Moonshine!
Posted in Essays, Favorites, Features, Food, Writing and tagged with Salon
Standing in the middle of the room at the Sweetwater Distillery in Petaluma, Calif., Bill Owens held a feedbag full of stale donuts high in the air. With a crowd gathered around him, he dumped its contents — chocolate glazed, jelly-filled, iced with sprinkles — into a tank filled with hot water and plunged an industrial mixer into the liquid, splattering warm, sticky bits onto anyone who stood too close. A dog wandered up and began licking the floor.
As part of my research for this article about moonshine for Salon, I got the chance to track down local distillers and sample their homemade spirits. (And no, drinking moonshine isn’t actually against the law.) My advice? Beware the slivovitz.
(The piece also got picked up by the New York Times’s Idea of the Day Blog.)
December 3rd, 2012 at 1:43 pm
You do realize this means you HAVE to make a trip to Ireland to sample poteen, the Irish moonshine ideally distilled from potatoes.
In the old days, the police found some distilleries because of the smell of Irish peat burning in the mountains. The smell of burning peat is both delicious and very memorable.