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What Is Moonshine?
If it shed any light on the subject at all — and it doesn’t remotely — I might be tempted to elaborate on the actual term “moonshine,” and where it originated (i.e., rural England, circa 1780), when country smugglers hid illicit barrels of French brandy in shallow ponds to avoid the taxman, but were discovered one fated summer night, when the moon shone down so brightly on the surface of the pond that it looked as if a wheel of cheese were floating there. These bootleggers told the taxmen that they were raking the water not for contraband but for a creamy piece of that cheese.
This, however, is all rumor and rodomontade, easily sliced with an investigative blade. It is in any case generally agreed that the term “moonshine” comes from the term “moonraker,” which indeed comes from this legend.
It is also generally agreed that moonshine — or white-lightning, if you prefer, or white-whiskey, or mountain dew — entered America in the early 1800s, when Scots-Irish immigrants, who back home often made their whiskey without aging it, began settling the Appalachian region of America.
Still, the question remains: if many vodkas are essentially white whiskies, and if many whiskies made of corn mash are not moonshine, what, in the final analysis, is the distinguishing characteristic of moonshine?
The answer, it turns out, is this: illegality.
Moonshine, notorious for its high proof — frequently hovering around 190 (yowza!) — is any distilled spirit concocted in an unlicensed still. That includes so-called splo, or bathtub gin, or the harrowing hooch cooked up by your next of kin.
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Man, I wish I could have been there.
A friend of mine got in on the legalized “moonshine” with Sugarlands Distilling Co. in Gatlinburg and he helped supply a lot of the quart size samples. I also included a quart of the revenue free stuff from a local “supplier” for the brave to try. Surprisingly, it was a pretty big hit as well!
I went to UT in Knoxville. It was sort of amazing how many little stills there were around campus, hidden in closets all over the place, making a pint at a time. It was a real center of hobby liquor production, and all strictly illegal.
Just remember that it is poison. Use sparingly.
“What is White Lightning?
Lighter fluid.
Heh. My father had a still running in his basement at the age of 14 (his father was Irish, so why not?). My Swedish grandmother, famous for her dedicated oblivion to things she did not want to see, dutifully ignored it until a meter reader brought it to her attention.
According to my father, the extraordinarily high proof and purity met with the approval not only of his friends (and likely his father), but of some of the local drunks too.
If I remember my federal laws right – you are allowed to distill up to 1 pint per year, strictly for your own consumption, and anything beyond that is illegal. Not for any lingering reasons of temperance, but because it must be taxed.
Popcorn Sutton!! I have an archaeologist buddy who worked with him before he committed suicide — one rough life right there. Tell me, y’all know anything about the Dancing Outlaw? I’ll be in my holler drankin on sum’er der clear!
Oh yeah, the dancin’ outlaw Jesco White from West ByGod!
Yessir! He’s Jesco, he’s Jessie, and Elvis!
Well done Concrete!
Yep, he is one crazy sumbitch and one helluva a dancer!
“So I held the butcher knife to her throat and said woman, if you wanna live to see tomorrow you better start frying them eggs a better than you been fryin em. I don’t like sloppy slimy eggs”.
I guess we all have our lighter fluid sniffing phases.
Phase?
My dear fellow, sniffing lighter fluid is, like drinking Sterno, one of life’s little pleasures. ;-)
Speaking of which, have you ever danced with the devil by the pale moonlight?
This is an amusing post. Really…. My only moonshine story isn’t at all funny, though. In the Prohibition era, my dad’s father and uncle made moonshine in our little town in Wyoming, which was also populated by mostly Mormons. Hmm..I wonder who their customers were…Well, anyway, my grandfather was an alcoholic and so would sneak a fair bit of it for himself. Apparently, the mysterious loss of their supply angered his brother, who put strychnine in a bottle. Of course that was the one my grandfather drank. He had lost his wife (my grandmother) two years earlier from an accident. My dad (age 8) came home from fishing with his friends to find his father convulsing in the house. The dad died a few hours later, leaving three young orphans. So, both mother and father were dead before age 30. The three children were farmed out to relatives. Luckily, my father got picked by a really nice family. As a child, I only ever overheard this story. It was never told to me straight up. I’d just quietly hang around and hear it while he was talking to other adults in the barn, or standing by a truck with cattle in it, or some other farm scene. Life was hard back then.
My only other encounter with homemade hooch was when my husband’s friend brought a gallon jug of hand-crafted mezcal to our house. These folks were from Guanajuato, and this was the real-deal, homemade from the blue agave. I don’t drink alcohol—(GLMG–good little Mormon girl)—but hubby doesn’t follow my beliefs. When they took the lid off that jar–WOW! You could see the fumes rising into the air in a shimmer. Clear as water, but apparently wicked, wicked strong.
Whoa, Cowgirl! That’s one heck of a story.
Oh, I forgot about that song!
@Ray Harvey:
It is a crazy tale. I was once telling it to friend and my tween daughter asked later, “Was that a book you read Mom?” Nope, just your family history. Despite all the trauma, my dad was a really kind, fun, and hard working father. I credit my mother for helping him feel loved and wanted. I think he did, too.
