My New Book: Drugstore Whiskey, Pharmacy Gin

You've heard of bathtub gin, sure. Everyone has. The stuff has become shorthand for the legendary horrors of Prohibition-era drinking. But what was it? No, for real: what was that stuff — and was it always a horror? Where did it come from? Where did it go?

A peek inside.
Kornschärfe: It schärfes the Korn.

Though it may seem as if the action has slowed around here, the truth is that behind the scenes at the Whiskey Forge has been hectic as I've been writing for various magazines, traveling, giving talks around the country, and getting elbow-deep in several book projects. This morning, I woke to a tweet from Bitters author Brad Thomas Parsons congratulating me on the announcements for one of those books.

Here's the deal: I have a contract with Countryman Press, a branch of W.W. Norton, for a new book tentatively called Drugstore Whiskey, Pharmacy Gin that will hit the shelves in 2015. Eater reports "Veteran booze writer and author Matthew Rowley is at it again, this time turning his attentions to the recipes of the Prohibition bootleggers." Publishers Marketplace gives a little more:

Author and historian Matthew Rowley (Moonshine!, 2007) continues his exploration of illicit alcohol and cocktail culture in Drugstore Whiskey, Pharmacy Gin: Making It and Faking It with 200 Secret Booze Recipes from the Height of Prohibition. Using high-resolution images from a secret 1920’s manuscript, Rowley examines the traditions, ingredients, and cultural context of Prohibition bootlegging with extensive annotations and over 200 recipes. Sold to Ann Treistman at Countryman Press by Lisa Ekus of The Lisa Ekus Group. Publication Fall 2015.

If you've come to any of my talks over the last six months or so, you already know a bit about this since I've been using some of the material when kicking around notions of Prohibition-era urban moonshine. Years ago, I was given a gift: a 1920's manuscript hidden within what looked like a book of poetry. It wasn't. Rather, the book held page after page of handwritten recipes — in English, German, and occasional Latin — for gins, genevers, absinthes, whiskeys, rums, brandies, and dozens of spirits and cordials, essences and extracts, all tied to New York City at the height of Prohibition. Some recipes are for genuine articles. Others hail from an earlier era, a time when traditional beverages relied on herbs and spices for their flavors. Still others depend on 19th century advances in applied chemistry simply to fake some spirits and "enhance" others.

It'll be cool. Even most bartenders hip to vintage drinks haven't seen anything quite like this.

Okolehao, Historic and Modern

Many drinkers prefer it to gin (1912 ad)

One week in September of 1886, the Deputy Sheriff in Maui rounded up fourteen men the Honolulu Daily Bulletin called “illicit dealers in the ardent.” The ardent in this case was okolehao, the Hawaiian analog of mainland moonshines. Early journalists called it white mule and Hawaiian whiskey — although it wasn’t really whiskey. Not yet. That came later.

A handful of cocktail recipes calling for okolehao show up in the historical record. If you read Jeff "Beachbum" Berry’s books on tiki drinks, however, you will learn, perhaps with disappointment, that okolehao is extinct. Berry suggests a few substitutions — he proposed Martinique rum at first, but later recommended bourbon or rye — and there’s a reason. We'll circle back around to that. He wasn’t wrong; when he wrote the books, oke, as some call it, had fallen from production.

Like a lot of other discarded spirits these days, okolehao is back. In fact, in the summer of 2013, attendees of my standing room only talk on moonshine at Tiki Oasis in San Diego sampled a twist on a whiskey sour made with a modern take on the old spirit: 100-proof okolehao from Island Distillers in Honolulu. It’s a cane and ti-root distillate that's earthy, vegetal, and a little funky.

Hawaiian Moonshine

Distillation seems to have come to Hawaii in the 1790’s. I say “seems to” not because the date is uncertain, but because Hawaiians seem not to have distilled spirits at all until then. That changed when William Stevenson, an escaped convict from Australia, used rendering pots from a whaling ship as the boiler for a rudimentary still. The iron pots were said to resemble a woman’s plump backside and the nickname “iron bottom” stuck. In the local language, “iron bottom” was "okolehao" and the stuff eventually became nearly as popular as the bit of anatomy that inspired it.

Like moonshines in general, okolehao didn’t have a single recipe. There were as many ways to make it as there were stills and distillers. Any single batch might contain distillates of taro, rice, honey, corn, bran, sweet potatoes, kiawe beans, molasses, breadfruit — whatever was nearby and cheap and could be fermented. If pineapples were cheap, it had pineapples in it. If white table sugar were cheap, then that’s what distillers used.

Ti plant, courtesy of Dave Flintstone,
Island Distillers

But one thing held this island mule together in a way that mainland moonshines, in their diversity, did not and do not have — a single, defining, ingredient: ti. From the day Stevenson made that first batch until now, regardless of other ingredients it may contain, ti is at the heart of Hawaiian moonshine. For countless visitors over the last century, taking home a bottle of okolehao — or at least taking one as far back as the ship where it was emptied before next landfall — was a reminder of their time in that Pacific paradise.

Ti shrubs grow throughout Hawaii. It is also called ki especially in 19th century accounts. The botanical name is Cordyline fruticosa and historical accounts boast of “inexhaustible” supplies. The leaves have medicinal and decorative uses, but the big, starchy root is what is what we’re interested in.

On mature plants, these roots are huge; they can grow to 25 kilos or more, bigger than a lot of dogs. Dave Flintstone, distiller at Island Distillers, says that when harvesters select plants for his okolehao, they look for those with a central stalk about the thickness of a man’s wrist.

After workers unearth them, the roots are baked in underground ovens called imus. If you are familiar with how tequila is made, you’ll see the resemblance to how agave hearts — the piñas — are roasted in kilns or ovens.

Freshly unearthed ti root,
courtesy of Dave Flintstone, Island Distillers

In each case, starches convert to sugars under heat and the whole thing is crushed and fermented. Distillers run the low-alcohol ti root wash through stills to concentrate the ethanol but collect those compounds that give okolehao its characteristic funky taste and distinctive smell.

In fact, okolehao’s smell could be a problem for distillers, haulers, and customers. That distinctive aroma often tipped off law enforcement to nearby stills and mash tubs, or confirmed that a container had held okolehao and not, for instance, whiskey or water. When caught red-handed in towns with their illicit cargo, Hawaiian bootleggers often smashed the glass demijohns they used to transport their haul to the ground in attempts to destroy damning evidence. This dodge was so common that during the 1920’s, one catty journalist suggested that officers should be issued sponges so they could mop up evidence and squeeze it into vials before it trickled away.

When police did capture okolehao, though, it had a habit of transforming in evidence holding rooms. Old reports note that quantities of the local moonshine remained the same, but in storage, the proof sometimes mysteriously would go down. Any kid who’s drunk her parents’ liquor and topped off the bottles with water knows exactly what happened in those police storage units; somebody inside was pilfering the hooch.

