Chasing the White Dog: An Amateur Outlaw’s Adventures in Moonshine
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In Chasing the White Dog, journalist Max Watman traces the historical roots and contemporary story of hooch. He takes us to the backwoods of Appalachia and the gritty nip joints of Philadelphia, from a federal courthouse to Pocono Speedway, profiling the colorful characters who make up white whiskey’s lore. Along the way, Watman chronicles his hilarious attempts to distill his own moonshine — the essential ingredients and the many ways it can all go wrong — from his initial ill-fated batch to his first successful jar of ’shine.It begins in Monongahela, Pennsylvania, where drunk and armed outlaws gathered in the summer of 1794. George Washington mustered 13,000 troops to quell the rebellion, but by the time they arrived, the rebels had vanished; America’s first moonshiners had packed up their stills and moved on.From these moonshiners who protested the Whiskey Tax of 1791, to the bathtub gin runners of the 1920s, to today’s booming bootleg businessmen, wh… More >>
Chasing the White Dog: An Amateur Outlaw’s Adventures in Moonshine
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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.
One of the first uses of the word “bootleg” in connection with booze appeared in the “Omaha Herald” in 1889: “There is as much whisky consumed in Iowa now as there was before…’ for medical purposes only,’ and on the boot-leg plan.” The more general meaning appeared in The War in Kansas by G. Douglas Brewerton in 1856: “He sports a sky-blue blanket overcoat (a favorite color in Missouri), from the side-pocket of which the butt of a six-shooter peeps threateningly out, and if you will take a look into his right bootleg, we should say that a serviceable bowie-knife might be found inserted between the leather and his tucked-in Kentucky jean pantaloons”. (“Bootlegger” became current at the same time; this example from the July 17, 1890 “Voice”: “The `boot-legger’ is a grim spectre to the anti-Prohibitionist… He is a man who wears boots in whose tops are concealed a flask or two of liquor.”)
Today, of course, there aren’t many bootlegs around, but the phrase has been used in many different contexts. Max Watman glories in the usage which gained its greatest currency during Prohibition, where it became a constant companion of “moonshine”, or unlawful whisky [whiskey].
Watman has written a marvelous, somewhat disjointed history of the distillation of alcohol from corn; he tries to make his own moonshine — it made his mouth numb — and realizes “I’m not a distiller; I tell stories.” His story telling in this book is wonderful — he covers a NASCAR champion’s memories, a gigantic still in Pennsylvania, a defense lawyer’s strategic decisions in West Virginia, Popcorn Sutton peddling his book Me and My Likker, and his real heroes, microdistillers who have registered with the government and market their liquor to whisky lovers. (The illegal stuff can be quite dangerous, not from the corn, but from the equipment, much of it made from used automobile parts containing a residue of harmful chemicals.
These paragraphs taken from Watman’s blog will give you a flavor for his writing style and a sense of how he has begun to lose some of his romance with illegal booze:
“Over the last few years, I’ve tracked moonshine busts with much more than a cursory interest. One of the arresting officers says, almost without fail, that either they never see any moonshine any more, or that this bust is the largest one they can remember. My clipping file holds 265 articles (obviously some are repeats, and some aren’t all that recent, but I doubt many go any farther back than the 90s). My online bookmarks number 129.
“Clearly there’s a disconnect, or a short term memory problem, or something. 300-odd busts in the last few years might not register in comparison to how many people have been arrested for assault or possession of a controlled substance, but it’s hardly non-existent. And yet, when they busted Roger Lee Nance in North Wilkesboro with 929 gallons of moonshine a few days ago, the lead read: “in one of the largest liquor seizures in recent memory.”
I found this a really enjoyable book, one which helped me understand a life style totally alien to me, but apparently alive and well only a few miles from my house in the Ramapo Mountains — allegedly Ramapough Mountain Indians run illegal stills only a mile from one of my favorite trail heads. (I haven’t checked.) I’ll leave all that adventure to Max Watman, and enjoy his adventures vicariously.
