Moonshine: It’s Not Just For Hillbillies Anymore

SAN DIEGO (TNA)—“We had a fort in a canyon, a big fort,” recalled Chris Harmon, reminiscing about his early teens.

“It had underground rooms,” he continued. “In one of these underground rooms we had a still. That was when I first experimented with making corn-mash bourbon.”

You might expect that Harmon was speaking of a misspent youth in Kentucky, Tennessee, or North Carolina. No, this neophyte whiskey-maker was practicing his dark art in a sunny suburb of San Diego.

A few simple household items is all it takes to get a homemade still brewing.

Harmon’s father, a scientist, first demonstrated for his 12-year-old son how to distill some fermented apple cider they had brought home from a trip to nearby Julian.

“We set up a little still made of Pyrex,” Harmon said, “and he showed me how to distill it, and separate the alcohol from the water, thinking that he was just teaching me some chemistry in a little science experiment.

“I always remembered that,” he added, “and then as a teenager I thought, ‘Hmm, maybe I can make my own alcohol.’ The first stuff that came out was crap, but as crazy teenagers we drank it anyway.”

Using information he gleaned from “The Foxfire Book,” a collection of histories about Appalachian life, Harmon not only figured out how to build a still, but also how to devise a mash recipe that would result in something worth drinking.

Harmon started small, but by his senior year in high school was producing gallons of high-quality whiskey. Harmon and his partner-in-crime, a fellow student, had refined their technique to the point where they were distilling 15 gallons of mash in an afternoon, all while their peers were working part-time jobs or attending football practice.

“If we knew it was a ‘still day,’ we’d have to hurry home, and get ice,” Harmon said. “We’d drive over to this hotel, and we knew where their ice room was, so we’d go and steal ice – we had to get everything done and the kitchen cleaned up and the smell gone before my parents came home.

“Our favorite smell-removing thing was burnt toast – if you burn toast in a toaster, it takes care of a lot of smells,” he added.

Toward the end of his whiskey-making days, Harmon began incorporating charred white oak after reading about it in Jack Daniels magazine ads.

“We’d get glass jars and put these charred sticks into the jars, and then pour in the whiskey,” Harmon explained. “Two weeks later the stuff is caramel-colored and looks like whiskey. And then it started to taste good. Once we started double-distilling, it was smooth, it was very drinkable – and we would drink it a lot.

Author Matt Rowley says moonshine is an honorable American tradition.

“Then we started aging it,” he continued. “Soon we were making so much we couldn’t possibly drink it all. Then we were having six-month-old whiskey and it was really smooth. We’d put it against Jack Daniels, and it tasted better. Now I know that Jack Daniels is hardly the end-all and be-all of whiskey, but at the time, we thought that was the best.”

Far from an isolated example, people like Harmon can be found all over the United States, even in the posh neighborhoods of Manhattan. No longer exclusive to Appalachian backwoodsmen, moonshine is now being produced by people from all walks of life. Home-brewers, chefs and even accountants are getting involved.

“It is ubiquitous, and it’s just totally off the radar,” said Matthew B. Rowley, author of “Moonshine!” (Lark Books), a new book devoted to the history and practice of illicit spirits production that includes numerous recipes as well as instructions on how to build a copper still.

“The people who are getting into distilling today are just deeply curious people,” Rowley said. “I think 30 years ago some of them would have been the guys with muscle cars with the hoods popped open, and all of them sort of leaning in admiring each others’ engine and manifold.”

Distilling spirits is a fairly straightforward procedure, so it’s not surprising that so many hobbyists are trying their hand at it. Broadly, the steps are:

1) Find something with sugar in it. Fruit and grain are most commonly used, but some people just use straight sugar. In the case of grain, you’ll need at least some that has sprouted, which makes enzymes that convert starch to sugar. This is known as the “mash.”

2) Cook your mash. This allows the enzymes to go to work, converting starches into fermentable sugar.

3) Add yeast. The yeast eats the sugar, converting it into alcohol. This step is known as fermentation.

4) Heat the fermented liquid in a still at a temperature low enough to release the alcohol as vapor. Collect the vapor and condense it into liquid, discarding the heads and tails (the heads and tails are the first and last substances out of a still, which can contain hazardous compounds).

Considering the relative simplicity of distilling, the truth of the matter is that there are only so many places where things can go wrong, provided you are using the proper ingredients, procedures and equipment.

That being said, unlike beer- and wine-making, home distilling is still illegal. To the layperson, informed only by oft-recycled tales of people going blind from Prohibition-era bathtub gin or dying in still explosions, the laws prohibiting home distilling likely seem completely sane and rational – on the books to protect the public from being poisoned by bad hooch.

But that notion falls apart when subjected to close scrutiny and a stiff dose of reality.

“There’s two obvious hazards,” explained Steve McCarthy, owner of Clear Creak Distillery in Portland, Ore. “One, of course, is health – that you’ll make something poisonous to drink. That’s pretty hard to do. It may not be very good, but it probably will be drinkable.

“The other one is the risk of explosion, and that can happen, but it’s awfully hard to blow this stuff up because it’s not that flammable,” he added. “I don’t know about grain distillates for vodka, but most fruit distillates are not very volatile. They don’t create fumes that can easily be ignited.”

