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STILL LIFE
Let me tell you about a typically modern bootlegger. He's an
average, everyday home-distiller I'll call, "Merry Moonshiner."
Ha! What a hippie name! Moonshiner isn't a hippie, though, and that's
not his real name. He lives with his family in an undisclosed
well-ventilated location, earning his fun the old-fashioned way.
Illegally, and with a good buzz. After all, what could be more
American than a hearty slice of Mom's Apple Pie, with a little moonshine
on the side?
Moonshiner doesn't consider himself a rebel rabble-rouser. Instead,
he's just an average Joe who happens to make low-tech/high-octane
intoxicants in the comfort of his own environment--in spite of his
government's insistence he shouldn't.
"I do consider myself a normal person," 34-year-old Moonshiner says.
"I'm married, have kids...and lead a regular lifestyle."
Contrary to the bootlegger archetype, instead of lying around every day
tying one on, Moonshiner says he walks around daily "with a tie on." He is
a senior management consultant with a background in business economics.
"I'm a healthy guy, too," he says. "I play a lot of sports, and don't
have a beer belly. I used to go out a lot until the kids came along."
Even though the tykes are a part of the mix when he's cooking around
the house, Moonshiner says the kids are under the implicit impression that
their pappy is simply making beer.
"At this stage, I'd like to avoid them telling their friends at school,
'Dad made moonshine last weekend.' It's not that I don't want them to know
I just want to protect them.
"I use different kinds of malted grains, and as I grind the malt
manually, the kids like to help me. When they're older, I'll teach them a
bit more about the process. I think it's nice to know that beer and
whiskies are made from grain, what fermentation is, and that most products
we buy are not as technologically advanced as the manufacturers want us to
believe."
NOW... ABOUT MY FLAMING BODY...
Okay, so what are the physical gambles?
"Not much risk to be honest," beams Moonshiner, "but there are some
basic guidelines you should keep in mind. The main risk is that alcohol
and open fire is a dangerous combination."
Moonshiner says most home distillers use electrical heat sources. He
prefers to cook his stills with gas because the temperature is easier to
control. That is, if you're in control. Two years ago, he almost brought
the house down, but got lucky.
"I was distilling a batch during the winter," he recalls. "It just
started freezing that day, and after dinner I heated up my still. It
normally takes a few hours to complete a batch, including cleaning
materials, and other preparations. My wife called me in the house. I got a
call from a colleague about a meeting with a client the next day. We had a
long conversation, during which I completely forgot what I was doing in
the garage.
"After that, I put down the phone I got myself a beer and sat down in
front of the TV, thinking about the issues we had to bring to the table
the next day."
Moonshiner says he relaxed for about an hour, contemplating his job,
before his wife finally inquired about his side project. He dropped his
beer and ran to his ruined still.
"In order to condense the alcohol vapor," Moonshiner explains, "the
condenser is fed with running tap water. Unfortunately, the hose feeding
the condenser split, spilling water all over the garage and driveway and
causing the still's boiler to collapse."
Luckily, when the hose burst, the alcohol vapor couldn't reach
"condensing temperature" and so an explosion didn't happen. And to cinch
matters, the meltdown of the still snuffed the gas flame. Moonshiner says
he got away with a little water damage to his garage and a skating-rink
driveway, but learned an important lesson.
"Never leave a working still."
BEER: THE GATEWAY BEVERAGE
Not surprisingly, Moonshiner's first shot at making hooch came when
he made a shitty tasting batch of homebrewed beer and didn't want to flush
it. Checking through one of his homebrew magazines, he came across an
article on distilling, and says from that point on, he was seduced by the
distillation "virus." Many homebrewers suffer a duplicitous malady. But it
wasn't just the fact that he could save that particular batch of brew that
caught his attention.
"It really started with a natural curiosity about how things are made,"
Moonshiner spouts. "It's the excitement of turning up the heat and
watching the first drops of alcohol leaving the condenser, tasting it, and
trying to determine which ingredient exemplifies the heart of the
alcohol--I find it very relaxing to do.
"As a management consultant, most projects I work on are high-risk for
me and the company I work for. That gives me a lot of stress. We're one of
the top five auditing firms. Given that, I find it very relaxing to do
something creative at home. Andone of the fun things I like to do is
produce my own liquor."
WHY SO SMALL-TIME?
Most of the booze from
Moonshiner's "Office of Homeland Insobriety" is for
personal consumption, but he admits giving a few jars away to
deserving compatriots and a hushed circle of close friends and
relatives.
"It would be possible for me
to produce more and start selling it," Moonshiner ponders,
calculating the character of his prime elixirs. "Quite often I
appreciate my own liquor more than commercial ones, as I can
fine-tune the taste myself."
Moonshiner considers his options.
"I suppose I could transform this into a commercial operation.
The quality is quite good, but since it's not legal, I feel that
would bring on certain risks I'd like to avoid."
THE MONSTER MASH
"White Lightning makes you go
blind!" "Rotgut kills ya'--eats your very entrails from
the inside!" "Gives ya' siphon breath!" These are the
sort of rumors that hounded moonshine and its makers for years.
Well, not any more!
Back in the days of Prohibition,
hotrod bootleggers raced against cops to get hooch out of the woods
and into the mouths of decent American citizens like you and I.
They, being amateur mechanics of the resourceful kind, stole parts
from whatever was handy to manufacture their stills, which often
included discarded automobile radiators. Therefore, the rocket fuel
they produced did rot guts, blinded folks, and even killed
quite a number of people. (After prohibition, the surviving
bootleggers started up NASCAR, which usually only rots the guts of
those who hate NASCAR.)
These days, still-making
components of the highest caliber are sold in brew-shops and over
the web with impunity. Moonshiner asserts there are two basic types
of home distillers: 1) People who ferment sugar and use a so-called
"reflux still to produce 95% clean and odorless alcohol"
and 2) people who like to use grain and operate "an
old-fashioned pot still," to make bourbon, whiskey, and gin.
"Making alcohol is an
extremely simple process," concedes Moonshiner, adding that the
most technical aspects consist of a little welding and being able to
follow a recipe.
"It's very easy to do. You
don't need any training and it's very cheap. If you think about it,
during prohibition, thousands and thousands of stills were operating
throughout the country. Distilling alcohol is nothing more than
heating a fermented liquid, and collecting the vapors. That's
all."
Important Links to
Home-Distillation Sites:
http://www.stillcooker.servebeer.com/
http://www.dangerouslaboratories.org/moon1.html
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/new_distillers/
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