Expert: Matt Dick - 1/16/2008

Question
ok why is moonshine illegal? does it have more to do with the process or is it just because it is home brewed. i know nothing about alcohol, but i was just wondering about this. because i was wondering why no one has marketed moonshine or have they?

Answer
Thanks for the question!

There is a misconception buried in your question.  Alcoholic drinks are broadly able to be broken up into two categories -- fermented and distilled.  

Fermented drinks are generally wine and beer.  Wine is fermented sugar from grapes, beer is made from fermenting the sugar from (mostly) the malt from barley.  There are some others, but they are rarer (like mead which is made from honey).

The distilled alcohols are actually initially fermented, but then distilled (which means that the alcohol is separated from the fermented materials which makes it much more purely alcohol than beer or wine is.  Like the fermented beverages described above, the primary difference between the types of drinks is the kind of sugar that the yeast turns into alcohol.  Whiskeys are made from grain sugars, rum from cane sugar, tequila from the sugar from cacti, etc.  

Moonshine is not a type of drink the way the others are, it is called moonshine precisely *because* it is illegal.  When alcohol was prohibited in the United States, illegal stills were used by individuals and were kept secret, and often were used at night (used by moonshine -- hence the name).  Later, it became common to refer to any illegally distilled alcoholic drink as moonshine, regardless of what category of drink it might actually be.  Moonshine was often made from rye or corn, which would make it most closely related to whiskey.  

Aside from being illegal, moonshine can be dangerous, since an amateur distilling process can result in methanol and other toxins in the drink.  Professional and commercial distilleries can purify alcohol much more safely.

Cheers,
Matt