Typically we don't think of cities as being particularly extreme environments, but few places on earth get as hot as a rooftop or as dry as the corner of a heated living room.

There's something about when humanity goes from hoping they get lucky in finding something fermented to doing it on purpose. They don't understand what they've done until the late 1800s, but they know if they combine things in a certain way, they'll get something magic.

Our relationship with alcohol is a hologram for how human beings relate to the natural world. When you get to that level of brown liquor - an age distillate of a fermented thing, grain that we learned how to plant and make grow - it is in some ways the best expression of what humans are able to do. Nobody else can make that! And it's delicious.

Distilling is such a strange and arcane art, still. Not quite a science yet, but when someone's making something weird, I like to know about it.

I suspect states are going to realize there's money to be made, and they'll start to change laws so people can distil to sell. It happened with wine, it happened with beer.

From the early days of the telegraph, to be a telegrapher was a job, and there weren't many of those folks. They could recognize each other's style by their dots and dashes.