Holy Terror Hitchcock:
not a fan of the oke

It worked in reverse, too. Not only did hooch disappear, it sometimes showed up where it did not belong. In the mid-1890’s, the Marshal in charge of enforcing laws in the short-lived Republic of Hawaii was Edward Griffin Hitchcock. Known as “Holy Terror” Hitchcock, he was the top law enforcement officer in the islands. The nickname “Holy Terror” came from his efficiency in rounding up criminals, but the moniker was also a poke at his family; his father had been a missionary and the younger Hitchcock kept ties to Hawaii's missionary community.

In 1894, Marshal Hitchcock issued a letter to owners and managers of every place in the islands that sold liquor. In it, he schooled them on Hawaiian law and reminded them of the fines that could be levied on any person who sold adulterated liquor.

The adulteration in this case was okolehao. Rumors were going around that saloon keepers had been stretching their stocks of imported liquor with the local moonshine. The Hawaiian Star newspaper explained the next day that

Okolehao is very cheap and, containing such a large per cent of alcohol, can be employed in the preparation of drinks to immense pecuniary advantage. It was at one time, if not now, used in the preparation of wine. An extract was imported to which diluted okolehao was added in such quantities as to bring the alcoholic property up very high.

So what we have is a wine extract coming from California that’s got very little, if any, alcohol in it. Local merchants would add okolehao and water. Give it a stir and what've you got? Wine! Adding both high-proof okolehao and water to imported whiskey — maybe with caramel to bring back a semblance of barrel-aging — was a way to cheat customers and squeeze more profit out of every drink sold.

Swapping out moonshine for legal liquor is underhanded and illegal. And it is a trick that is still done in some bars — especially for customers too drunk to notice that their vodka is more white mule than Grey Goose.

Despite those early reports of “inexhaustible” supplies of ti plants, harvesting them is hard work. That’s why, since the 19th century, other sugars went into the mash: pineapple, refined white sugar, cane juice, rice — again, the stuff that was nearby and cheap. Very early on, ti became something distillers added to the mash rather than something they fermented as the mash.

From Island Distillers,
a 100-proof modern take
on Hawaiian moonshine

Authentic okolehaos, in other words, have long been made from less than 100% pure ti root. Some were pure, but not all. When I asked Flintstone why he didn’t make a 100% ti root distillate, he said that, though economics factored into it, the primary reason is that modern palates would find it too harsh and unpleasant, making it too hard of a sell.

And that brings us around to Jeff Berry’s recommendation to use bourbon or rye when there’s no okolehao. The first legal, commercial producer of ti-root okolehao was E. H. Edwards. In 1906, he imported a 200-gallon still to Kona specifically to make it. His business ultimately failed because the product was inconsistent, but he did make enough to put in barrels and ship to a bonded warehouse in Honolulu where it aged and took on color from the barrels.

You probably wouldn't mistake one for the other, but Edwards’ spirits started looking, smelling, and tasting — at least a bit — like whiskey. When his company was bought out, the new owners continued the practice; bonded, barrel-aged okolehao became common until Prohibition, when all beverage alcohol became illegal.

By the mid-twentieth century conditions had changed. Okolehao was legal again and popular both with tourists and US military stationed in Hawaii. By the 1960’s, however, okolehao had ceased being a blend of ti root and other sugars fermented and distilled on the islands, but was instead whiskey imported from the mainland and flavored with ti extract or ti roots simply ground and steeped in the whiskey to give it the "authentic" taste. This is why, when mixing drinks from recipes that call for okolehao but date from the 1960’s, Beachbum Berry says to use bourbon or rye.  Minus the funk of ti, that’s pretty much what midcentury okolehao was — at least the commercial stuff.

Hats off to Dave Flintstone for helping to resurrect local, high-proof wet goods.

Goes well with:

• Okolehao, naturally. Pick up a stoneware bottle of the 100-proof cane-and-ti distillate when you're in Hawaii or track down distiller Dave Flintstone through his distillery's site, Island Distillers to have a supply shipped.
• Swipes, the Pruno of Territorial Hawaii. Not all the beverages of old Hawaii were something you'd want to drink. By all accounts, swipes were a scourge that made many a sailor regret his stopover to the Hawaiian islands en route to the Philippines. 
• Visiting sailors and desperate drinkers aren't the only ones to his the sauce in Hawaii. In 1911, the Hawaiian Star printed a tall tale of feral hogs getting into a batch of okolehao.

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.

Swipes, the Pruno of Territorial Hawaii

"Honolulu's Queer Dope"
Omaha Daily Bee
30 September 1900

Swipes may sound like some modern cleaning product, but, in fact, the term refers to a style of intoxicating drinks from mid- to late-nineteenth century Hawaii. We are fortunate, perhaps, that swipes seem extinct.

An analogy for those who have spent time in the California penal system; swipes were the pruno of territorial Hawaii — by all accounts, low-alcohol brew made, at its best, from sweet potatoes, honey, sugar, molasses, bread fruit, and other produce or cane products brewers and bootleggers could get their hands on. The ingredients, however, were classic moonshine ingredients; anything fermentable, nearby, and cheap went into the pot. At its worst, the stuff was a toxic slop adulterated by unscrupulous bootleggers for desperate classes of drinkers.

A 1900 article on 'Honolulu's Queer Dope' (see right) reports that drinkers develop a "terrible thirst" but that the water they drink brings on fresh waves of intoxication. "It is said that four or five glasses of doctored swipes will keep a man drunk for two or three days if water is taken after awakening from the drunken sleep."

I mention swipes because they wander into some of the territory normally reserved for the rhetorical excesses of moonshine opponents. The adulterations especially — the cayenne pepper, and kerosene, and whatnot — that were added to fake potency resonate with the adulterations attributed to moonshiners and bootleggers on the Mainland. The reputation of swipes parallels that of modern inner-city moonshine: only a fool or someone too poor to afford properly made alcohol would drink it.

An 1899 article sets up swipes, garnished with the paternalism and racism of the time:

Swipes cause the police more trouble than all other police court factors put together. If you ask an experienced police court magistrate what the stuff is made of he will reply by asking you what it isn’t made of. In its purest state it is fermented from taro, rice, bread crust or anything else that contains starch. But fermentation from such materials is too slow a process to meet emergencies in which swipes are called on. The native in his domestic and primitive social life hasn't the forethought to set his taro fermenting against the time when he will be called on to extend hospitality to some chance visitor, or provide a luau for his neighbors who unexpectedly call.

The emergency arises and to meet it he goes to some Chinaman or renegade Hawaiian who has descended to the degradation of avarice and for a quarter gets a generous bottle of as vile a compound as ever wrecked a sound constitution or deranged nervous system. To a basis of fermented taro has been added kerosene, cayenne pepper, fusel oil and methylated spirits, till [sic] an oblivion of intellect, accompanied by maniacal combativeness, quickly follows its use. 

It is a most disastrous drink, as many of the soldiers who stop here on their way to Manila and accepted the hospitality of chance native Hawaiian acquaintance found to their sorrow.

~ Omaha Daily Bee, 17 January, 1899

Normally, I like to share historical recipes. You'll understand if I skip it this time.

