Whiskey Geeks Keep Moonshine Tradition Alive

[Capper]

Making moonshine has gone from a backwoods black art to a high-end hobby practiced by "whiskey geeks" with a taste for top-shelf hooch.

Unlike their bootlegging predecessors, who cooked up big batches of white lightning and distributed the illegal booze out of the backs of cars, today's moonshiners focus on quality rather than quantity.
"It took me years, but with practice and dedication you can make any spirit every bit as good as a commercial distiller," says Dave Robison, 42, owner of Pioneer Spirits, a single-batch distillery in Chico, California. "You might not be able to reproduce it exactly, but it will be as good as anything you can buy on the top shelf."

Home distillation of liquor used to be the province of backwoods bootleggers. Up until 1974, when the world price of sugar skyrocketed, commercial moonshiners throughout the Southeastern United States made enough money making hooch that it was worth the risk of getting caught by federal revenuers.
Today, making your own liquor is as illegal as ever, and a lot less lucrative. In fact, it's considerably cheaper to buy it off the shelf.

As a result, today's home distillers are quintessential do-it-yourselfers. Many are engineers and techies, much like the liquor connoisseurs who attend the Whiskies of the World Expo each year in San Francisco. "We have a whole audience that we refer to as the whiskey geek," event founder and organizer Riannon Walsh says. "I think 90 percent of them are techies."

John Spidell misses the moonshine tradition. A former federal revenuer, the 65-year-old spent the first half of the '70s "busting up" illegal stills in North Carolina. His job sometimes required living in a sleeping bag under a piece of canvas for weeks at a time, watching a big still, waiting for the owner to appear. Smaller stills got less attention.

"A five- or six-hundred-gallon outfit wasn't worth wasting time on," he says. "I'd go back to my vehicle, get the C4 explosives and blasting caps, and I'd blow it up. There were only so many of us, and only so much time."
Spidell was blowing up simple pot stills, which were used to distill mash made from sugar, water, yeast and hog "shorts" (corn feed for hogs). After it was fermented, the mash would go into the boiler, where it was heated.

Because alcohol boils at a lower temperature than water, the vapors that rose from the mash contained more alcohol than the mash itself. Those rising vapors traveled through an angled lyne arm to a condenser, traditionally made of copper coil. The condensed spirits were collected and redistilled until they reached a sufficient proof, then bottled in quart-size mason jars or gallon-size plastic milk jugs.

Bootleggers delivered the illicit liquor to "shot houses" in the cities on Wednesdays and Thursdays, ensuring they were stocked for the weekend.

Today's home distillers are more likely to build a small reflux still and hide it in the garage. Unlike a pot still, the vapors rise through a column packed with copper wool or another high-surface-area material before being directed into the condenser. A beer keg makes a good boiler, and a homemade column and condenser are within the reach of anyone with basic welding and soldering skills and access to copper pipe.

The packed column makes the reflux still more efficient than a pot still, so it produces a higher-proof spirit on the first distillation. Still, the average home distiller isn't making any money on the endeavor.

Whiskey Geeks Keep Moonshine Tradition Alive

[Boy'nBlack]

I'm not sure why they'd hide a small still. Check your local laws, but you can distill spirits. You simply can't distribute it, and is for your own consumption. Not just moonshine out of these things, which is pretty undrinkable, you can make sour mash (whiskey) if ya wanted to. At least it won't grab ya by the boo-boo as badly.

Neat article! Need to check if it's illegal to ship stills >:)