“These moonshine stills are cheap and easy and, friends, they bring in revenue all year round,” thus begins Leonid Gaidai’s Soviet-era short film Moonshiners with a song. In the USSR, homemade alcohol ...

Sean Kenyon knows how to pour out both drinks and advice. A third-generation bar man with 25 years behind the bar, including at some of this town’s most liquid assets, he is a student of cocktail ...

Heavy alcohol consumption is a major contributing factor to the very high death rate among Russians. Ongoing research shows that many Russians drink "surrogate" alcohols, such as "samogon" or ...

Every August, Nikolai Gusev juices hundreds of unwashed apples which grow at his dacha, west of Moscow. For a month he waits patiently for the juice to ferment and turn into a wine. He then distills ...

Samogon (self-made) is a Russian liquor that the people of Krasnaya Polyana, a town situated close to the exuberance of the Sochi Olympic Games, hold dear. "Look, it's like a child's tear," Baturin, ...

KRASNAYA POLYANA, Russia, Feb 15 (Reuters) - "I only drink mine," Edik Baturin warns when talk turns to samogon, a potent, chest-warming moonshine he brews in his shack in the shadow of the Caucasus ...