Goes well with:

• The 1900 article above mentions pineapple as a sometimes-ingredient of swipes. That's not what we use it for around here. More likely, we'll make vinegar out of pineapple (especially after using the hollowed-out fruit for tiki drink mugs) or pickle them. 
• Visiting sailors and desperate drinkers aren't the only ones to his the sauce in Hawaii. In 1911, the Hawaiian Star printed a tall tale of feral hogs getting into a batch of the local moonshine known as okolehao.
• What's pruno? You don't know? Aren't you sweet? Eric Gillin explains. 

1950 Paraty Cocktail: An Old Style Dry Shake for an Old Style Cachaça

In 1723, Jacques Savary des Bruslons informed readers of his Dictionnaire universel du commerce that native Brazilians — before Europeans came on the scene — were the most robust of all men, seven feet tall, and at the age of 100, they were no more decrepit than Europeans aged merely 60 years. However, he noted, ils ne vivaient que de maïs, d’oranges et de sucre — they lived on maize, oranges, and sugar. French merchants made fortunes on that Brazilian sugar and, in the process, some developed a taste for a Brazilian cane spirit called paraty (par-a-CHEE).

Over 225 years later, the 9th edition of Henri Babinski Gastronomie Pratique (1950), gives a recipe for a paraty cocktail "particularly appreciated in Brazil," but which is too strong, presumably, for more refined French palates. Paraty we would recognize today as cachaça and the technique he recommended for taming it as a variation on the dry shake so popular in recent years.

The dry shake, as practiced today, is a straightforward technique used to emulsify egg whites in drinks. Some think it’s new; it’s not. First, some portion (and sometimes all) of the cocktail’s ingredients is put in a shaker with the egg white. Then the bartender seals the shaker, shakes hard to emulsify, then re-shakes with ice, and pours the drink in a glass. It may or may not be strained into the glass, depending on the drink — and the bartender. The result is a velvet-textured drink with a foamy head made of very fine bubbles.

The technique Babinski (or Ali Bab, as he was known) recommends is different. Paraty — named for a colonial-era town of the same name in the state of Rio de Janeiro — was rough stuff for drinkers used to fine French brandies (though God knows some calvados could strip the paint off a barn door). It had what Ali Bab referred to as l’odeur empyreumatique, a “burned” smell, possibly from using direct-fire stills.

As anyone who has ever truffled eggs in the shell, refined homemade wines, or cleared soup stock or boiled coffee knows, egg whites can be used to absorb odor and trap particulates in liquids for easy removal. This is the same idea. Mixing egg white with the “burned” spirit, then straining the mix before using it in a cocktail, helped to remove some of the objectionable odor — which, seemingly, native Brazilians did not mind, even those who lived to a hundred years and stood seven feet tall.

Once softened and strained, the spirit was approachable for goût francais and could be blended with lemon juice, pineapple syrup, and bitters.

Cachaça imported today in the United States and western Europe generally does not need such taming. Leblon, for instance, works just fine without the strained egg white treatment. Some of today’s moonshine, though, could benefit from a bit of last-minute polishing…

From Ali Bab’s 1950 Gastronomie Pratique:

Paraty Cocktail

20 grams of paraty,
10 grams of lemon juice,
10 grams of syrup of pineapple,
5 drops of Angostura bitters,
1 egg white,
Crushed ice,
Zest of one lemon. 

Mix the paraty and egg white in a glass, which has the effect of mitigating some of the paraty’s burned aroma: shake it all for a few minutes, then strain. 

Put the strained paraty in a shaker with lemon juice, pineapple syrup, angostura bitters, crushed ice, shake to chill; pour into a cocktail glass, squeeze the lemon zest over the drink and serve with small straws.

And the original for those whose French is better than mine:

Cocktail au paraty 

Le cocktail au paraty est particulièrement apprécié au Bresil. Sa composition intégrale nous semblerait trope forte. En voici une adaptation au goût francais. 

Pour chaque personne, prenez:
20 grammes de paraty,
10 grammes de jus de citron,
10 grammes de sirop d’ananas,
5 gouttes de bitter angostura,
1 blanc d’oeuf,
Glace pilee,
Zeste d’un citron. 

Reunissez dans un verre le paraty et le blanc d’oeuf, qui a pour effet de mitiger un peu l’odeur empyreumatique du paraty: agitez le tout pendant quelques minutes; filtrez. 

Mette dans un shaker le paraty filtré, le jus de citron, le sirop d’ananas, le bitter angostura, de la glace pilée; secouez pour glacer; passes dans un verre à cocktail, ajoutez le jus du zeste d’un citron et servez avec des petites pailles.

Hulabilly Lemonade: The Fireflies Won't Be the Only Ones Getting Pleasantly Lit

Tiki Oasis is in full swing again. Regular readers know that for several years now, I've made a point of attending the four-day extravaganza of rum, beehive hairdos, Bettie Page lookalikes, surf tones, and tiki madness in San Diego. This year the theme is Hulabilly. Otto von Stroheim, the founder of TikiO, invited me to give a talk. So yesterday afternoon, we filled a ballroom, threw up some slides, hit the sauce, and delved into my field: illicit liquor. 

Over the next few weeks, I'll add some more stories from that talk, but I had so many requests for my boozy lemonade recipe yesterday that I realized I should put it up while the hulabilly hodown was in full swing.

Johnny Jeffery flew in from Wisconsin to join me for the talk since he was the distiller for one of the whiskeys we were tasting: Death's Door white whiskey. Jeffery is in the privileged position of sampling his white white right off the still. His recommendation for the rest of us who can't get it at quite such high proof? Try it in a margarita.

The Hulabilly Lemonade I made as a welcome drink for the crowd is a twist on an old-fashioned front porch lemonade…with two differences. The first is that I used two sugar syrups — one demerara and the other caramelized, which isn’t as sweet, but gives the drink a soft, almost praline note that complements the fresh lemon juice. The second is that I asked the volunteers helping out with the talk to pour in a whole bunch of whiskey.

Without the whiskey, the lemonade makes a good Arnold Palmer when mixed 1:1 with black iced tea. With whiskey, though, and cooling off on the porch some hot evening with a pitcher of this Hulabilly Lemonade and a few glasses…well, let’s just say that the fireflies won’t be the only one getting pleasantly lit.

Hulabilly Lemonade 

1.5 oz Death's Door White Whiskey
4 oz front porch lemonade (see below)
2 teaspoons caramel syrup (optional, see below) 

Mix whiskey, lemonade, and caramel syrup over ice. Garnish with mint if you're feeling extra fancy.

Front Porch Lemonade 5 parts lemon juice
5 parts water
3 parts Demerara simple syrup 

Stir until blended in a jar, pitcher, or gallon jug. 

