City liquor, country liquor
White lightning. Mountain dew. Devil’s brew. Blue-burner. Rotgut. Jungle juice. Joy juice. Firewater. Freakwater. Stump water.
Moonshine.
Everywhere in the world (at least everywhere I’ve been so far), when you get close to a working moonshine still you can smell it before you see it. That heady, cloying scent of fermenting sugar mixed with ethanol vapor that makes you feel like you might get drunk just from breathing the fumes. With cashew feni it is even more unmistakeable. The smell is impossible to describe, somewhere between the musk of a wild animal and rotting fruit, but boozy. As was promised to me, now that the season is in full swing you really can smell the distilleries as you drive down the road, even though they are far from view. These sites are never sterile, rarely tidy, occasionally of somewhat questionable safety, and always a little bit magical.
I never get tired of that moment of revelation, following a winding path through the forest or driving up to a nondescript garage and coming upon a little mad-scientist playground. Moonshine stills are sites of great innovation, for although distilling technology is pretty simple and straightforward (ferment sugar, heat it up, collect the evaporating alcohol as steam, condense, enjoy), the number of variables at play—the material of the pot, the coil, and the receiving vessel, the method used to cool the alcohol vapor, the source of the cooling water, the type of fuel and the temperature of the fire, not to mention all the variables associated with fermenting the mash, which in itself is of infinite variety—means that every single still site is an expression of the values, priorities, resources and resourcefulness of the distiller.
In Goa, I’ve seen many variations on the theme of the moonshine still. I’ve seen stainless steel and copper pots that don’t look all that different from what is used in the US and Eastern Europe, and I’ve also seen repurposed oil drums half-buried in mud. I’ve seen still pots connected to the condenser coil with a tube that is actually a large reed from the bonki plant that has been hollowed out with hot coals. The charcoal inside the reed is said to act as a sort of filter, and the outside of the reed is wrapped in fabric and clay to control heat loss.
The still top is often capped with a wooden plug made from a coconut tree. It is sealed with strips of cloth that are covered in a specific type of clay dug from nearby anthills, with a superfine texture that is less likely to crack under high heat.
In some stills, rather than allowing the finished distillate to trickle into a bucket or a jerry can, it is collected in a closed earthen pot, only to be opened when the process is complete. As I wrote in my previous post, this is called the launi method, and what I didn’t realize before I saw it in person is that it completely changes how the distiller judges the progress of the run.
You can’t take a sample and taste it, or light it on fire, or drop a hydrometer into it. Instead, you know from experience how full the pot needs to be when the run is finished, and you tap your finger on the outside to listen for the dull ring that says it has reached the correct level.
Everywhere in the world where I’ve seen people making moonshine, I’ve seen this kind of generational knowledge and deeply ingrained, hard-won expertise on display. The diversity of materials and methods in the universal practice of distilling alcohol speaks to the ecological and cultural adaptations that evolve over time to tailor both process and product to the specificities of the place where it is made.
Even in a small place like Goa where everyone is using the same fruit to make the same final product, I’ve seen a pretty diverse array of moonshine operations, from well-capitalized gentleman farmers with tidy still sites and a handful of workers who make feni for friends and neighbors to taxi driver/farmers with patched-together operations using whatever materials they can find to make as much feni as possible to sell to the bottling companies. This, all, is moonshine. In India, it’s called “country liquor”.
When I first heard this term I knew what it meant, I thought, and I’ve seen plenty of what sure looks like country liquor in the weeks that I’ve been here. But country liquor isn’t a local colloquialism. It isn’t India’s “white lightning”. It is, first and foremost, a regulatory category, defined by the Goa Excise Act of 1964 this way:
“country liquor” means liquor manufactured in any part of India other than Indian made foreign liquor [IMFL].
