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Wine bricks saved the U.S. wine industry during Prohibition (2015)
- alkaloid 5y agoWherever the Catholic Sun doth shine There’s always laughter and good red wine At least, I’ve always found it so Benedicamis Domino! ~ Hilaire Belloc
- gwbas1c 5y agoReminds me of when a friend ordered some San Pedro cactus over the internet "for religious sacrament." It included a note indicating that they ran out of the exact variety that he ordered, but they thought that he'd be very happy with the one they sent because it was stronger when used for religious purposes. (San Pedro cactus contains mescaline. It's perfectly legal to grow for ornamental purposes.)
- at_compile_time 5y agoMushroom spores are sold online for "microscopy purposes only".
- mmmpop 5y agoThey don't contain the active ingredient that is specifically illegal, which is what I always heard made the "loophole" possible. Would be interested to know if that's true (but too lazy to alt-tab and search myself.)
- 55555 5y agoNot sure why you are being downvoted. Perhaps for laziness. Spores indeed do not contain psilocybin.
- celticninja 5y agoSame reason that cannabis seeds tend to be legal but germination of them is illegal.
- mmmpop 5y agoI wasn't too lazy I was just interested in a conversation with people on the orange site instead of a boring Google search. Forgive me.
- 867-5309 5y ago"brick of concentrated sun-dried pre-milked opium poppy seed latex. organic, vegan, fair trade, 100% natural. NOT for intravenous consumption"
- Scoundreller 5y agoI mean, I wouldn’t IV the latex either.
- stragies 5y ago© 1895 BAYER, but their lawyers will probably not come after you anymore for that ;)
- Cthulhu_ 5y ago"bath salts" comes to mind, wasn't that a nickname for some wack shit? Over here, huffing nitrous oxide is a thing, but it's sold as pressure gas for whipped cream dispensers and the like.
- celticninja 5y agoThe difference being that they are/were legitimately sold for whipped cream dispensers prior to them being used to get hight. Wine bricks were designed to get around a ban.
- Cthulhu_ 5y agoIIRC mescaline or peyote (maybe they're the same? I don't know) is nowadays legally protected under religious laws, but iirc there's a lot of caveats around it (region, tribe, etc).
- mytailorisrich 5y agoPeyote is the plant, a cactus, and the active chemical it contains is mescaline. Peyote is only legal for native americans religious ceremonies, afaik.
- cestith 5y agoAIUI the plant is legal but consuming it, growing it for consumption, or preparing it for consumption is only legal for religious purposes. I could be misremembering, and state laws may vary anyway.
- int_19h 5y agoAnd then there's Delta-8 THC which was accidentally legalized by the 2018 law that was intended to legalize industrial hemp.
- Syonyk 5y agoI'm always reminded of the bit from The Incredibles: BOB PARR: All right, listen closely. I'd like to help you, but I can't. I'd like to tell you to take a copy of your policy to Norma Wilcox on... Norma Wilcox. W-I-L-C-O-X. On the third floor. But I can't. I also do not advise you to fill out and file a WS2475 form with our legal department on the second floor. I wouldn't expect someone to get back to you quickly to resolve the matter. I'd like to help, but there's nothing I can do.
- boogies 5y agoOfftopic, but The Incredibles has one of my favorite movie quotes: You always say “Be true to yourself”, but you never say which part of yourself to be true to! … which stuck in my head because so many Disney (and other?) movies seem to be all about being “true to yourself,” and in my experience they conspicuously fail to address the fact (in my belief system) that all humans have both good and evil, selfish and selfless within (we’re born screaming, demanding others’ attention; but even in the womb we listen to and begin to love familiar people, and in many situations we sacrifice much for our loved ones and even strangers).
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- cgio 5y agoAnd the villain quote along the lines of “if we are all superheroes then no one is a superhero”.
- Cthulhu_ 5y agoIt's an accessible entrance into things like entropy, or to think about subjects like eugenics (if we're remove genetic diversity there will be no racism) or wrongthink (if nobody has these bad ideas we would all live in harmony). DISCLAIMER: this is not an invitation to start debating these subjects, these are just crudely picked examples.
