this kind of food—gives you an ass like a sofa cushion and makes you drop dead at an alarmingly early age; the sheer piggish joy of gorging yourself has become a sinright up there with necrophilia. There is no particular reason why I chose this precise moment to emancipate myself from decades of repression. But I make a fascinating discovery: inside this average-sized body, a fat man has always been dying to get out. No glazed-eyed franticness to my assault on the table. I operate smoothly and methodically as the cook keeps piling more food on my plate. I could just go on forever. When I finally lay fork and knife down and push my plate back in surrender, one of the boys lets out an appreciative laugh like deep thunder. “Christ, John. You sure can pack away some groceries.” Blink of an eye I’m holding tight on the back of the ATV, dodging branches and trying to keep my inner organs from being pulverized as we blast up the hill.
These, as I know them, are the facts about moonshining in Nova Scotia: the RCMP has no idea how many stills exist across the province; the ones they do find tend to be set up in basements, woodsheds and forest hollows by men with names like Moonshine Bill and Deepwoods Dave, who use recipes that go back a couple of generations or so. The process is deceivingly simple: start with a liquid base, which can be as fundamental as water, add yeast and sugar. Let it ferment for a week or so until the alcohol level hovers around 17 per cent. Put the mash in a cooker, which could be anything from a steel beer keg to a large tank. Place it over heat and wait for the alcohol—which boils at a lower temperature than water—to form a gas, which is siphoned off and cooled until it distills into a highly concentrated liquid. Then repeat the process.
“It all depends upon how many times you run ’er through,” saysthe elder in the group, a thirty-five-year veteran of the craft whose father, ironically, spent the Prohibition years as a police officer chasing rumrunners in New Brunswick. We are sitting at a rough table in a cabin somewhere in the woods. He’s no hillbilly, a retired engineer actually, but like the others seems to revel in the outlaw life. At seventy, he takes pride in his work, distilling his product three times, once using charcoal filters, before deeming it drinkable. “The stuff that only goes through twice can be godawful,” he confides, pushing an old two-litre Coke bottle towards me.
The label has mostly peeled from the plastic, as if the contents radiated immense heat. The liquid is as bright as spring water. I undo the cap and lower my nose to the opening. My sinuses are in their usual clogged state. Even so, enough of the fumes seep in to trigger distant memories of being chloroformed as a kid so a gash on my forehead could be stitched up. He produces a tumbler, pours an inch in.
“Cheers,” I say gamely.
The others just smile as I take a sip. At a university party back in the days when people actually handed bottles around I once took a haul on a plastic jug and found I’d just inhaled a cup of rubbing alcohol. Immediately I began gasping like a beached carp. Two hours later, my mouth and lips were still numb. I think it was three full days before my tastebuds began to function again. This stuff isn’t that bad, even if unconsciously my upper lip begins to curl in revulsion. I manage to croak, “Hey, that’s good.”
He looks immensely pleased and starts pouring me some more.Panicking, I try to divert him with a lame question about the Mounties. He waves a hand dismissively. Long as they don’t sell to toddlers, or the desperate wife of some shine-addled layabout doesn’t blow the whistle on them, he brags, he and his ilk are safe. I’m relieved to see him add a gallon of Pepsi to the glass before handing it to me. There are so many unpaid lookouts in the woods and hills, he adds, that by the time the Mounties got here there would be nothing left but a faint hint
These, as I know them, are the facts about moonshining in Nova Scotia: the RCMP has no idea how many stills exist across the province; the ones they do find tend to be set up in basements, woodsheds and forest hollows by men with names like Moonshine Bill and Deepwoods Dave, who use recipes that go back a couple of generations or so. The process is deceivingly simple: start with a liquid base, which can be as fundamental as water, add yeast and sugar. Let it ferment for a week or so until the alcohol level hovers around 17 per cent. Put the mash in a cooker, which could be anything from a steel beer keg to a large tank. Place it over heat and wait for the alcohol—which boils at a lower temperature than water—to form a gas, which is siphoned off and cooled until it distills into a highly concentrated liquid. Then repeat the process.
“It all depends upon how many times you run ’er through,” saysthe elder in the group, a thirty-five-year veteran of the craft whose father, ironically, spent the Prohibition years as a police officer chasing rumrunners in New Brunswick. We are sitting at a rough table in a cabin somewhere in the woods. He’s no hillbilly, a retired engineer actually, but like the others seems to revel in the outlaw life. At seventy, he takes pride in his work, distilling his product three times, once using charcoal filters, before deeming it drinkable. “The stuff that only goes through twice can be godawful,” he confides, pushing an old two-litre Coke bottle towards me.
The label has mostly peeled from the plastic, as if the contents radiated immense heat. The liquid is as bright as spring water. I undo the cap and lower my nose to the opening. My sinuses are in their usual clogged state. Even so, enough of the fumes seep in to trigger distant memories of being chloroformed as a kid so a gash on my forehead could be stitched up. He produces a tumbler, pours an inch in.
“Cheers,” I say gamely.
The others just smile as I take a sip. At a university party back in the days when people actually handed bottles around I once took a haul on a plastic jug and found I’d just inhaled a cup of rubbing alcohol. Immediately I began gasping like a beached carp. Two hours later, my mouth and lips were still numb. I think it was three full days before my tastebuds began to function again. This stuff isn’t that bad, even if unconsciously my upper lip begins to curl in revulsion. I manage to croak, “Hey, that’s good.”
He looks immensely pleased and starts pouring me some more.Panicking, I try to divert him with a lame question about the Mounties. He waves a hand dismissively. Long as they don’t sell to toddlers, or the desperate wife of some shine-addled layabout doesn’t blow the whistle on them, he brags, he and his ilk are safe. I’m relieved to see him add a gallon of Pepsi to the glass before handing it to me. There are so many unpaid lookouts in the woods and hills, he adds, that by the time the Mounties got here there would be nothing left but a faint hint
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