Moonshine has become a favorite pastime of wealthy Russians

The word “moonshine” since Soviet times has a taste of something forbidden in our culture. In fact, for many, moonshiners are still characters in Soviet cartoons. Meanwhile, the law does not prohibit the production of strong drinks for oneself and friends (without the right to sell). And therefore, over the past quarter century, home distillation has turned from a small illegal business into a hobby and a kind of subculture.

Previously, someone knew moonshiners as Dunce-Coward-Experienced from Gaidai’s short film. Others personally communicated with “grandmothers who always had”: the magic device rescued many village women from poverty and even enriched them. In times of alcohol shortage and sometimes introduced in different parts of the USSR “semi-dry law”, moonshine was a salvation both for, as they say now, alcohol addicts, and for those very “grandmothers”: for a penny of overhead, moonshiners always had a garden dug up and a fence corrected , and firewood delivered and chopped.

Now the times are completely different: the old moonshine “out of need” is killed and reliably leveled into the ground by private distilleries, which, by definition, drive cheaper products of different quality. Not a single moonshiner can compete with the dumping of “excise-free clandestine spills.” As a result, distillation has become a niche activity aimed at obtaining an interesting taste. Well, and, of course, to satisfy vanity.

A modern moonshiner is a person, as a rule, not poor in either money or time. “We deliver devices to expensive and difficult cottage settlements, I know Rublyovka like the back of my hand,” Alexei Redko, owner of an online store for home distillation lovers, tells MK. – Of course, a significant percentage of the equipment is taken as a gift, this can be understood from the sets that are purchased. But there are also those who are seriously addicted, read literature, develop, and this is also evident from the purchases of regular customers.”

So, unlike in the past, moonshiners are now respectable people. From this we will start; raw materials, methods and other details are deeply secondary.

Gastronomers against summer residents

As Aleksey Redko told MK, customer surveys show two main categories of modern moonshiners (if you do not take those buyers who buy such things as a gift). The first of them: gastronomes, gourmets, connoisseurs of culinary culture, who consider alcohol an organic part of the “world of tastes” and therefore take up the independent “cooking” of strong drinks. Second: people “on the ground” who are faced with the problem of processing a huge amount of fruits, apples and other crop surpluses.

“Last year, when we had a grand harvest of apples, I processed 750 kg of raw materials,” recalls Vladimir, an enthusiastic lover of distillation with 15 years of experience. – Of course, our family does not drink so much: Calvados were given, shared with friends, neighbors, exchanged for jam, marshmallow and other preparations. But the most important thing, I think: the gifts of the earth should be preserved, it hurts me to see heaps of apples buried in the ground or simply rotting.

“A fine composition of taste and aroma is what the right distillate is,” says Mikhail Cherkasov, a chef who retired two years ago and became interested in making strong drinks. – In general, this is a nightmare for any food worker of the Soviet years: there are no two bottles or barrels of the same distillate. It means that it is impossible to patent taste and technology once and for all, it is unpredictable. But when you are not a distillery, but a private owner, this is the most interesting thing: each bottle you get is handmade, each one has its own culinary accompaniment. This is creativity, but not for everyone, but only for those who have a developed taste.

A lot of mash – from what?

The raw material for home distillate can be – remember Ostap Bender – anything. About the stool – these are comrades Ilf and Petrov turned down a little, but almost everything that contains carbohydrates can become moonshine in their future life. But first, “it” must become a bubbling cloudy fermented raw material for distillation – colloquially mash.

The simplest option is sugar itself (remember the shortage of granulated sugar during perestroika, when there was an all-Union fight against drunkenness?). However, according to the taste, as the general opinion of moonshiners says, it is the simplest.

The classic of the genre is grain moonshine: “whiskey”, or “schnapps”, or “polugar” with your own hands. There is a lot of fuss with grain, but what you can’t do for the sake of an impressive result. In this case, not only grain can serve as a raw material, but also starchy household products: flour, cereals, bread, pasta, potatoes.

“The advantages of grain mash over sugar: better taste and aroma properties of the final product, lower price for a wide range of raw materials,” writes one of the old-timers of a specialized Internet forum. “Disadvantages over sugar mash: greater complexity of the process, lower yield of anhydrous ethyl alcohol from 1 kg of raw material.”

There are many options for grain mash: with the use of malt (germinated grain, there are two main types of it – non-dried green and dried white) and without it. Hot fermentation (faster) or cold fermentation (retains yeast). Boil raw materials or not. Not to mention the technological features of the process: the number of batches, maturation.

“Fermentation, saccharification, fermentation are no less complex processes than with yeast dough, and there are no less nuances,” says Chef Mikhail Cherkasov. – Once they printed such an advertisement: “Drink beer – liquid bread.” This applies no less to distillates: grain mash is as lively as dough.

Finally, the most popular brew among Russian moonshiners is fruit brew. Homemade calvados is one of the “easy natural ways” to lime hundreds of kilograms of apple, plum and other garden fruits.

“The more, the better,” says Vladimir, the owner of the apple orchard. – If there were 20, 30 or even 50 kg of apples, there would be nothing to mess around with, but from 150 kilograms meaningful work begins. From 200 kg of apples, more than 100 liters of juice are obtained, and this is already enough to load the machine and still leave juice for the family.