As with most prohibitive laws, there is a grain of truth in the health-and-safety argument. Historically, stills made with lead solder, for example, produced lead-contaminated booze. Also, some unscrupulous moonshine distillers would adulterate their final product with hazardous chemicals.

Finally, some greedy distillers included in their product the heads and tails, which can contain substances like methanol, a potent neurotoxin that can cause blindness.

But these are issues dating back to the Prohibition era, when bootleggers rushed to cash in on black-market booze, and put profits ahead of potability. Before that, home distilling was a common and widespread practice in the United States.

“You’ve never been able to escape the idea that making your own whiskey was really something that people were entitled to,” Rowley said. “It was part of the whole package of liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

“When the government started to put some [tax] on this, that was when people said, ‘The hell with this, we’re going out to the frontier,’ Kentucky and the Carolinas,” he said. “It was part of the big migration that moved west along the Appalachian Mountains into Virginia and Kentucky – places that today are considered the strong-bed of historical folk distilling techniques.”

The more one learns about the process of distilling, and the steps needed to secure permits to distill spirits legally, the more it seems clear that what most concerns the feds is the loss of tax revenue, not the health risks.

The health argument seems particularly disingenuous when considering the fact that, if people are making spirits for their own consumption, they certainly aren’t going to employ lead-soldered stills or imbibe methanol.

Regardless, the reality is that unless one has a large chunk of spare cash lying around, legal distilling is not a viable option.

“It’s cumbersome, it’s not an easy process, it’s time-consuming, and unless your intent is to engage in the business, I don’t know whether it’s worthwhile to pursue,” said Art Resnick, director of Media Affairs for the Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau. “If you’re just doing it for the heck of doing it, it’s a burdensome process.”

Purchasing a federal alcohol bond is one of the more financially significant burdens. As Resnick explains, “In essence, what you’re doing is saying that your production facility is capable of making this much, and here’s a bond to cover the federal excise tax if [you] refuse to pay it. We hold the bond, and if you should default on your taxes, we can go against that bond.”

With federal excise taxes of $13.50 per proof gallon, that’s a sizeable bond for the average hobbyist to post. Producing 100-proof whiskey would mean paying the feds $13.50 for every gallon. Add to that the requirement of maintaining a building that’s not a residence, and one can quickly see why Resnick calls the process burdensome.

However, burdensome doesn’t mean impossible, as evidenced by the aforementioned Clear Creek Distillery.

According to a biography posted at www.clearcreekdistillery.com, McCarthy started making booze because he wanted to find the best use for the fruit from his family’s orchard. Having encountered traditional eaux-des-vies during European travels, McCarthy knew he could produce stuff just as good with the great fruit grown in Oregon.

“If you can fill out all their forms, jump through all their little hoops,” McCarthy said, “buy the right kind of padlock, for example, and if you can show where the money’s coming from – they’re concerned about people laundering money. You have to show you’re not a convicted felon, and you have to be able to get a federal alcohol bond, which appears to be not much more difficult than getting car insurance. Once you do all that, then the feds must give you a license.

“It’s not discretionary – they can’t say we’re not very impressed with you, we won’t give you a license,” he added.

And, McCarthy says, it’s not too expensive, tabbing his own distilling license at $500 a year, and his state license at about $100. “If you hire a lawyer to do all that for you,” he said, “then you could run up a pretty good tab. But if you just grind it out yourself, you’ll get there.

“You do have to have a building,” McCarthy continued, “but it doesn’t have to be a separate building. It must be physically secure – if you’re renting a portion of the building you have to have adequate security because they’re very sensitive about losing revenue from the disappearance of distilled spirits. That isn’t to say that you aren’t going to spend a hell of a lot of money on equipment. But in terms of the regulatory issues, it can be quite straightforward and relatively cheap.”

Clear Creek is not alone. Today there are approximately 90 micro-distilleries in the United States, including ones owned by Dogfish Head and Anchor Brewing, two of the nation’s top microbreweries.

While this is encouraging news for consumers, the fact remains that small-batch distilling is not legally viable for the hobbyist. And until lawmakers can be persuaded to permit small amounts of legal distilling, small-scale illicit spirits production will continue.

Unsurprisingly, much of this illicit distilling takes place among home-brewers. What’s amusing, though, is how many brewers try it once or twice before abandoning it as a waste of time.

“I had some bad batches of beer that I wanted to recycle,” said Bob Brown, a San Diego home-brewer. “I know a couple of others who tried it, but they didn’t keep up with it. It wasn’t worth it. I certainly wouldn’t recommend that anybody do it if they just want to produce alcohol, because you can buy decent booze for not very much money.

“If you can go to the store and buy vodka for $10 a half-gallon,” he added, “why would you spend all this time making something that’s going to be worse?”

While producing quality, drinkable hooch can be a daunting challenge, it’s a challenge that Rowley hopes people will embrace nonetheless.

 “I want people to write to me and say, ‘You know what? That corn whiskey recipe, that wasn’t bad, but what I ended up doing was taking that, and doing y, and doing x,’” Rowley said. “Good, good, good – do it. Go baby, go. Do it. Tell me what you come up with. Better yet, share it with me!”