The private distillation of alcohol is only legal in New Zealand. The Customs Act 1996 Excise Regulation 9 says "Any person who produces beer, wine or spirits for his or her own consumption is exempt from excise tax". The NZ Customs Act is available online at http://www.customs.govt.nz/library/legislation/default.asp. The exemption for home distilling is at http://www.customs.govt.nz/manufacturers/licensing/exemptions.asp. It says: “There is an exemption from the manufacturing area licensing requirement for any area you use within your private house to manufacture the following: tobacco grown on your own land, manufactured exclusively for your own personal use, and beer, wine and spirits manufactured exclusively for personal use.” Distillation is simply the collection of the ethanol (alcohol) that was made during fermentation. It is the process of heating up the liquid so that it becomes a vapour, then condensing the vapour on a cold surface & collecting it. This works due to the fact that the vapour will contain more alcohol than the liquid it is boiled from, because of the different physical properties of water and ethanol. You can then make the vapour more pure by letting it be "stripped" of its water content by passing it up through a packed column which has some condensed vapour running back down through it as liquid. When the two pass each other, the vapour will absorb alcohol from the falling liquid, and the liquid will take some of the water from the vapour. Distilling doesn't "make" the alcohol, nor turn some of it into something "bad" that will blind you; its only collecting the alcohol that was made during fermentation. The Home Distiller website at http://homedistiller.org/ will guide you through the processes of preparing the feedstock, distilling it, then diluting, aging & flavouring it. The site also covers how to make a still and where to buy them.
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