One morning, as usual, I woke up at 8:50 to the sound of my iPhone alarm, flipped the phone face down out of habit, and walked to the bathroom.

The small attic bathroom of our wooden country house greeted me with the invigorating chill of missing heaters. In the corner, instead of the bidet that had once been planned for the space, stood a happily gurgling moonshine still perched on a red stool. The air carried the intoxicating sweet-and-sour smell of homemade liquor.

Crystal-clear tears of seventy-degree liquid courage steadily traveled through the reinforced tubing into a five-liter Agusha children’s water bottle.

I glanced at my reflection, distorted in the sensually curved coil of the condenser.

Now that was an invention, I thought. A true masterpiece of engineering and industrial design created by my father-in-law, an experienced aircraft flight engineer.

The hand of a craftsman could be felt in every detail. Every joint of the copper coil was perfectly fitted together, the body of the apparatus carefully wrapped in a neat foam “fur coat,” while the heating element with its electronic sensors looked like an organic part of the entire construction.

Beyond its elegant appearance, the machine possessed extraordinary productivity in producing high-quality liquor—a fact that was also entirely thanks to my father-in-law.

“What looks good works good,” I recalled Steve Jobs once saying.

If only all the objects surrounding us gave the same aesthetic pleasure as my father-in-law’s moonshine still. Perhaps the whole world around us would become different. After all, to make something truly beautiful, one must genuinely love the craft, become obsessed with it, and devote oneself completely to the creation born from one’s own mind.

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