief shared by almost all these clandestine distillers that making your own liquor is honest labor, as harmless as raising your own vegetables or curing your own meats. But that’s not new. That independent streak was part of what caused the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794.

No, what’s new tracks primarily back to three convergent trends;

1. Itchy craft brewers
2. The internet
3. New Zealand

I said earlier that you could talk to some people somewhat openly about home-distilled spirits—If not very loudly and you don’t mind a cold shoulder. Those people were home beer brewers.

You see, beer is a gateway beverage. Yesterday’s homebrewers have evolved into today’s home distillers. Those with brewing backgrounds will continue to shape how we think of hobbyist distilling because brewers have mastered three key skills: 

• how to talk to each other
• how to organize, and 
• how to drive legislation

It is virtually impossible to talk to craft beer brewers today who aren’t distilling on the sly, working on permits, or know someone who is.

See, this is why: Making beer at home has been going on for most of the 20th century, but it’s only been legal since 1978. For a decade or so after it was permitted, American homebrewers explored all kinds of beer and ale styles they couldn’t get at their local stores. They perfected their techniques, competed against each other in regional and national contests, published their recipes, gave out awards, and, later put that knowledge to use by opening brewpubs and microbreweries across the nation.

Homebrew supply shops were selling hops, malts, specialty grains, carboys, esoteric scientific equipment, and lab-cultured yeasts to tens of thousands of homebrewers trying, good-naturedly, to best each other’s beers. 

As surely as thunder follows lightning, whiskey follows beer—and in the eighties, you could smell whiskey in the air like an approaching storm.

By the nineties, brewers had become the novice distillers I mentioned—the folks with the questions about stills and how they operated. They were learning on pot stills because that had been the folk tradition for hundreds of years. And frankly, unless you knew about mashing and fermenting, a home distilling rig looked pretty much like a home brewing setup, so outsiders didn’t necessarily notice what was happening in their neighbors’ basements and garages.

These brewers-turned-distilling novices already knew about grains, malt, yeast, enzymes, ideal fermentation temperatures, filtration systems, and the water profiles that led to great-tasting beverages. The more curious and competitive among them began devising ways to remove what increasingly seemed like way too much water in their beer.

As I said, moonshining had long been a secret practice. Hell, I’ve gotten death threats from asking questions of the wrong people. But sharing, critiquing, and judging were an entrenched part of the brewers’ culture, and that carried over to home distilling. Homebrewers had developed widespread networks for sharing information; books, magazines, contests, clubs, festivals, newsletters, and rudimentary online newsgroups. Those anonymous online forums turned out to be ideal tools for vetting home distilling questions.

Unlike the old Appalachian moonshiners, newer distillers with homebrewing backgrounds were already used to talking to each other online and in person. If anything, they were—and remain—chatty.

Then, in 1996, New Zealand passed its Customs Act, allowing home distillation without excise taxes as long as the production was for personal use. Tiny little New Zealand on the other side of the world, about as far from Appalachia as you could get. There was an explosion of interest and innovation, specifically around design for home-sized stills that veered off from the old styles.

The Kiwis were looking into the physics of stills, attaching probes and meters to measure, exactly, what was going on when one fired up. They learned how tall and wide small stills should be. They affixed columns to their pots and filled them with ceramic and copper packing material for maximum efficiency. Those stills started looking less like the old copper pots and more like something out of an industrial refinery, churning out high-proof alcohol on single runs rather than the multi-stage process that traditional pot stills called for.

These distillers started comparing notes online. Americans brewers who were getting into distilling, with their already-established networks and culture of openness, noticed. They seized on a wealth of new verifiable information coming out of the southern hemisphere and added their own experiences, especially in online forums such as homedistiller.org, yahoo distillers, and new distillers.

Since then, home column stills have evolved, becoming more compact and efficient, able to put out—well, not pure alcohol, but about as close as you can come outside a laboratory: very clean stuff.