- 5y ago
- wumpus 5y agoFun that the homebrew limit is still 200 gallons. The more things change, ...
- jerrysievert 5y agothat's about 4 gallons/week, which translates into 32 pints. that's a pretty decent haul.
- icanhackit 5y agoMy children need wine!
- ch4s3 5y agoThat’s per adult in the household is it not?
- wumpus 5y agoYes. And places where pot is legal have similar per-adult limits.
- awild 5y agoIn germany beer homebrewing is limited at 200L/year (approx 50gallons, which is a respectable but not huge amount if you have friends). Anything above you have to pay taxes on. Those taxes however are pretty minor for a typical 20L batch, and customs are only allowed to investigate a case if they suspect a big enough discrepancy (I think 10€). So there's a group of petty homebrewers who don't make use of their free 200L, but instead opt to report every single batch, only paying 0.01€. The intention is to waste time and annoy as many customs employees as possible to create friction and lobby against restrictions on homebrewing.
- Cthulhu_ 5y agoIf it's just homebrewing / for personal, family / friends consumption, how would they even find out? A lot of laws are only there to enforce if they actually uncover a big operation. Like, during the 'rona lockdowns you weren't allowed to have more than X visitors, but no policeman would want to go door to door to see if people were having visitors. (actually don't quote me on it, the visitors thing may have been advisory)
- xmprt 5y agoI love the warnings that they put on these things. (paraphrasing) "Under no circumstances should you follow these extremely specific steps listed below or else you might accidentally make an alcoholic beverage which would be illegal"
- rdtsc 5y agoWhen someone suggests a clever loophole, the response is usually “that would never work, the police and the judge will know exactly what you’re doing”. But somehow, a whole industry developed around the “do not do … detailed prohibited thing”. I guess, because it somehow worked that one time, it became memorable as an exception, while in most cases it wouldn’t fly in court.
- mod50ack 5y agoThe thing you must realize is that despite prohibition public attitude soured on it very quickly and many judges and politicians were themselves partaking in prohibited alcohol. And the situation cannot be compared with marijuana; it was on a whole different magnitude.
- gwbas1c 5y agoBack the the defense could ask for Jury nullification. Now the defense can't.
- TylerE 5y agoThere are a number of other examples... Like the companies selling whip cream chargers by the case of 600... You know, for the people that need to make whipped cream by the gallon at home.
- db65edfc7996 5y agoFor anyone else who was clueless, whip cream chargers are a source of nitrous oxide.
- twirlock 5y ago
- galaxyLogic 5y agoNitrous oxide, is that the same thing as "mad oxygen"?
- tptacek 5y agoWarning: After dissolving the brick in a gallon of water, do not place the liquid in a jug away in the cupboard for twenty days because then it would turn into wine.
- bruce511 5y agoOne cool thing about the pandemic is that many countries took the opportunity to run large-scale social experiments under the guise of Covid Restrictions. I expect social scientists will be digging into this data for years to come. One experiment in South Africa was banning the sale, or transportation, of alcohol. (Production and consumption was still allowed, just not sale or transportation.) This resulted in a marked decrease in hospital admissions, traffic accidents and domestic crimes. [1] The ban would morph during the first year of Covid, alternately covering things like trading hours, availability in restaurants and so on. Some restrictions were more effective than others, and overall effectiveness decreased as the population got smarter about stocking up with sufficient quantities to bypass any restrictions. Even the hint of restrictions now (such as was rumored to happen, but did not happen, when Omicron was first recognized) resulted in huge surges of sales. Generally speaking though more restrictions resulted in fewer hospital admissions. Clearly prohibition taught us that a blanket ban on alcohol just incentivizes organized crime. So it's not like a long-term ban is useful. But the effects of lowering alcohol consumption are also clear. Balancing these two very conflicting points of view is going to be a challenge for society as we move forward. [2] [1] Clearly not all decreases are solely because of this, less traffic means fewer accidents for example, but it's considered to be a high contributing factor. [2] https://businesstech.co.za/news/government/547654/what-all-those-lockdown-bans-mean-for-future-alcohol-regulation-in-south-africa/ https://businesstech.co.za/news/government/547654/what-all-t...
