Chasing the White Dog with Max Watman
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/books/excerpt-chasing-the-white-dog.htmlMax Watman is author of Chasing the White Dog: An Amateur Outlaw’s Adventures in Moonshine. He spoke with the Booze Blog about the history of American moonshine, the culture of modern distilling, and his own short career as a moonshiner.
What is “the white dog” in your title, and how does it compare to the whiskeys our readers are more familiar with?
White dog is what legit American distillers call whiskey when it comes off the still, at its raw state, before the barrel has turned it brown and given it all that caramel and vanilla we get from the oak. I used the phrase in the title for a few reasons (including a self-indulgent desire to link my American search, my quest, to Moby Dick) but, most importantly, I think that the line between legal and illegal whiskey is somewhat arbitrary, and I wanted to begin by blurring the separation.
White Dog, which is available from micro-distillers like Koval, House Spirits, and Death’s Door as well as (major distiller) Buffalo Trace, is more complicated than vodka. It is the framework upon which those oak flavors hang. The grain profile of the spirit is very present, the taste is undeniably the taste of whiskey, but it is young and raw, like beaujolais nouveau is to burgundy.
In your book you describe moonshines from the poisonously bad to the transcendent. In your opinion, how do the best illegal whiskeys stack up against their legitimate counterparts?
The best illegal spirits are fantastic. They are different than the best whiskey available, if for no other reason than no illicit distiller that I know of keeps a barrel of the stuff around for a dozen years. Of course, the best illegal spirits aren’t necessarily whiskeys. If you’re working on your own, you can do anything you want. You can make a distillate that is half apricot brandy and half rum, and the result is amazing. I’ve had moonshine made out of tomatoes, which had a nose that reminded me of brushing up against a tomato plant in the garden in August — find me a product on the shelf at the store that smells like August.
You describe your first taste of moonshine simply as “searing.” From that less than auspicious start, how did you get hooked on the topic?
Searing isn’t a bad thing, of course. I like the sear of high-proof liquor. That said: my initial motivation was romantic and nostalgic. I wanted to explore this bit of Americana and I assumed that I would spend a lot of pleasant time in the hillbilly hills. Once I started researching, I was surprised at every turn. Every door I opened had something behind it, and rarely was it what I had expected. My creekside pastoral became a federal courtroom, my imagined hillbillies became black marketeers selling their hooch in rough cities.
The issue of authenticity – specifically authentic moonshine culture – runs throughout the book. Who are today’s modern moonshiners and what traditions would you say they’ve preserved?
I’d say there are two answers to this question. Two answers and a pre-amble, perhaps. Authenticity in America is weird, slippery stuff. We celebrate the idea to no end: we want artisanal cheeses and farm fresh eggs. I think the food truck phenomenon has to do with our search for authentic food. Documentary film is popular, it seems to me, because it gives us something unscripted, something authentic.
At the same time, all of that is packaged for us. I find myself buying packaged authenticity all the time. I was just on Block Island, digging clams, and I’m writing about it now, so I was researching the clams there. I found a newspaper article from 1912 that detailed how they’d run out of clams and had to seed them. There aren’t actually any clams there anymore, we ate them all a hundred years ago. So they plant clams, and I gather them. Am I doing something authentic or not? I can’t even answer that question. I can say that the clams I dug were delicious.
I would say that the line between “moonshiner” and “distiller” is fraught. Micro distillers are reclaiming an authentic American tradition. The colonists distilled because it was good farming. It was a way to store, preserve, and transport their grain. It was a part of their culture. Spirits were a vital part of our early economy.
In 1800, there were 14,000 distilleries in America. Over the course of the Nineteenth Century, that industry experienced a natural consolidation — with better transportation, bigger cities, bigger commerce, it was only natural that distilling would commercialize. Still, in 1900, there were about 1,000 distilleries. After prohibition, and for the next 60 years or so, there were about a dozen. Small distilleries are a part of the American landscape that vanished. They are coming back. We’ve got about 200 now, and to me they speak to a historical authenticity. They make something with care, they use local products, and they sell to people with whom they have a connection. That’s authentic.