In just the last ten years, a specific style of distilling has evolved that’s all about purity, efficiency, and making lots of neutral spirits in very compact column stills. Easily built and easily operated, they are more efficient and less work than pot stills. For better or worse, they are part of the future of American moonshining.

Expect to see more moonshine in the upcoming years if you keep your eyes and ears open. Especially whiskey. Expect to see more of it in rural communities and in cities and especially among distillers with no immediate family history of moonshining. Some of it will be bad (there will always be bad moonshine), but some will be very good because a new generation of distillers is talking among themselves and are genuinely eager to cast aside decades of derision to make outstanding spirits. 

They deserve our respect and support. 

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A Writer’s Guide to Moonshine, Part 2

Last month, I joined Max Watman and Bill Owens for the annual meetings of the American Distilling Institute. This year's theme — whiskey and moonshine — was something each of us know a little bit about. The three of us formed a panel to talk about our respective moonshine books and what we knew on the state of illicit liquor in the US.

Bill, as president of the ADI, approached moonshine as a distiller, letting the audience of accomplished and aspiring spirits wranglers know just how straightforward it is to make commercial spirits that evoke popular concepts of Appalachian moonshine. Max, ever an entertaining reader, read from his book Chasing the White Dog and tackled commercial moonshiners — those who make untaxed liquor for sale — and I talked about origins of modern home distilling.

With minor edits for flow, here's As Surely as Thunder Follows Lightning, my talk. Since it's a bit long, I'm dividing it into two sections. In this section, I break down in general terms who's distilling off the grid. Part two in this ongoing guide to moonshine will lay out in broad strokes how law-abiding homebrewers turned their eyes to more ardent — and less legal — beverages.

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Last week, I talked with the owners of four businesses selling mail order stills in the United States: BrewHaus USA, Mile High Distilling, the Amphora Society, and Vaughn Wilson, whom some of you know as the Colonel.

Between them, they sell over 200 stills a month, most rigs so small you can fit them in a broom closet. If anyone’s telling you that moonshine is dead, understand that businessmen like these are laughing all the way to the funeral.

I’ve studied illicit liquor for more than half my life. As an historian, I’ve traveled over 20,000 miles and interviewed secret distillers from Florida to Oregon. And if there’s one single, irrefutable fact I’ve learned, it’s that no drink is more degraded and disgusting than American moonshine. I’ve had liquor so bad that it’s brought tears to my eyes and made me fear for my own safety.

Something else I’ve learned: there are few drinks I’d rather have than today’s crop of homemade liquor. It’s true: some of what’s out there will flat out hurt you. But some of it ranks among the very best liquor I’ve ever had.

Call it white lightning, white mule, panther piss, old horsey, bug juice, bustskull, forty-rod, tangleleg, squirrel whiskey, or Mom’s Summertime Elixir, it’s all the same in this regard: The liquor that most interests me, regardless of what it’s made from, or where I find it, is the result of unregistered and unlicensed distilling.

Not all that long ago, otherwise enlightened drinkers would tell you in all earnestness that moonshine liquor was eradicated on Prohibition’s repeal almost eighty years ago. Recent stories from mainstream press such as The Washington Post, Salon.com, Imbibe, Wired, and Esquire have clued in non-distillers that moonshine is back—and it’s not what it used to be. They are right.

The distilling landscape has changed since the days of Thunder Road. Today’s most active stills are not the 400-gallon hedgehogs or 1000-gallon models of our grandparents’ era. They’re ten gallons, five gallons, marvels of efficiency, some of them so small, you could tote them in a backpack. And they are everywhere. They are in Manhattan, in Seattle, in New Orleans, in Kansas City; they are in Ames, Iowa, and San Diego, California.

My work as an historian and writer has allowed me to talk to people making all kinds of liquor for lots of different reasons. Among the distillers I’ve met: a Kentucky farmer making the whiskey his father and uncles did; a suburban housewife running sugar washes while her kids are at school; a New York imbiber wresting ten ounces of gin from a case of Budweiser; and a chef tweaking her grandmother’s kümmel recipe. Now, I don’t particularly like kümmel, but I love the fact that someone cares enough about family history to carry on a tradition she considers an honor and duty.

