Green’s Dictionary of Slang

(US black) an area where one purchases bathtub liquor.

1939

D. Burley N.Y. Amsterdam News 29 Apr. 20: Eight Avenue betwen 117th and 122nd [is] ‘The Bathtub Circuit’. You can get it freshly stilled [...] for two-bits a quart.

see under crank n.²

(US) illicitly distilled alcohol, esp. in the Prohibition era.

1930		J. Lait Put on the Spot 23: He shoves that Wop bathtub slop.
1936		Mencken Amer. Lang. (4th edn) 580: Some of their inventions, indeed, were adopted by the whole population, e.g., [...] bathtub-gin.
1938		A.J. Liebling Back Where I Came From (1990) 89: He [...] came back and delivered a case of bathtub gin.
1945		O. Lewis Uncertain Journey 103: You start filling your skin with bathtub hooch. As though that’s going to help.
1952		C. Hamilton Men of the Und. 185: From bathtub hooch to a basement still was just a small step.
1959		F. Brookhouser These Were Our Years 119: The speak-easies, the bathtub gin, the gangsters: I do not regret that I knew them.
1986		S. King It (1987) 454: The stuff you could get in town was ten times as good as the rotgut whiskey and bathtub gin you could get at the white boys’ NCO.
1995		B. Conrad Martini 31: Bootleggers found it easier to make drinkable gin than whiskey, and bathtub gin became the liquid currency of the underworld.
1998		J. Womack Terraplane 157: Early on, though, Vernon set up a couple alky cookers, ran off batches of bathtub hooch.
2007		J. Haft All the Tea in China 61: It tastes vaguely like grappa but packs a punch like bathtub hooch. The Chinese consider this drink to be very strong.
2010		Codella and Bennett Alphaville (2011) 150: Bootleg heroin, the narcotic equivalent of bathtub gin.

see under scum n.

see under speed n.