Why is making of moonshine so important to a great many of us?

Over the broad sweep of the history of moonshine it is really the story of the pioneer instinct that is within many of us.  The history of moonshining is also the saga of a poor but proud and striving people, fighting against the insurmountable odds of the future but what they consider to be unjust government interference in their own private lives.

ILLICIT DISTILLING, my first book was written by me in 1993.  This was a very emotionally painful time of my life.  I felt I had been "shafted" by my best friend and a close relative in a business venture.  I had lost my home, job and was living in a summer vacation area and it was fall.  I was at that time suffering severe emotional pain.

In my search to overcome this pain I discovered a book written by Peter Thomas, who had brought CENTURY 21 (the real estate franchise) into Canada.  At the height of the real estate "boom" he was worth 28 million dollars. When the "crash" came he personally had debts of $14 million.  He wrote a book called "Never Fight with a Pig", which was the story of how he survived this period of his life.  While my financial problems weren't as large many of the problems were similar.  One of his rules of survival was to go out and start a new business.  What this accomplishes is that you take your mind off yourself.  I had always been "fascinated " with moonshining, so I began to research the history of it.  My goal was to become an author of a "How to Book".

I soon discovered there was a fascinating history to moonshining.  Almost all countries of the world, in their development, had to deal with the problem of "Moonshining".  Scotland had a particular interesting era.  There was a story about the peasant farmers who lived outside of Edinborough in earlier times who grew potatoes.  They were literally "starving" because they didn't have any market for their potatoes or it was too far away for them to transport them.  There weren't the road systems that they could move their products to market.  They discovered if they distilled the potatoes into alcohol they could move their product to market and make a living.  While it was against the law and they were predominately staunch Catholics, the priests had to overlook what they were doing in order for the people to survive.

There is no country who has more of a history of "moonshining " than North America.  On this period of history I have chosen to write.

The most eventful day of my research was when I went to The University of Toronto Library and put the words ILLICIT DISTILLING in their computer.  What came up was they had one book which was over one hundred years old which was kept in their "rare book archives".  This is a temperature and humidity controlled environment so that the paper does not further deteriorate.  You wait in a room with the same kind of environment and the librarian goes down into basement where the archives are located and the book is brought up to you on a cart.  The interesting discovery was that in the distilling of alcohol the fundamentals haven't changed since the beginning of time, only the process has been refined.  You put the mash into a pot, heat it and at the same precise temperature the alcohol evaporates which must then be trapped and cooled.

I suggest that many of you would enjoy reading this book.  Whether or not you ever build a "still" the knowledge of how to do so is an enjoyable experience.  You should research the legality of doing so and the risks involved.  In making this decision you must come to grips with what most moonshiners before you had to face.  I KNOW IT IS ILLEGAL BUT IT IS NOT IMMORAL.

The reason for my second book HOME DISTILLING and the design of my new improved WATER TREATMENT SYSTEM.  I have been able to combine stainless steel and sanitary grade plastics that reduce dramatically the cost of materials of the unit.  This opened the door  to offer freedom and opportunity to many. The home we live in is changing dramatically.  The home is now more than ever an oasis for us to pursue our own hobbies.  The Internet has changed our world forever.

Many of the third world countries the biggest single problem is good drinking water.  There is a need for this product in every country.  We have made the transition in what we are doing from illegal to legal and have given people the opportunity to improve the quality of their life within their homes.

The reason for my third book POCKETS OF EXCELLENCE is really God's work.  What he taught me in my own survival in the past three years is that the greatest untapped resource in the world is the personal growth of each and every human being that lives on this planet.  I know because I am a living example.  Through my own irresponsibility I lost everything financially and emotionally.  Today my life is in complete balance of MIND, BODY and SPIRIT.  My mind is more alert working at a new layer of conciseness, than it ever has been.  My body is physically in better shape than it has been in my entire life.  I promised my two squash partners, Janet and Joan that I would their picture on the Internet. I am quite proud of the fact that they want play squash with me and we have become good friends sharing many of our most inner thoughts.

I also have a great friend in Mary, my duplicate bridge partner, I also promised her she would be part of my website, thus part of my journey through life. 