By and large, I talk to individuals making moonshine for themselves, their families, and friends. Unlike the commercial operators Max talks about, today’s hobbyist nano-distillers don’t sell their products. In fact, one of the quickest ways to really piss them off is for an unlicensed distiller to start making noise about selling their makings.

Some embrace a Southern moonshiner identity while others skitter away from the term because of its association with lawlessness. Regardless of what they call themselves, most of these small-batch, home-based distillers fall into three loose categories—economic, technical, and artisanal producers.

A few words about all three:

Economic distillers make liquor because homemade is cheaper than store-bought. Might use pot stills, might use reflux stills. Might use an aquarium heater in a plastic bucket. Whatever gets the job done. They are apt to distill sugar spirits, but also grains and fruits when they are cheap. When you hear of Corn Flakes whiskey or doughnut mashes, think of these guys.

Technical distillers are armchair engineers and chemists, gearheads striving to make the most efficient distillery setup they can, forever tweaking and adjusting their rigs, never quite satisfied with the results. They will make, and make, and make a batch of the most pure spirit they possibly can, trying to extract all the unwanted flavors, taking meticulous notes. And then change one thing and do it over. They tend to have a lot of vodka on hand which they flavor with extracts and essences to simulate a range of spirits.

That leaves the group closest to my heart: Accomplished and aspiring artisans who strive to make great-tasting spirits. The chemical compounds that technical distillers consider impediments to achieving pure liquor, artisans rightfully regard as taste and aroma, the backbone that defines their own personal styles of distilling. They tend to use less efficient, old-school pot stills, to ferment grains and fruits rather than sugar, and not to care what it costs—because they’ll be the ones drinking it.

They are in pursuit of an experience, sometimes exploring their own heritage. They are Italian Americans making grappa; Southerners creating their own real corn whiskeys; Georgians churning out peach brandy, five pints at a time; chefs realizing that making whiskey is part and parcel of preparing the best meals they can.

I put home distillers in that order because that’s the progression I’ve seen both historically and individually. Twenty years ago, those making cheap liquor were most prevalent while in the last five years, growth has been strongest among the artisans. Individually, many begin distilling with affordable equipment and ingredients before stepping up to all-grain and fruit mashes and more expensive distilling rigs.

In over 20 years of looking into moonshine, covert distilling, and personal, bespoke liquors, I’ve never seen anything like the renaissance of the last few years, not just with nanobatch artisans, but with hobbyist distilling of all kinds. It’s time to reboot the entire concept of moonshining as a dead, dying, or suspect art. Homemade liquor is not dead; it is not dying; more people are making it; and more of them are getting really good at it.

Here’s the deal:

Not that long ago, American moonshiners were rumored to be extinct. Popular accounts from reputable authors assured us that the old artisans, Appalachian geezers making pure and powerful mountain dew, the echt shine, had died off and that their craft had passed with them.

Those accounts, as Mark Twain would say, were much exaggerated. I’d met enough men and women making their own liquor to know that. I wanted to know why, when all that was supposed to be history, I could find people making their own spirits as easily as I could find those making their own cornbread.

One reason—a big one—is that it’s still against the law to make moonshine. So it’s understandable that traditional moonshiners tend to be isolated, secretive—and sometimes violently protective of those secrets.

Another reason for the premature report of moonshine’s demise is a book. Joe Dabney’s 1974 Mountain Spirits remains a cornerstone in any American distiller’s library. It captures a snapshot in the history of Southern folk distilling. Unfortunately, it was so well-researched that it helped set the tenor for writing about clandestine American liquor for four decades.

Here’s what Joe wrote:

The truth is that compared to equivalent figures from five, ten, and twenty years ago, the “corn likker” craft is dying fast.

Joe wasn’t alone in his lament.

