A few weeks into my time in Goa, I sent a draft of one of my Substack posts to a Goan colleague to get his feedback. He told me, “you can’t use the term hooch to talk about feni. Hooch has a very specific connotation in India, and it is not good.” After one quick internet search I realized that, in India, hooch denotes a specific category of sketchy homemade rotgut booze that somewhat regularly kills people en masse. In the five years from 2016 to 2020, more than 6,000 people in India died from drinking “spurious liquor”.
People often ask me if I’ve ever declined to sample a home distiller’s product, given the rough shape of some of the still sites I’ve visited. My thinking is, a sip or two of anything won’t kill me, and it is more important to me to show respect and gain a rapport with the folks I am asking to let me in on their secrets than to decline and risk offense. I will admit, however, that on a couple of occasions—in both Romania and Goa—I’ve been gifted a bottle of booze that I later poured down the sink.
But for the most part, even if a still looks sketchy to me, my experience tells me that it almost certainly has been producing reliable booze for the community, and often for the distiller himself, for a long time.
Some folks might think I am too trusting, but to me the physical evidence is pretty clear. Even if the mash has bugs in it, even if the fermenting barrels and jerry cans don’t look particularly clean, alcohol is antiseptic. And more importantly, to a person, the people I have met are proud of what they make, and they stake their reputation on quality. They wouldn’t give it to me if they wouldn’t drink it themselves.
This is to say, I haven’t yet met anyone in Goa who makes hooch* in the way that Indians use the term (hereafter denoted with an asterisk): homemade booze unscrupulously adulterated for maximum quantity and a quick high, health consequences be damned.
I chose the name Hooch Planet for this project because, to me, it seemed more universal than something like moonshine. I use it with affection and no small amount of admiration for the ingenuity of the hooch-makers. In my naiveté, I thought that hooch meant pretty much the same thing everywhere in the world—a generic term for homemade distilled alcohol. Turns, out, I was wrong about that.
I may have a rather romantic view of what I have been calling hooch throughout this project. But hooch* is qualitatively not the same thing, and definitely not what I have encountered in my fieldwork.
The hooch* that kills people in places like Madhya Pradesh and Punjab is not romantic, nor is it a carefully tended craft spirit. It is usually made in large quantities with additives like industrially-produced Extra Neutral Alcohol, or ENA, which is often destined for use in solvents, paints, cosmetics, vaccines, and is also used as a base for factory-made whiskies, vodkas, rums and brandies.
ENA is incredibly strong—usually over 90%—but this isn’t what makes hooch* lethal. What kills you is methanol, an alcohol compound whose molecular weight is lighter than ethanol and therefore is quicker to evaporate when a mash is heated. Scrupulous distillers usually toss out the first 50-200ml or so of the distillate—known as the heads—to minimize the amount of methanol in the final product. No booze is completely free of methanol as it also carries some important congeners that contribute to the flavor of the final spirit, but since ingesting just 40 ml can be fatal, most conscientious distillers make sure to chuck out the first bit just to be safe.
Even if you don’t toss it out, though, the amount of methanol that comes off of a home-distilled run is probably not enough to blind or kill anyone. What makes hooch* deadly in India is when extra methanol is added to amp up flavor, increase quantity, and provide and an extra “kick” that gets you drunker faster. If consumed in high enough quantities, this hooch* will, in fact, kill you.
And even if it doesn’t, a lot of other bad stuff can happen. Alcohol is responsible for many social ills, and India has a long history of anti-alcohol movements—the most famous being led by Mohandas Gandhi—that rightfully link excessive alcohol consumption with domestic violence, labor absenteeism, and a drain on family finances. Alcohol use is a major public health issue in many places in the world, and one study estimates the 30 year cost to the Indian economy at one and a half trillion US dollars.
But in the 7 months that I have spent interviewing moonshiners in different parts of the world, in all sorts of circumstances, at all hours of the day and night, I’ve yet to see any of them drunk, or even tipsy, or even drinking more than a taste or two, usually just to keep me from the embarrassment of drinking alone when they offer me a sample from their still. (In fact, I have met far more distillers who claim to be teetotalers themselves than I ever expected to.) I have not seen widespread drunkenness (or even, really, any obvious drunkenness) in the communities where they make their booze. And every distiller I have met claims that their product is therapeutic, even medicinal, even for children.
Maybe these claims are just a way to rationalize drinking, but beliefs about appropriate medicinal, therapeutic, ceremonial, and recreational use of spirits seem to be widely shared. And there are clear social norms around drinking behavior in these communities: always drink with food, a small glass only before a meal (or after), a taste before you go to work in the fields in the morning, or when you come home. Never more than a glass, or two. Always to be shared.
Obviously not everyone observes these norms—with drinking often comes transgression. But what counts as acceptable and what counts as transgressive is established, maintained, and negotiated within structures of power that stratify society by race, caste, and class.