A note on the caramel syrup: In my opinion, the caramel syrup really makes this shine, but it's not strictly necessary — you could leave it out entirely. It not just tastes good, though; it's a nod to old-school bootleggers who sometimes faked age in illicit spirits with caramel (a practice that hasn't died out). Author David Lebovitz has good notes on making caramel; if you've never made it, check them out before you begin. The way I make this cocktail syrup, it's a simple ratio: two parts sugar to one part water so that the final version — by volume — is 25% more than the original sugar volume. First, measure whatever quantity of plain white table sugar (12 ounces by volume is a handy amount for home use). Then measure half that of water (6 ounces in this example). Have it at the ready.

Slowly caramelize the dry sugar in a deep, heavy-bottomed pan (I use an unlined copper pot, but use what you've got). When it reaches a rich amber color, immediately (and carefully) pour in all the water. Be careful: it will spatter and steam. The whole mass will seize up in a hard candied blob. No worries. Turn the heat to low, stirring now and then, until the sugar dissolves. Some water will have evaporated as steam, so when the whole thing is liquid and cool, put it in a measuring cup and add just enough water to make the total volume 25% more than the original volume of sugar. In this example, 12 ounces (100%) plus 3 ounces (25%) = 15 ounces. Just top off with cool water until the total volume is 15 ounces. Easy peasy.

Goes well with:

• The Tiki Oasis site.
• Death's Door spirits are distributed in 40 US states, including California. Check out their website.
• Martin Cate (almost) Blows the Lid off Tiki Oasis, a piece about San Francisco barman Martin Cate, his talk on the history of punch, and a recipe for his Tiki Oasis 10th Anniversary Punch.
• The Hyperreality of King Kukulele, an affectionate look at the slippery notion of authenticity when talking about tiki.

Not a Curl Was Left: Okolehao and the Hogs of the Waianae Range

“No animal shall drink alcohol
 to excess.”

~ George Orwell

Animal Farm

Wild Hog from
Tsunajima Kamekichi's 1887
Fashionable Melange of English Words

In preparing remarks for my talk on moonshine next month at Tiki Oasis, I came across a bit of suspicious journalism.

After a preamble on the natural history and curious habits demonstrated by the wild hogs of the Waianae range on Oʻahu, an anonymous columnist for Honolulu’s Hawaiian Star reported in the summer of 1911 on even more incredulous behavior. The Onlooker columnist claims the report is from “Old Oponui” (a distiller of okolehao, Hawaii’s indigenous moonshine) and concerns what happens when the hogs gained possession of his entire supply.

Readers of Orwell’s Animal Farm will find familiar material here.

Old Oponui, the okolehao expert who makes booze about a mile from the hog-built dam, came along while I was there and told me of the misfortune the hogs had caused him. It seems that, after the dam had been made secure, the porkers lay in the old adobe wallow for about three days while the roasting pigs enjoyed the bathing. Then they got up refreshed and hungry. The small pigs were routed out and sent out for wild bananas which they easily got. Oponui saw them in the woods bringing half ripe bunches of bananas home, where they were spread m the shade to ripen. Two or three nights later there was a sudden rush of hogs at the well-hidden shack where he slept and had his still. The structure was quickly torn down and he just had time to get on his escape ladder, which he uses in crossing a ravine if any revenue men are about, and to see the hogs rolling away two barrels of his good stuff, all he had. The native followed the drove at a distance and when near the hog rendezvous, he climbed a tree and watched. Oponui says the sight almost led him to disbelieve his eyes. 

The pigs had dug a big hole and plastered it with adobe. At the bottom was a sharp piece of lava. They rolled one of the barrels into the hole, where it broke apart, filling the well with okolehao and bringing the remnants of the barrel to the surface, where each piece was nosed out and pushed away, every hog, big and little, excepting four that were stationed about as guards or were opposed to drink on principle, proceeded to get full. They were celebrating the completion of the dam like happy engineers. According to Opunui the sight was almost human. Now and then a hog would rise to grunt but would turn a somersault down hill. Several did nothing but squeal in different keys, leaning lovingly on each other. Younger ones walked round and round the ladies of the party, holding their ears erect and making graceful motions with their tails. One group hustled into an alley between some guava bushes and carried wild onions in their mouths, while they sought to get on their hind legs. They were an inimitable reminder of the Honolulu Onion Club. Between drinks the hogs ate bananas, and by the time the second barrel of okolehao was reached everyone of them tried to sing. It sounded much like a joy party coming home. When morning dawned Opunui climbed down from his tree, for it was then safe for him to return to what was left of his home. The place was a wreck; the good liquor all gone, bananas lying about crushed or half bitten; one old porker under a bush was mourning a broken tusk and not a curl was left in the tail of any pig. That very morning the native had seen every porker at the reservoir lying beside the water into which two had fallen and been drowned. He himself was leaving. He said he was tired of this kind of moonshining and he could do better by going into Honolulu politics and being a hog himself.

~ The Hawaiian Star July 15, 1911

Goes well with:

• Hawaiian hogs are one thing. Kentucky Mules are another. My advice? Grab some bourbon and whip up a batch of the latter.

Sweet Spirit of Cats a'Fighting! It's Moonshine at Tiki Oasis

It's Tiki Oasis time — or, rather, it will be soon enough. Next month is the 13th annual celebration of all things tiki here in San Diego as hordes of revelers take over the Crowne Plaza Hotel for a weekend blowout of rum-drinking, hula-dancing, surf music-playing, aloha shirt-wearing, beehive-sporting fun. It is, as I've mentioned, a blast. The theme this year? Hulabilly. What else will there be? White whiskey, maybe a little ti root. You'll just have to drop by to find out.

Who's going to be there talking about moonshine? Yours truly.

I'm expecting something like this.

The name of the talk is Squirrel Whiskey, Monkey Rum, and Sweet Spirit of Cats a'Fighting: The Taming of American Moonshine. Here's the skinny from the TikiO site:

Despite the hype, most moonshine isn't corn whiskey and hasn't been since Donn Beach was knee-high to a moai. For almost 400 years, Americans have distilled untaxed liquor in cabins, sheds, warehouses, hollers, and now garages and basements. Author Matthew Rowley examines the history of moonshine, America's primal spirit. From the colonial era though Prohibition to its recent incarnations, moonshine has changed with the times. Through guided tastings from some of today's (legal) craft distilleries and Q&A, participants will learn to distinguish so-called "legal moonshine" and white whiskeys from their illegal forerunners and modern cousins.

See you there!

Goes well with:

• Find Tiki Oasis on Twitter here.
• Information on my talk and speakers at this year's Tiki Oasis (including San Francisco barman Martin Cate, radio host Charles Phoenix, and Lady Borgia with "The Higher the Hair, the Closer to the Tiki Gods") is here. 
• Lack tiki mugs in which to serve up your summertime moonshine drinks. Check out some of our favorite tiki mug vendors, including Tiki Farm, Munktiki, and Tiki Kaimuki.

From the Pages of GQ Magazine: My Moonshine

Thanks to Nathan Mattise of Ars Technica who hipped me to GQ Magazine's 2012 gift guide for foodies. There're more than a few things on the list I'd like. Take, for instance, the $350 Kikuichi Yanagi Sushi Knife. I am, after all, a bit of a knife fetishist. Eric Ripert of Le Bernardin suggests a 2008 Haut Brion Magnum for $1,150, Jim Meehan of PDT recommends a Kaikado Tea Canister for $140, and chef Marcus Samuelsson calls out a $232 Handpresso Outdoor Set.