Around the American bicentennial, as America looked to its future, many folklorists and journalists also looked to the past with a nostalgic longing for parts of America’s story they thought were dead and gone.

They wrote about everyday life and subjects that historians largely ignored. They wrote about the nation’s quaint customs, Southern moonshining included. And they took their cues from books like Mountain Spirits and The Foxfire Book. The almost palpable sense of loss in their works came to infuse subsequent writing about homemade liquor. Until 2009, in fact, essays on moonshining read like…well, like obituaries.

Those obituaries were pining for a mostly romanticized history of moonshine.

The real history is somewhat different.

Here’s the truth: In the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries American spirits were made with local or regional ingredients: apples, peaches, corn, rye, sorghum—whatever grew nearby and was abundant. Condensing acres of perishable crops into just a few barrels was a smart way to get a lot of product to market in as few trips as possible.

Invariably, the production destined for local or personal consumption was regarded as higher quality than the liquor shipped out. The distinction became known in some places as the difference between sippin’ whiskey and sellin’ whiskey. Strangers got the sellin’ whiskey.

And the selllin’ whiskey could be rough stuff. That was especially true during Prohibition, when beverage alcohol became illegal. Americans developed an unslakable thirst for alcohol, and distilling began to pull in staggering and unprecedented profits.

Distillers ditched grains and fruit in favor of table sugar. They started cutting corners by building stills from dangerous materials; by not separating heads and tails from the cleaner heart of the runs; by failing to clean out stills between runs; or not bothering to filter their makings in the hurry to get it made and get it sold. Bootleggers selling this rotgut watered it down and added toxins and colorants to simulate age and give it a kick. Some called it “splo” for the ‘splosion in your head when you drank it.

Everybody got in on the act. Ignorant, careless, and just greedy distillers and bootleggers sold shudderingly bad—sometimes deathly bad—liquor because they didn’t how to make it properly or didn’t care—They weren’t the ones drinking it.

By the middle of the 20th century, illegal liquor wasn’t pure rye or applejack anymore and especially not corn, but cheap, poorly made sugar-wash splo’ — contaminated with heavy metals, adulterated with antifreeze, spiked with wood alcohol, colored with iodine, seasoned with dead possums, and run through a truck radiator. I’ve even collected recipes for chickenshit mash. It’s no wonder people got sick.

That stuff existed. It still exists. And while it may be of interest to historians—or epidemiologists—that’s not what I’m talking about when I say moonshine is back. I’m talking about small-batch, hand-crafted artisan liquors that I’d pour for my own mother—who, incidentally, brought me to my first still site, unknowingly, when I was a toddler.

Despite what the best books claimed ten years ago, the old-timers who knew what they were doing weren’t gone. They were just hard to find—as I’ve said, for understandable reasons. But you could find good whiskey and brandy from unlicensed distillers in the 90’s. You just had to have the right ins.

Sadly for them, the upcoming generation of novice distillers, many of them in cities, didn’t have those ins. They didn’t know where to start separating moonshine myth, folklore, and hearsay from basic facts about recipes, still design, and whether the stuff really did blind people.

Even today, “secretive” remains the rule when it comes to unmarked liquor. But amateur distillers are far from isolated anymore. In less than a generation, they’ve learned to talk to each other, pool their knowledge, and ask ever-more nuanced questions about building and operating a range of stills.

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The last part of the talk comes later this week. I'll post the link here when it's up is here. Download a PDF of the entire talk here

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A Writer’s Guide to Moonshine, Part 1

The single, universal, and defining characteristic of moonshine is that it is made outside the law…That’s your litmus test. If you can you buy it in liquor stores, it’s not moonshine.

Matthew Rowley

Time magazine has a load of information on the resurgence of moonshine this week. Some of the writing is good, some bewilderingly bad. I’ll have more to say on this in the coming days, but for now, I want to tackle just one aspect of a flawed article.

