"What do you know about our culture?"
How I learned the Norwegian art of making moonshine*
Last week’s post was about how I lived abroad for forty years before I started to learn, acknowledge, and appreciate that the history of my homeland was far different than what I’d been taught in school. You can read it here:
Part of my heritage is Norwegian. Norway was where the gap year that I stretched into four decades began.
When I arrived, I suffered from a little culture shock and a lot of homesickness.
Thoughts of my finger-waving mom saying, “I told you so.”, kept me from caving in. Mom said I was too immature to spend a year abroad. She was right, but I wasn’t going to prove it by giving up. In my sink-or-swim world, I flailed my arms, kicked my legs and did what it took to stay afloat.
Learning the language was one of the keys to my survival as an ignorant 18-year-old in a foreign country.
If this was an episode of “The Goldbergs”, the next line would be “It was 1980-something when I learned the real meaning of sugar and yeast in Norwegian culture.”
OK, I will explain what the real meaning of yeast and sugar is, or at least was, in Norway.
I had been there for three or four years and at university for two or three. At times, I had a girlfriend. Other times I didn’t. I studied psychology most of the time, but for some reason, I chose to study biology during one particular semester.
Maybe I thought there would be prettier girls in biology class and this was a semester when I was single. Maybe I was getting tired of walking an hour to the psychology campus each day. (The biology campus was only a ten-minute walk away). Maybe I fell out of bed one night and bumped my head. I don’t know.
I failed high school biology so I have no idea why I signed up for biology in university.
Academically, it was not a great semester. How was I supposed to know there were eighty-seven thousand two hundred and twenty-six different types of grass plants in Norway? How was I supposed to know their names and how to identify them just by looking at a seed, a single blade, or by smell?
That was only a small part of what we were expected to learn…
The only interesting types of grass to me were the ones my classmates used to flavour their moonshine.
Moonshine was the drink of choice for Norwegian students in nineteen eighty-something. In those days, Norway was a developing country (that means poor according to interviews
has conducted. Subscribe to his “Born Without Borders” site to learn more).Fun fact 1: Before Norway became the wealthiest country in the world thanks to offshore oil and gas, it was a poor country where people survived solely on berries, dried fish, whale and reindeer meat (sorry Rudolf). Yes, I have eaten all of the above, although when I could afford to, I tried to avoid berries.
I think moonshine was key to their survival, because everyone I knew, drank it.
The only Norwegians who drank spirits with labels on the bottles that weren’t handwritten by someone’s grandma were people who specialized in cheating on their taxes or people that had been on holiday abroad. (Probably the same subset of Norway’s inhabitants.)
Fun fact 2: It was punishable by prison and public shaming if Norwegians tried to pass through customs without their quota of tax-free cigarettes and alcohol.
Most people drank moonshine. In proper Norwegian, it was called “hjemmebrent”. In the Trønder dialect I learned, it was called “heimbrent” and was often enjoyed as the key ingredient in “karsk”. Karsk was heavily-sugared coffee with a drop of heimbrent. Ideally, the drop was large enough to equal the amount of coffee in your cup.
Before I forget, “perfect heimbrent” was 96% alcohol and was made from three ingredients: Water, yeast, and sugar. (*Unlike what some people call moonshine, no cornmeal, potatoes, flour or other ingredients are added to good heimbrent.)
One of my classmates was an expert in Norway’s flora and fauna. I’m confident he aced the biology tests. From experience, I know he was an expert pairing wild grass and herbs to heimbrent. He knew this but believed the best karsk came from untampered heimbrent that got its taste from a distilling process resulting in what others would call a less-than-perfect product. (Read on for details)
My classmate became a good friend. He helped me cheat on assignments.
One day, he asked if I wanted to spend the weekend at his family’s place, a hundred clicks or so north of Trondheim.
His family included his dog, his mother, his on/off girlfriend, and, every third week, his sister who worked on oil rigs in the North Sea.
The weekend I spent with my friend and his family only his mother and his dog were at home.
