I had no idea Lagavulin was part of the hegemony. As long as it tastes like a bog mummy, I’ll keep buying it.
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I think the battle is long lost for spirits.
For beers, when AB InBev buys a local one I like (e.g. Elysian), I simply stop drinking that, and move onto a different local one. I don’t blame the owners for selling up, they get offered a lot of money. I’d just rather not support it.
Weird thing is that Elysian still sells this:
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You’ve got my vote.
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Distillation won’t produce any chemicals that weren’t already in your booze before you distilled it.
You can introduce lead into your spirits if you use lead anywhere in your still. This is easy to avoid if you’re not being silly (don’t use parts that aren’t intended for non-food uses. don’t use the radiator from a car in your still)
Going blind would be the result of high levels of methanol. In theory it’s possible for someone to do this if they start with ingredients that are very high in pectin. It won’t happen if you start with grains or sugars. The association between distillation and blindness probably goes back to prohibition days - in order to prevent people from drinking industrial alcohol, it was deliberately contaminated (denatured) with methanol (source).
I won’t say it’s impossible to harm yourself with home distillation, but it’s not that hard to avoid it. I’d put it on the same level as maybe cassava - if you don’t prepare it properly, it can fuck you up, but we still sell it in grocery stores.
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Yup, although some of 'em (like 10 Barrel as an example) are starting to get bought out. 
I don’t know about at the Federal level, but I believe in Texas, the bar (no pun intended) is much higher to obtain a distilling license. My brother-in-law went through this with some partners.
from my cold, dead hands…
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I hope it’s better than Rogue’s Dead Guy Whiskey.
Bulliet, Oban, and Johnny Walker aren’t bad. Not my favorites, but I’ll drink them. Johnny Walker Black is my go-to cheap blend (since they ruined Black Bottle), when I don’t want booze sticker shock for my nightly tipple.
Its getting really hard to drink independent brands. When I do my bi-yearly trip to the big-box liquor store, I sometimes feel like I need a spreadsheet. I generally try to support local beer (especially since the big companies ruined two of my go-to beers, Smithwicks and Rolling Rock), but our local stores mishandle them to the point where 50% of the time they are undrinkable.
Dear desert retailers, don’t leave craft beer in a 120 degree warehouse.
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It’s definitely true that legal home brewing allows many to experiment with brewing before deciding to go commercial, but there are plenty of ways to get your hands dirty if you are interested in going into commercial distilling. The easiest, obviously, is to start working for a distillery. Basically learning the trade the way everyone else learns trades.
I think going into commercial spirits is far more of a business decision than a question of whether you’re “confident you can produce something people will buy.” After all, the way to make basic spirits is pretty well established. After that the decisions are the amount of care you want to spend doing things perfectly, buying locally-sourced ingredients, or whatever.
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♪♫♫♪ It’s la Fin du Monde as we know it.
It’s la Fin du Monde as we know it.
It’s la Fin du Monde as we know it.
And i feel fine… ♪♫♫♪♫
♪♫♫♪ It’s Fin du Monde but not as we know it,
not as we know it, not as we know it.
It’s Fin du Monde but not as we know it,
not as we know it, Jim! ♪♫♫♪
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I quite liked both the gin and the vodka.
We have a local distillery, called Hamilton, that makes lovely whiskey. It’s named Whiskey Del Bac. One of their offerings has hints of agave in it, just to make you forget you’re not drinking tequila.
Between that and the dozens of fine regional beers available at such fine downtown watering holes as Tap and Bottle, whose selection changes weekly, the mega-corporations can’t catch up.
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Not in my case. I only drink small batch local distillery/brewery products, with the notable exception of a handful of products that I know are from small batch indie companies. Like Reyka Vodka for instance. independently owned and operated and hands down the best vodka I have ever had.
Additionally my friend and I have been working on the business plan and logistics to start our own locally sourced distillery. Because why not make it for a living instead of working in a cube farm.
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Thank you for this. It’s a discussion I have had many, many times. I don’t distill, myself (Hi, BATFE!), but I’m convinced that it could be done at home safely by anyone who cared to make the effort.
The simple fact is that you can’t get anything out of a still that you don’t put in, because all it does is separate one thing from another. In other words, if you get methanol out of your still, it’s because you had methanol in the wash. It follows that if you hurt yourself with distillate containing methanol, you would have hurt yourself by drinking the wash. Having drunk considerable homebrewed beer over the years, I’m confident that homebrewed beer is every bit as safe as commercial, and that a safe homebrewed distiller’s mash could be made with even less effort.
This is not to say that people have not been hurt by bootleg alcohol in the past - they have! But they were hurt by the inclusion of ungood shit (sometimes literal horseshit) put into the still or the distillate in order to increase profit. And lots of people were hurt by non-bootleg alcohol, too. For example, “jake leg” is a neurological condition that people got by drinking legal, commercially-available “medicine.” They drank the stuff because it had ethanol in it, but the producers had included some damaging chemicals to mask the taste of the preparation - again, to increase profits.
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Wait, Unibroue has been bought by InBev? I’d been told that it had been bought by a Japanese group and that was the reason why we couldn’t find their beers in France anymore - that it was all shipped to Japan.
which is why so many “artisanal craft distileries” that start up with little to no experience are selling flavored industrial grain alcohol with the intention of going legit after they are profitable. I’d rather drink the big names when I drink spirits. At least there is some integrity there.
I’ve observed the early days of InBev as a global company. It started with the friendly merger between Belgian company Interbrew and Brazilian company AmBev. From a beer lover’s point of view, Interbrew was perceived as a lesser evil compared to, say, Heineken, when it came to a brewery being bought by a large company. Unlike Heineken, they seemed to respect the breweries’ savoir-faire, not dragging it down. Not sure it’s still the case.
Agreed.
My scotch comes from a distillery on Skye or Islay (and occasionally from Japan). The profits may go to Diageo and the taxes are paid nowhere, but I know where the product came from because I’ve been to the distilleries in many cases.
My beer comes from craft brewers - a couple (like unibroue) owned by multinationals, but most from small-ish operations