It’s testament to the underground nature of illicit liquor that factually incorrect reporting passed muster at Time. One can only assume that Time’s editors — like journalists in general — are so unfamiliar with the lore of moonshine that they just didn’t smell bullshit when it was dumped on their desks.

Actually, you don’t have to be steeped in moonshine lore to get the story right; you just have to talk to knowledgeable people or pick up a book. Or go online for basic research. Here’s what I mean.

Dan Fletcher (whom I don’t know) wrote a solid piece called Moonshine: Not Just a Hillbilly Drink. Nothing groundbreaking, but it’s engaging and accurate. In it, he interviews Max Watman, author of Chasing the White Dog. Max is a friend and, I can testify, knows his stuff. The piece is mostly Max talking, but Fletcher asks good questions and leads us to a sense of moonshine as substance both dangerous and full of potential.

Then there’s Josh Ozersky’s White Dog Rising: Moonshine's Moment. Reading it, I was angry — actually angry — at Ozersky’s sloppy, willful misinformation. It was writing such as this that inspired me to write Moonshine! in the first place. I worked for years to overturn decades of bad information about illicit liquor, to provide a guide and reference source that, while it didn’t contain everything, did refute an accretion of hearsay, fakelore, and flat-out benighted misunderstanding.

I’m not just picking fly shit out of pepper. As writers, it’s incumbent upon us to get stories right or we lose credibility, individually and as a class. The truth about moonshine is out there…and it’s not hard to find. Yet Josh “Mr. Cutlets” Ozersky fumbles badly in the pages of a respected national magazine and others will take his confused writing as reality. Take, for instance, this:

Moonshine, both then and now, is whiskey as it comes out of the still: no oak barrels, no caramel color, no aging. It's just straight liquor from fermented corn or wheat mash.

The writing is not just scratching the surface, it’s wrong. Let’s start with moonshine “then.” Francis Grose’s 1785 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue — the go-to definition for first baby steps research into moonshine history — describes moonshine as “white brandy smuggled on the coasts of Kent and Sussex, and the gin in the north of Yorkshire” at night to avoid detection. Brandy, gin. No mention of whiskey. Also, in 1785, such smuggled spirits would have arrived in wooden barrels, thus unavoidably imparting taste and possibly color to the spirits. Not “barrel aged” as we use the term today, but it was certainly in barrels.

Ok, so maybe 18th century England isn’t what Ozersky had in mind. Fair enough. There was a time between the late 18th and early 20th centuries when Scots-Irish settlers did, in fact, make genuine whiskey from actual grain here in North America. But not merely corn and wheat, as Mr. Cutlets proclaims; rye whiskey is older than the United States itself. It was largely the spirit at the heart of the 1790’s Whiskey Rebellion, the skirmish that helped set the tenor for hundreds of years of moonshiner/government relations — and which he actually mentions in the article. His definition also ignores other American spirits such as peach brandy and applejack, sorgum skimmin’s, rum, and other untaxed local spirits.

Or perhaps the 20th century is where we should cast our eyes for this “straight liquor from fermented corn or wheat mash.” In the mythological mountain South, that pure old mountain dew was corn whiskey. But even in 1974, actual journalist Joe Dabney realized that style of moonshine was on the wane, replaced by modern sugar washes that distillers took up in widespread corner-cutting in the 1920’s. In Mountain Spirits, he wrote “The truth is that compared to equivalent figures from five, ten, and twenty years ago, the ‘corn likker’ craft is dying fast.” No, what was around for most of the last 90 years was not corn whiskey at all, but spirits made from table sugar, made fast to be sold fast. The old corn whiskey of our parents’ and grandparents’ eras was rarely corn and rarely whiskey. But it sure was moonshine.

In the American idiom, moonshine refers to illicitly distilled spirits – illicit because the distilleries are unregistered and the liquor untaxed. After twenty years of researching moonshine and those who make it, I’ve come to this conclusion: The single, universal, and defining characteristic of moonshine is that it is made outside the law.