- mmmpop 5y ago"Interesting" perhaps... but our definitions of "cool" vary widely.
- bruce511 5y agoCool because data is always cool :) More seriously,because it would simply be impossible to run these social experiments in normal circumstances. There are other examples; New Zealand and Australia tested a "closed border" approach, Sweden adopted a "personal responsibility" approach. Some places had curfews. The shere variety and scale of the last two years have generated enormous amounts of data, and matching data to long-term consequences will keep anthropologists busy for years. And just might inform better choices when the next one happens.
- Haemm0r 5y agoSimilar story: https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datenklo https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datenklo Assembly instructions: "And now never ever connect pin x and pin y, because then you'd have a working modem, which would be illigal...
- galaxyLogic 5y agoOr cryptography. It used to be illegal as well, right?
- dagw 5y agoIt was illegal to export certain classes of cryptography software. It was however never illegal to export books about that software. So what they did was publish a hardback book about the algorithm [1], which contained the entire source code of the software. This book was then freely sold all around the world. Now all you had to do was scan and OCR the relevant pages, cat together the resulting files and compile. All perfectly legal. I remember there being distributed proof-reading groups on Usenet and IRC where you would get 1 page of OCR'd text and the corresponding scanned image and you would manually go through and verify and correct the source code. [1] https://books.google.com/books/about/PGP_Source_Code_and_Internals.html?id=xR4ZAQAAIAAJ https://books.google.com/books/about/PGP_Source_Code_and_Int...
- philjohn 5y agoThe export certainly was - but the 1A provided a loophole - they printed the code for PGP into book form, sent THAT overseas then scanned and OCRd it.
- cestith 5y agoI have a tattoo of an encryption routine, partly as a protest. Unfortunately I changed it at the last minute to make it look cooler and introduced a bug. Here's the entire proper Perl 5 code: undef $/;print<>$<> The buggy version is slightly shorter but I depended on an incorrect reading of some tricky wording in the docs and didn't test thoroughly enough. I'm considering turning the tattoo into a diff. I recommend Crypto by Steven Levy as a high-level refresher on the events of the time. (https://www.bookfinder.com/search/?isbn=9780670859504&st=xl&ac=qr https://www.bookfinder.com/search/?isbn=9780670859504&st=xl&...)
- jameslk 5y agoI'm very curious how this tasted and I wonder why there isn't anyone selling them anymore (based on a quick Google search). If it tasted half decent I'm curious if there could still be a market for something like this, given it seems to be able to be stored dry?
- istjohn 5y agoFermenting alcohol that tastes good is not easy enough to justify a mass market product. Furthermore, why buy this when you can just buy cheap boxed wine that probably tastes much better than whatever you would get from fermenting reconstituted dry grape concentrate?
- sdenton4 5y agoI've often made one gallon batches of mead; it's pretty simple, and wine (if you don't get too fancy) is a similar level of difficulty. IME, one gallon batches about two hours of work from start to a clean kitchen. Five gallon batches take much longer to cool after boiling, so are a much bigger headache.
- rndgermandude 5y agoYeah, my late grandpa after he retired used to grow some grapes and make wine out of that on his small hobbyist gardening parcel[0]. And at least by the time I grew old enough to be allowed to drink it, he had become good enough at it that it was quite enjoyable and vastly better than cheap boxed or bottled wines in my humble opinion. His output was like 30 bottles of red and another 30 of white, so in gallons that would be a little more than 21 liters each or 5 gallons each. He gave away most of it to family and his friends - we had a lot of his bottles on regular barbecues he hosted - and even had my cousin help him design and print funny bottle labels. [0] A "Schrebergarten" with a small almost-a-shed house.