The most interesting part of all is my SPIRIT.  Since turning my life over to God and Jesus Christ my life has taken one giant step forward, it is almost unbelievable. The emotion growth that I have experienced has been awesome. To boil it down into one short statement: Some people say you have to learn to like yourself before you can like others. I think the idea has merit, but if you don't know yourself, you don't have mastery over yourself, it is very hard to like yourself except in some short term psyched up way. 

Please go to www.encode.com/exec/nbkopen.htm  I hope you will have a look at it.  If you sense a need that something is missing out of you life than make it a must read.

My newest book ESSENTIAL OIL DISTILLATION is just a further enhancement in the pleasure one gets in helping others. It really is what life is all about. At this time I know very little about the subject. The pleasure I am getting is the enjoyment that I seem to feel that they have at last found someone who can help them achieve their goal of making their own essential oils and herbal medicines. I feel that there is a great untapped market for those who are interested.

This today, May 3, 2003  is the start of what I feel might turn into being my most important book. It will be entitled "GOD AND MOONSHINE DO MIX" The two now are so intertwined in my life now that many of the people that are interested in making moonshine or essential oils are also Christians and they are not only customers but have become  my friends. They are interested in knowing more about my story leading up to the sequence of events that lead up to me finally turning my life over to God and Jesus Christ and in doing so how my life has been enriched. The following is my testimony:

It really started when I was at the lowest point in my life. I was without a job, my wife had left me, my son was alienated from me. The place that I rented where I was living in, I depended on bringing in additional boarders in order to help pay the rent or I couldn't afford to live there. I had always depended on bringing in two additional people and things had worked very well for a period of about two years while I was putting my life together. The two boarders I had left suddenly, winter was coming and the heating bills started to come and I didn't have enough money coming in (My pension income was $4,100.00 Canadian per year) to pay the rent, heat, phone and food. It got to the low point where one day I felt that I was out on the end of branch, the branch had been cut off behind me and yet I wasn't falling. I don't know, even today,  if this was a dream I had had or what. I felt that very soon I was going to be homeless on the street. The next day I walked down to pick up the mail, I had about a 500 yard walk and a good lady friend of mine had sent me a book entitled "The Celestine Prophecy" by James Redfield. I will never forget that day. I started reading that book and I never put it down. It was about two o'clock in the morning when I finished. I remember that night that I went to sleep and had a good night's sleep. I woke up the next morning and somehow I felt that things were going to be okay. I felt a peace that I had never felt before. It was my first experience of something spiritual happening in my life. Some how the rent got paid, the other  bills got paid and a lot of good things started to happen. All I seemed to know, to sense, that there is a power, an energy, a force, beyond mind and body. I wanted more. 

For the next six months I tried a dozen different churches but each of them left me with an empty feeling. Then on Mother's Day of the following year I went into a Pentecostal Church and the youth minister, a 27 year old man by the name of Roger Reid preached a sermon like no other I had ever heard. The only way I can describe the experience is that he sounded like a young Martin Luther King Jr. It wasn't the words he said but how he said them. They where right from the heart. I knew immediately I had found my church home. Events led very quickly to an introduction to the head minister who gave me two books called "Born Again" by Charles W. Colson, who was President Nixon's hatchet man during the Nixon era and who had gone to jail and had become a "Born Again Christian"  and "Mere Christianity" by C. S. Lewis. After reading those two books I wanted to  give my life over to God and Jesus Christ. I wanted to become a Born Again Christian. I think it is important for me to explain my definition of being "Born Again." It really wasn't being born again but more like being awakened spiritually for the first time. Like seeing the light It was a wonderful feeling for me and still is every moment of every day. I have in front of me a plaque that I got when I went to Japan to help build two Christian churches there. it states: "Good Morning, THIS IS GOD! I will be handling all your problems today. I will not need your help . . . SO HAVE A GOOD DAY!" and I do. He doesn't exactly let me off the hook though. In my praying he has given me the message that I have to take full responsibility for everything that has happened in my life and all I have to do each day is simply be the "best" that I can be. Chase my dreams, reach out to people, help people who are in pain and try and replace it with humor, make people laugh, tell them about God, Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. On those days that God doesn't answer my prayers and things don't go the way I planned He is very, very clear in telling me not to give up. All you have to remember He answers prayers in his time not your time. I sometimes  discover that my plan wasn't that great anyway and He has saved me a lot of wasted time in going down that path. I do believe that He has a plan for all of us.

