Saturday, March 10, 2007

Russkie moonshine

The bouquet - rocket fuel with a touch of boot polish. Not for the yellow-livered.
Posted by at

5 comments:

My Frontier Thesis said...

I forwarded this link to a friend. He remarked about three years back that he encountered Mongolian vodka shine. He refused it, but a local and veteran Mongol took a couple shots. He said the local was fine. He also remarked that it's extremely unadvisable for Westerners to touch the stuff. It probably wouldn't even phase JJ though.

3/11/2007 12:39 AM
Tecumseh said...

JJ would chase it with Stone IPA, and that would annihilate all the junk from the moonshine (?) Of course, there is an old Romanian saying that applies: "Cui pe cui se scoate", which roughly translates as "The nail pops up the nail". Anything remotely comparable in English?

3/11/2007 1:46 PM
My Frontier Thesis said...

AI, in regards to the "nail pops up the nail," could you contextualize it a bit more? I think I know where the proverb is headed, but don't want to assume.

After reading the Russian moonshine link, I forwarded it to the said friend in Ulaan Bataar (the same guy who moved to Mongolia to become a drunken nihilist because of post-modern feminist literary critics at Macalester). He fired back a response. Here's what's going on with the Mongolian moonshine front:

Ulaan Bataar, Mongolia:

"Fascinating Link. I, of course, have drunk some shady vodka. I think fondly of the engine de-greaser I drank one morning in the countryside at the urging of our burly host, an elementary school gym teacher ("The bouquet - rocket fuel with a touch of boot polish."). It was in a Danzka bottle. Jack went first and immediately tried to dissuade me from following suit. Gulp. Burn. Jack was dyspeptic for the good part of the day. I was all right in 20 minutes. Also, the bottle I bought with Baagii the Elder after spending the afternoon in the Hospital... drinking.... with doctors. I paid around $.80. Bottom shelf. All the brands, around 15 total, were obviously from the same still - the blurred colors on the labels that were all slightly crooked gave it away. There must have been a good deal of quality testing of the product around the bathtub on bottling day. The headache I had the next day seared my cerebellum, effectively "training" me, and I have not drank $1 vodka since. In order to prevent poisonings, people turning yellow, and the like, the best Mongolian vodka now comes with a contraption built into the opening of the bottle which, besides controlling the flow due to a movable part similar to those bar-pour devices, is purportedly extremely difficult to engineer, or at least too expensive to build on anything but a large scale, thus effectively barring bootleggers from making and selling counterfeit vodka. Also, if it wasn't clear from my "bar-pour" comparison: That device in the bottle allows only egress. To remove the device, as I know from experience, one must break it, so simply refilling empty bottles is not feasible. Mother Russia should consider doing something similar. Mongolia: On the forefront of vodka technology."

FCP'ers will have to plan a field trip to Ulaan Bataar someday. JJ will get along splendidly — in the roaring drunk sense — with my friend mentioned above.

3/11/2007 9:22 PM
Tecumseh said...

Nail driving out nail: well, you know, MFT, you hit nail #1 (already stuck in the wood) on the head with nail #2 (with pointy head on nail #1, and with head hit by the big hammer). If you hit hard enough, nail #1 goes through the wood and pops out on the other side. If you do it just right, nail #2 does not go through, so you pop it out with pliers -- or better still, with your teeth if you are like that Russkie eith iron teeth from one of the James Bond movies.

OK, if you buy this scenario, what the Romanian saying says is that, if you drink too much tzuica from a 1-liter plastic coke bottle (this is like nail #1 in your stomach), the way to pop it out is to flush is with another liquid, say Pilsner Urquell lager (this is like nail #2).

I hope this is good enough an explanation. Let me know if more details are needed to elucidate this saying.

3/13/2007 1:59 AM
My Frontier Thesis said...

Thanks AI, now I understand what the saying was originally driving at... (bad pun, I know: but they are all bad, right?).

3/13/2007 4:03 PM

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)