Allspice, Absinthe, Moonshine, and Lies

Words by Rachael Fowler

I used to tell people that allspice was a mixture of cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves. It’s just all the spices you need for an apple pie, I would say.

I was wrong.

Allspice is a berry from the tropics. Tink Jamaica, Cuba, or Puerto Rico. If you grind it up, it smells like cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves. It smells like all the spices. But it’s a berry. I associate it with a crisp whif of evergreen, with the thick flm of eggnog, or with the faky crust of an apple pie. I think of silver rhinestone ornaments, not Caribbean beaches. I’d imagine other people think the same. But is that thought wrong?

Earlier this October, I stopped at a liquor store before a house party. Te white-haired worker had to buzz me in the door which told me I’d defnitely be carded at the counter. Te tiles were sticky near the Bailey’s, causing my shoe soles to slightly rip of the foor with every step. Lef, rip, rip. Right, rip, rip.

I scanned the squatty-square room searching for the whiskey section, because whiskey is what one drinks when one hopes for winter to come sooner. Whiskey means fannel and fre logs and a promise of cooler weather. Rum is for summer. Whiskey is for winter.

When I reached the whiskeys, I had one thought: What’s the cheapest thing I can buy that won’t also make me vomit instantaneously? I scanned over honey-infused concoctions and rye variations, pondering my choice. Scotch? Defnitely not. Crown? Oh, if only. And that’s when I saw it. Glass jar with a vintage label. On the shelf. Legally sold.

Apple pie moonshine.

I was elated. Moonshine? In the store? I’ll have three please. I remember a similar feeling once in Prague. Two friends and I found a bottle of cannabis-infused absinthe in a tiny shop by a cofee house. It was too good to be true, too easy to buy, exactly what we wanted out of a European adventure. But it tasted like red Play-Doh mixed with stale licorice.

One friend took a sip, refused to even look at it afer that, and went to sleep. My other friend and I dissolved foreign mints in the bottle so we could tolerate each gulp. We spent that night in the basement of a boat hotel, whispering through a tiny round window to unsuspecting locals walking by. Was it worth it? I’d say yes. We fnally understood Alice in Wonderland and cubism. And we did it with something we considered to be specifcally European.

When I saw the moonshine in the liquor store, I had hopes of the same experience. Moonshine was exactly what I wanted for a Southern house party. I thought I’d found a gem.

Some people only know about moonshine because of Lawless or Te Dukes of Hazard. Maybe a few people remember it from Te Great Escape. My frst experience with moonshine was with white lightning in Mississippi.

I was sixteen and staying with my family in a cedar house on the Pascagoula River. We had a neighbor who placed tailgating chairs in his backyard, as if he were perpetually watching football, and drifwood sculptures in his front yard, as if he were some rustic salvage-the-land type artist. He also made moonshine.

No one ever ofered me any. But the thing about moonshine, about white lightning in general, is that it doesn’t take too many swigs before the drinker’s body stops all normal functioning. Adults don’t really pay attention afer white lightning.

If you’re sixteen, and the adults are a bit inebriated, you funnel some of the moonshine into an empty water bottle and scamper upstairs to taste it. You slip into the bathroom and click the lock. And then you snif the moonshine before tasting, tentatively tilt the bottle to your lips, barely let the liquid graze the tip of your tongue, and decide to just throw back the whole half a shot that you stole. And then, if you’re me, you almost choke. You hate it. You’d rather drink fngernail polish remover.

My frst thought was that Mississippi moonshine must be the worst. Te water in that state is just too brown for moonshine, too muddy, too Mississippi in general. I fancied myself an amateur moonshine connoisseur, a connoisseur who would eventually realize that all moonshine gobbles up your throat when you swallow it.

My understanding of moonshine begins with my knowledge of Prohibition. What a failure. Maybe some people were more sober then. But some people were just as drunk as before Prohibition, and more rich, in fact, because they also made moonshine.

Tey’d brew it in old buckets or bathtubs in the woods, bottle it in family-stamped mason jars, pack it in a jalopy, and scurry to sell it to some gang in Chicago or a cave party in Alabama. Tis is how I think about moonshine. I believe it’s more or less true.