There. That’s it. Spirits are moonshine when their manufacturers illegally avoid paying taxes. That’s your litmus test. If you can you buy it in liquor stores, it’s not moonshine. What it’s made from, what color it is, and how old it is are irrelevant. I’ve had moonshine made from apples, dates, rye, corn (and corn flakes for that matter), sugar, agave nectar, and countless other starches and sugars. I’ve had stunning hausgemacht absinthes and mediocre garage grappa. I’ve had it right off the still and aged for upwards of 20 years. I’ve had it aged in new and charred barrels and aged in stainless so that it mellows and becomes more polished without oak notes.

Don’t let anyone ever tell you “Moonshine, both then and now, is whiskey as it comes out of the still: no oak barrels, no caramel color, no aging. It's just straight liquor from fermented corn or wheat mash.”

That’s fine for 6th grade book reports, but when you’re writing your articles, blogs, and books, take the time to find out what the real story is instead of repeating the same old tired romanticized myths of American history.

Obscure information that only those steeped in two decades of moonshine study would know? Could be. Could very well be. Or you could go to the library and read my book.

You want to write about moonshine? Talk to me. Talk to Max Watman. Talk to people for whom it’s important to get the story right. Try Paul Clarke at The Cocktail Chronicles, Jim Myers at the Nashville Tennessean, or distiller Jonathan Forester who helps run the discussion forums for the American Distilling Institute (but be sure to quote him correctly). Even go online and talk to Harry and Wal on yahoo’s distilling groups (link on the righthand panel here). Though we may not agree on every point, these are observers who understand what one means by “moonshine” and I’d stand by most of what they have to say about it.

In fact, if you’re writing articles, speeches, scripts, books, even research papers, email me or post comments here with questions about moonshine — what it is, what it isn't, where it came from, where it’s going. I’m traveling this weekend, but if I know the answers, I’ll tell you when I get back to the office. If I don’t, I'll try to find out the facts. One thing I won't do, I promise, is regurgitate tall tales for the gullible.

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Meet Me in Kentucky: ADI's Whiskey & Moonshine Conference

For casual drinkers, Springtime means a switch from brown spirits to white. That means an uptick in vodka, light rums, gin…and—something new this year—moonshine. Or at least a slew of spirits meant to emulate and suggest unaged whiskey. And there are few better places to learn what the buzz is about than the annual meetings of the American Distilling Institute.

The ADI’s 7th annual meetings run May 3-5 in and around Louisville, Kentucky. The theme this year is Whiskey & Moonshine. I’ll be joining Chasing the White Dog author Max Watman, distiller Rick Wasmund, and Bill Owens, president of ADI, for a panel discussion on moonshine: what it is, what it’s not, where it’s coming from, why it’s back, and what its resurgence means for spirits producers and cocktail enthusiasts.

We might even agree on a few points.

The rest of the conference will include talks on building and licensing distilleries, fermentation, distilling, malting, blending, the effects of barrel aging, tax issues for craft distillers, marketing and selling of spirits, getting press coverage for your brands, and tasting.

Lots and lots of tasting.

The full registration info and schedule are here (click on the 2010 conference registration button on the left to download a PDF).

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Moonshine in the News

Today’s idea: Not content with home microbrewing,

artisinal types are distilling their own illicit “craft” moonshine —
more in an epicurean style than in the spirit of Prohibition
outlaws in backwoods Appalachia. Oregon grappa, anyone?

~ New York Times’ Idea of the Day

Decent articles about homemade liquor and moonshine crop up with increasing frequency. Seems like word is out that not all the shine out there is the rotgut that our parents and grandparents knew.

The past few weeks have given us the New York Times blog piece quoted above. And then there’s this Salon article that inspired the posting. In it, Bill Owens, president of the American Distilling Institute and consummate showman, makes a donut mash. Not something you’d really want to do, but he’s proving the point that sugar, regardless of the source, can yield liquor. The author, Catherine Price, quotes Alcademics writer Camper English and yours truly about who’s making moonshine these days and why.