You can’t process so much with a juicer, so for large scales, you first need to grate the fruit on an electric grater, then squeeze the juice with a press, says Vladimir. Apple puree (if they are only crushed, but not squeezed) will also ferment, but it will not give such a delicate aroma, the MK interlocutor is sure.

– I picked apples both in my garden and traveled to abandoned villages. From 750 kg of apples, I received 45 liters of apple spirit with a strength of 68 degrees,” Vladimir said. — The result is this: the transparency is almost perfect, the color is light straw, it smells like a fresh apple, almost no alcohol content is noticeable. Other than the apple flavor, nothing else at all.

Yeast is a separate topic for disputes between moonshiners – they are necessary at the stage of fermentation. There are irreconcilable supporters of dry yeast, there are those who consider the pressed ones to be “more alive” (and remember the plant on Derbenevka that was closed a few years ago), and there are fans of growing and maintaining their own, homemade yeast culture (sourdough).

“You can get a bad product from any yeast if you don’t follow the technology,” says Mikhail Cherkasov.

The sum of technologies

When the mash is delivered, the time comes for the foam to be extinguished (and this is a separate song: someone remembers the experience of moonshiner grandmothers and uses sour cream, someone makes up complex chemical compositions). Sometimes the foam “attacks” so powerfully that it causes considerable damage to the kitchen of a novice (or even an experienced) moonshiner.

“I put the mash in a five-liter bottle on the kitchen cabinet, did not close the lid so that the gas would come out,” the gardener Vladimir recalls one of his experiments ten years ago. “There were a few millimeters between the bottle and the ceiling. The next day I hear a characteristic hiss: what is it? I looked – the bottle was inflated and pressed against the ceiling, it was about to explode. I can’t take it out anymore, unscrew the lid too. I had to pierce the bottle with an awl, covering the “fountain” with my hand …

And when the mash is ready, it’s the turn of the moonshine still. Surprisingly, those who love “the process itself” usually do not bother too much with the complexity and appearance of the device. They are more interested in volume (there is a device for 5 liters, and sometimes for a centner; home craftsmen prefer 15–20 liters).

– The neck is better wide than narrow, so it is easier to wash the cube, – says Mikhail Cherkasov, chef. – For an electric stove, the bottom must be flat, for an induction surface it should also be magnetic. The walls are better thick – two millimeters, no less.

According to Alexey Redko, the owner of the device store, they usually take the most basic set as a gift, sometimes it may not even have a thermometer or dryer. Often, the recipients of the gifts themselves come for these components, who want to try it for real. A good thermometer must also be supplemented with an alcoholometer, and preferably a pair.

– A working set can be purchased for 20-25 thousand rubles, what is cheaper usually needs to be finalized and supplemented, – says the interlocutor of MK.

The distillation itself is a process replete with nuances and giving rise to a “religious war” in specialized forums. As a rule, it is distilled at least twice; it is considered necessary to separate the “heads” (the first portions of the product from the apparatus, they contain a lot of fusel oils) and “tails” (the last portions rich in water). By the way, about fusel oils: most often, supporters of home distillation say that their harm to health is greatly exaggerated. In itself, ethyl alcohol is much more harmful.

“You don’t need to throw out“ heads ”, – writes one of the popular authors on the forum dedicated to moonshine. – Their strength is in the region of 75-85%. They can be used in different ways. I fill my windshield washer reservoir in the winter. It stinks, of course, but it will never freeze in any frost. Excellent tool for lighting charcoal in the grill. Well, as a solvent-stain remover is very good.

The next stage of work is cleaning (there are supporters of carbon filters, egg white, milk). This may be followed by aging in oak barrels (either with oak chips in bottles, or on walnut partitions, and sometimes with the addition of natural oak extract).

Finally, technically advanced moonshiners have long developed sets of “smart moonshine stills” on microcontrollers: according to a given algorithm, the device can reduce and increase heat, open and close a tap, and control temperature. However, this is already too reminiscent of industrial production, therefore, apart from IT people, this topic is not very interesting for most distillers.

Drive and recoup

But is it still possible to make a business out of moonshine – the current, gourmet – business? It is possible, but, as the experience of St. Petersburg shows, only illegal.

“Of course, the sale of homemade distillate is legally impossible, as well as its inclusion in the “white” restaurant menu,” says lawyer Alexei Golubev. – It’s not just about obtaining a license for production, which in fact can only be obtained by full-fledged distilleries. It’s also about excise taxes, the EGAIS system and similar reporting, which is too big a cost for a small private distillery.

“To be honest, I never even thought of legalizing it,” one of the gourmet distillers, who successfully combines this activity with master classes in a rural guest house and a village restaurant, told MK. — For many years, many of us have tried to legalize Russian grain and fruit distillates, but without success. For example, we have outlawed the production of copper stills, which have been used for centuries and are now used in Scotland. Anyway, our business is a little underground. But that just makes it more fun, doesn’t it?

Perhaps it is this image of a pirate (almost disinterested, by the way: distillates do not bring income, unlike master classes and tourism) that attracts advanced and non-poor Russians to the new moonshining. Because if you really want to be a pirate, then you should be one who enjoys life and doesn’t really spoil anyone’s life. A kind of balance between vitality and adrenaline. Yes, here it is necessary to add: drinking alcohol is harmful to health. But they don’t have alcohol, they have a product.