In 1978, under the Carter administration, brewing beer in your own home became legal. You can brew as much as 300 gallons per year for your own use, and many people do so. They find this an appealing hobby. But you cannot distill your brew into liquor. It is illegal to do so, even if you make just a pint, even if you are not going to sell it, even if you are not going to drink it: home distilling is forbidden. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms is dedicated to finding you if you distill at home, as it is in finding and punishing any moonshiner. It's no surprise that they haven't been able to wipe out illegal stills, but it might be a surprise what forms those stills take and who runs them. The story of one moonshiner (who says he is no longer practicing this particular outlawry) and a description of modern moonshining is in _Chasing the White Dog: An Amateur Outlaw's Adventures in Moonshine_ (Simon and Schuster) by Max Watman. It isn't a how-to guide, though anyone who wants to practice home distilling will find advice, especially on what not to do. It is an amusing account of his own, sometimes successful, attempts at distilling, a history of distilling in America, and a look into the work of the moonshiners and of the new legal micro-distillers who are producing artisanal liquor.
Watman's first attempt at distilling was a patriotic try of recreating the liquor brewed by George Washington himself. The first decades of the nineteenth century were good for booze, with bourbon being perfected and over a hundred patents being given for gadgets of the distillation process. The boom ended with liquor taxes levied to pay for the Civil War, making moonshining without paying the revenue tax illegal. One of the happier aspects of this account by this self-described "bibliophilic, bespectacled Jewish boy" is that he participates in every aspect of the distilling scene he finds. This means he hangs out with revenuers who are using the latest gadgetry to find moonshiners. They may have an archetype of taking hatchets to stills hidden in the woods, but plenty of moonshiners are running industrial operations with stills holding hundreds of gallons. He sits through the trial of men who ran a large-scale moonshining operation (they are accused of making 1.5 million gallons) to show how difficult it is to prosecute such offenses. He finds a "dusty little shop in upstate New York" where he can buy yeast, rye, barley, and various hardware. The woman at the till assures him she was not entering his purchases into the computer, and says, "You were never here. I don't know you." Because there is a historic NASCAR / moonshining connection, he hangs out with Junior Johnson, a stock-car legend and former bootlegger who invented the 180 degree "bootleg turn" which might have been useless on the track but helped him outrun the feds. Johnson says he had fast cars on the track, but he'd "never run anything as fast as the fastest cars I had on the highway," which could be modified and supercharged with no rules except physics. "Bootlegging," Watman says, "was once upon a time the farm league for race-car driving. White lightning is a link to the straightforward, small-money, Southern roots of the sport." NASCAR is ambivalent about such roots; Johnson says the drivers today are "ice-cream drivers." Johnson, we learn, has joined in a legal, small-batch distillation business for "Junior Johnson's Midnight Moon," about which we may trust Watman's description: "a very good white dog." A step further and he is on the track himself, having been through a quick training course. Watman further checks out the wicked liquor made in "Moonshine Capital USA," Franklin County in southwest Virginia. Tons of pure sugar go into the blackpot-stills, and out comes a mass-produced vile liquid that somehow winds up in "nip joints" in Philadelphia. He tries some; it is "as if you took the stomach acid from acid reflux and strained it through a cheesecloth and blended in a dash of simple syrup to sweeten it... the only liquor I've ever had that made me feel that I was hurting myself." He gets hammered at a conference for home distillers. When he asks a revenuer who had successfully busted a bunch of moonshiners if any of them were still moonshining, he gets the reply, "They're still breathing, ain't they?" Watman has written an introduction to a world most of us didn't know had such a wide extent. His book ranges from self-deprecating stories of bad batches to happy tales of clever duplicity to dark stories of poison and death, all told with a fine good humor perfect for an intoxicating topic.
