Misadventures With Moonshine

There was a time many years ago when kicking back naked in a lawn chair with a bottle of Rogue was impossible. Not for any quirk in the cosmos, and who cares about public decency when you live on the fringe, but for the simple fact I was a minor. Not that my dream of lazy inebriation was impossible, just unnecessarily inconvenient. So I did something about it.

I read up on home brewing, and armed with mental diagrams, marched to the local hardware store for copper tubing, rubber stoppers, and gallon-size glass jars. Then it was off to the grocery store for honey and spices, for my recipe of choice would yield melomel: a mead-like drink favored by Greek gods and philosophers for millennia. Plus, it was far easier for a high school junior to make melomel in his parents' basement - no cooking like beer, no carbonation stage, and primary fermentation was less touchy. It seemed idiot proof.

The lynchpin ingredient to homebrew is the yeast, and there are more types and strains of yeast than prostitutes sneaking cigarettes behind the small town movie theater. My recipe called for "brewer's yeast," which sounded logical: I was brewing, after all. But in the baking section between the flower and sugar there was nothing called "brewer's yeast," and cruising the hallowed halls of inebriation, I saw only the finished products of someone else's toil - not the raw ingredients for my cause. The kindly old counter woman told me I could find brewer's yeast at the local health food store.

That yeast came in pills in a plastic tub with a nutrition information chart longer than Schindler's list. I took my supplies home and set to work.

With much revelry I bent the vent tubes and mounted the plugs, stopping the flow of fresh air into the jars so the yeast would undergo anaerobic respiration and pee drunk-alcohol as opposed to using oxygen to make killer-alcohol. That was critical: I couldn't have the little beasties turn my potion into several gallons of honey-flavored death. So I donned safety goggles and a white apron, set some superfluous science stuff around the kitchen to feel more the mad scientist I must have been, and stirred the potion into a thick amber stew. It smelled amazing. It looked like death, and hovering over the fumes I could well imagine the insanity botched brew caused in the days before Science unlocked the art of merrymaking.

My mom came home and asked what I was doing, so I explained "I'm researching yeast reproduction in a nutrient saturated environment." I was such a good little boy.

"You're making beer, aren't you?"
"Melomel."
"What's that?"
"Better than beer."

She asked about the ingredients and laughed when I told her of the brewer's yeast.

"That's a dietary supplement, dear, you need champagne yeast. They sell it at the pharmacy across town."

So she drove me to buy the right yeast, and helped me add it to the foul concoction that, by now, was moved out of the basement and onto the kitchen counter so the whole family could watch.
The day of truth arrived on New Year's Eve four months later. I carefully bottled it in wine bottles scrounged from the recycle bin, popped in hardware store corks and set off to a New Year's Eve party. When the stroke of midnight came, I lit the fuse on a battery of fireworks and my girlfriend raised a glass of my moonshine. I watched in the flickering pyrotechnics as her face twisted all around, one eye bugging out, gasping for breath.

It must have been some good shit. Then she drank the rest and staggered backwards three paces, running into a wall and straightening like a rod had been shot up her back. She stared at me, unblinking, foam forming at the corners of her mouth, eyes growing bloodshot. She lifted her right hand and pointed at me, curling her finger around and giving the "come here, slave" sign I'd never seen in person before. It was horrifying.

She was fine three days later when she emerged from her dad's bathroom dehydrated and exhausted. My white lightning was too much for the poor girl.

Damn glad I never tried any of it.