"The distillers don't band together in public the way home brewers do," says Rowley. "And until they get organized, you won't see a change in legislation."

Though I’d love to see home distilling legalized as in New Zealand, I’m not holding my breath.

Want to know more? Snag a copy of Moonshine at Amazon.com. My favorite customer review so far: The author is a bit opinionated in a few places but doesn't come off preachy. He simply states his opinion and gives the information anyway.

That's me: opinionated but not preachy. Well...mostly.
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Beer: Gateway to Whiskey

At a cocktail conference, a certain amount of rejiggering is expected. With Tales of the Cocktail only two weeks away, it's high time to see what needs rearranging. Wouldn't want to miss a free drink, now.

Needless to say, I'm excited about the upcoming annual event, but one session in particular made me certain not to miss it this year. Chris Sule, distiller at Old New Orleans Rum, has put together a panel discussion called "From Brewer to Distiller" that explores the sensibilities brewers bring to the game when they turn to distilling. Check out the preview here.

Last year Chris pulled out the stops for Mike McCaw's workshop on operating a small modern column still (in that case, a PDA-1 from the Amphora Society). Given the concerns of the NOFD (something about...explosions?), Mike wasn't allowed to distill on site, but Chris brought in waves of foreshots, heads, tails, and hearts to pass around and illustrate the smells and tastes typical in various stages distilling process. It was, perhaps, the most rank smelling room in the hotel that week. And an absolute delight.

Mike, Ian Smiley, and I followed with a panel talk on what we called, tongues in cheeks, nano-distilling: that is, very small batches typical of modern home distillers. Needless to say, we weren't the only distillers there.

As the three of us talked about our backgrounds, it came out that we all began as homebrewers. Maybe it's the experimental bent of brewers or the small batches that encourage much tweaking and adjusting and succumbing to the temptation of strange ideas. But it's undeniable: There's something about making your own beer—once you do it enough—that just says whiskey is the most natural next step.

Sule joins Ray Deter (d.b.a New Orleans and d.b.a. NYC), Jess Graber (Stranahan’s Colorado Whiskey), and hos won brother, noted home brewer Charles Sule, for a discussion about what brewers bring to the craft once they catch the distilling bug.

Hosted by Old New Orleans Rum, the 90-minute session will include tastings of whiskey mash as well as several spirits made by former and current brewers. Expect an enthusiastic examination of the “new state of American beer and spirits, drawing parallels, crafting contrasts, and telling the story of where we were, where we’re at, and where we’re going.”

Thursday, July 9, 2009 2:30-4:00 PM in the Riverview Room at the Hotel Monteleone in New Orleans. A review of the calendar suggests I'll be in that same room all day...

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Bookshelf: Cordial Waters

Volodimir Pavliuchuk is so well known among hobbyist distillers that if he spent a week in internet silence, home distillers from New York to New Zealand would call his local police to make sure the man had not fallen in his boiler.

Pavliuchuk, better known as Wal, is a pillar of Yahoo’s online distillers’ group. His near daily posts about and links to historical recipes, PDFs of old distilling manuals, ethnographic accounts, essays, and dissertations on producing spirits spur hobbyist distillers to recreate bygone, lost, and forgotten spirits. Or, at least, to know about them.

And now Wal has a book. Cordial Waters: A Compleat Guide to Ardent Spirits of the World hit the shelves recently and home distillers everywhere should be breaking out wallets right about…now.

The book covers distilling basics, including simple recipes for creating vodka, whiskeys, brandies, rum, and other spirits from primary ingredients. Purists may balk at plain white sugar in some recipes or additives for emulating peat or barrel aging, but recall that the recipes are for home enthusiasts who may not have access to expensive professional equipment. If those bother you, skip them. There’s plenty enough here worth digging into.















