Okay so uh Lyle was pretty in his grips the other day, but he had a neat idea that basically I thought could be a money maker around here. The rule of the land is you can't be a booze company unless you jump through just incredible amounts of hoops, and pay taxes out the nose to help cover all the society disasters your product creates, and have sanitation inspections and all of that crud that doesn't matter if your product is basically sanitizer. So to cut to the quick of it, is, I skipped the rules and I am a booze company now. It is weird how that plays out, as I had maybe at best hoped I would be sort of found half dead but not auto-sullied in my britches some day. At best. But here I am, a booze company. Mama come gander at Timmy B. Silktone.



The idea of booze is easy. You put sugar in water. Yeast (a fungus) eats the sugar and sheds off alcohol. When the yeast dies from starvation, you have the most possible alcohol your sugar could make. You boil that water and collect the steam at various temperatures: the steam is your product. Don't collect it 'til you get to 173*F, or it's walleyes and buttersharts for you. Stuff that boils below there is basically like the stuff that they use in dry-erase board cleansing spray, or to help write On The Road. There you go, you have some concentrated, less-deathy booze. It will be harsh, but get this: it will also have boutique cachet. Folks are nuts for somethin' local and fresh-made, so that has got to go for booze as well. I mean hell people buy Monarch gin and that's just nail polish they made clear with gas, expired aspirin, and a canary nobody was attached to.



So I dig this pretty much from the simple science angle, but also I like to finger it up and run this bootleg thing as a kink for the Man. The money won't hurt, even if it's spare, because I don't pay the electric bill around Ray's place, and he ain't the sort to notice a terawatt gone missing.



I was going to name the booze company Hornswoggle, you know, like to "bamboozle," but decided that was just a horrible, horrid type of cleverness that's actually more stupid than smart (also it sounds like what Harry Potter throws up after the Hufflepuff cocktail progressive). So, I got my midnight lumens out and read up on the true recipe of Achewater. Man that took some page-rubbing, but I pieced together a pretty good bunch of the puzzle. Lots of botanical history, regional Southern foodways, ethnic migration patterns, even some phone calls to families nearing defunction. I am making Achewater. Everybody here basically has to buy at least one bottle...but there won't be enough and the X-Y curve will do a little jig in my favor.