Robert C. Ross 2010
Ever start reading a book and say ’small world’? That’s what I have been doing since getting this book. It was a month ago while watching a documentary on some art type cable channel that I saw Popcorn Sutton who is often mentioned in this delightful book. It showed him making moonshine, and how he mixed his cornmeal to make a paste that he used to seal any leaks in the stills. Then I was reminded of someone we met in the 80’s who had been to visit family in the south and came home with moonshine, which they gave us a pint of. To show you how pure the stuff was, when we place a small amount in a small stainless steel container and lit a match to it, it burned a beautiful pure blue colour. And when I took a tablespoon of it and drank it I was afraid to be near an open flame as it was intense. The taste was clean but strong.
Chapter 4 is interesting for anyone who wants to learn or be reminded that until shy 1800 moonshine was legal in the states. On page 14 the author even has George Washington’s Recipe which includes amounts of boiling water, corn, malt, rye, and pitch yeast. Often wonder how many Americans know that some of the founding fathers actually owned breweries. The book is wonderful because it also comes west to Colorado, California and other places to share their history of moonshine. Which makes sense when one considers the west as the last frontier where folks who believe in states rights, wouldn’t think of anything odd about someone making moonshine.
The book also reminded me of how weird laws can be. Wine and beer kits for home brewers abound and make great money via taxes for the government. Here in California and other states we have even ignored marijuana and in California come November 2010 the voters will decide if it should be made legal for those over the age of 21. So why is whiskey so different? Why shouldn’t we be allowed to make our own? This book covers all these subjects and much much more.
By the way did you know that whiskey was still legal during Prohibition? As the book notes on page 102 notes, it was still available if prescribed by a doctor, and that Washington State had gone dry in 1916, and one month later, in Spokane, there were issued 34,000 prescriptions for medicinal liquor, and that the town had 44,000 registered voters. The same was true in other areas of the country. The Yale Club in NYC was a private club and when they saw prohibition coming they laid up fourteen years worth of bottles down in their cellar.
This book is about moonshine: its history and the folks who make it. Who would have thought it would be so interesting? But it is! I had heard about the Whiskey Rebellion that took place in the 1790s, but I really couldn’t recall anything other than that the government had tried to impose a tax on liquor. Even though that initial tax was lifted after a few years, eventually a permanent tax was imposed at around the time of the Civil War. Folks have been flouting that law ever since!
In this book, the author very amusingly tells of his own attempts to brew a little of the white lightening himself — or at least he uses such an attempt as a part of a narrative structure to let us know what is involved in this home brewing. This is highly illegal (as he reports, one person reminds him that it is not the state you are annoying, but the Feds! And they mean business!), whereas a little homebrewed, for personal use, beer or wine is OK. This is all truly fascinating.
The author also includes lots of wonderful vignettes about both moonshine itself (good grief! Who knew about the lead content!), but also the colorful characters that have been associated with it that he has heard about or met. Even though this can be a serious subject, you can’t help but enjoy these stories.
Personally, although I believe in following the law, I’ve always had a soft spot for moonshine folks. It just doesn’t seem like it should be against the law. And I can recall, as a small child many many years ago, visiting relatives (and there was no road in to their place — you had to go up a dry creek bed on foot), and having shots fired in the air. My grandmother would announce that it was us, and then the shooting would stop. I asked her why the shooting, and she and my father laughed and said they were just making sure we weren’t revenue boys checking out their still. And more honest and law abiding folks didn’t exist than my grandmother and father….
So, my point is, Americans have always had a strange relationship with both moonshine and with representatives of the federal government. This book is a lovely history of the subject that I think many, many people would enjoy.
With bright, engaging writing, Max Watman takes us on a trip through America’s love affair with illegally manufactured liquor. He gives us a glimpse of his own past experiments in distilling, interviews moonshine makers and legal microdistillers, and looks back upon the history of the US through a whiskey-colored lens. I was especially impressed by the section on Prohibition, its possible intent, and its aftermath. Watman sent me on a quest for the (excellent) products of microdistillaries, and led me to hope that we will see legalization of hobby distilling in the near future. Even a teetotaler will enjoy the great storytelling and cultural analysis in this fine book.