The meat of Cordial Waters—the reason you want to buy this book—is 260 recipes Wal gives for flavored spirits; cordials, liqueurs, flower waters, crèmes, gins, flavored whiskeys and brandies, citrus infusions, bitters, kümmel, pastis, absinthes, monastic liqueurs, genevers, vodkas (flavored with bison grass, tormentil, tobacco, birch buds, spruce, and more), spiced rums, cream liqueurs, spirits spiked with beans and nuts, shrubbs, and—for you tiki fans—Hawaiian okolehao. Hell, he’s even got mesquite mash. And mastic liqueur. Laudanum. Crazy shit with alkermes, cochineal, and ants. So many more culled from sources spanning centuries and continents.

The recipes have been scaled to standardized 1- or 4-liter batches. Many readers—perhaps especially those with little experience, or patience with, interpreting older recipes—will find this a great convenience since such recipes often call for outdated or uncertain measurements [hands, drachms, “enough,” two bottles (what size?), until it becomes a stiff paste, etc.]. By presenting the recipes in liters and grams, Wal skillfully works around the uncertainties a novice might encounter.

Readers with a tenacious historical or bibliographic bent, however, will regret that the book does not present original recipes alongside the adaptations nor does it cite each recipe’s source. This redaction—understandable given the book’s space restrictions—nevertheless is frustrating because original recipes contain valuable clues about techniques, procedures, purposes, and sometimes even reasons why mixtures were made at certain times and not others.

An 1890 falernum recipe, for instance, calls for milk, presumably cow’s. Milk? Really? See, that’s interesting in and of itself. I trust Wal, but want to learn about its role from the original. Was it a fining, maybe? Combined with lime juice, allowed to settle, then racked and strained, that may just work, but modern versions from the cocktail crowd and rum enthusiasts don’t use it. A citation would give enough information to start a library hunt in earnest. Ah, well. Second edition perhaps.

Regardless, Cordial Waters is a delight. Those who want to learn more no doubt will latch onto innumerable nuggets of insight larding the book. Buried in notes for a rosa-solis recipe, for example, is mention of a 1609 recipe that calls for Brasilwood boiled in rosewater to create a red color. What New York or San Francisco bartender is doing that? Also noted is that drying celandine (Chelidonium majus) reduces its toxicity and that adding 0.1 gram of silver nitrate/liter prior to redistilling causes hydrogen cyanide in stone fruit spirits to precipitate as insoluble silver cyanide. These are good things to know.

It’s not all fancy, outrageous, or outré concoctions. There are plenty of recipes that can be made with little more than store-bought vodka and fresh herbs or spices. Knowing something about cocktails and liquor, though, would be a great help in understanding procedures and, occasionally, when to veer from directions.

Of particular use is an appendix explaining the Pearson Square. Homebrewers and winemakers are familiar with this handy diagram that allows mixers to calculate quickly the amounts of two liquids required to fortify or dilute alcoholic beverages. Several examples (including one suggesting that Pavliuchuk likes his martinis 7:1) show in clear detail how to make simple calculations using the square.

Who should buy it? Every hobbyist distiller. Who else? Bartenders, cocktail enthusiasts, drinks historians, botanists, ethnopharmacologists—anyone who enjoys making cordials and liqueurs. Certainly anyone with a still will find inspiration here. In these tight times, and with the long-overdue ascendancy of cocktail culture, that’s a lot of people.

Who else should buy it? You.

Do so here.

Goes well with:

• Moonshine! ~ my own novice's guide to distilling. Publisher's Weekly calls it "the last book one will ever need on the art of in-house hooch." Perfect for Father's Day.
  
• The Compleat Distiller ~ Mike Nixon and Mike McCaw's treatise on the science of making spirits, a classic among modern hobbyist distillers.
  
• Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails ~ Ted Haigh's erudite profile of cocktails fallen into obscurity and now enjoying a renaissance. Second edition is forthcoming.

Volodimir Pavliuchuk (2008)
Cordial Waters: A Compleat Guide to Ardent Spirits of the World
152 pages, paperback.
Published by The Amphora Society
Pakuranga, New Zealand
$25


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