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.”