Word: worldly
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...field drinking hooch. One of the times I left the valley someone gave me a present of a coil that would sit atop a pressure cooker and turn it into a still. It landed on a bookshelf. And there it was, reminding me that out there in the world, there's someone making moonshine. I came across a really surprising story that challenged every preconception I had of what moonshine is. There was a still in Philadelphia in 2002 that exploded. It blew the wall out of a brick warehouse building in North Philadelphia. Inside, there were...
...moonshiner changed? The hipster kids that drove the home-brew movement, making ale in their kitchens, are the ones now making booze in their kitchens. That part is very foodie, very crafty and very caught up in authenticity and care, and there's a booming - booming - hobby world. The federal law makes no dispensation for personal use. The penalties are still very severe: fines up to $10,000 and imprisonment of up to 10 years. But it's just a part of our current cultural place. We're obsessed with craft, we're obsessed with authenticity, and people like...
...only imagine. I spent a lot of time and I asked a lot of people, sometimes very brazenly. I had some immense strokes of luck - I met some key people for whom it probably wasn't a very good idea to take me in. It can be an impenetrable world. I read most of the moonshine literature available, and I've only found one other journalist who has been taken into an operating still site...
...This changed in the '90s with the beginning of a multidepartmental investigation called Operation Lightning Strike that brought in the feds. This was centered on a farm store in Rocky Mount, Va., called the Helms Farmers' Exchange. This was a very badly kept secret in the world of moonshine. From about 1992 to 1999, the farmers' exchange sold 12 million lb. of sugar, enough to make 2 million gal. of liquor, which is approximately the same as what Maker's Mark was making at the same time. What they did by knocking it up to the federal level was that...
...years ago, wine in Asia tended to refer to dusty bottles of Mateus Rosé or Liebfraumilch, decaying at the backs of corner stores and wedged between the boxes of mosquito coils and the tins of evaporated milk. How times change. Today the wine world's great hope is the Asian drinker, for many of whom the consumption of grape wine is an aspirational and pleasurably exotic activity, much like sake drinking is in European or American cocktail bars. Facing stagnant sales at home, the Old World's lordliest vintners must leave their crumbling châteaus...