Making Liquor Legally at Home

February 10, 2020

Originally published on January 11, 2016

Author Victoria Redhed Miller

Today's blog post comes to us from Victoria Redhed Miller, the author of the book, Craft Distilling: Making Liquor Legally at Home.

This unique resource shows you everything you need to know to get started crafting top-quality spirits on a small scale.

In the post Victoria shares her struggles to not only make liquor legally at home but how, once realizing there was not a reasonable way for an individual to legally distill liquor at home, she engaged in the process of changing the law.

The stainless-steel boiling pot, showing the ball valve drain and fitting for thermometer near the bottom.

In most of the world today, including the United States and Canada, it is illegal to distill liquor without a license. (In the US, distillers must have a Federal permit as well as a state license.) What I didn't know was that I was the first person in Washington to apply for a distillery license as a private individual, and that I was inadvertently exposing a major flaw in the system: there is simply no provision in the law for someone like me. That is, the licensing system is completely biased toward commercial distilleries. The bottom line is that I am required to have a license to distill liquor, but they won't give me one unless I open a commercial distillery.

I could have left it at that. I could have decided at that point to give it up, and either not distill liquor at all, or else quietly pursue the hobby illegally. Instead, I am actively engaged in the process of changing the laws, both state and Federal, to allow limited home production of distilled liquor while making it a lot easier for hobbyists to do so legally. The current laws, most of which date back to around the repeal of Prohibition in 1933, no longer make sense given that we are allowed to make beer and wine at home legally. The Liquor Control Board had no idea of this until I applied for the license!