Mike and Pat Sheerin of Trencherman in Chicago named Moonshine!, though, as the only book on the list. At $14.95, it's one of the most affordable gifts on GQ's guide.

Knives aside, it's also one of the coolest. Five years after its publication, Moonshine! remains the premier introduction to home-, small batch, nano-distilling. Technical manuals go into greater detail for experienced professionals or for those who operate very specific kinds of stills, but the enthusiasm the book still generates among the cocktail and amateur crowds makes me beam with pride for a job well done. One distiller told me "When it was so hard to find reliable information on distilling, your book was like a handrail in the dark." More than a dozen profesional distillers have told me some version of "We never would have launched a distillery if you hadn't make it look so easy."

To be fair, I never said operating a distillery was easy. Just that learning the basics of making spirits certainly is. Cheers to the Brothers Sheerin for the nod. I do get to Chicago on occasion and have made a note to visit the restaurant of two men with such discerning taste. If their tastes in reading material is so solid, can you just imagine their food?

Nathan Mattise, Nathan Mattise...that name sounds so familiar. Oh, yeah ~ he and the Whovian editor of Wired magazine, Adam Rogers, spent the better part of an hour chatting with me while I was in San Francisco this Spring for Wired's Storyboard podcast. Here's a link to that and the podcast itself.

Whisky Advocate Runs Feature Story on White Whiskey by...Oh, Hey. Me.

You have to look at white whiskey 

on its own merits. 

If you judge it 

compared to aged whiskeys, 

it fails. 

Every time.

~ Darek Bell

Corsair Artisan Distillery

Shea Shawnson pours Double and Twisted light whiskey at Elixir

The current issue of Whisky Advocate magazine has a feature article on white whiskey by yours truly. [Edit 12/9/12: scroll down for a link to a PDF of the article.] White, light, unaged, minimally aged, and "raw" whiskeys are growing in popularity. Not everyone — including those who make it — agrees on what it is, so when editor Lew Bryson asked me to take a run at white whiskey, I made some phone calls, packed a sandwich, and hit the road to talk to distillers who make the stuff and drinkers who down it.

As grain spirits come off the still, in- dustry insiders call the heady, limpid distillate new make or white dog. Every whiskey distiller in the world makes it and almost all of it is destined for barrels. Some, though, trickles out to the public. Lately, distillers and consumers alike have taken to calling it white whiskey. Marketers trumpet it as a hot new thing. In truth, the wheel has been around longer. And fire, of course. But new make was old hat when Johnnie Walker took his first wobbly steps. 

What is novel is that until about 2005, few dreamt a market still existed for the stuff.

My travels brought me up the west coast of the United States. From tiny sheds up dirt roads to a distillery in an old Air Force hangar, I met with men and women making, selling, drinking, and mixing white whiskeys.

Bars and restaurants from New York to Seattle offer white whiskeys as a matter of course, even pride. White Manhattans and albino Old Fashioneds abound. If whiskey cocktails unblemished by oak are insufficiently exotic, trendy tipplers can ask for them “improved” 19th-century style with a few dashes of absinthe. 

Despite growing awareness and acceptance, the category is dogged by three recurrent questions. Two are worth addressing in passing: (1) Is white whiskey moonshine? and (2) Is it any good?

I tackle those in about 500 words, but the third question, the one people should be asking and which fills the bulk of the article, is what do we do with it? Pick up the Winter 2012 issue of Whisky Advocate for some of the answers — including arguments that the way many white whiskeys are made is completely wrong — or download a PDF of It's a Nice Day for a White Whiskey here.

Interviews, insight, and recipes from Thad Vogler of Bar Agricole and Shea Swanson of Elixir in San Francisco, Darek Bell of Corsair Artisan Distillery (and author of Alt Whiskeys), Jim Romdall of Vessel in Seattle, Ian and Devin Cain of American Craft Whiskey distillery, barber and distiller Salvatore Cimino, 13th generation master distiller Marko Karakasevic from Charbay, and, midwife to the modern tiki renaissance, Jeff "Beach Bum" Berry.

Here's a bonus recipe that didn't make the article from bartender Rhachel Shaw whom I ran into as a customer at rum bar Smuggler's Cove. Shaw pays tribute to Elizabeth Taylor (whom one can only presume guzzled staggering quantities of raw whiskey) with a drink named for the late movie star's perfume:

White Diamonds  

1.5 oz. Koval Chicago Rye
.75 oz. Cocci Americano
.5 oz. Maraschino
1 dash Bitterman's Grapefruit Bitters 

Stir on ice. Strain. Garnish with grapefruit peel.

Crispy Moonshine Onion Rings

In Charred & Scruffed, his 2012 book on otherwise new grilling techniques, restaurateur and barbecue enthusiast Adam Perry Lang leverages an old trick — folding liquor into flour-based batter or dough — to yield flaky pastries and batters. After our recent turkey deep-frying, we had plenty of peanut oil around, so I decided to put his recipe for "moonshine" onion rings to the test.

Alcohol in pastries is nothing new. We’ve seen, for instance, that Polish Mardi Gras doughnuts known as paczki are sometimes made with vodka and pie crust recipes using vodka have been floating around for years. It’s not there as a flavoring or to get eaters drunk; vodka can discourage gluten formation in pastries, lending a crisp and flaky texture.

Lang is co-owner of the Original Moonshine brand which is why he specifies it but, as we all know, isn't actual moonshine. Not a value judgement; just a statement of fact. If you have some, use it. If not, you can easily substitute vodka, genuine moonshine, home-distilled neutral spirits, or any one of the lighter "white" whiskeys on the market. You can use mature whiskeys or even brandies — just be aware that they'll impart flavor you may not want in your onion rings.

The verdict? Yep; they are crispy and tasty. Break out the ketchup, malt vinegar, and aioli. Just be sure to eat these little buggers while they're hot because even when they're crispy, cold onion rings are best left for dogs and stoners.

Crispy Moonshine Onion Rings 

8 cups peanut oil
3 large Spanish onions cut into ½”-thick slices and separated into rings
1 cup milk
2 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons sea or kosher salt
plus more for sprinkling
2 teaspoons freshly ground
black pepper

Batter
4 large egg whites
1 c Original Moonshine, clear corn whiskey, or vodka
2 c cornstarch
2 tsp sea or kosher salt
2 tsp freshly ground black pepper
2 tsp cayenne pepper
About 4 cups panko crumbs

Heat the oil to 350°F in an 8-quart pot. Meanwhile, put the onions in a large bowl and pour the milk over them to moisten them; drain.

Put the flour in a large sealable plastic bag, add the salt and pepper, and shake to mix. Working in batches, add the drained onion slices to the flour, seal the bag, and shake vigorously to coat the slices, then spread on a baking sheet.