Indian made foreign liquor covers alcohol that is manufactured in, but not indigenous to, India—whiskey, vodka, rum, and brandy. IMFL carries higher excise duties than country liquor (for which excise duties are essentially zero), and also higher social status. A wealthy Indian living in a big city might drink feni, or toddy, or mahua to signal their hipster credentials or show that they’re down with the people, but it is not the bottle they regularly reach for to make their evening nightcap, or to serve when they are entertaining.
In India, drinking prestige spirits is a marker of status. One college student told me that while her father very rarely drinks, he has a glass-fronted cabinet full of expensive whiskies worthy of a serious collector. Drinking country liquor, or desi daru in Hindi, has the opposite social connotation. It is sometimes called a “laborer’s drink”, and is associated with lower caste and class status. Some country liquors, like coconut toddy, are in fact associated with a specific caste. This is not the case with feni but historically it hasn’t been something you’d see on the menu at a fancy hotel. At least, not until recently.
Like many other foods and beverages that once sustained the lower classes, often made from scraps, leftovers, or less desirable parts, or from plants wild-foraged on communal lands, desi daru is ripe for a rebrand. In fact, a UK-based liquor company has quite literally trademarked Desi Daru to brand their “Indian-inspired, British-born” vodka.
There are other companies in India that are working to “elevate” what was once (and in many ways still is) considered a proletarian beverage to a status that reflects its important role in regional cultural traditions. Desmond Nazareth is one such entrepreneur, working to bring a spirit called mahua to a wider consumer audience. Mahua, made from the flowers of the eponymous tree, is the “country liquor” of several different tribal groups across central India. It is also one of the nation’s most contested country liquors, and has been the object of suppression and even criminalization since the early days of British colonization. I don’t have time to delve deeply into the case of mahua here, but suffice to say that DesmondJi is one of a growing number of craft liquor manufacturers working to change the perception of desi daru in the culinary world.
In Goa, feni’s most zealous evangelist is Hansel Vaz, owner of Cazulo Premium Feni and secretary of the Feni Distillers and Bottler’s Association. Vaz’s company distills feni at their own facility in the countryside of central Goa, and they also buy feni produced by villagers throughout the state, repackaging it into Cazulo’s fancy branded bottles to be sold at premium retailers, hotels, and restaurants.
Vaz is on a mission not just to support and capacitate local village distillers and market feni as a top-shelf spirit, but to teach people, Goans included, how to drink it. For Vaz, the biggest challenge to establishing feni as a spirit on par with the finest whiskies has nothing to do with the qualities of the spirit itself. It comes from the cultural stigma of country liquor. By leading distillery visitors through an opulent “feni experience” where different varieties of the spirit are paired with foods meant to both compliment and clash with its unique qualities, Vaz is introducing novitiates to what he thinks could become the next mezcal.
To what end? The project of “elevation” suggests challenging, reversing, and eventually capitalizing on the marginalized social status of foods and beverages that marginalized people have relied on for their material and cultural survival. It is a way of taking something that is seen by mainstream culture as rustic, unrefined, sometimes unclean or even shameful and holding it up as the repository and material embodiment of an idealized authenticity that modern life has all but extinguished. It is a celebration of centuries of accumulated knowledge and tradition that make a place and a people unique unto themselves. But what happens when these foods and beverages become the object of bourgeois desire?
When I was growing up in Tennessee in the 1980s, ramps, the pungent wild leeks that grow under the forest canopy of the Smoky Mountains and throughout the Appalachian range, were one of these shameful foods. A common schoolyard insult was “you smell like ramps!”, which was a proxy for calling someone poor. In the mid 2000s, ramps underwent a renaissance as “elevated Appalachian cuisine” had a moment in refined culinary circles.
Predictably, not long afterward, stories began to emerge about “apocalyptic over-harvesting”, trespassing, and property crimes being committed by eager ramp-foragers capitalizing on a new high-end market that seemed to materialize overnight. Pork rinds became the keto-friendly potato chip of the 2010s, fried green tomatoes now appear on fine-dining appetizer menus in the early summer, and social media has reversed the fortunes of the humble paw paw, previously little-known outside the region and now referred to as the Appalachian mango.
