TIL - that should not be an issue:
As much as you need to be physically fit, there is no height limit to becoming a truck driver. As long as you meet other requirements, height isn’t a barrier to becoming a truck driver. Even dwarfs can be truck drivers once they pass other requirements.
Who knew?
I don’t disagree if you want to stay out of the very bottom basement; or adhere to current legislation(I suspect that just redefining the supermarket deli counter guy’s job description to also include handling the safe and repeatable dilution of hundreds of liters of nearly pure alcohol for human consumption would make the penalties for underage whiskey disappear into the noise by comparison); my thinking was more along the lines of “what would you end up doing to satiate the people who start feeling at least some alcohol withdrawal symptoms if they stop drinking in absence of the usual supplies?”
As you note, the logistics are totally backwards if you want to still adhere to some semblance of how things are done; but more distributed; I’m thinking more along the lines of "when someone is available to drive it a tanker truck full of NGS shows up in the supermarket parking lot; the employees handle dilution and billing by weight, and flavoring if they have something soluble and likely to make the stuff go down a little smoother in stock. Customers bring their own containers, and pretend they are clean, while staff fill them and pretend to believe that.
I’ll confess to judgement perhaps skewed by an interest in dystopian fiction; but I had a supply chain for alcohol junkies with standards they had hoped not to test the flexibility of in mind; not so much one intended to keep marginally respectable booze on the shelves for the holidays.
And i think even that is skewed by a misunderstanding of what we’re talking about with these reserves.
The maple syrup thing is a price control vector from an industry group. They buy when production is high, and prices low. To soak up excess, and bolster demand. Then they sell when prices are high, and production low. To keep prices low and maintain commitments.
Distilleries already do this. This is what distilling is for. Spirit does not spoil. That helps insulate producers from the vagueries of the market, it’s a big part of why the industry is so profitable. I can tell you from experience in the alcohol business, the amount of money running around in liquor makes every other aspect of the alcohol business look pathetic.
The US Strategic Oil Reserve. Which a lot of people are jokingly conflating with the syrup. Is not that.
It is literally barrels of oil in warehouses, or tanks on government lots. That the government keeps on hand so that certain critical functions, mostly military. Can keep going for a shockingly short amount of time (it’s like weeks) if oil supplies are some how cutoff.
Either by war, malfeasance or disaster.
We do occasionally try and fail to use it to impact pricing though.
If the idea is to have alcohol on hand to treat DTs in case if shortage or disaster. All they have to do is purchase spirit from a distillery and send a guy to pick it up. Entirely routine alcohol can be and is stored with emergency medical supplies. A lot hospitals actually have it in house for exactly this.
If it’s the post apocalypse. They can just run a still.
A lot what I’m talking is that it’s not about staying above the bottom basement.
To take an example even rot gut whiskey is still made the same. They just blend really cheap, really young whiskey with a much smaller portion of older stuff.
For a lot of this you’d have to invent entirely new ways of producing in order to blend them on site, on short notice, from pure ethanol.
Even during prohibition it was more about masking young or cheap spirit made the same way but faster, and with less skill. Or mixing down normally made stuff and minimizing how obvious it was. It was done well ahead of time, in one central place. Then shipped out. No bar was mixing up scotch, bourbon, gin and brandy from the same tank of clear liquor to order.
I’m also saying the logistics of that are entirely backwards for anything.
You’re introducing a whole lot of stuff must be produced or acquired elsewhere, then shipped to a whole lot more places. Expecting a certain skill set to be set up at hundreds or thousands of supermarkets.
That’s a logistical shit show. Even with a magic way to turn ever clear into EJ brandy in 5 minutes.
It’s the least efficient possible way to handle it. That sort of inefficiency is really not gonna help a shortage. Logistics shortcomings are exactly what’s causing the actual shortage.
In our nightmare scenario it would work much better to just do Victory Gin.
Where mass quantities of a single product, are produced by one centrally controlled facility. And distributed by government employees. There’s no flavoring it on site, or product variety. Everybody just drinks the same rot gut gin, from the same government factory.
I heard it on Yes Prime Minister, so I wasn’t thinking of searching for the first occurence.
Yessss!
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