MOONSHINE OVER MANHATTAN;
Grand Rapid Press
June 25, 2008 Wednesday
Michigan
Small-batch distiller near new york joins growing trend
AN HOUR OUTSIDE NEW YORK CITY — Near here was a grapevine. The vine
grew long. Its fruit was plucked. The grapes were crushed. Their
seeds and skins were separated. The juice made wine.
And later, the seeds and skins were stuffed into garbage bags and
dumped in the bed of a pickup truck to travel here to this front yard
and, through simple chemistry and patient tending, become something
entirely different, something not really legal, something as clear
as spring water and as flammable as gasoline.
They call this moonshine, but it ain’t the stuff made with car
radiators in the hillbilly country of the South. It is not for sale,
but for personal consumption, and it is carefully handmade in the
isolated yard of a home in a well-appointed suburb of New York City.
It is part of a mini-renaissance of individual urban and suburban
small-batch distillers in back yards, on rooftops, in kitchens and
even occasionally here, in a clearing across from a forest.
"There have always been pockets of people who do it in the cities. It
was never quashed entirely," said Matthew Rowley, author of
"Moonshine!" Still, he said, "What you’re seeing now is there are
more people doing it, and they’re also being more open about what
they’re doing."
Driving forces
It is a trend driven in part by immigrants, such as the Argentine
man in Queens who goes to a local market that sells winemaking grapes
and heaves home boxes of other people’s leftover seeds and skins to
ferment for his own grappa in his back yard.
And it is driven in part by next-generation foodies forever seeking
a more complex and rustic thrill from the homemade, such as a young
American-born food blogger who experiments in his Brooklyn kitchen
with apple brandy and absinthe from homegrown herbs.
Here in this yard, from noon to nearly midnight on a Sunday last fall,
an Armenian immigrant instructs a party of New Yorkers in the art
of making a favorite alcohol of his native land and, all the while,
drinks it with them.
"It’s very strong," said Ashot, the Armenian, who does not give his
full name because it against federal law to make liquor without paying
taxes and getting permits.
The grape pips and skins have been sitting in a barrel for a month
and have become a powerful yellow brew that stinks of ferment. This is
the mash, and Ashot dumps a portion of it into a container over a fire.
He works on a homemade still. It is made from a $25 stainless-steel
milk can (whose lid is held on with woodworking clamps), a stretch
of copper pipe and half-inch copper tubing spiraling through a
55-gallon drum.
The fire burns on hickory wood gathered from the forest. The fire
can’t burn too hot, Ashot said, or it will put pressure on the mash;
that’s what causes moonshining disasters, explosions and fires.
As the mash boils, vapor rises into the pipe above. Where the neck of
the pipe bends horizontally, the vapor travels through it and cools;
where the pipe turns down vertically into a barrel of cold water from
a garden hose, inside the pipe the vapor turns liquid. It drips into
a waiting cup as spirits.
The first round is bluish in color — still full of impurities,
Ashot said. It must be distilled a second time, perhaps a third.
Ashot calls it vodka, though purists would say only spirits made
from barley, grain or potatoes deserve that name, and elsewhere
in the world, people would call Ashot’s grape-based brew grappa
or aguardiente. It is for Ashot the elixir of alcohols. "This is
clear," he said, holding a cup to the sunshine so the light shines
through. "There’s no smell. It is pure. You don’t get a headache the
next day."
His homemade brew, he insists, is cheap but good, as good as the
premium Russian stuff that costs $70 a bottle.
Traditions from afar
Bulk grape sellers in Brooklyn and the Bronx will tell you some
of their best customers — Italians and Argentines, Croatians and
Portuguese — always have supplemented their winemaking — which
is legal — with a batch of illegal grappa, and they cite the same
reasons Ashot does.
Most every place in the world has its homemade hard liquor: Chilean
aguardiente, made with almonds and walnuts; Cambodian lao khao,
sometimes infused with scorpions; Lebanese arak, with aniseed. And many
who have immigrated to American cities here have tried to re-create
the alcohol of home.
The Internet also has contributed to the rise of the urban and suburban
home distillery, said Allen Katz, chairman of the board of Slow Food
USA and a mixologist himself. The Internet (homedistiller.org) has
been a boon to all kinds of semi-licit activities, enabling people to
read and learn in the privacy of their homes and order the materials
they need with the click of a mouse, he said.
"We’re not talking about building a bomb here," Katz said. "We’re
talking about a practice that has been done for centuries."
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
