IN "DRY" AMERICA.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LVI, Issue 17276, 27 September 1919, Page 2 (Supplement)

IN "DRY" AMERICA.

HOME-MADE LIQUOR.

SOME . INGENIOUS INVENTIONS.

It bai been said that the American people have quietly settled down to prohibition, and that very soon they will forget their former drinking habits, moderate or otherwise,

This, however, is not the opinion of all observers. Sir John Foster Fraser, who is at present in Chicago, tells another story.

The Americans, he writes, are an amazingly inventive people, and I understand that many of the ablest minds in the Republic are devising schemes to be occasionally wet, despite the prospective law that everybody shall bo dry. All those who are so disposed can purchase at moderate sums appliances so that every roan can be his own distillernotwithstanding the " search and seize " horror.

The market is being flooded with imitations, but the general verdict is that they " lack kick." Newspapers which are anti-Anti-Saloon League are publishing recipes to provide new drinks. The humble dandelion has great potentialities.

I read that if you mix orange and lemon with dandelion, boil them, add sugar and a little yeast and then wait a while, you can produce a beverage which is " a sturdy little brother to the demon rum." A similar treatment with elderberries as chief ingredient makes a drink mora potent than old sherry. Grape juice, which is William Jenning Bryan's favourite tipple—l rather like it myself if you insert into the bottle a few split raisins and a tiny amount of yeast, and the conccction is given a rest for a mouth —bo made more pleasing than crusted Bordeaux. Dried apples, peaches, prunes, all yield to gentle treatment; but it is always insisted on there must be inserted a little veast. Tinned fruit, with the accelerating yeast added, can be made wonderfully effective m producing a joyous exhiliaration. The anti-saloonists are contemplating having a Bill rushed through Congress making the possession of yeast as serious an offence as dealing in cocaine 1 Porto Ricoone of the dependencies of the United States— long been dry for the moral benefit of the Porto Ricoans. But news comes that hair tonic has leaped into favour as a drink in Ponce. In one week more than 4350 bottles of a kind manufactured by a local firm under a formula registered with the insular Government was sold to the city. The tonio, said to contain more than 60 per cent, aloohol, Las been selling at 15 cents (<id. a drink. It is said that in taste the tonic is similar to pure rum. Within a few weeks 75,000 bottles of this flair tonic has beer, imported into Ponce, but the polica have stopped the sale and are endeavouring to corral the supply. All of which shows that, although the United Stites on July 1 set a great and noble example to the rest of the world, not a few Americans are determined they rather will be free than virtuous.