It's offensive because it's a big brother-ish intrusion.

If I raise my own grain, and distill alcohol out of it on my own property with my own equipment, and use it to put up my own fruit for the winter, I should have to tell somebody in Washington about this, preferably without asking where the fourth amendment just went, and then, having done so, ask him for his permission to do that which affects nobody else and pay him for the privilege of doing that which he has helped me in no way to do - why? "Because we're got more guns than you do" is the usual answer these days, and I can't say I think much of the answer. Back when the government made more of an attempt to pretend to be operating on a higher level than Al Capone did, however, the answer was that distilled spirits were the alcoholic's drink of choice, and the social damage they brought called for some attempt at correction. Which really would be an argument for putting a tax on them at the municipal level, not the federal level, because rural folk use alcohol as a preservative, doing in the dead of night that which they ought to be able to do in broad daylight as they distill it.

Let's keep in mind that the rationale for this intrusion into the farmer's (or other rural person's) personal affairs, in which he does something that hurts absolutely nobody, is that this needs to be done in order to keep somebody else from harming himself. One could write a completely different piece about that concept, but let's try to keep focused on one bad idea at a time, if we can.

Can you really picture somebody scarfing down a bottle of lady apples, just to get a buzz just barely strong enough to distract him from the stomach ache he'd get from eating those things raw? Can you really picture the need for secrecy and the reduction of peer review of the process that results improving the safety of the process? As for the municipal taxes, even those are questionable, because liqueur makers tend to make good use of one very interesting trait of ethanol - it can dissolve more than its own volume in sugar, if one is patient, and repeatedly shakes the bottle until that which settles out dissolves into solution, over the course of a few months. The usually relatively expensive and highly seasonal herbs and other seasonings are used to flavor the alcohol until it is very strong in flavor, and usually very bitter and very sweet, the sugar balancing this out to produce a powefully flavored and agreeably sweet - usually not overpoweringly sweet - beverage that is, nonetheless, more than half sugar. Anybody who was so wasteful as to chug noisette (homemade amaretto) would be rewarded for his undiscerning extravagance by a bout of nausea that would not leave him in the mood to consume anything else, for quite some time.

Reason, then, would suggest that even the municipal tax would best be applied only to dry spirits, which, aside from plain distilled alchohols (whiskey, vodka, etc) are in so little demand in much of this country, that people often have to be told that any (aside from Gin) even exist. Realistically speaking, we're living in a country in which selling eggplant is a challenge. Bitter spirits aren't going to go into fashion, any time soon. It doesn't matter. Might makes right is the new principle of law, and so the law is the law, whether it makes sense of not, and is not open to any real discussion. One might well wonder with whom the discussion would take place, anyway, the government being unresponsive in matters of far greater urgency that the freedom to make one's own brandy, and the people, living by the credo "I'm entitled to my opinion", not really listening when the status quo is questioned. It is what it is.