During prohibition, how many ways could you have hidden alcohol?

I saw this at a Kentucky Derby race one year. This guy had a small table that he set up and plunked down a huge jar of peant butter, the size a restaurant might use. I watched as he opened it up and stuck his hand down to almost his elbow and pulled out a bottle of vodka.

In my stomach lol. XD

Under the floorboards sounds like it could work, or in some nooks in crannies that are easily overlooked. In attics, basements. During Winter, you could bury it under the snow I guess. That depends on how thorough the searches for alcohol back then were though. Does anyone know?

I couldn’t guess. I don’t think like a criminal. What seem like really good hidey places to me are probably the first places the cops know to look…

Knowing me, I’d abide by the rules. Hope smoking is banned…

@zensky – Smoking is banned in public places (as it ought to be). But in private, people should be allowed to do what they want.

Rhode Island and Connecticut refused to ratify the 18th Amendment. There’s some stories to tell from that generation. I know a few people now who make moonshine. I knew of a cab driver who sold alcohol from his cab on Sunday back when you couldn’t sell on Sundays. That wasn’t that many years ago.

@HungryGuy True dat. Parents smoking in the house when they have kids are retards though.

I agree ^

Anyone see the movie Thunder Road?

I haven’t seen that movie, @john65pennington. I saw “Hillybilly: The Real Story” on the History Channel. There is a part in the documentary about the origins of NASCAR and how it started in Georgia with moonshine runners.

They never (or almost never) invaded people’s homes (unless they were criminals) for booze. So I don’t think most people worried about hiding it at home. They were more likely to be circumspect out in public. But you can transfer the alcohol to any container for anything else: OJ, milk, juice, whatever.

@wundayatta Well that answers my question. I’d just stash it in my place, well hidden, just in case. Well hidden, but always easily accessible when needed or wanted.

It was purchasing the booze and getting it home that created the problems.

@bkcunningham Couldn’t smugglers and hustlers dress up as delivery men or wtv to bring it to the people? Or did it not work like that? I have very little knowledge on booze banhammering. I should get a book about it, I bet it’s really interesting.

Some of these answers remind me of a situation I had with two high school students that were skipping school.

They left school for lunch, but never returned.

I noticed them walking on a street behind the school and stopped them. One had a can of Coke in his hand and the other had a bottle of orange juice. I knew these two students and their alcohol problem.

I was close enough to them to smell alcohol on their breath. Sure enough, one had vodka and o.j. in the bottle and the other had straight vodka in the Coke can.

You just can’t fool an old cop. Both were arrested.

I don’t think many people had door-to-door delivery to their homes, @Symbeline. You could buy your spirits at a speakeasy or through your local bootlegger. You could get a permit to keep upto 200 gallons of wine/year in your home for personal consumption. Many people sold it and traded it around to other users for various alcohol.

When I used to go to Dodger games back in the 1980s I had all sorts of neat ways to get beer into the stadium.

1) Take a 1960s era transistor radio and take the guts out of it. You can fit three cans of beer in there. Security guards just think it is a radio you are carrying in.
2) Take two liter bottles of pepsi, empty them, and put 5.5 cans of beer in each with two drops each of blue, green, and red food coloring. It will look just like pepsi or coke. We would put two of those pepsi bottles (11 beers) in an ice chest (they permitted ice chests back then – but no beer). The security guards would say “What’ch got in the cooler punk?” I’d open it up and he’d see the pepsi bottles with our trojan horse beers and let us in. That saved us like $50 on beers.

On airplanes today it is perfectly legal (again, one of my favorite phrases) to take those little one ounce booze bottles through TSA security, as long as they are unopened and fit in a one quart zip lock bag. You can fit 6 or 8 in the bag. Mixed drinks are like $7 on the airplane but orange juice or cokes are free. You figure it out.

I would have hollowed out the back of cinder bricks and placed bottles there. I would have made a fake fireplace and used it as a storage place. I also would have made false bottom barrels to store bottles.
Other ideas for hiding booze:
The Library. Think, hollow books.
Hidden false wall.
Under the stairs but not just under them, in wooden boxes nailed to the sides so that when checked it would appear to be supports that if knocked out would throw the stairs off. Hide them in the middle.
Wrapped in blankets in the coal shaft.
In gas tanks.
Create a false bottom table.
False pipes under the sink, large enough to fit smaller pipes that are filled with booze and capped off.
In plain sight. I would fill medicine bottles, soda bottles and paint glass milk jugs white and store it there.
In the garbage pile. It is a capped, glass bottle, nothing can get in to it and it is easily cleaned.
In holes dug around and near the police station.
This is how I would hide personal bottles. Large amounts, I would create a false store front that is out of business. Also maybe hide large amounts in blankets at the Salvation Army…I could carry on but…I don’t want to draw attention to myself.