10 March 2015. From the Russian Web… What Your Cat Can Do For You: Taste Your Whiskey to See If It’s Any Good!

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MEOW! That had some nice kick! It shure do!

BMD

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Orthodox Monastery to Dominate Finnish Whiskey Production

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On Wednesday, Finnish MTV News reported that an Orthodox monastery in Finland will become the country’s largest whiskey producer. The monastery, which is already in the wine-production business, is going to invest millions of euros to build a distillery. It expects to produce 120,000 litres of spirits annually. They’ll bottle the finished product at Finland’s historic Hermannin Winery, the oldest in the country. Bottles of Valaam Whiskey will reach liquor stores in spring 2018. New Valaam Monastery in Finland will produce the hooch. Monks evacuated from an older monastery in Russian Karelia established it in 1940. Shortly after the evacuation, Soviet forces occupied the original Valaam Monastery, but it reopened in 1989, and President V V Putin now frequents it. Unlike the Finnish monastery, it doesn’t produce any alcoholic beverages.

Editor:

As Rocky asked Bullwinkle, “Are they good spirits?” Well… we’d hafta pass the jug and see, wouldn’t we?

BMD

2 July 2014

Moscow Times

http://www.themoscowtimes.com/news/article/orthodox-monastery-to-dominate-finnish-whiskey-production/502883.html

Crook Moonshine Kills 29 in Czechia

Here’s a real old-school samogon-apparat… a still, for them not in  the know…

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On Saturday, ČTK reported that a 60-year-old Czech man died from methanol poisoning, bringing the death toll from crank moonshine to 29. The first methanol death from rotgut hooch was in early September. Dozens of people were hospitalised since then; some of them went blind. In mid-September, the government introduced a two-week ban on the sales of drinks with an alcohol content of more than 20 percent and it banned export of such alcoholic beverages. The police have accused some 50 people in connection with the poisoning. Three men face charges of endangering public safety, facing up to 20 years in prison if convicted. The police say the suspects didn’t want to kill anybody, but they wanted to earn money by producing illegal liquor. However, prosecutors said that they knew well the consequences of methanol consumption. They wanted to maximise profit by buying cheaper components for liquor production. When they mixed the components together, however, they prepared a mixture with an excessive methanol concentration, which eventually poisoned consumers.

20 October 2012

RIA-Novosti

http://en.ria.ru/crime/20121020/176782532.html

Editor’s Note:

The Czechs call it samohonka… hell, which sounds suspiciously close to the Russian samogon. It’s the same stuff with the same punch alright… and Czechs have the same Artful Dodger attitude as Russians do concerning official prohibition. I’ll lay you even money that the jabronies who did this were a bunch of city slickers who didn’t know shit from shinola about the making of passin’ fine sippin’ whiskey. Trust me, if it had been some good ol’ boy peasants from the backwoods of the Tatra or Giant Mountains, there’d been no deaths, just a lot of smiling faces that evening and bodacious hangovers the next morning (“Dear God! I’m NEVER going to do that again”).

BMD

11 August 2012. A Point to Ponder…

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