One day my friend Kenny and I were sitting around having deep thoughts and philosophical discussions about what our community was lacking and what we could do to help. We decided that what the town of Randolph needed was a good brewery, and that we were just the ones to remedy this situation. I had a magazine article with directions and recipes for making home brew so we had all the information we needed.
We bought several gallons of Pabst beer-making syrup from Hap’s grocery store. We added sugar, hops and water, heated it up a bit over a camp fire, added some Red Star yeast, stirred it with a tree limb, and poured it into a 30 gallon crock. We hid this vile mixture in a patch of elderberry bushes somewhere along Johnnycake road and gave it time to ferment.
After waiting about two weeks we could hold out no longer- we just had to try this concoction. Since it was a hot summer we figured the little yeastie beasties had done their job by now, so we proceeded to the bottling stage.
The yeast along with other little goobers and snake-heads settled to the bottom of the crock. We didn’t want that stuff in our final product so we siphoned off the “good” liquid using a few feet of windshield wiper hose taped to a stick that kept the end of the hose about 4 inches from the bottom, thus preventing the yeast from entering the siphon. We didn’t have any bottles but we did have gallon jugs, so we filled up the jugs with the home-brew. The stuff was dark, warm, flat and skunky, but the price was right and it definitely did the job.
We didn’t have any place to hide the beer from our parents or other authorities so we dropped the jugs at intervals in the ditches and weeds along the roads around the township.
Kenny was a couple of years older than I and he had a car. He would sometimes be driving down the road with a car full of rowdy friends and someone would exclaim, “Gee, it sure is hot in here, I would give anything for a beer.” Kenny would immediately slam on the brakes, jump out of the car, pull a jug of home brew out of the weeds, and pass it around.
Everyone was surprised – and also very impressed.
But wait, there’s more!
If a town has a brewery, it also needs a distillery.
I found an old pressure cooker in our basement. With the cooker used as a boiler, a copper coil from an old water heater and a 1 gallon lard can used as a condenser, Kenny and I put together what we thought was a first class still.
Since I always had crocks with deer hides from my taxidermy business curing in our basement, another crock containing whiskey mash wouldn’t cause any suspicion. We mixed together a concoction of chicken feed, sugar, water and yeast, and let it do its thing for about a month. Then taking this mash and the still, we headed for the creek to start our careers as moonshiners.
We heated the pressure cooker with a gasoline weed burner and boiled the mash. When the steam came through the copper coil we cooled it with creek water which caused the steam to condense. Out of the end of the coil slowly dripped what we hoped was top quality first class hooch.
It didn’t quite work out that way. The final product was so bad that even our dog wouldn’t drink it. It tasted like the whole Russian army had used it to wash their socks, so we abandoned that endeavor and moved on to other interesting ways to improve our community.
In the likely case that the reader thinks all this stuff is only in the imagination of the author (I sometimes wonder myself), let me present the following untouched photo of the still, along with its proud owner.
c.1947