What Is Moonshine?

Moonshine is spirit distilled in secret: without a licence, without paying the tax, usually at night. In the United States the word today mostly means a clear, unaged whiskey made from corn. It usually sits around 40 % ABV, often higher, because nobody measures a still that does not officially exist. The name comes from eighteenth-century England, and it tells you what time of day the work was done.

What is moonshine?

For a long time "moonshine" simply meant moonlight in English, and later empty talk. From 1785 the word is recorded for smuggled spirits on the coasts of Kent and Sussex. The liquor was made and moved by moonlight, because that was when you were least likely to be seen.

The word found its second home in America. In 1791 the young government put a tax on whiskey, and a good many small distillers decided not to pay it. Prohibition, from 1920 to 1933, turned a sideline into a trade. Today American distilleries sell clear, unaged spirits under the same name, perfectly legally. The word changed sides. It kept the smell of woodsmoke.

How strong is moonshine?

Legally bottled moonshine is usually around 40 % ABV. Illicit moonshine can be a great deal stronger, and that is exactly the problem: without anyone checking, nobody knows what is in the jar. When you read "moonshine" on a label today, it is a promise about style, not about origin.

Is moonshine the same as Schnaps?

Not quite. Moonshine is not a drink with a recipe so much as a circumstance: spirit made without permission. In America it was mostly corn. In the Alps it was fruit. An Obstler, for instance, is distilled mainly from apples and pears and has at least 37.5 % ABV; Austria's agriculture ministry lists it among the country's traditional foods. Distil it with a licence and it is an Obstler. Distil it without one and it is a matter for customs.

Distilling in the dark: the Alpine version

The Alps had their own version of this story long before anyone here knew the English word. A Tyrolean account book from 1322 to 1332 already mentions "aqua vitae", brandy. Where fruit trees grow and winters are long, people distil.

The state wanted its share, and the farmers found ways not to ask it too often. What came of that was a very Austrian arrangement: the Abfindungsbrennerei. The small distiller pays not on the alcohol that comes out at the end, but on what goes into the still at the start. On top of that came a tax-free allowance for the Hausbrand, the schnapps kept for the farm itself.

Some of these farms were allowed to make up to 300 litres of pure alcohol a year. Locally it is still called the Maria-Theresian distilling right. Whether the empress ever signed anything of the sort cannot be shown; the Austrian finance ministry found no trace of it in the legal commentaries. The name stayed anyway. In Tyrol alone, some 8,200 farms held such a right in 1996.

And alongside them, to be honest about it, there were always the others. Unlicensed stills have been part of farming country for as long as there has been a tax to avoid. People tell of a small copper pot in the hay barn that no office knew about, and a fire that was only lit when the fog was low enough to hide the smoke. Nobody talked about it much. Everybody knew.

Why is a shop in Bad Gastein called Moonshine?

Because the name remembers that tradition and does not pretend to be it. Gastein Moonshine is a shop in Bad Gastein, not a copper pot in a barn. On the shelves are bottles we chose, some to our own recipe: a Zirbenschnaps, a Zirben Gin, liqueurs for long evenings. All of it licensed, all of it taxed.

What we kept from the old moonshine is the other part: that a glass in the evening can be more than a drink. That it is shared. That it is allowed to be cold outside.

The schnapps and liqueurs are in the shop and online. How it all began is in our story.