If moonshine is considered "whiskey"...

[68blue]

You can make excellent wine very easily with frozen fruit juice concentrates you get at the store. I also buy fresh apple juice in the fall from local orchards very cheaply and make good stuff from that as well. Most of doing a good job is just keeping things clean. While I haven't had any wine snobs as guests at my house, I have served a lot of homemade at get togethers and everybody was happy.

[mauve66]

then why is it clear?

Sorry for the late reply, been grading chem exams the past two weeks......

Ethyl alcohol (or ethanol or grain alcohol) is a colorless liquid, as is water.  The color in whiskey is due to materials added to the liquid to give it that particular color (usually from storage in hard woods or other stuff that gets mixed in, even charcoal).  If you took any whiskey and distilled the solution, you would get a clear solution, but it would not be a 200 proof batch of alcohol.  This is because ethanol forms an allotropic mixture with water (hydrogen bonds holds them together), which means that you would get at best 190 proof (95% ethanol/5% water) out of the whiskey just by regular distillation.  To get it to 200 proof, you have to do some special chemistry techniques......

When I was a graduate student, I was capable of going down to the stockroom and ordering 200 proof in both gold and blue labeled bottles.  The difference in them is whether or not an additional chemical has been added to prevent human consumption.  The stockroom guys knew that I was highly allergic to ethanol, so there was no chance of me drinking the stuff I got.  Since I worked in a rad lab, we did not have to worry about our supply disappearing once in the lab (locked and monitored area).  My problem is that once open to the air, the alcohol would convert to the allotrope before I could use it up in reactions.....

damn those were some big words in there............