But the one thing I know for sure is that people drank the acid-shine then because they had to, because there was no other choice, because things always taste better when they’re illegal. And because I tasted moonshine when I was sixteen, I know people still drink it. But now they drink it by choice. I used to think it was because people wanted the high alcohol percentage. But then I discovered Everclear.

My new theory is that people still drink moonshine for one of two reasons. One: the drinker is too young to buy alcohol and is ingenious enough to make his/her own moonshine or homemade wine. Two: the drinker wants to consume liquid which makes him/her feel like an underground partier of Prohibition America. Te drinker wants to consume history, history that feels particularly American in spirit. Tey want the same high as the rebels who supplied the country with liquor. When I drank cannabis absinthe, I thought I was getting the same high as Hemingway, Joyce, van Gogh, or Picasso. I thought I was consuming history.

What’s even more interesting about moonshine is that the taste is specifc to the place of origin. When people say Guinness tastes better in Dublin, or Sam Adams tastes better in Boston, they’re right. It does.

Tink about how wine from California difers from wine in France. It’s because of the soil, the climate, the grape’s DNA and various other factors that a sommelier can one day tell you about in detail. Moonshine in Mississippi must be diferent than moonshine from Tennessee or Alabama. Consider the water that’s used, the difering recipes, the person who actually makes it.

It’s quite possible that the moonshine I tasted when I was sixteen was just bad. It’s also possible that it was fantastic. Whichever the case, it was defnitely Mississippi moonshine. And I’m proud of tasting it. Tat one batch of moonshine was a part of history. And I was one of a handful of people who lived some of it.

Not too long afer that, my grandma showed me a ceramic jug which she still keeps in her garage. It’s a little over a foot tall, feels thick, and has a brown veneer. It’s very smooth.

She told me it was her family’s jug. When they made moonshine, they’d pour some in that jug and bring it home. Te water they used in the process came from a spring that was thought to have healing powers. My family’s moonshine was magical.

If I was given the chance, I’d travel back in time to when my grandma’s dad brought his brown jug home. I’d sit next him in their farm house and introduce myself. He’d take a swig of the healing liquor, ofer me some, and I’d accept. Knowing I’d abhor the taste, I’d take a swig anyway. And I would savor it, maybe swish it around in my mouth, then barely stomach it when it went down. I’d give a silent nod of approval because I’d want to impress my grandma’s dad. But mostly, I’d be a bit more a part of my family. I’d be tasting moonshine made with a family recipe, from magical waters of Alabama, out of a homemade jug. I’d be consuming family history. It’d be a part of me, at least until my throat stopped burning and the drunkenness wore of.

When I go to my grandma’s now, I pass that jug in her garage. Most times, I don’t even think about it. But sometimes I think about how many hands the jug has passed through, how many mouths have skimmed the rim, how many miles it’s traveled down from the woods of Alabama to Mobile. And then I think about what’s gonna happen to that jug when my grandma is no longer here to have a garage to keep it in.

When I saw the apple pie moonshine in the liquor store, I eventually thought of the brown jug. I thought of the Mississippi moonshine and our family recipe. I realized the apple pie moonshine wasn’t moonshine at all. It was a lie. Too good to be true. Too easy to buy.

Mass-produced moonshine is manufactured in large distilleries. It comes in a bottle crafed to sell with a label plotted out by a graphic design major. It’s 20% alcohol by volume. It isn’t any more authentic than cannabis-infused absinthe.

Prohibition Americans weren’t drinking our store-bought apple pie moonshine and Picasso wasn’t getting cannabis-infused absinthe from Prague. Just because something makes you drunk, it doesn’t mean it is what it pretends to be. Even though I’ll probably never drink moonshine out of the brown jug, it still feels more authentic than apple pie moonshine from the ABC store.

I could’ve bought that moonshine before the party that day. And I’m sure people would’ve been happy about it. It would’ve been a hit. We’d pass it around, sloppily. Shot, pass, shot, pass, shot. Let me try it, someone would say. We could’ve been drunk enough to sleep on a boat and whisper to passers-by. And it certainly would’ve tasted better than Play-Doh, licorice, and mints.

But buying that jar and calling it moonshine felt like a lie. It felt like calling allspice a mixture of cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves when the real thing is actually a berry.

It would’ve been wrong. So I didn’t buy it. I grabbed a whiskey, showed my I.D., and prepared myself for the step and rip of the Bailey’s foor.