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.

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.

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.

Moonshine in the Mainstream

"Moonshine is the Amy Winehouse of the drinking set," Rowley said. "There is real genius afoot, but what a mess you have to crawl through to find it."

~ The Washington Post

The past few weeks have seen some growing mainstream interest in topics moonshiny.

First, there’s Jane Black’s piece Distillers Betting On 'Boutique' Versions of Hooch in the Washington Post that spotlights Joe Mahalek and his take on Carolina moonshine at Piedmont Distillers. Piedmont makes Midnight Moon, an homage to the moonshine of yesterear, backed with thumbs-up from Junior Johnson, one of NASCAR’s founding legends who earned his stripes running moonshine in the early days of stock car racing. They also put out Catdaddy, a spiced liquor that I’ve been playing around with lately.*

Second, there’s Robin Shulman’s take on an uptick in home distilling in New York: The Scene of the Crime Was an Upscale Suburb. I like the piece and found it completely in line with what I’ve experienced in the field meeting distillers from Europe and across North America. One quote, though, stuck out:

Enter the Brooklyn food blogger, who refuses to give his name for fear of legal repercussions, who mounts his still on top of his kitchen stove to take advantage of its steady gas flame.

He makes apple brandy from apple cider he fermented, distilling it to ramp up the alcohol content to 140 proof. He distills mead he first made from local buckwheat honey.

Hoping to pay back his college loans, he toyed last summer with the idea of making and selling absinthe, the "green fairy" long illegal in the United States, but his plans were stymied when he found out absinthe is now being imported legally.

I love this guy’s whole approach to products, including his plans to make a whiskey from “heirloom floor-malted Scottish barley” to the cast-iron grain mill he’s bought to crack the barley to the correct size. But I sprouted a tight-lipped smile at plans to sell his absinthe.

Moonshiners (those who make illicit spirits) and bootleggers (those who sell spirits—legal or not—under illicit circumstances) wouldn’t care one way or the other if someone wants to sell liquor…unless it’s in their stomping grounds, then there might be an anonymous call to the sheriff’s tip hotline.

But selling homemade liquor among the home distilling crowd? I can’t imagine something that’d turn a room of home distillers on you faster. Forget metaphors of red-headed stepchildren or having a raw steak tied to your head at a Michael Vick dogfight: the established hobbyists go bizooty when they hear newcomers planning to sell their makings and let the newbies know that they consider it a flagrant violation of an informal home distillers' code. I've seen it happen; it's quite impressive.

Sub rosa distillers don’t all talk to each other, though many of them do, and there’s still far from a common vocabulary to describe their equipment and products (no national moonshiner union to enforce standards, I suppose), but "don’t sell your makings" is one message that seems to have sunk in regardless of where I talk to them.

Of course, the article is ambiguous. Sell hausgemacht absinthe? Or sell legal licensed liquor? I like the sound of that. I’ve said it before: I can’t wait for the day when legal micro-distilleries are as common on the American landscape as craft breweries. In a trend that seems to grow more pronounced, yesterday’s home distillers are becoming licensed micro-distillers. Be patient with that homebrew, boys (and girls): You may get around to selling it eventually.

*Disclaimer: Piedmont Distillers is sponsoring a session I’m chairing at next month’s Tales of the Cocktail in New Orleans. You’ll notice, however, that there’s no advertising on my blog, other than the occasional plug for my book. If I mention a product, well, it’s because I want to, not because I’m being paid for it. I'd mention Jane's article if for no other reason than I'm quoted and I've been accused of being a media darling. Or was that "ho?" I get them confused.

Goes well with:

• Tom Wolf's 1965 essay "The Last American Hero is Junior Johnson. Yes!" Even if you don't care for NASCAR or car racing, it's a fun read even after forty-three years:

  In this legend, here is a country boy, Junior Johnson, who learns to drive by running whiskey for his father, Johnson, Senior, one of the biggest copper-still operators of all time, up in Ingle Hollow, near North Wilkesboro, in northwestern North Carolina, and grows up to be a famous stock car racing driver, rich, grossing $100,000 in 1963, for example, respected, solid, idolized in his hometown and throughout the rural South.

.

Shameless Self-Promotion

Rowley clearly enjoys thinking about spirits
as much as he does imbibing them...

~ Anne Brockhoff

Love the free airport wifi. I'm killing time in San Diego waiting to board a plane to New Orleans and came across Anne Brockhoff's piece in the Kansas City Star about cocktail reading, Spirits & Cocktails: Good reads on the rocks. If you're a home distiller new to cocktails, it's a decent little primer about what's out and relevant from an imbibing rather than distilling angle.

If you're a cocktail enthusiast, however, she notes a fantastic little book on the history and practice of distilling that you should add to your bedside reading. Yeah, I'm a dork: it's my own book, Moonshine!

But it's not just me that likes it. Micahel Dietsch over at A Dash of Bitters said about the book:

...I kinda understood what a still does, but it wasn’t until I read this book, with its intricate diagrams and instructions, that I really started to get it. There’s something about seeing the parts, illustrated, and how they work together, that helps me understand it.

I'll take that as a mission accomplished. Thanks for the plugs, guys.

.