For the batter, whip the egg whites to soft peaks in a large bowl. Fold in the moonshine. Sift the cornstarch, salt, black pepper, and cayenne over the egg whites and fold in gently.
Spread the panko crumbs evenly on a baking sheet. Line another baking sheet with paper towels. 

Working in batches, add the onion rings to the batter, then, one at a time, toss onto the panko crumbs and flip over to coat with crumbs; repeat until you have filled the baking sheet with a generously spaced layer of onions. 

One by one, drop the coated onions into the hot oil, without crowding, and cook until golden brown, 3 to 4 minutes. Remove with a spider or slotted spoon, transfer to the lined baking sheet to drain briefly, and sprinkle with salt, then transfer to a mesh cooling rack (this will prevent the onion rings from becoming soggy). Repeat with the remaining onion rings and serve.

Adam Perry Lang (2012)
Charred & Scruffed: Bold New Techniques for Explosive Flavor on and off the Grill
280 pages (paperback)
Artisan
ISBN: 1579654657
$24.95

Goes well with:

• Even the Ten Dollar Whore Sneered at Me — make-believe moonshines and white whiskeys have become darlings of distillers and drinkers alike in the last six years, but it wasn't that long ago in New Orleans that they could raise another response entirely.
• It's a Nice Day for a White Whiskey — including video of newbies trying to drink the stuff
• Just Some Ice Cubes, My Good Man — white whiskey at New York's 21 Club.

Moonshine Monday: Uncork that Pig's Ass and Have a Go at It

One look at their upended pig-shaped bottle with a cork jammed in its ass and you realize that Mick and Michael Heston have a sense of humor. What is not as readily apparent is that the West Virginians are paying homage to an old American tradition.

Many of toady's more fanciful bottles hold tequila — calaveras (skulls), the Republic of Texas, machine guns, and the like, dripping with testosterone and machismo — but in the late 19th century, some American distillers offered their whiskey in bottles shaped like fat, jolly swine. Usually, these were glass, but pottery examples do sometimes surface. Randy Ludacer shares photos of a variety over at the packaging blog Box Vox.

Why swine? Well, pigs — especially white ones — have long been associated with wealth and luck. Fat, happy pigs have been deployed as mascots in European and American advertising almost since the field's advent, selling everything from candy to, sadistically, sausage, hams, and bacon. Pigs also have an historic association with distilleries; for centuries, savvy distillers raised pigs in lots next to their stillhouses and fed them on spent grains. Selling off the litters added a welcome line to the account books at the end of the year.

Like fez monkeys, pigs also stand in as humans, filthy examples what what we're supposed not to be. Pouring from the rear end rather than the mouth just encourages more coarse joking. Men, after all, are such pigs.

The Hestons' Buckwheat Moon is made of 51% buckwheat with the balance of the grain bill corn and barley. Hats off to them for some fun whiskey* packaging. As it is for most craft distilleries, distribution is limited, but check out the website below to see if they can hook you up with a source in your area.

Goes well with:

• That Whiskey You Like May Cause Hog Farms to Explode, a bit on the mysterious modern case of exploding hog farms with historical notes on the distilling/hog-raising connection.
• Dan Aykroyd (yeah, that Dan Aykroyd) once held my skull in his hands. Read on and you'll understand the connection.
• Check out Pinchgut Hollow Distillery's website and see what else the crew is putting in pigs.
• *Buckwheat Moon isn't a true whiskey. As we've mentioned before, buckwheat is not really a grain, but it can be treated as one when brewing and distilling. Of course, this isn't true moonshine, either, but heel-over-heads pigs make me smile enough to not go on my usual rant about that.

The Coming of Red Likker to Kentucky

In 1929, as the failures of Prohibition had become manifest even to the most ardently braying temperance hounds, the prolific American author and inveterate blowhard Irvin S. Cobb published Red Likker, his love letter to bourbon and Southern honor. It is not a particularly rare book. It is not a particularly good book. But I've hung onto my first edition for decades because it deals with whiskey — a topic dear to my heart —and for Cobb's brazen manhandling of the English language, which is at turns entertaining and appalling. He does not present the South so much as a caricature of the South.

The novel concerns the fictional Bird family of Kentucky and in particular Colonel Attila Bird who distilled a great deal of the red likker in question and who lived long enough to see Prohibition descend on America. In my mind, his voice hovers somewhere between that of the 1940's Senator Beauregard  Claghorn and that of Mel Blanc's diminutive Kentucky colonel from Dog Gone South. In other words, he's a joke, son. Or at least comical, though Cobb, a Kentuckian. no doubt intended to impart almost heroic qualities.

In an early section, Cobb describes an exchange from the 1790's between brothers Isham and Shadwell Bird. Before then, the whiskey with which the brothers Bird were familiar was white, none of this fancy barrel-aged stuff we take for granted more than two centuries on.

In his hand Isham held what Shadwell had bade him seek for in the saddle-bag. It was a wickered case-bottle, stoppered with a corn-cob.
 
"Tried it yet?" said Shadwell, his voice thickened,
 
"Not yet."

"Well, you'd best not lose any more time then. It's prime. Man, I tell you it's just prime! Primest ever I swallowed anywheres or any place."
 
"What is it ?"
 
"Likker. What else would it be but likker?"

"But it's red!" Isham was holding the flask up to the west and through the meshes in the plaiting the glass, by reason of its contents, showed him a deep russety-amber shade. That was puzzling.

"Shore, it's red. That's the joke about it. Red as stinkabus rum, e'en near it, yet powerful well-flavored. Take a swig and then tell me if it ain't about the potentest likker ever you put lip to."

Goes well with:

• The Maine Julep  Cobb's unrelenting style in on show here as he excoriates a Maine bartender — “a criminal masquerading as a barkeeper” — who dared serve a julep that was not up to his Kentucky standards.
• Red Likker is not a terrible book; it was just a product of its time, written by an author with a distinct brash voice, and has not aged well. If you'd like a copy, even first editions can be picked up online for less than $10. Jerry Thomas he is not.
• Even the Ten Dollar Whore Sneered at Me, a look at how far white whiskeys have come in a few short years. 

Make-Believe Moonshine in Massachusetts

Regular readers know that I take a dim view of calling "moonshine" all those clear grain- and sugar-based spirits cropping up from American distilleries. Doing so obscures the fact that moonshine was — and continues to be — made from nearly every carbohydrate available in North America from persimmons and pumpkins to quinoa and triticale. Sometimes, it is aged for decades. It was always illegal. Always. This so-called "legal" moonshine is a recent historical fallacy, one promulgated by marketers and distillers in the last five or six years who hope you'll suspend disbelief long enough to buy a bottle or jar.

That's not to say I don't like some of these make-believe moonshines. Some are quite good and modern bartenders have been making exceptional cocktails with them. Shoot, friends of mine — welcome guests at my home — make the stuff. I'm just not moved by attempts to redfine a word that has, for three centuries, entailed illicit distillation.

