Hanging Out with the Moonshine Outlaws of British Columbia

LaPhogue's still, dripping away at three drops per second.

LaPhogue is pleased. The still is performing like a dream; the column purrs along at its optimum temperature (78.5 degrees Celsius), and the outflow rate holds steady at three drops per second.

“Look at it!” he cackles, doing a little dance. “It's clear as a fucking bell.”

Nine mason jars are lined up at the base of the apparatus, each containing a small amount of

liquid which, according to the fluid hydrometer, drips from the outflow at 95% ABV. We've been minding the still for close to five hours now, halfway through a second round of distillation known as a Spirit Run, and the result, when safely diluted down to the more customary 40%, is a pure, clean, slightly sweet, crystal clear alcohol that tastes and smells better than anything you could hope to buy from your local liquor store.

“Do you have a stopwatch on your phone?” he asks. “I'm running her slow today.”

Three drops per second is actually a touch faster than normal (one drop per second yields optimal flavours on LaPhogue's still), but the clock is ticking. In less than two hours, he has to deliver his product to a venue in an undisclosed part of town, discreetly sealed in commercial liquor bottles, for sale to eager partygoers. He doesn't sell often (this is only his second sale), and he doesn't need the money—his last job offer came with a $200,000 salary attached. A far cry from romanticized notions of jug-toting hillbillies and bathtub gin, LaPhogue is part of a new breed of DIY moonshiners cropping up all down the west coast of Canada: intelligent, informed, educated, and more concerned with making a quality product than a quick buck.

Unfortunately, what he's doing is also very illegal.

Forget the cozy realities of home-brewing or amateur winemaking; according to Canada's Excise Act, the sale of unlawfully manufactured spirits carries with it a fine of up to $10,000, and a maximum of a year in prison. The sale of illicit liquor is subject to the same penalty, along with the confiscation of any manufacturing equipment or vehicles used for transport. The construction, concealment, or even the possession of a functional still can lead to 12 sodomy-filled months behind bars.

“The legality of it is intimidating,” explains McCoy (not his real name), part of a BC moonshine co-op that's three years old and boasts close to 20 members. “There are lots of people in our co-op who have public personas and important jobs and have a lot on the line. Getting busted even for something minor could have professional ramifications…and we're always scared. When someone was pulled over near where we were working awhile back, we were very nervous. It was unsettling, and we had to work very quietly after that.”

Much larger than LaPhogue's two-man operation, McCoy's co-op has an organized hierarchy (including an accountant), and two functioning stills. Both were built by members of the co-op, with one of them capable of holding up to 100L—meaning that a spirit run usually involves multiple shifts over a period of as much as 13 hours. The members of the co-op are passionate and educated, with backgrounds in everything from engineering to welding to computer science. In an era of increasingly high-end designer drugs and sophisticated digital crime, outlaws of LaPhogue and McCoy’s stripe seem downright antiquated, but, while McCoy's skittishness might seem extreme (he confides that ten months ago he wouldn’t have done an interview), he does have reason to be worried. Earlier in 2013, a family operation said to have been running for fifty years was shut down in Tennesse. Popcorn Sutton, among the oldest and best-known moonshiners in the U.S, committed suicide in 2009 rather than face jail time. And in 2011, a 65-year-old BC resident was arrested and charged with possession of a still, possession of bulk alcohol, production of illicit spirits, and unlawful sale of liquor after a police raid discovered he was running a sizeable moonshine operation out of his basement. He escaped jail time, but was hit with several fines.

Aside from being thrown into a real life game of cops and robbers, making moonshine presents other concerning dangers.

“The flammable gases are actually pretty sketchy,” explains Huck (also not his real name), who has been making moonshine on his own for more than five years. “It's easy to underestimate it, but they're flammable to the point where static electricity can ignite them. And if you're heating something in your boiler that's 50% alcohol, and there's air in the headspace of your boiler, at some point when you're heating it up, there's going to be an ideal mixture of air and alcohol vapour. And it could cause an explosion if a static charge were to cross it. You can get vapours going through the exhaust fans in your house, and if there's an electric motor, you could light your roof on fire and burn your house down. It sounds kind of farfetched, but it's possible. These vapours are about as explosive as gasoline.”

Huck's stove-top pot still.

Huck knows what he's talking about. He's made dozens of batches over the last half-decade, experimenting with everything from fermented fruit to leftover beer, and actually built his first reflux still for the purpose of making biodiesel. Unlike LaPhogue and the unfortunate retiree in Newton (as well as an operator making a tidy profit on Vancouver Island who declined to be interviewed), money has never been part of Huck's motivation. In fact, for most of the people involved, profiting or otherwise, making moonshine is as much about process as it is about product. McCoy's co-op has made everything from espresso vodka to absinthe, to homemade bitters, to a gin formulated specifically for gin and tonics. McCoy has Crohn's Disease, which means he can't even drink the booze he helps make, but this hasn't put a damper on his love of the process.

“Alcohol extraction is a miraculous process,” he insists, “and alcohol has an effect on flavors which is totally distinct from its effect on people. There is something beautiful to the crafting of flavours using alcohol—it takes essential oils out of fruits and herbs, and allows them to be served as an extraction. There's a whole other side to home distilling that has nothing to do with getting drunk.”

