My father was a bootlegger. Growing up, our tiny, standardized apartment kitchen had a large, gray plastic barrel occupying the space between the stove and the calorifer: the metal pipe heater that, on a good day, would be filled with tepid water by the benevolent authorities that ran the neighborhood thermal utility. Nestled between two sources of warmth, the barrel collected discarded grains and fruits over the summer. My father would check it periodically, giving it a stir, adjusting the water level, whispering encouragement, until one day in late Fall when it was time to distill.
My father’s day job was heading a department in an electronics research institute, which was an advantage when it came to making tuica, the traditionally plum-based but infinitely flexible Romanian moonshine: he had access to a quality supply of glass vials and plastic tubing, which he fashioned into an unnecessarily ingenious still.
Distilling tuica is relatively simple. You need a large pot to boil the horinca (the fermented slurry). This pot requires an airtight lid with a small opening you can fit a tube into. The tube leads to a glass cylinder seated lengthwise, fitted with a small spout: the condensation chamber. To cool the condensation chamber, you run a small tube from the kitchen faucet, wrap it around the glass cylinder, and run it back to the sink where it drains.
My family had a stovetop pressure cooker which made a perfect boiling pot, as Dad would simply remove the pressure valve and stick a tube into the opening. Not content with inelegant solutions, he rigged an adjustable metal frame for the still, so the condensation chamber and the tubes slanted just so above our red formica kitchen counter, the tuica dripping into clear glass liter bottles.
Making tuica was a near-universal occupation in the late Fall. Having collected fermentable materials over the summer, barrels everywhere began giving up their odorous contents in November, and urban heads of family began making frequent trips to manholes behind the apartment buildings in which they resided. The personal manufacture of tuica was against the law, and no responsible bootlegger wanted to possibly incriminate his fellow apartment dwellers by discarding the byproducts of distillation into the building’s dumpster. So, under cover of night, a gentleman well under the influence of his day’s work turning stone (fruit) into liquid would grab a pry bar and a plastic bag of mush, find the nearest storm drain, pop off the lid and plop down the refuse. Neighbors often encountered each other during such excursions; I’ve always wondered what pleasantries they exchanged on the occasion.
While technically illegal, making tuica was nearly universal, for two main reasons: 1) Communism sucks, and booze helps people endure things that suck; and, 2) Communism sucks, and the booze legally available on the market was abysmal in both quantity and quality.
Having noticed a near two-fold increase in per capita alcohol consumption between the mid 40s and the mid 50s, the Communist party rationed alcohol consumption and waged a vigorous campaign against drinking in the workplace (!) as well as public drunkenness, which was punishable by temporary consignment to alarmingly named “sobering rooms'' at the police station. The Party’s concern had less to do with impaired productivity or safety and more with the fact that drinking and smoking were seen as capitalist vices which needed to be educated out of the New Communist Man.
But Romania is an agrarian country, with a long history of making do and an even longer tradition of imbibing alcohol. Everyone made booze. Growing up in the 1980s, I don’t remember the adults in my family buying alcohol except for a bottle of champagne for New Year’s, but there was always alcohol around. Folks living in rural areas would flaunt ordinances against growing grapes on their modest plot of land and make wine every year. The grape harvest usually took place in late August and, in the absence of equipment, wine was pressed the old fashioned way: dumping a bunch of grapes in a large vat and stepping on them. The resulting liquid, called must, was intensely sweet, on the thick side, and already slightly fermented, and kids and respectable ladies were given sips as a token of appreciation. Wine was left to age for only a few months, usually the span between harvest and Christmas, and then stored in large glass vessels encased in woven twigs, called damigeana (demijohn, duh).
As stone fruit, especially plums, were ubiquitous, hard fruit liquors were also particularly easy to make. Traditionally, tuica is made from plums, but the recipe is forgiving enough that you could use anything that ferments. Romanian performance artist Ciprian Homorodean distilled a batch of 42 proof liquor out of parka filling and chicken shit. Hai noroc!
Once bottled, booze had almost unlimited uses. It was currency: in the multilaterally developed Communist economy, where people were nominally paid but there was nothing to buy, barter was how we acquired necessities. Tuica was extremely giftable, and an appreciated bribe (second only to cartons of Kent cigarettes). It was a source of calories and a way to get warm when the water pumped into the calorifer was frigid, which was often. Tuica was even medicine; coughs were often treated by wrapping a high proof alcohol compress around the neck, and in a pinch you could use it to disinfect wounds.
None of these reasons were why my father made moonshine, though. He did it because he found it funny. The whole endeavor was ridiculous: adapting a messy, smelly, “country” operation to the constraints of an 800 sqft. city apartment; the turning of literal kitchen scraps into liquor; the necessary subterfuge and dissimulation during the entire process; the fact that officials nominally tasked with enforcing the prohibition on home distilling would inevitably receive some of its products as bribes. Making moonshine in our kitchen, my dad felt he was giving the finger to a Communist Party that wouldn’t be able to do anything about it.
I’ll drink to that.
Excellent article with an inside view of communism and its effects on the family. We’re blessed with hot water, dependable electricity, and air conditioning!