Among the moonshiners, the illegal distillers, there is a group of people who work very hard to carry on the mountain traditions and to make whiskey in what I’ve come to think of as the “bluegrass” way. They are few, but they are up there in the hills, making liquor the way that it’s always been made. Hats off to them.
Of course, there’s nothing inauthentic about the new, foodie, explorations of the crazy folks haunting the farmer’s market for overripe fruit. That’s new, but new can be authentic, too.
Some of the funniest scenes in the book involve your own adventures (and misadventures) as an illegal still operator. When in the writing process did you decide that you were going to break the law and create your own still? And how do you rate yourself as a distiller?
I like to put my hands on what I’m writing about. I like to get mud on my boots. I realized early on that if I was going to write it, I was going to do it. I learned a lot about distilling, and I think if I was dropped into an actual distillery, with real equipment, I could do pretty well. I worked at Stranahan’s Colorado Whiskey for a spell while writing this book, and I don’t think I ruined any of their whiskey. (It’s great whiskey, it’d break my heart to screw it up.) My experiments… well, I don’t know. I got close.
I found your discussion of the historical role of moonshine to be politically resonant with our own times. I could hear an echo of the conflict between moonshiners and the government in the rhetoric of contemporary right. What does the history of whiskey tell us about our modern political landscape?
History resonates. Things are as they always were. The conflict between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson is at our core. Are we, when it comes right down to it, a nation of individuals or a nation of corporations? The regulation of liquor, and therefore the role of moonshine in history, has a lot to do with to whom the benefits will fall. Hamilton envisioned America as a machine designed to enrich the few — the cost of throwing advantages to the few has certainly come up again recently. Jefferson’s vision was focused on individuals, on small scale economies loosely connected. Hamilton wanted to tax whiskey, Jefferson repealed that tax. Left/right: divisions like that don’t actually work all that well, I think.
Another striking feature of modern moonshine culture is the symmetry between the legitimate distilling business and it’s illegitimate shadow. Just as the legal market features small-scale producers and large volume distillers, the black market features micro-distillers and large-scale producers.
There is a real symmetry there. While researching the book, I got so close to the details of the business that the parallels where sometimes obscured, but both sides have big producers and little guys. On both sides, your smaller producers are more experimental, less consistent, and more interested in the art and craft of it. The bigger producers want to quickly produce a consistent product that they can sell easily. One of the key differences is that the large legitimate producers actually produce quality stuff. The big illegal producers tend to make poor stuff. Not all the time. Some of the large production moonshine is very good quality. In North Carolina I saw a large-scale illegal operation with stainless steel stills, dairy-grade equipment, and the mash was high quality. I’d have drank it.
How big do these illegal producers get?
There are no business records from these producers, of course. But you can get a good sense of the size of these organizations from Operation Lightning Strike, the crack down on the Helms Farmers’ Exchange. The Helms Farmers’ Exchange was the worst kept secret in moonshine. It was allegedly selling fertilizer. Between 1992 and 1999, the Exchange sold more than 12 million pounds of sugar. That turns into about 2 million gallons of liquor. At the time, that was nearly equal to the production of Maker’s Mark. Maker’s Mark is one of the smallest big producers, but still, there’s a bottle of Maker’s Mark in nearly every bar I walk into.
Is there an argument for deregulating alcohol in such a way as to make moonshine legal?
Certainly. At the same time, if you are introducing something into a marketplace, it should be held to certain standards. There’s a lot of really horrible hooch floating around out there. Studies at UVA found that 60% of the seized bootleg they studied had staggering lead content. That’s poison. It should be illegal to poison people.
Most importantly, however, the hobby distiller should be released from penalty. We can make 300 gallons of beer or wine at home per year, and to say that we can’t get the alcohol out of that beer or wine with another tool is just absurd. Regulating a marketplace is one thing, regulating a hobby is just silly. It’s an arbitrary line and it should be erased.
Any advice for would-be home distillers?
Write your congressman. Get it legalized.
