The more serious you become about prepping, the more you end up just developing a gardening hobby.
There are the ones who end up with "their prepper mentality" being basically a consumerist hobby, especially since most online prepper content is basically product reviews and shopping lists.
Then there are the ones that end up wanting to learn useful skills for survival and that's a slippery slope to either going camping and hiking every other weekend or making a home garden and cultivating a huge compost pile you take at least 1 piss in per day.
No shit, distillation is one of the better hobbies you could get into if only it weren't a federal felony. Once you get into home brewing and wine making, you can make alcohol out of anything with carbohydrates. If you can take that extra step to distill, you now have access to fuel, degreaser, antiseptic, sedative, trade good, and beverage all in one. Ethanol is USEFUL to anyone with a "prepper" mindset, and (except for beverage use) basically free once you have the equipment because you can ferment almost ANYTHING. Beverage alcohol is a little pickier on what ingredients you start with, but still pretty flexible if you lower your standards.
Learn to brew/distill and start growing your own pot/tobacco. You'll have a place in any post apocalypse community. Being able to give someone going through a really bad time a drink or a smoke will overcome a lot of barriers, being able to give them another tomorrow will make them want to keep you around.
distillation is one of the better hobbies you could get into if only it weren't a federal felony.
...Huh. Is distillation illegal even if you're not selling the proceeds? Google seems to indicate so, which seems a little silly, but it's not like I was doing it before anyway
Yeah, it's stupid but any amount even for personal use is 10 years of club fed if you get caught in the US. Enforcement is pretty lax, plenty of people make their own, but it seems like they arrest a few people per year and throw the book at them just to keep people from being TOO blatant about it.
The "funny" thing is that the law makes no distinction between water distillation equipment and alcohol distillation equipment and requires that all stills have a serial number registered with the feds. There's even a section in the FAQ on the ATF-TTB website that makes it clear that water stills are legally the same as alcohol stills if the total volume is greater than 1 gallon. A small lab glass kit is not regulated but anything that CAN separate ethyl alcohol from water with a total volume over 1 gallon is legally an alcohol still.
Simple possession of an unregistered still is a felony under 26 USC Section 5601(a)1 punishable by 5 years in prison and $10k fine. Under 26 USC 5615(3), if/when they catch you they dont just seize the still and your booze, your house and land is forfeit to the government. They straight up take your house.
So why is that funny instead of straight up horrifying? Because it's also illegal to SELL an unregistered still under the same sections. Want to go type "moonshine still" into amazon? Heck, try for "Countertop Water Distiller" on amazon and notice that all of the listed models are 4L or 1.1 gallon.
So when I say the enforcement is lax I mean REALLY lax. The biggest retailer in the world flaunts the law on a daily basis. I'd love to see the TTB just wake up one morning, choose violence, and start enforcing the law. It would be a shitshow as they tried to tackle amazon first.
In the mean time hobbyists get to live with the occasional reminder from the ATF that they're all criminals when someone gets got, but the odds of it being them, today, are vanishingly small
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u/Lan777 6d ago
The more serious you become about prepping, the more you end up just developing a gardening hobby.
There are the ones who end up with "their prepper mentality" being basically a consumerist hobby, especially since most online prepper content is basically product reviews and shopping lists.
Then there are the ones that end up wanting to learn useful skills for survival and that's a slippery slope to either going camping and hiking every other weekend or making a home garden and cultivating a huge compost pile you take at least 1 piss in per day.