- carlmr 5y ago>Fermenting alcohol that tastes good is not easy enough to justify a mass market product. Not quite the same, but in Germany they sell Federweißer, which is an unfermented wine, but the yeast is already on the bottom. It turns from sweet grape juice (day 0), to sweet wine (day 2-3), then slightly sweet more alocoholic wine (day 4-5), until it turns into wine fully. Quite a lot of people enjoy it. It's not a proper competition to normal wine, but it tastes good in its own way.
- tdeck 5y agoWanting to read more I found this other article with a more nuanced take and some additional information: https://grapecollective.com/articles/prohibitions-grape-bricks-how-to-not-make-wine https://grapecollective.com/articles/prohibitions-grape-bric... > The grape of choice for home winemakers quickly became Alicante Bouschet. Thick, tough skins helped the grape survive the cross–country journey, and it grew in large quantities > By the end of Prohibition in 1933, other grape varietals and fruits had been ripped up and 40,000 acres of Alicante had been planted. > “Grape bricks had a disastrous effect on the early American wine industry,” Suttner wrote in an email. Grape bricks’ place in Prohibition history is largely glossed over, but Suttner was able to learn about them through period newspaper articles and Eric Burn’s book The Spirits of America. “By encouraging the production of cheap, fast–growing grapes like Alicante Bouschet at the expense of other, slower varieties, American wineries limited themselves severely.”
- llampx 5y agoIf it helped the wineries and vineyards survive, I guess its the lesser of the two evils. Given that the other wine-drinking regions probably didn't want to import new world grapes to make wine with.
- Stratoscope 5y agoIf you find this interesting, I highly recommend Last Call by Daniel Okrent: https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B003JTHVHY/ https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B003JTHVHY/ Some related tidbits from that book: Like the compressed grape bricks, grape juice was perfectly legal. And making your own wine for family consumption was also legal. So in San Francisco, many homes had basement wine cellars, and you could arrange a delivery from the grape juice truck down a chute into your wine barrel. If you preferred fresh grapes, you could go to the Drumm Street station to pick up boxes of Napa County grapes straight off the train. Then go next door to the barrel maker and take it all home. http://santarosahistory.com/wordpress/2019/05/will-wine-country-survive-prohibition/ http://santarosahistory.com/wordpress/2019/05/will-wine-coun...
- asdff 5y agoReminds me of the local hydroponic industry being ostensibly for "tomatoes" in the years before medical marijuana started getting passed.
- supernova87a 5y agoHow did they make the concentrate without destroying all the subtle things I hear that wine is supposed to contain (and the yeast)? Did they boil it? Reverse osmosis? Vacuum?
- Sharlin 5y agoI doubt those “subtle things” were a priority in this case. Or any consideration at all. People didn’t drink this stuff for its flavor.
- Cthulhu_ 5y agoNot much has changed if you look at the cheap alcohol available.
- bradleyjg 5y agoEven cheap alcohol is much much better than it used to be. Mulled wine was so popular back in the day because wine was barely drinkable. Cocktails exist for the same reason (and that’s why classic recipes are so sweet). It’s a similar thing with classic “ethnic” dishes—they are so rich and flavorful because they needed to cover the taste of marginal meat.
- gwd 5y agoThere's almost certainly wild yeast on the grapes themselves; and in any case yeast is more or less omnipresent, so you'll have wild yeast all over your own kitchen at home. The usual problem is preventing things from fermenting, not causing them to ferment.
- zxcvbn4038 5y agoIn the early 90s the NY post published a similar article about how not to smuggle in cigarettes from the Native American reservations nearby - including which roads to not take and intersections to not be wary of because there were frequently “speed traps” in place to stop vehicles that might be smuggling tobacco - just an FYI which readers should not be interested in. In the 2000s the NY state police started searching and seizing all UPS trucks exiting the reservations because the practice of shipping cigarettes had become so common that the state was losing significant tobacco tax revenue. They argued that UPS had to be aware of what they were carrying because the shippers were tobacco stores and the parcels were exactly cigarette box sized, thus they were willing accomplices. After several days the Native American governments backed down and agreed to not ship cigarettes anymore.