Now back to moonshine. A good friend of mine and mentor said to me "why don't you change the name of your book from ILLICIT DISTILLING to HOME DISTILLING. He said you a less likely to have any trouble with the police. Illicit Distilling is like waving a red flag in front of a bull. So I did but I also thought maybe I had better build a unit to see what it was like. The design a had was one that I got somehow was a design from some person in Sweden and I basically just copied it and it became part of my book. I discovered that when I went to build one it wasn't practical to build at all. I liked the design but then I started to search out practical ways that any body interested with a few tools could build one. I came up with the right components and decided to build one. I got it built with the help of some friends. The next natural step is you have to try it out. I had some old moonshine recipes which consisted of taking some sugar, water and yeast fermenting it for 10 days and then distill it off. I thought that I would invite these same friends who had helped me build it over for dinner and we "run off" our first batch. We had no instrument and no idea if the thing would even work or what would come out. We put it on the stove and turned it on and waited. After about an hour this awful smelling clear liquid started coming out. Nobody wanted to be the first to try it. I hadn't had a drink in over 15 years so my tolerance to alcohol was not very high. So I put a little bit in the bottom of a glass and filled it with Coke. It didn't taste that bad but it sure was alcohol. After a few sips everyone else wanted to try it. The long and short of that day was that it was one of the best days of my life. I was with some great friends, we had some wonderful fellowship, got a little drunk, a lot of laughs and a memory that I can look back on of one of the good times.

I now had the basis of a new book. In my new book HOME DISTILLING I showed people how they could actually make their own unit with just a few basic tools and where to purchase the materials. The whole book took on a new meaning. ILLICIT DISTILLING was about how things that happened in the previous century HOME DISTILLING is about the new millennium. The old days they did it at night in unsanitary conditions with only the minimum of supplies. Today moonshine is made in the privacy of your home on the kitchen stove with materials that are made stainless steel and copper. The materials used are made to very high standards. Safe to use and laboratories can produce essences that can give you a taste equal to the best whiskies, rums, gins and liquors that are on the market today at 1/5th the cost. I am proud of the book that I have written.

I discovered as I went along that there are two types of people. There is the person who is the "do it yourselfer" who wants the challenge of making his own "water purification unit" as it is called in the eyes of the law and there is their opposite. The person who has neither the skills, tools or desires to make one. They simply want to enjoy the excitement of making what "Charlie" calls it "Bob's Moonwater. I have tried to cater to both parties.

How the medium unit came in to being was through a potential customer who owned a motor home. He stated that the large unit was too big for his home and could I build a smaller unit. The result is the medium size unit. As soon as I started advertising that I got a call from a woman who asked me if my unit could manufacture "essential oils." I asked her what was essential oils? She went on to explain that she had lavender growing wild at her home and that lavender oil and water where wonderful perfumes and that many flowers and fruits where steamed distilled in there manufacture. I discovered if I put a stainless steel screen above the water then placed the leaves or petals on the screen that the oils in them will rise, having a lower boiling point than water, giving off there oils. I found it fascinating. There are hundreds of very valuable things that can be distilled. Rose petals, catnip, thyme, coriander, it seems the list goes on and on. From this came my book ESSENTIAL OILS. Upon further investigation of the market I have inquiries from as far away as South Africa and South America. Business is continuing to grow.

Now back to God, Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. I do try at every opportunity to find out if people are Christians, either on the phone or in person. An interesting story was last Christmas a person wanted to purchase one of my stills but did not have any credit cards. He wanted to send a money order but by the time it got to me, with the way the mail is at Christmas it wouldn't have got to me in time. I asked him if he was a Christian and did he believe in God. He stated that he was. I told him that I was going to send the unit out the next day and I believed that he would send me the money. I got the money order and a Christmas Card and on it saying "Thanks for the trust" signed Steven. I don't believe I would have trusted him if he hadn't said he was a Christian. Since that event I have many people who send me E:mails and attach things how God does work miracles for people.

My life continues to be enriched as these two elements continually intertwine. For those of you out there if you have a need for an enriched life I would welcome the opportunity to talk to about God, Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. 

ENJOY THE EXPERIENCE

God Bless

Bob Sebert

Tel: 705 252-4433

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