Reminds me of when a friend ordered some San Pedro cactus over the internet "for religious sacrament." It included a note indicating that they ran out of the exact variety that he ordered, but they thought that he'd be very happy with the one they sent because it was stronger when used for religious purposes. (San Pedro cactus contains mescaline. It's perfectly legal to grow for ornamental purposes.)
IIRC mescaline or peyote (maybe they're the same? I don't know) is nowadays legally protected under religious laws, but iirc there's a lot of caveats around it (region, tribe, etc).
Wine bricks saved the U.S. wine industry during Prohibition (2015)
131–140 of 190 posts
Re: Wine bricks saved the U.S. wine industry during Prohibition (2015)
#132Ontario has a bunch of make-your-own wine companies that work like wine bricks. 1. you buy 5 gallons of grape juice for ~$20 per gallon. 2. yeast is dropped into your grape juice 3. you come to the store to decant your grape juice into wine bottles and cork them up. Since no alcohol is bought or sold, you avoid the (very high) taxes on liquor. You end up with ~28 bottles of wine for ~$4 per bottle. It's not the great…
Guess that's the kind of wine that goes well with Coke, Pepsi or my personal fav Lemon Fanta.
Re: Wine bricks saved the U.S. wine industry during Prohibition (2015)
#133In the early 90s the NY post published a similar article about how not to smuggle in cigarettes from the Native American reservations nearby - including which roads to not take and intersections to not be wary of because there were frequently “speed traps” in place to stop vehicles that might be smuggling tobacco - just an FYI which readers should not be interested in. In the 2000s the NY state police started searchi…
> They argued that UPS had to be aware of what they were carrying because the shippers were tobacco stores and the parcels were exactly cigarette box sized, thus they were willing accomplices Would that matter? Fully legal duty-paid cigarette boxes would presumably be the same size and shape from the same origin.
Re: Wine bricks saved the U.S. wine industry during Prohibition (2015)
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
Guess that's the kind of wine that goes well with Coke, Pepsi or my personal fav Lemon Fanta.
Am I misreading, or are you saying you mix wine with soda/pop?
Re: Wine bricks saved the U.S. wine industry during Prohibition (2015)
#135When someone suggests a clever loophole, the response is usually “that would never work, the police and the judge will know exactly what you’re doing”. But somehow, a whole industry developed around the “do not do … detailed prohibited thing”. I guess, because it somehow worked that one time, it became memorable as an exception, while in most cases it wouldn’t fly in court.
It’s kind of like a little speeding on the highway. In many places, a lot of people are OK with it and the risk of being ticketed is very low. Yet in other places, it is not OK. Something being on paper is basically meaningless. It’s all the “soft” cues that we use and you pick up those cues through experience.
Traffic is one of the other things that HN "just doesn't get" because the rules are fuzzy and the fuzziness is contextual.
Re: Wine bricks saved the U.S. wine industry during Prohibition (2015)
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
Am I misreading, or are you saying you mix wine with soda/pop?
it's a Thing: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calimocho
Re: Wine bricks saved the U.S. wine industry during Prohibition (2015)
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's an accessible entrance into things like entropy, or to think about subjects like eugenics (if we're remove genetic diversity there will be no racism) or wrongthink (if nobody has these bad ideas we would all live in harmony). DISCLAIMER: this is not an invitation to start debating these subjects, these are just crudely picked examples.
Well.. if you post on an internet forum it kind of IS an invitation to debate. I have a crazy relative who likes to make controversial speeches and then yell "you don't have to reply!" as if it insulates him from feedback. I'm sure most are aware but your description about eugenics is a bit off. It seems like you are putting a positive slant on it or suggesting thats the goal, whether intentional or not. Eugenics is…
Re: Wine bricks saved the U.S. wine industry during Prohibition (2015)
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's the yeast strains. Some can survive higher alcohol concentrations than others. For instance this[1] one can achieve up to 25% under right conditions. [1] https://www.whitelabs.com/yeast-single?id=146&type=YEAST&sty... No yeast can digest starches afaik. It's why you need a mashing phase to turn starches into simpler sugars when brewing beer.
Though there are cultures of yeast and bacteria where the bacteria breaks down the starches to sugars which in turn gets eaten by the yeast. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q%C5%AB
Re: Wine bricks saved the U.S. wine industry during Prohibition (2015)
#139Re: Wine bricks saved the U.S. wine industry during Prohibition (2015)
#140When someone suggests a clever loophole, the response is usually “that would never work, the police and the judge will know exactly what you’re doing”. But somehow, a whole industry developed around the “do not do … detailed prohibited thing”. I guess, because it somehow worked that one time, it became memorable as an exception, while in most cases it wouldn’t fly in court.
There are a number of other examples... Like the companies selling whip cream chargers by the case of 600... You know, for the people that need to make whipped cream by the gallon at home.