- dmurray 5y ago> They argued that UPS had to be aware of what they were carrying because the shippers were tobacco stores and the parcels were exactly cigarette box sized, thus they were willing accomplices Would that matter? Fully legal duty-paid cigarette boxes would presumably be the same size and shape from the same origin.
- throwaway0a5e 5y agoWhen has NY state ever cared about making their budgetary ends meet? They cared that the people had dared to disobey them, not about the money.
- mrtweetyhack 5y ago
- mmettler 5y agoThis reminds me of how q-tip manufacturers forbid you from using q-tips to clean your ears.
- leobg 5y agoThat’s a good one!
- mrexroad 5y agoFWIW, you really shouldn’t put them in your ear…
- thowawaymed50 5y agoDon't do this. I learned the hard way because I ended up pushing earwax into the canal, eventually forming a blockage. I couldn't hear out of my ear and had to go to an ENT, where he use vacuum suction to take some of it out (the deepest he could go without risking damage to the ear drum), and then I had to do two weeks of hyrogen peroxide drops (Debrox) to help liquify the earwax. Not being able to hear out of one ear is miserable, even if temporary. Your ears are self-cleaning. They automatically push earwax (slowly) to the outside. A Q-tip is only meant for the outer rim of your ear. There's a saying ENTs use I found while researching my problem: "nothing smaller than your elbow should enter your ear". My ENT told me to stop using the Q-tips. If you find your ears produce a lot of wax, you can just use a tissue on the outside. Or if you're willing to heed the warnings, carefully use a Q-tip, but don't insert it into your ear canal. (Throwaway because I don't like mixing personal medical info with my regular account)
- franciscop 5y ago> the note would continue with a warning instructing you not to leave that jug in the cool cupboard for 21 days, or it would turn into wine I read (cannot find the source now though) that's similar to today's homemade alcohol/beer in Japan, where there's a limit of what % of alcohol you can make at home. So all the official instructions include a last step: "mix in water until the alcohol percentage is below the legal limit". Of course people just ignore this to have stronger alcohol.
- chrismaeda 5y agoOntario has a bunch of make-your-own wine companies that work like wine bricks. 1. you buy 5 gallons of grape juice for ~$20 per gallon. 2. yeast is dropped into your grape juice 3. you come to the store to decant your grape juice into wine bottles and cork them up. Since no alcohol is bought or sold, you avoid the (very high) taxes on liquor. You end up with ~28 bottles of wine for ~$4 per bottle. It's not the greatest wine, but it's ok for sangria and cooking, and it's a good story if you hang out with people who like to talk about tax loopholes...
- pantulis 5y agoGuess that's the kind of wine that goes well with Coke, Pepsi or my personal fav Lemon Fanta.
- alistairSH 5y agoAm I misreading, or are you saying you mix wine with soda/pop?
- rozenmd 5y agoit's a Thing: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calimocho https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calimocho
- dwringer 5y agoI always heard a mixture of wine and soda pop called a "wine cooler", a use that would have gone back several decades, but Wikipedia seems to think that specifically means a mix of fruit juice and wine. There is some discussion in the talk page about this discrepancy. I guess maybe the term was a regional thing.
- pantulis 5y agoI guess it's not that an original invention so it may have different names in different places ;)
- richardfey 5y agohttps://github.com/bottlesdevs/Bottles https://github.com/bottlesdevs/Bottles A missed chance to call these "bricks" instead of bottles!
- black6 5y agoThe calculus book my university used was a loose-leaf "custom edition" which came in shrink wrap. My cal IV prof told the class first day: "I cannot advise you to go down to the copy shop and run off copies of the relevant chapters for your friends. That would be theft and is illegal. Again, I cannot recommend that you go down to the copy shop next to Pizza Hut on Jackson Avenue and run off copies of the relevant chapters for your friends. That is illegal."
- guerrilla 5y agoWe have something like this in Sweden (where we have an state-run alcohol monopoly that makes getting alcohol annoying and expensive). It's just a bag of juice with some additives. Never tried it myself but I heard it's not great.
- yohannparis 5y agoAnd this is why stupid banning should not exist. Instead, introduce reasonable regulations to keep your citizens safe from bad business...