As we sat in front of the one-channel black and white TV watching whatever the national broadcasting company was entertaining the country with, my friend’s mother asked:
“How much of our culture have you learned since you arrived in Norway?”
I said I knew some of the words in the national anthem and that I’d been forced to learn the Norwegian version of Happy Birthday when I had a girlfriend. (It’s not even the same tune.)
My friend’s mother dropped her knitting and laughed.
“No, I mean real culture.”, she said, “Kan du brænne, eller itj?”
(That was an attempt to write the dialect form of “Do you know how to distill moonshine?”)
I honestly admitted that I did not.
“Take your friend to the Co-Op tomorrow morning!”, she commanded my friend.
Bright and early, or at least before noon, we were at the Co-Op filling our cart with massive amounts of sugar and yeast.
As he rang us through the checkout, the store manager said to my friend,
“Looks like your mom’s gonna be doing some baking, eh?”
My friend confirmed.
The store manager smiled and said,
“Save a litre for us, please!”
There was a reason for the coded exchange.
Despite the fact that everyone did it, distilling alcohol was illegal and more seriously punished than most violent crimes. Fortunately, the police couldn’t afford store-bought spirits for their weekend enjoyment either. Arrests and prosecutions were fortunately few and far between.
My friend walked me through the process.
His family was renowned for their high-quality distilled product.
The secret, he told me, was to make sure the alcohol content hovered around 89-90.
“That’s when it still has some taste to it.”, he said.
Distilling alcohol isn’t a one-weekend job.
We returned to the small town every weekend before the batch was ready to be “burnt” on the homemade still. As we entered the home on that final weekend, the smell of the batch was extremely strong. It’s hard to explain the aroma.
Shortly after we arrived, my friend’s sister entered. It was her week off.
She walked in, sniffed the air, lit up in a huge smile and exclaimed,
“Oh my god, Mom, it smells like Christmas!”
I guess that’s how to explain it. Uncooked moonshine, at least to 1980s Norwegians, smells like Christmas.
When the distilling process was complete, my friend shared another secret with me.
“We’ve chosen you to hand out the welcome drinks at the local harness racing association’s 75th anniversary. It’s a big honour!”
I was bigly honoured until we arrived at the party and it turned out that the person handing out the welcome drink was obliged to sip a toast of the potent cocktail with every attendee. Who knew such a small town could have so many horse-interested harness-racing enthusiasts?
I can’t remember much of the party or even what we put in the cocktail but I’m willing to bet it contained both berries and grass-flavoured moonshine. Something tells me, we even poured a bottle of proper Johnnie Walker into the twenty-litre tub. That evening is a bit of a blur in my fading memory.
Today, as a no longer developing country, (isn’t that a sad thought, we have developing countries and then we have us.) I fear the art of making moonshine is a lost art in most parts of Norway.
Hopefully, my friend, wherever he is, still makes his less-than-perfect moonshine simply “because it tastes better”.
I lost touch with him long before the internet was invented but I do remember the last time I visited him.
It was summer.
We were a geographic degree or two below the Arctic Circle. At that latitude, the sun sets, but it never gets dark.
We sat at the top of a mountain looking out at the endless, cloudless horizon beyond the fjord. We had a flask of well-sugared coffee each and, between us, we shared a wine bottle full of heimbrent. With our minds powered by karsk, we spent the night on the mountain talking about life.
At sunrise, we wandered home. I remember feeling a sense of cultural achievement knowing I had stirred the “sats” that had been distilled into the elixir that flavoured our karsk.
Skål!
Stay safe, Always Care
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All of my stories are personal, authentic, and unashamedly enhanced by imperfect memory and literary creativity.
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Ooof, that's quite a difference between then and now.
Thanks for the mention, Paul! I enjoyed these facts. Especially, "I think moonshine was key to their survival, because everyone I knew, drank it.
The only Norwegians who drank spirits with labels on the bottles that weren’t handwritten by someone’s grandma were people who specialized in cheating on their taxes or people that had been on holiday abroad. (Probably the same subset of Norway’s inhabitants.)"