Colonizers the world over, for example, tend to pathologize the loss of inhibition that comes with drinking, especially among colonial subjects who they are desperate to control. Natives are infantilized as neophyte drinkers who can’t be trusted with intoxicating substances. Nor can white lower-class soldiers and laborers who similarly lack the impulse control of their European superiors. Lords and masters, on the other hand, host booze-soaked bacchanals where the quantity and quality of intoxicating substances is crucial to maintaining one’s social standing.
Where pre-colonial indigenous alcohol traditions exist, they are taxed, criminalized, or otherwise oppressed in order to protect the market for foreign booze, upon which the natives eventually get hooked. There is a reason that Gandhi’s call for national prohibition was a core principle of the Indian independence movement.
In his exhaustive global history of prohibition, Smashing the Liquor Machine, Mark Schrad posits temperance movements as movements of liberation by oppressed classes seeking to overthrow their chemical and fiscal manipulation by those in power. But prohibition laws are also inherently about control—controlling the behavior of those who cannot control themselves.
In this framing, prohibition laws constitute a kind of state paternalism that is often shot through with racist and casteist ideology. Whether, how, and who is allowed to drink is a political question as much as it is a cultural one, and India is a fascinating case study in the range of ways that the state and society can organize laws and expectations around drinking behavior.
As I have mentioned, each state in India regulates alcohol independently, and some states like Gujarat—where a strictly prohibitionist Hinduism is dominant—are completely dry. Goa, on the other hand, is a place where Indians from more conservative parts of the country come to let their hair down, and have a drink.
The geography of alcohol in India is incredibly complex. Across this vast landscape, local traditions, religious beliefs, colonial histories, and a capitalist state all contribute to how some foods and drinks become framed as good and others as bad.
It’s clear that drinking can lead to personal and societal outcomes that are objectively bad, but most drinking doesn’t go that far. And in fact, as many people have told me over the course of this project, it is an activity that brings conviviality, helping to establish and reaffirm the social bonds of family and community. And, as I said in my first ever post for this project, for many people, it’s just fun.
In his book Drunk, philosopher Edward Slingerland explores the evolutionary, archaeological, and aesthetic roots of the human drive to get high. He peers past puritanical moralizing to argue that the pursuit of pleasure is essential to being human, and that getting drunk every once in a while might actually be good for us.
Clearly there are entire belief systems that vehemently disagree, but often at their core is a paternalistic drive to police the pleasure of those lower in the social hierarchy. The narrative around the harm that is caused by the manufacture and consumption of hooch* in India is a narrative of the dominant caste. Yes, many people have died from drinking tainted alcohol in India, but those deaths in many ways are the tragically predictable result of the criminalization of the very existence—not to mention the livelihood strategies—of entire groups of people.
When upper-caste Indians and hand-wringing foreigners characterize hooch* as something unhealthy, unclean, illicit, and dangerous, that characterization is all too easily extended to the people who make it as well. Often, these folks belong to castes that have been forced to live on the razor’s edge of survival, their livelihood driven underground while the state earns revenue from the slice of the liquor industry that it deems “legitimate”. This toxic brew of colonialism, capitalism, casteism is as much to blame for India’s thousands of alcohol casualties as the individual hooch*-makers adding methanol to their booze.
In the five year period mentioned above, only 2 of India’s 28 states had zero hooch*-related fatalities. One of those two states was Goa, where the tradition of home distilling is a matter of pride and craft, and the state’s policies toward alcohol manufacture and consumption are the most permissive in the country.
From what I can tell, nobody is dying from drinking hooch* in Goa because no one is making it. As in Romania, I hear rumors about unscrupulous distillers who are just out to make money adding questionable stuff to their booze, but the fact that I’ve never seen or met or even gotten a name of a single person who is actually doing that makes me think that maybe this is just a useful myth to emphasize my interlocutors’ integrity. “There are people who do that, but I never would”.
This is not to say that excessive alcohol consumption isn’t a problem in Goa. In fact, walk the streets of the capital city of Panjim any given Friday night during the high season and you’ll be lucky not to trip over a sloppy-drunk tourist. But excessive alcohol consumption isn’t a Goan problem, or a tourist problem, it’s a human problem.
Every society, whether alcohol consumption is officially permitted or not, confronts these issues. And the fact that many Indian states with far more restrictive alcohol policies also have more hooch*-related tragedies raises the uncomfortable question of whether banning alcohol just drives it underground, reducing community accountability, and making it more dangerous.
Alcohol, like pretty much everything we do for fun, has a dark side. And it is a source of frustration and even danger for the more sober citizens of India’s party state. It is important for me in the course of this project not to pass over the very real personal and social harms that alcohol has wrought, especially here in India.
But hooch means different things to different people in different places at different moments in history. Hooch Planet is a big, complicated world of contradictions: of pleasure and risk, of social dislocation and community, of tradition and modernization, of oppression and sovereignty. The point of this project is not to resolve these questions, but to explore them and see where they lead.
I hope you're collecting these to revise and republish. This one begs for a digression into the widespread adulteration of American moonshine during Prohibition and the carnage that ensued. You're really onto something here.
Extremely well said, Emelie - especially noting the paradox of state disciplining of alcohol precipitating backcountry stills…and very informative regarding managing additives to the brew! Safe travels to Brazil.