Is this good or bad? I don’t know. It’s complicated. The thing is, when these foods are elevated, the folks who have relied on them for centuries usually aren’t elevated with them.
In her 2021 article in T Magazine, Ligaya Mishan recalls growing up in Hawaii where SPAM was the ultimate utility food, and then watching as it began to appear on high-end restaurant menus, “typically with a heavy helping of irony”. Countless foods have been the object of this kind of culinary gentrification, becoming, in Mishan’s words, “a souvenir from another life: someone else’s struggle, reduced to a commodity, with a backdrop of distress as window dressing”.
But is that what’s happening with desi daru in India? Or with Goan feni, in particular?
In the last decade, some states in India have created a new administrative category for liquor, positioned in between country liquor and IMFL. Legally it isn’t clear yet what the implications of the newly coined “heritage spirit” will be, as each individual state in India regulates alcohol production, sale, and trade independently. It may help some products sidestep the commercial restrictions on inter-state sales of country liquor. But perhaps more importantly, it sidesteps the cultural baggage of desi daru.
In my conversations it is clear that the term “heritage spirit” means something to the folks who make feni. IMFL isn’t special to India, and country liquor isn’t something you drink in public in polite society. Heritage spirit reveres the traditions embedded in local distilling practices and makes an identity claim. This product is worthy of value. It is special. It is ours. It is artisanal. It is craft. It belongs on the menus of fine dining establishments. It is not your father’s country liquor. Even though it might come from your father’s still, which might be a repurposed oil barrel perched on the edge of a creek tucked up what I can only call a Goan holler. Does it matter to those folks whether it is country liquor or heritage spirit? As a moonshine drinker from way back, it still looks like country liquor to me, and there’s nothing shameful about that.
It’s clear that country liquor’s historically marginalized status in India is tied up tightly with relations of caste and class, which implicates broader social structures of oppression with its social standing. I think similar things can be said of moonshine in the US. Clearly some of the euphemisms that lead off this post are pejorative. Who wants to drink rotgut or stump water?
But when tourists come to the Smoky Mountains, they flock to the (legit, licensed, commercial, advertised on billboards for miles in every direction) Ole Smoky Distillery and buy up the White Lightning (TM) as fast as the company can restock the shelves. Moonshine cocktails headline the menus of restaurants and bars seeking to signal their regional bonafides, just as feni cocktails signal a commitment to featuring Goan cuisine.
But do Goans or Appalachians drink their moonshine shaken with pomelo bitters and eggwhite? Probably not. Will Goans who bring their own plastic water bottle to the local tavern to buy feni for 200 rupees a liter start paying 1000 a liter for essentially the same product in fancy packaging? Again, nope. Which producers will get a slice of new premium market? What is actually signified here? And what (and who) is actually being elevated when these previously subaltern spirits are bestowed a new status of legitimacy by the culinary elite?
Last week’s headline in Goan newspaper O Heraldo reads: “It’s not quite ‘feni’ as Goa’s cashew production dips with neglect”. According to the article, Goan cashew farmers are struggling with low prices, terrible yields, and what they see as a lack of support from a state government that claims to want to promote feni as an essential part of Goan culture, but is doing little to materially support producers. The very next day, I sat with my feet in the cool water of a mountain stream, at a long table heavily laden with succulent olives, tropical fruit, and Goan sweets as Hansel Vaz led a rapt crowd through an hours-long lesson in how to taste, how to see, and how to feel about Goa’s heritage spirit.
Hours later the workers who were probably at that moment sweating under the oppressive heat to gather cashew fruits for the distillery would arrive to deliver their daily harvest for a price that, according to them, barely breaks even. But by then, the tourists would be long gone.
Excellent distillation of Feni in Goa.
And the basics: Ferment, heat, condense, enjoy.
And you show us how something so basically simple gets very complicated.
Looking forward to a tasting . . .
According to verbal lore, one hillside home on Peine farm made moonshine.