If I were anywhere near Julio's Liquors in Westborough, Massachusetts this weekend, though, you can bet that I'd be front row at the Loch &K(e)y Society's MASS Shine 2012 Expo and Competition (on Twitter as @MassShine). Alas, I'll be under three deadlines three thousand miles away. Distiller Curtis McMillan will present "Understanding taxed moonshine" (ahem) and Gable Erenzo of Tuthilltown Spirits will be talking about New York state moonshine.

For details on times which distillers will be on hand to share their wares, and how to sign up for the free classes, head over to Julio's website.

Do go if you're nearby. Do meet the distillers. Do try their spirits. Just...take as many grains of salt as will fit in your pocket.

Goes well with:

• Legal Moonshine? You've Been Conned
• Even the Ten Dollar Whore Sneered at Me, a look at how far white whiskeys have come in a few short years. 
• Lots of moonshine (actual moonshine) flowed during Prohibition. Here's a look at a 1927 recipe calling for Georgia or Maryland "corn." 

Moonshine Monday

A new hashtag popped on my Twitter radar today: #MoonshineMonday. So far there's just the smallest trickle of action. In my mind, a proper Moonshine Monday stands a good chance of ending up a bit like this:

But I'm willing to ride this hog and see where it goes. Even if all you can get is the pretend moonshine from the liquor store, you can still join in, but why not knock back a little sub rosa liquor today and see where it leads you?

Encyclopedist Rowley Is Rumored to Live a Dream Life

I visited Northern California last month to work on two different booze pieces. When he learned I was coming to the area, senior editor Adam Rogers invited me to stop by Wired's San Francisco offices where he flipped the table and interviewed me.

Hey, hey, hey. I'm the one supposed to be asking questions, bub.

Speaking on Wired's Storyboard podcast, Rogers makes the outrageous claim "If civilization really begins with distillation, as William Faulkner is supposed to have said, then let me introduce you to one of civilization's premier encyclopedists...Matthew Rowley is here." Bryan Lufkin's write-up sets the tone for the podcast that follows. If you've never heard me speak, here's your chance as we talk about moonshine, California spirits, being a spirits judge and more.

Then over this past weekend, Ars Technica ran a story about how best to celebrate World Whiskey Day, including what to watch and what book to read. There's the suggestion that readers follow my Twitter and blog ramblings: "Rowley leads a dream life. The man is paid to travel, eat, and drink, and then write about it for some of the biggest names in the field."

Sunday afternoon I was thinking about that dream life I'm rumored to enjoy as I swung a pickaxe to break apart and pry from its earthly grip a decades-old sidewalk buried in our back yard. Sweaty, muddy, and grunting with mulch in my hair seems far from glamorous.

Yet...yet at the end of the day, I was greeted with an impromptu cocktail made with Germain-Robin brandy, fresh loquats picked from our yard, peach bitters, and a squirt of lemon. Didn't even have to ask.

Yeah, I suppose — and this is hard for a quiet and softspoken guy like me to admit — that my life has turned out pretty damn well, pickaxes and all. Now, if you'll excuse me, there's a brick wall that needs demolishing. After I clean those bricks, there's every likelihood they'll get reused as the base of a smokehouse — because, with a little work, even dream lives can get better.

The Greatest Trick the Devil Ever Pulled is Getting a Little Threadbare

I've been studying moonshine and moonshiners for more than twenty years and even I am a little taken aback at just how many busts we've been seeing in the press lately. For the longest time, the biggest joke about moonshine (laid out by shiners themselves) was that it was a dead or dying art, that moonshiners didn't — to lift the words of Verbal Kint in The Usual Suspects — exist. A TTB agent in a major Southern city once told me that he'd been in that office 19 years and that moonshine "hadn't been a problem" for the last 18 of them.

In the last year, though, we're hearing and reading fewer discordant claims from law enforcement officials that they haven't busted a still in years or that this or that bust was "the biggest in memory."

Max Watman wrote about this back in 2009:

Over the last few years, I've tracked moonshine busts with much more than a cursory interest. One of the arresting officers says, almost without fail, that either they never see any moonshine any more, or that this bust is the largest one they can remember. My clipping file holds 265 articles (obviously some are repeats, and some aren't all that recent, but I doubt many go any farther back than the 90s). My online bookmarks number 129.

Clearly there's a disconnect, or a short term memory problem, or something. 300-odd busts in the last few years might not register in comparison to how many people have been arrested for assault or possession of a controlled substance, but it's hardly non-existent.

As fun as it is to tell the story of supposedly non-existent moonshiners, perhaps it's finally time to put that threadbare trope to rest. Yesterday's Franklin-News Post noted that 25 moonshine stills had been located and destroyed last month in three Virginia counties. A further 15 were found that had been incapacitated in previous busts.

ABC Special Agent in Charge J. Chris Goodman said:

In addition to verifying still locations, agents seized and destroyed more than three dozen 800- and 400-gallon black pot stills, as well as other paraphernalia used in the manufacture and distribution of illegal whiskey...

Three dozen 400- and 800-gallon stills. Kids, the cat's out of the bag; moonshine is not dead, moonshiners are not dying off any faster than those in any other profession, and the busts will continue. The decreasing frequency of claims about the biggest bust in years or the first bust in memory tells me that, whatever else they may be dealing with, more and more state agents are learning how to identify and destroy illicit distilleries.

Goes well with:

• Moonshine Stills Destroyed in 3 Counties from The Franklin-News Post.
• Chasing the White Dog. See Max Watman Writes Second-Best Moonshine Book on the Market, my take on his excellent look at modern moonshining. 
• A Writer's Guide to Moonshine. Start with part 2, the body of a talk I gave at the American Distillers' Institute's annual meetings a while back. Or download a PDF of the entire talk here.
• Not only are would-be distillers learning the craft of making whiskey, but law enforcement has been learning to find and bust them. The centuries-old game continues in Georgia as officers attend Moonshine School.

A Little NPR Story about "Moonshine" Made in a Square Pot Still

As I was scrambling to get out of town to visit a passel of California distillers last week, Shelly Baskin rang to talk about that most indomitable of American spirits: moonshine.

Mr. Baskin was working on a story for National Public Radio about a Kentucky distiller trying to haul a bit of Kentucky's liquid history into the 21st century. Spencer Balentine makes his spirits in a custom-built square pot still. That's noteworthy because commercial stills are usually almost always round in cross-section. The still's square shape isn't unique exactly, but it is an old design that was idiosyncratic in its day and downright odd today.

Baskin writes of Balentine:

He cooks his whiskey with practice and care, following the recipe from his great grandfather to create the best batch of moonshine possible. He says, “From day one I’ve tried to recreate at least the taste, and the smell. And by doing it on the historic still I think this is close as you’ll get to experiencing that, you know, that 1958 moonshine.”

I just left Kentucky a few weeks ago. Clearly, I missed the chance to see an intriguing bit of distillation technology.

For the full story, see Moonshine is Alive and Well in Marshall County. Click on the "listen" button at the top of the article and you'll hear my croaky voice tripping over the inelegant line  “…the moment that moonshine becomes legal, it stops to exist.”

Stops to exist? Oh, aphasia. You make me sound so smart. Ceases. It ceases to exist.

