Moonshine
Moonshine. A word that typically conjures up thoughts of illicit high-octane liquor, clandestine stills, mason jars, potential blindness and bearded mountain men with colorful nicknames. Producing moonshine without a license is still illegal in the United States, but a large and growing number of licensed distilleries are now producing their own interpretations of moonshine. And despite moonshine’s negative associations from the past, TTB seems to have no issue allowing the word to appear on distilled spirits labels, as evidenced by the scores of moonshine labels approved so far. There is also an upsurge in approvals for moonshine’s cousins, such as white dog, white whiskey and white lightning.
As far as we know, there are no specific TTB requirements to label a product “moonshine.” Apparently, moonshine can be a whiskey, a specialty product with flavors of apple or blackberry (for example), a high poof neutral spirit distilled from apples, peach brandy and even tequila. Although it appears that you can call just about any distilled spirits product “moonshine,” we think it is unlikely that TTB would allow the word on beer or wine labels anytime soon.
Tags: drinkwire, history, policy
This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 19th, 2013 at 8:55 am and is filed under alcohol beverages generally . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
April 7th, 2013 at 3:13 pm
White Whiskey | Bevlog | beer, wine, spirits trends | beverage blog says:[...] few weeks ago we wrote about moonshine and now we have occasion to write about its close relative, White [...]