When does a monkey stop being a monkey, and become an invitation to riot in the streets? When it’s pictured on the label of a bottle of absinthe, using a femur to beat a skull like a drum. Or so said the federal government in 2007, when it rejected the label design for St. George Spirits’ Absinthe Verte. And as St. George Master Distiller Lance Winters wryly observes, “the government’s job is to prevent riots in the streets.” Having produced the first authentic absinthe for sale in this country since 1912, Lance and his crew expected close scrutiny of their formula by the government, and apprehension by less adventurous consumers. They did not expect what they got: a fight over the absinthe’s label. The Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB), the division of the U.S. Treasury Department charged with regulating the production, sale and marketing of beer, wine, [...]

No spirit has been more misunderstood, vilified, or coveted than Absinthe. It reportedly caused Van Gogh to cut off his ear. That rapping, rapping at Edgar Allan Poe’s door? That was no raven: that was the green fairy. Toulouse-Lautrec, Oscar Wilde, and Alastair Crowley were known absinthe fans. Marilyn Manson produces his own absinthe. It has always had a mysterious and often dark air about it, driving sane men mad, and mad men to their graves. Dr. Valentin Magnan conducted a study on the mysterious spirit in the 19th century and found it to cause seizures and hallucinations. It was later proven that high levels of thujone (a byproduct of wormwood), a chemical present in early absinthe recipes, caused the seizures. The alleged hallucinations were just his way of trying to make the imbibers seem unstable, to prove that alcohol was “degenerating” the French. It was said by one temperance [...]

There are the laws of man and those “of God.” The latter is dependent upon where you stand, literally. In the state of Utah, for instance, legal restrictions and permissions have ping-ponged back-and-forth since before it was a state. Early Mormon pioneers took alcohol along as part of their personal provisions during their treks westward and they used wine as sacrament in meetings and at temple dedication ceremonies. Yet as recently as 2009, LDS-influenced restrictions dictated that you had to be a member of a “private club” in order to get a drink at a bar. Fortunately for those wanting to do so, “joining” cost about $5 and, in some cases, was included free upon registering at a hotel. But Utah is not the only one of the United States to be impacted by religion. In fact, much of America is caught in a duality between “blue laws,” which limit [...]

Take a look at the bottle of wine/beer/spirits in your hand. How did it get there? Well, after it was produced, the producer sold it to a distributor at less than 50% of its retail price, who then sold it to a store at a large profit, who then sold it to you at a markup 18-25% higher than its intended retail price. There may have been a broker in there as well. Why so many middle men, and why so complicated? Prohibition and the three-tier system. Prior to prohibition, the alcohol industry was very loosely regulated, and dominated by a few very large producers. Anti-competition practices abounded: if a brewery or distillery didn’t have its own bar, it ‘invested’ in bars by giving loans or furniture and, in exchange, demanded that no other brands be sold on the premises. These big, bad breweries also required increasing sales, so the [...]

Our little planet is absolutely rife with liquor laws: the good (don’t drive drunk), the arbitrary (our legal drinking age), and the just plain daffy (in alaska it is illegal to feed whiskey to a moose). Such laws, however, are nothing new. Governments of all types have been seeking to control booze ever since the human race ceased its hunter-gatherer ways and settled down for some serious civilization building. the earliest examples we have of these sorts of statutes are found in the ancient code of King Hammurabi, which dates back to approximately 1750 b.c. Now known as the Hammurabic Code, the 282 laws (originally inscribed in Old Akkadian) deal with almost every facet of life and commerce in the Babylon of Hammurabi’s reign, and the Code probably represents the first time a nation’s legal writs were codified in written language.

“It may seem a little quaint in light of all that has come since,” says Dave McLean, owner of the San Francisco brewpub Magnolia, home to Old Thunderpussy, an 11% alcohol barley wine. He continues, “But our observation back in 2001 or 2002 was that these big beers were generally special occasion beers, commemorating events, marking time, celebrating holidays, or maybe just intended as wintertime sipping beers to take the chill off in cold-weather brewing nations.” He’s talking about February’s Strong Beer Month, Magnolia and nearby 21st Amendment Brewing’s celebration of big, bold, boozy beers that typically hover around the 10% mark when the law, in some states, mandates beer be brewed to a mere 4% ABV. To most religious zealots and even many craft beer connoisseurs, the strength of certain beers has gotten out of hand in an arms race to see who can reach the highest number. Scotland-based [...]