Michael G. Davis, 1942-2012

Sad news from Kirksville, Missouri. Word came last night that Dr. Michael Davis has died.

There's no particular reason you should know Davis, but if you know my work on moonshine, you've felt his touch. I met Davis, an anthropology professor, more than twenty years ago as an undergraduate student at what's now called Truman State University. By chance I took his introductory anthropology class to fill a general requirement. It was a fateful decision.

Mediocre students found him boring. It was a different story for me. I had heard of anthropology, of course, as a kid, but my eyes were glued on science. Once I entered college, I thought I would leave behind the things that fascinated me as a kid; fossils, tales of Amazonian and Polynesian explorers, storytelling, how human bodies were put together (and taken apart), martial arts, strange plants and what can be done with them, cannibalism, archaeology, foreign languages, etc. Under Davis' tutelage, I learned that all these are exactly the sorts of things that anthropologists study. Took me a year to switch majors, but once I did, I never looked back on the biologist I might have been.

Davis become my advisor and my mentor. He taught me about paleotechnology: how to use an atl-atl to throw a spear harder and longer than I could with my arm alone, how to knap flint spear points and arrowheads (including a cheaty sort of arrowhead knapped from the bottom of a bottle a repugant Mexican vodka), how to tan leather, and how to make beer by chewing corn and spitting it into a communal bucket where enzymes and wild yeasts went to work to yield a Peruvian specialty known as chica. I won't pretend that it's delicious. He taught me tai chi. He rekindled my interest in German and Russian (though French, he argued, "should be against the fuckin' law.") and taught me the basics of linguistics that have served me well to this day.

He once butchered a deer in my basement because he didn't want his wife knowing he'd bagged it. When I went outside, I realized he had dragged the bleeding carcass from the bed of his pickup truck to my cellar door...over the fresh, white snow. My yard looked like the scene of a massacre.

As for moonshine — It wasn't a specialty of his. In fact, I never saw him drink more than beer, and Coors at that. But Davis spent long hours teaching me about fieldwork, about how to approach people and get them to talk about their lives, what they do, why they do it. He taught me gentle and purposeful interview techniques and the ethics of interviewing. He taught me how to earn trust and keep it from people who were not inclined to trust outsiders.

Naturally, these skills served me well in boardrooms and in business (not the spear-throwing and butchering bits, necessarily: the getting people to open up bit), but before moonshine and white whiskeys achieved their modern hipness, homemade liquor was still an esoteric practice, and those who made it were secretive — sometimes violently so.

With techniques I learned from Davis, I sidestepped death threats and promises to beat me, burn down my house, and kill my family for asking questions about moonshine and instead got some of those same people to invite me to their homes, to meet their families, and to show me their stills. It's all a walk in the park talking about moonshine and moonshiners today, and I'm fortunate that moonshiners and home distillers seek me out rather than always the other way around. But twenty years ago, questions like those I was asking could get a person beaten or killed.

It's thanks in part to Davis that they didn't.

Who Makes Popcorn Sutton's Tennessee White Whiskey? And Why Call it "Wild?"

As I recall, a bumper sticker on Popcorn Sutton's truck read Never let the truth get in the way of a good story. Keep that in mind when talking about one of American moonshine's most prolific self-promoters.

Here's the deal with moonshine stories; there are more lies, falsehoods, deceptions, poorly understood half-truths, bluster, bravado, misquotes, and corrupted second-hand information than at a West Virginia Liars Contest. Many of these untruths are willful misdirection, but most — maybe even the majority— of them are simple misunderstandings, innocent of malice.

I think that's what landed on my desk yesterday morning.

Ever since the Discovery Channel began broadcasting its new series Moonshiners last month, the Whiskey Forge would get frequent spikes for searches about late moonshiner Marvin "Popcorn" Sutton. Even before that, he often showed up in the site traffic reports, but this was more than the usual pings here and there. Yesterday, surfers from across the US and Canada were digging into earlier stories about Sutton.

What gives? He's been dead for some time now. Why the sudden interest? Turns out Huffington Post ran a story about him and the new 93-proof white whiskey crafted on his persona and the moonshine he made. Also turns out that Huffington Post doesn't have an ear for Southern accents. The article includes a video in which Sutton's widow Pam talks a bit about the whiskey. It quotes her as saying:

“We have a distillery set up in Nashville, Tennessee. We can’t legally call it moonshine. We have to call it Tennessee Wild Whiskey, and also Popcorn’s liquor is the first white whiskey that the federal government has approved.”

Well, a few clarifications are in order. Mrs. Sutton doesn't call it "Tennessee Wild Whiskey" in the video. What she says is "Tennessee White Whiskey." If you hear talk or read of a new "wild" whiskey, double check that source.

Sutton's white whiskey, however, it not the first approved by the federal government. Just last Fall, Whiskey Advocate magazine ran Lew Bryson's reviews of more than a dozen unaged or minimally aged white whiskeys. There are plenty of such spirits out there and plenty more on the way.

The brand's website is here, but as of today, it's just a parking page. The distillery Pam Sutton mentions isn't one of Popcorn's old rigs in which he cranked out thousands upon thousands of gallons of untaxed liquor. "Nashville" was the giveaway. Popcorn operated in and around Maggie Valley, North Carolina, about midpoint between Asheville and Gatlinburg. No, Nashville and commercial white whiskey mean one thing to me and one thing only: this particular grain spirit got its (legal) start at DSP TN-15006, our good friends at Corsair Artisan Distillery, makers of some really lovely spirits.

Darek Bell of Corsair tells me Jamey Grosser originally used Corsair stills to make Sutton's whiskey, but just secured his own Distilled Spirits Plant permit. The TTB confirms it: Popcorn Sutton Distilling, LLC of Nashville, Tennessee has its DSP*. The day to day operations guy is distiller Travis Hixon, formerly brewer at Nashville's Blackstone Brewery.

Congratulations, boys, on getting your own place set up. Any chance we'll be seeing some legal versions of Popcorn's brandies?

*Edit 1/10/12 I had originally written that DSP TN-S-15009 was assigned to Popcorn Sutton Distilling, LLC, but Christian Grantham of Short Mountain Distillery corrected the record: HIS Tennessee distillery is TN-S-15009. I can only sympathize with distillers and the endless reams of paperwork they have to endure to get a legal distillery up and running. 

Goes well with:

• Legal Moonshine? You've Been Conned, a bit I wrote this summer about the flawed concept of so-called "legal moonshine."
• One of Corsair's standout whiskeys is the triple smoke American single malt. Attendees of last year's Tales of the Cocktail session on New American distilleries got to sample some, but if you missed out on that, do try tracking some down. 
• Moonshiners runs on the Discovery Channel on Wednesdays. Last week's marathon of it is what made me late for a New Year's Eve party. I happen to like the show, even if—as are all "reality" shows—it is so clearly a product of artifice. Viz Popcorn's bumper sticker supra.
• The West Virginia Liars Contest has been going on for decades. I've never been, but would love to make it one day.