When you can find the good stuff, you'll know why people love it. He's part of a growing movement that's putting good—and legal—moonshine on the map. Of the new-age brands, a few stand above the rest. Buffalo Trace Distillery in Kentucky creates a moonshine called White Dog, a moniker reflecting a colloquial nickname for the drink.
With a sweet vanilla finish, it honors the first moonshine pioneers who distilled the clear and unaged spirit with a hint of sweet corn. See the recipe for apple pie moonshine here. In Brooklyn's Pfizer building, you'll find Hrabowsky's Standard Wormwood Distillery , whose product is made with equal parts corn and rye , as opposed to the traditional Southern moonshine made strictly from corn.
Photo: Standard Wormwood Distillery. Although Hrabowsky believes the future of moonshine is unpredictable, he is delighted to see an uptick in craft distilleries pushing the boundaries to create sipping moonshines, eschewing a new era for the spirit.
To-Dos allows Tasting Table members to store and remember all of the food and drink recommendations we send out each week. You've now added the To-Dos below to your personal list. Happy eating! There was a lot of pride in operations that could put forth a quality spirit for their communities. That sentiment lives on in many modern and now legally concocted moonshines enjoyed today and is forever cemented as a part of moonshine history.
Quick clarification: moonshiners make the liquor, bootleggers transport it. Of course, when cars entered the picture, its meaning was expanded to include anyone who smuggled liquor. As soldiers returned home armed with new mechanical skills following World War II , they quickly took on work in their communities as bootleggers.
By modifying cars, these modern bootleggers were able to maximize how much moonshine they could transport, while developing the necessary driving skills required to evade the law. It is not uncommon for insects or small animals to fall into the mash while it's fermenting.
That's pretty gross, but it probably wouldn't kill anyone. You might have heard stories about people drinking moonshine and going blind -- or even dying. These stories aren't urban legends -- they're true.
During Prohibition, when moonshine was made and sold in "speakeasies" across the United States, thousands of people died from drinking bad moonshine. There isn't anything inherently dangerous about moonshine -- at least no more dangerous than any other alcoholic drink.
When made properly, it is simply very strong alcohol with a very hard taste, or "kick," because it hasn't been aged. It is usually very potent, as high as proof , which is about 75 percent alcohol. That high alcohol content can be pretty dangerous in itself; but again, the biggest problem is that there aren't any regulations to make sure that it's made properly.
Some distillers realized that part of the appeal of moonshine was that "kick. Many of these ingredients are extremely poisonous , and many people died from drinking it.
Besides poisonous ingredients, there are at least two manufacturing mistakes that can lead to a poisonous batch of moonshine. There has to be a good reason to go to all the trouble of making moonshine. Actually, there have been several reasons, but they all boil down to one thing: government control of the alcohol trade. Moonshining began very early in American history.
Shortly after the Revolution , the United States found itself struggling to pay for the expense of fighting a long war. The solution was to place a federal tax on liquors and spirits. The American people, who had just fought a war to get out from under oppressive British taxes among other purposes , were not particularly pleased.
So they decided to just keep on making their own whisky, completely ignoring the federal tax. For these early moonshiners, making and selling alcohol wasn't a hobby or a way to make extra cash -- it was how they survived. Farmers could survive a bad year by turning their corn into profitable whisky, and the extra income made a harsh frontier existence almost bearable. To them, paying the tax meant they wouldn't be able to feed their families.
Federal agents called " Revenuers " were attacked when they came around to collect the tax, and several were tarred and feathered. All this resentment finally exploded in , when several hundred angry citizens took over the city Pittsburgh , Pennsylvania.
President George Washington called for a gathering of militiamen under federal authority. Thirteen-thousand troops dispersed the mob and captured its leaders. This Whisky Rebellion was the first major test of federal authority for the young government. Despite the failure of the rebellion, moonshining continued throughout the United States, especially in Kentucky, Virginia, the Carolinas and other southern states.
Excise taxes on alcohol didn't go away, so moonshiners always had incentive to avoid the law. Gun fights between moonshiners and revenuers became the stuff of legend.
These battles escalated in the s as the government tried to collect on the excise tax to fund the Civil War. Moonshiners and Ku Klux Klansmen joined forces, and many pitched battles were fought. The tactics of the moonshiners grew more desperate and brutal, intimidating locals who might give away the locations of stills and attacking IRS officials and their families. The tide of public sentiment began to turn against the moonshiners. The temperance movement , which sought to ban alcohol, gathered steam as the United States headed into the 20th century.
In the early s, states began passing laws that banned alcohol sales and consumption. In fact, it's now legit. The first legal moonshine distillery in Tennessee opened its doors in , and others followed in Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina. There are some estimates that more than a million illegal moonshine stills are in operation in the United States, making the production of the clear, high-potency brew more prevalent and widespread now than it has ever been in history.
And, it's potentially very dangerous to make at home due to its ingredients, byproducts, and flammability. Moonshine, also known as "hooch" or "homebrew," is made by fermenting a sugar source to produce ethanol. Traditionally, moonshine is made from a mash of corn and sugar. The alcohol is separated from the mash by a distillation process. One big difference between moonshine and other liquors like whiskey or bourbon is that moonshine is not aged. Moonshine may conjure up stereotypical images of "country-folk" distilling and transporting their potent potables in jugs branded "XXX" during the middle of the night to avoid detection.
What has changed is that now, the ability to buy commercially produced, all-copper moonshine stills on the internet has taken some of the danger out of the moonshine distilling process. Despite this improvement, that does not mean that all moonshine is safe to drink. Plenty of moonshine continues to be brewed in stills made from automobile radiator parts and other dangerous materials.
Moonshine was once an important financial aspect of the Appalachian economy, providing a source of income in bad economic times and in areas where poverty was rampant. Like any good produced in the U. Moonshine experienced a deep lull when the U. In recent years, moonshine seems to have had a resurgence. Now with the trend for higher prices at the liquor store, especially for imported spirits, moonshining has hit the spotlight again.
In , a BBC investigation into moonshining in the United States found that as many as a million Americans were breaking the law by making moonshine. In the same year, Tennessee started selling legal hooch in big box stores like Walmart and Sam's Club. On the internet, several websites offer stills made of all copper for sale, ranging from 1-gallon personal models to gallon commercial outfits. One seller claimed the demand for his copper stills doubled in recent years and that he had shipped stills to every state in the U.
Illegal moonshine remains dangerous because it is mostly brewed in makeshift stills. It can be dangerous on two levels, both during the distilling process and when consuming it. The distilling process itself produces alcohol vapors, which are highly flammable. The flammable vapors are one major reason why moonshine stills are almost always located outside, although it makes them easier to be spotted by law enforcement. The threat of vaporous explosions is too great if confined inside.
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