Lets not forget Grand Metropolitan PLC which not only produces J&B Whisky, Bailey’s Irish Cream, Gilbey’s gin, Piat wine and Croft sherry and port brands, as well as the European and Commonwealth rights to Smirnoff vodka, they also own Pillsbury and Burger King.
So that Bailey’s Irish Cream cookie / Whopper combination is pure inter-corporate synergy
Besides what @samsam said the rules for distillation of spirits were relaxed about 10? years ago now which resulted in a nice local craft booze industry across the USA. My current bottle of bourbon is from a distillery right in my city and it is quite tasty.
Pssh, all my booze comes from accidentally consuming rotten fruit.
There are still a few holdouts. Here’s one that’s still family owned, and is in my house right now:
And there’s also a real surge in small producers of gin as well, for those of you who like that sort of thing.
Makes sense that gin would be the spirit of choice for a small new distiller. Lots of opportunities to distinguish your product with interesting botanicals, and unlike whiskey, you don’t have to age it for years before you can sell it.
The business plan for anything that needs to be aged 10 years must be insane.
Meh who cares. What ever is cheap.
Are you insinuating that someone in here might be just a little teentsy bit smugly pretentious?
And on that note, 
I don’t drink for enjoyment. I drink to get drunk. If it tastes bad, add more what ever you’re mixing with it.
That said, I do have some good scotch and can tell the difference between that and the cheap stuff. But really I’d just rather have something like hard cider or a well mixed drink.
nope, just don’t drink it. seriously.
best advice i got from an ex-barkeep was if you can’t drink it straight don’t have in a mixed drink.
not saying you should use your woodford reserve for a whisky and coke but there are better options than the cheapest stuff on the shelf for that and you will be thankful for it in the morning.
no. no it won’t. this is a story similar to razor blades in Halloween candy. if ya wanna talk the chemistry of it, let me know 
(now a bad batch of hooch will give you a headache, but the ethanol will make you blind before anything else)
Meh, who cares. Whatever tastes good.
Stopping drinking a good beverage because they got bought out (assuming no other changes) is like not listening to a great album by your favorite band just because all of a sudden they hit it big. Be happy for them and continue to enjoy it, until it they actually start to suck.
I for one am still going to drink certain Ballast Point products, even though they sold for 1 billion with a B. They also make a nice rum, and I have a bottle of their vodka someone brought to a party that I haven’t tried yet.
for a hot second i thought about getting into the spirit business. but to make what i would want to make would take so soo much time. you can make a really good whisky in two years, but as a customer would you pay as much for a two year whisky as you would a twelve? unlikely.
i think whisky distillers business plans always start with, “We shall endure pain, injury, insult, and despair. And ask for a another helping.”
I had some nice 2 year whiskey from this guy out in nowhere WA. He runs the operation in a garage and was happy to give a tour and tasting. I didn’t have the budget for his $90ish dollar bottle of the good stuff but oh it was very very nice.
Methanol can cause eyesight damage, can’t it?
Is the lack of risk from hooch due to the low amount of the methanol? I thought it was produced at lower temperatures, so you needed to throw away the early stuff and keep the temperature up?
Presumably, though, you shouldn’t drink methylated spirits?
Yeah it comes from the distillation process. The first distill has significant methanol in it and you have to toss that. Backwoods moonshine was infamous for not doing that part and cutting it with the rest of the hooch sometimes not enough.
ETA I should read the whole post shouldn’t I?
your wash has the same amount of methanol as beer. even if you didn’t take any cuts, you can’t get more methanol from distillation than was in the wash.
beer, wash, wine, low wines, etc. all have methanol. we reduce methanol by ‘cutting’ the spirit to improve flavor, since methanol is more volatile (thus tastes like crap). the ‘goes blind’ myth comes from adulterating the final product, not from bad distillation. so to be more accurate, “if you add poison to your distillate, you may go blind”.
(i can talk at length… a friend told me all about it…)
It’s not quite as unheard of as razor blades on halloween. It would require bad luck and vast ignorance, but I believe that if you were to drink foreshots on a batch of grappa, you could kill yourself.
@daneel - methanol is produced when you ferment foods that are high in pectin. If you start with malted grains or refined sugars, then I think it should be basically impossible to produce a significant amount of methanol.
If you start from fruits, you will have some methanol in your undistilled product. You are correct that it evaporates at a lower temperature than ethanol, which is why you want to throw away the foreshots. You should have a thermometer on your still that should give you a pretty good idea of when to cut
…was infamous for using copper coils soldered with leaded solder. which leached big time. you seriously cannot get enough methanol from any fermentation, even if you add it to subsequent batches, to cause more health harm than the methanol itself.
whistles quietly
my dr. says my liver function is within normal levels.
