Templeton Rye

From the Des Moines Register:

Templeton’s modern bootleggers remain jittery considering that the town of 362 is dominated by multigenerational families. If you’re not related to your neighbor, you probably know him well enough to guess where he hides his hooch.
Day delved into Templeton bootleg legacy in a new documentary he directed, “Capone’s Whiskey: The Story of Templeton Rye” (so named for notorious Chicago gangster Al Capone’s reputed fondness for Iowa’s rural booze).
So there I stood in front of a soldered-together copper kettle that sat atop a modest gas stove. Tubing snaked from the kettle down through an oil drum that gets filled with water — cooling the alcohol vapor to convert it back into liquid by the time the booze trickles out the bottom, into a crock situated atop concrete blocks.
Hydrometers to measure alcohol content being scarce in the Prohibition era, the clear liquor trickling into the crock often would be tested with a match; when it quit lighting, it was ready to drink at about 85 or 90 proof.
If you’re imagining giant 53-gallon charred-oak barrels for the aging process, 15-gallon barrels are more manageable when lugging them out to be hidden in a cornfield.

It is amazing how many people still are distilling on the sly.  One of my neighbors recently got into the act.  More on the new legal Templeton Rye here.