and feathering tax collectors, planting liberty poles, circulating petitions of protest, and against forming political action societies to defend the cause of liberty against its enemies in government.” So replicating almost exactly the things happening before the American Revolution. If you didn’t know better, you might think this was an episode from before the Revolution, not after. So in a sense, the Whiskey Rebellion is a moment where the founding fathers are forced to face the reality that governing is harder than they might have believed, and that they – when themselves are in positions of power – might recreate the very systems of power that they had railed against during the Revolution.
Marissa: Exactly, yeah. I don’t know.. So I mean Cody wanted us to sort of…
Sarah: Well now it makes it sound like he was cracking the whip…
Marissa: Cody is bossing us around…
Cody: I’m just dropping the hammer guys.
Marissa: Think about that decision to quell the rebellion, to kind of use your own troops against your own countrymen, whether that was worth it, or the right thing to do, or an effective thing to do. I mean it was pretty obvious that it was effective.
Cody: Yeah. If it’s okay Marissa, I kind of want to go back to something that you and Sarah had talked about with the hard cider. I don’t know, do you know how hard cider is made?
Marissa: No, no I don’t.
Cody: What ends up happening when you create any type of alcohol is separate ethanol and water. And the way that’s commonly done today is through heat. And heating up the substance. So alcohol will burn off, water will remain, and you sort of collect that condensation. You can do the same thing at the other end of the spectrum. If you don’t have access to a still and to a heat source, what you do instead is you will take hard cider, set it outside and let it freeze during the winter. The liquid that you’re left with is actually that higher alcohol content that you want. So you end up with these chunks of water, essentially ice, and you ring those out, and then over time you repeat this process and you end up with 30 proof hard cider.
Marissa: That’s smart!
Sarah: That’s so interesting.
Cody: Now the reason we don’t do this today, and the reason it’s not very common, is because you’re not getting rid of a lot of the impurities within ethanol and within alcohol that you want to get rid of. And so, the reason that we heat things up is to get rid of all the impurities and one of the main issues with this cooler method is that you don’t get rid of them. The reason that is relevant, the Whiskey Rebellion as a whole really shapes the alcohol industry and it becomes much more federally regulated and I think that was ultimately a good thing. Um, because at the end of the day alcohol is a substance that people can abuse and uh, you know, misuse, and so it’s just interesting to me that the Whiskey Rebellion is really the first time that we see alcohol being regulated at this federal level. And sort of the impacts that it had long term for that.
Sarah: That’s a really interesting point, and I’d never thought of the Whiskey Rebellion in those terms. As the federal government exerting it’s right to regulate a domestic product. One other thing that you made me think of- even though I think all of that is accurate, one of the areas where you continue to have a culture of individual alcohol production is Appalachia. Right, with uh moonshine. They do continue to make alcohol on their own and specifically try to hide it from regulators and government control.
Marissa: Well that’s funny though because one of the most highly regulated states, when it comes to alcohol sales at least, is Pennsylvania.
Sarah: Today. Yeah. Can’t buy beer in the grocery store and it’s annoying.
Marissa: And you have to get it from a state store and they close at 8pm…
Cody: Wait hold on, I’m really curious about this. I live in Utah and we have a lot of regulations as well. So we have state stores and all that stuff. Can you go into all the regulations that you guys have in Pennsylvania?
Marissa: Yeah state sto