Moonshine always reminds me of the time the great P. J. O’Rourke got hold of a jug of the stuff in college and it caused him to be struck blind. It seems that O’Rourke and some of his buddies in Ohio went down into Kentucky looking for moonshine to bring back for a party that night. He drank from the jug—amount unknown—and by the time he awoke next morning all he could see was white! He spent several terrifying moments until, at last, he realized he was on his hands and knees with his head hanging in somebody’s toilet.
With that warning ringing in your ears, Dear Reader—come, let’s investigate this 10,000-year-old phenomenon known as moonshine. Contrary to popular legend, “moonshine” does not take its name from dark Appalachian mountain hollows and a sinister time of night when the moon shines bright but from (we are told), of all things, Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor (1602), in which the term is meant to denote a “pleasant radiance.” By the 1780s, English magazines were speaking of an alcoholic concoction at “a house of call for smugglers where one is sure of meeting always with genuine Moonshine.”
The author of this informative study tells us, right up front, “People do not drink Moonshine to grow taller, stronger, or smarter. They drink it to get drunk. Fast”—which is not surprising, since moonshine can contain at least twice the alcohol content of store-bought booze. Science says that the distilling of alcohol has been in vogue since the days of Aristotle, who, in 350 b.c., described in detail the operations of a condensing still used to make liquor. Modern moonshine as a commercial product was born when, in the 1400s, governments from Scotland to China made illegal the production of spirits sold without subjecting them to taxes—which became the formal definition of moonshine.
Moonshine has been a feature of American life since before the revolution and almost started another one when, in 1791, citizens of western Pennsylvania and elsewhere were provoked to violence by the imposition of a whiskey tax sponsored by Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton. For three years these home distillers raised hell and refused to pay, beating, shooting, stabbing, and tarring-and-feathering tax collectors trying to enforce it. At length, President Washington, at the head of an 13,000-man army, put down what became known as the Whiskey Rebellion—at which point the distillers simply hid their stills in the woods and became moonshiners.
Pure moonshine is as clear as spring water, and odorless. People are sorely put when trying to describe its taste—everything from gasoline, to rubbing alcohol, to lighter fluid—one has even said “hot tide water.” The problem with moonshine—even if you can get past the taste and the effects—is that if you get the wrong kind it can kill you, make you blind, or produce various permanent neurological afflictions. That is because in the distilling process, a substance called methanol is produced. This is also known as “wood alcohol” and is strong poison that once ingested causes the body’s cells to produce deadly formaldehyde. In a proper distillation, the methanol will be bled off, leaving only ethyl alcohol, or ethanol—the good stuff (yes, the same thing they’re putting in your gas tank) for you to drink.
Some moonshiners are simply too greedy, lazy, stupid, or sadistic to get rid of the methanol, and should you somehow lay your hands on a tainted jar or jug, pleasant surprises will not overtake you. It is impossible to test by the naked eye, nose, tongue, etc. Thousands of people die each year from methanol poisoning—according to this account, some 18,000 people in Indonesia alone, and the Moscow Times is credited with saying that 40,000 Russians perish from it annually. The good news is that most moonshiners crave return customers, and so are more meticulous in their craft.
Moonshine reached its apogee here during Prohibition, when Al Capone and other moonshining gangsters ran amok in American cities. Even the Great Gatsby himself was in the moonshine racket. Since repeal of the Volstead Act in 1933, however, American moonshiners have mostly receded into the back hollows of the southeastern mountain regions as staple caricatures for movies and TV.
Over time, however, with the compounded rise in liquor taxes—levies on a legal $13 bottle of whiskey in a state like Alabama, for example, raise the cost to $21.50—illegal spirits have made a comeback. A moonshiner can retail a quart product with twice the alcoholic content for about three to five dollars, a significant discount, especially to people who count their pennies. Criminal gangs have moved into the enterprise and can produce thousands of liters of moonshine weekly, some sold in containers with labels that are just as counterfeit as the liquor, seeking to fool buyers into thinking it’s the real thing. This has led to mass poisonings: During one week in 2015 a hundred people died in the city of Mumbai from consuming toxic spirits.
The growing cry to raise, yet again, the federal excise taxes on alcohol would no doubt be a boon for moonshiners. Today we even have “legal” moonshine (an utter oxymoron) sold on liquor store shelves as a novelty drink—unaged whiskey distilled under government regulations (and taxes) with such labels as Mosby’s Spirit or Old Iron Pants, and other such foolishness. As the author of this succinct little chronicle insists, “If nobody demanded it, it would not exist.”
Winston Groom is the author of 22 books, including Forrest Gump (1986) and his latest novel, El Paso.
