[Avodah] Selling whiskey/bourbon

[David Riceman]

Me:
> : Not all minhagim fit this paradigm.  Take glatt, back in the day when 
> : Jewish butchers sold mainly to Jewish consumers, so that every treifah 
> : was a monetary loss, and back in small towns where they slaughtered one 
> : or  two cows a week.  As I understand it, those are the conditions under 
> : which the custom originated, and when the meat wasn't glatt the people 
> : who were makpid simply didn't eat meat that Shabbos.  But extend the 
> : custom to an entire kehillah and the economics fails.
>   
RMB:
> Umm, that was an entire kehillah. As you write, the loss was absorbed so
> it seems they could manage. The fact that 100 mi away in some other town
> someone else would have eaten the meat doesn't change the feasability of
> the minhag. It's not today, when economic and social groups span large
> swaths of a continent.
>   
Well, no, it wasn't an entire kehillah.  The people I've asked about 
this who actually lived in small towns in Europe have always told me 
that just a couple of families in whatever town they lived in were 
makpid on glatt, and that the meat was always sold to Jews unless it was 
definitively treif.

David Riceman