It wasn't until years later that I was sitting around watching FX and M*A*S*H came on. Now, as you'll recall there were only three things ever really seen in Hawkeye's tent: bunks, a stove, and a large glass still. Hawkeye taps some of the hootch and hands it to a visiting friend, saying something witty I'm sure. It was lost on me, though, gazingly longingly upon his contraption.

Adding just a bit of sugar--10 lbs in fact. And yes, Charlie Bubba's hair is blue in these photos.

Unfortunately, this country takes a dim view on home liquor production for a number of mostly selfish reasons. One can not simply walk down to the local home brew store and pick up a kit like one can in a number of more enlightened countries.

Now, if there's one place to find anything you wanted to about any sort of sin, vice or perversion, the Internet is it. I was sure that hiding amongst the badly doctored Alicia Silverstone pictures and Craig Shergold pleas would be a site or two detailing how one might go about building one's own still.

I was sadly dissapointed. There was plenty of material on beer and wine production, but any suburban yahoo can do that--hell, there's places where you can just walk in and use their stuff to do it. At one point, this was pretty much the only way a guy in this country could get a decent beer, but now with the explosion of microbrews, any desire I may have had to brew my own evaporated. The hard stuff was where it was at, and I was bound and determined to find it.