Yay!

Now make a rum.

Is there a Washington version of Applejack? THERE SHOULD BE.

What's unclear still is wheather the 51% rule for locally grown ingredients is on a per/label basis or per/distillery. If it's per/label, then no rum unless you can conjure something up from Washington-grown sugar beets. If those beats are grown here, but processed into sugar, say, in New Jersey and your molases comes from New Jersey, it's considered locally-grown. Same thing with grain grown here, but shipped elsewhere for malting. Also unclear is how the LCB enforces this. Maybe it doesn't. I dunno. Anyone wanna start a distillery with me?!

@3, you're right. I hadn't thought of that. I got carried away because I like rum. It has to be from sugarcane or molasses. There's a guy in Tennessee who tried to get permission to make rum from sorghum but the Feds said no -- he could make it, but he couldn't call it rum. He buys in his molasses -- Tennessee apparently has no local content rule.

@2, you can make your own applejack. Freeze hard cider and keep straining out the slushy ice that forms. That ice is pure water, which leaves increasingly strong applejack behind. This is in fact the difference between applejack and apple brandy (which is distilled).

Small Hessian farmers planted medieval berry bushes, waited years for them to mature, and created organic fruit schnapps that were delicious and both exotic and extremely local. Local pubs charged around 12 euros per shot, what with Germany's extremely low liquor taxes.

@5: The ice is not pure water. It is mostly water, but still weak cider, with a much lower proportion of alcohol, sugar, and fusel oils than the portion that doesn't freeze. Look up fractional freezing sometime.

@7: "Fusel"? That's German for cheap bad liquor. And the nickname of a friend in the greatest bar in the world (spiekerscorner.de).