While BC seems an unlikely place for a lively moonshine scene, the province has always had a serious thirst for alcohol—legal or otherwise. Before Prohibition, BC had the most relaxed attitude toward alcohol consumption in the country; at the turn of the century, bars were open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and British Columbians were consuming twice the national liquor average. Prohibition was remarkably short-lived in the province (only three years), and was, by all accounts, a disaster. So much so that by 1918, even BC's Prohibition Commissioner had been charged and sentenced to two years in prison for the sale of bootleg spirits—all of which he'd pilfered from provincial storage warehouses. In the wake of changes made in the post-Prohibition era, a number of bizarre restrictions were enacted in British Columbia, some of which still stand today, including a ban on happy hour, and an unofficial prohibition on drinking while standing. For decades, liquor store employees were forbidden from making recommendations, and vodka had to be stored behind the counter, owing to the fact that its colorless, odorless nature was thought to contribute to juvenile delinquency. And forget going to a neighborhood pub; for almost fifty years, beer could only be served by the glass in hotel “beer parlors”—windowless rooms forbidden from selling food or playing music, and in which men and women had to sit in separate sections, to prevent the ever-present specter of venereal disease.

Stills seized by the RCMP in BC during Prohibition, 1918. Image Courtesy of the Vancouver Archives.

As one could well imagine, it’s contributed to some serious bitching.

Even city magistrates, the people responsible for enforcing the freaking legislation, have been outspoken against it for decades.

“It’s unfortunate the laws in this province aren’t a little more civilized,” Magistrate Bernard Isman stated in a 1963 interview with the Vancouver Sun. “There shouldn’t be any more restrictions on the sale or partaking of liquor than there are on eating or smoking.”

Even today, BC has some of the most restrictive liquor laws in the country. South of the border, in Washington State, there are more than 20 licensed distilleries in operation. In BC, there are less than ten. Operating a licensed distillery can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and the facilities themselves are subject to extremely stringent health and safety protocols. The province's liquor laws, griped about for decades, are something which not only contribute to the continued existence of operations like McCoy's and LaPhogue's, but for others such as Chris Dahl and Jason Gowans, they actually inspired them to do it in the first place. Both Gowans and Dahl are members of The Everything Company, a Vancouver-based art collective that, for the past year, has been giving away liters of moonshine as part of a monthly series of speakeasies held all over the city.

“We would come into places which we felt had interesting histories, and we would distill for a month, and stockpile as much as we could—and we would just give it away for free,” Gowans explains. “We didn't want to sell it. We had no desire to make a business out of it. We had no desire to even be good at it at first. It was all about starting a conversation around where Vancouver was at with its liquor laws, and how these things are changing. How liquor is so expensive in BC that people are out there drinking things like Listerine? That's a very specific problem to Vancouver in a lot of ways. In a lot of places in the US, you can buy a bottle of vodka for five bucks. You can't do that in BC, so you have people drinking things that are so much more toxic.”

A totally staged photo of a moonshiner.

Today, alcohol offered for sale is subject to a hefty provincial markup: 123 percent for beer and wine, and 170 percent on spirits. Bans are still in place on public drinking and happy hour. That said, after nearly 100 years, things are finally starting to change. 2013 in particular has been a pivotal year in terms of changes being made to BC liquor regulations. Movie theatres can now apply for licenses to serve alcohol, and bring-your-own wine is permitted in restaurants. Since February, both breweries and distilleries have finally been allowed to actually serve their own product, in attached tasting lounges. For the first time, craft distilleries that use all BC ingredients and produce less than 50,000 litres per year can sell to stores without the mandated provincial markup. And now, just as the Everything Company takes a brief hiatus, the government has initiated a public consultation process (wrapped up at the end of October), soliciting local input on changes to the liquor act.

“Part of the reason we've stopped for the moment is because we realized that change was starting to happen,” Gowans says. “It was obvious that we were doing this at a key time, as this dialogue was ready to be had. We weren't interested in distilling so much as why people start distilling in the first place. Why this is a movement right now. Like many people, we were saying that this is something that needs to be paid attention to.”

“It would be nice to see the provincial government come face-to-face with the realities of how people drink, how they want to drink, and where the real danger spots lie,” McCoy adds. “I understand that it can be a harmful substance, and that there are ways that it's dangerous, but the level that alcohol is controlled is extremely unreasonable. And it's socially unrealistic. It seems like a form of denial more than any actual attempt at control.”

The Everything Company's still, built from fire extinguishers.

As a result of changes made in 2013, at least six more distilleries will be opening in BC by early next year. That said, barring a widespread (and farfetched) police crackdown, operations like LaPhogue's, McCoy's, and The Everything Co aren't likely to be going anywhere.

“For a lot of people, it's about the craft project,” McCoy concludes. “They're interested in what they can do themselves, but also in doing things that they can do a little bit differently. This movement is mostly about really complex, exciting flavors that can't be obtained through government liquor stores. And if we want to make it ourselves, it has to be made illegally.”

Back at LaPhogue's still, things are winding down. The column has been detached and flushed with water. The condenser has been removed and stored. The boiler has been cooled and siphoned dry. The bottles have been filled, and placed carefully into a backpack. By now, LaPhogue isn't much interested in talking. He's already running late, and his taxi is waiting outside to transport him to the party—where, reportedly, his moonshine will have sold out in less than two hours. Before he jumps into a cab, I ask him if he’s worried about getting caught selling it.

He shrugs, as if he hasn’t really given it much thought and replies, “Not really.”

We made a couple of short docs about moonshine that you should watch:

War Gin

The Quest for Moonshine