Other parts of the country might have been more civilized in the 20s and 30s, but Wyoming was still out there in the Wild West. The weather was hard, and so the people had to be tough.
Kinda messy when it blows up in the closet, too.
Years ago when the hippie back to the land movement was still going, a company called Garden Way found a larger market for its country oriented how to books.
One of them, which as near as I can tell came out in 1980, was on apple cider. Hard cider, to be specific. After all, if it’s not fermented properly, you can’t store it for nearly as long, right? It went into varieties of cider apples, and included what varieties of crab apples added depth and complexity to the flavor.
It also had a detailed chapter – just for completeness, you understand – on how to use a pressure cooker as a pot still to concentrate your product. Length of tubing, precisely how much to waste at first to be sure any methanol (boils at 64.7 °C at sea level) comes off first before you started collecting the ethanol (boils at 78.2 °C at sea level) enriched product you want, and how much of the tailings to waste at the end. Just as a theoretical discussion, you understand, because to distill anything in your home is illegal.
The book was interesting to read, and very well written. It later added a coauthor and got a bit fancier, but the original author was a lady named Annie Proulx. Yes, that one. I told you it was well written.
No kidding. wow. I guess that would’ve fallen under living archaeology.
I went to school with a guy whose family had been farming in Northern California for over a century. His grandfather made moonshine, his grandmother was teetotal. He stashed the finished product all over the property, because when she found it she’d break the bottles. She finally prevailed on him to stop distilling, which he did. The thing was, he didn’t recall all of his stash locations. My friend found a few of them in his youth.
California could surprise you. I used to go to this old school barbershop, which at one point hired a woman who was licensed as a cosmetologist. That meant that she couldn’t use the straight razor around your ears and to define the hairline at the back and shave the hair on the back of your neck. She had to use clippers.
Anyway, she told me that her family had been in California since before the gold rush. Pause.
“Oh?”
“They came over with the Donner Party.”
I never quite got up the nerve to ask.
Visit the memorial outside of Truckee, it’s a cool little museum and nature hike. Avoid the cafeteria.
Now that’s what I’d call a coyote date.
I guess this is the other side of that:
And yes, Emmylou’s version a couple of years later was great.
Sounds like my senior prom night, to be totally honest.
I grew up in E. TN. Used to walk in the woods around the area hunting squirrels. One afternoon, I walked up on a working still. I hadn’t been particularly quiet and as a result no one was to be seen. I very carefully backtracked my way away from that still being careful to place my feet in exactly the same spots I had walked before. I didn’t know if I had been lucky and missed the traps or there weren’t any but I was taking no chances. Close call.
12 Likes and Main Feed…..Hmmm,,,I’ll make it 13 in a minute….so we moved to Ellijay. GA yes, from Boston, but hold on now, my husband’s kin is from there and all over GA. We couldn’t afford to buy a house in Boston (moved there for business and “band” reasons, but that’s another story), so we moved back for a spell to NW GA, to my husband’s grandma’s abandoned tin roofed 4 room house. She was in a nursing home and it was free, just pay the utilities said my father-in-law. There was a red pump house and smoke house. My husband’s dad had to take a shower in there when no plumbing in the main house. We had a plumbing problem so the “plumber” showed up and fixed it. My husband had a cold and allergies. He said he had a cure. He pulled out a mason jar of clear liquid and told my husband to take a swig. He did…..it cleared his passages for six months……our first intro to moonshine….I fell in love with the place. We got barbecue from the Pink Pig and groceries from Piggly Wiggly. When my adopted mutt Stanley went missing, every kid on a bike scoured the woods for him. We found Pootsie, our Calico cat of 18 years, at the dump. The vet saved her from feline leukemia, administering meds all weekend, after saving an injured baby bear……
When I was in high school, my brother and the neighbor kid and I distilled some ethanol with chemistry class type glassware. Took forever to make about a half pint. I don’t remember what we started with. Likely home made hard cider. We were about as far as possible from moonshine country: small town coastal Oregon.
My grandfather got out of Poland and worked as the ship’s engineer on the Good Ship Goniff, running booze for the Bronfmanns from Canada to the US during the Prohibition..
“Goniff”, btw, translates as “thief.”
Wait…..there’s more – so we got jobs in NW Georgia where we met our plumber who made moonshine and cleared my husband’s sinuses – we got jobs. I got a job as a receptionist for a log home company – the only job in the paper. I had to answer the phone: “It’s a great day at Fireside!!”. Once, the owner called in and said “Great balls of fire! What a great sounding greeting!” My husband got a job with local AT&T. So his co-worker buddy invited us to dinner. They gushed over their new baby, who had the most wonderful tuft of flaming red hair. She slept well because they put rice in her formula. On the menu that evening was squirrel and dumplings. I couldn’t do it. Not to be disrespectful, I chowed on fried okra and cornbread and gushed over the cute baby….at least no moonshine…..