Charcoal Filtering Whiskey: History, How to Build a Charcoal Bed, and What Goes Wrong

My hands are black to the wrist as I write this. I have been burning and crushing coal in the yard since sunup, and I look like a man who spent the afternoon strangling a chimney sweep and lost. Barnaby, my black bear, is lying against the log wall in a sulk. He is sure that charcoal smoke means supper. Before we go on, here is the sermon the law requires: making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of these United States, and what follows is for history and education only. Take the learning and leave the larceny.

A Russian Apothecary and the Bones of Oxen

Charcoal is older than whiskey, older than the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and older than the grudges of the Pittsfield town meeting, which go back to the Flood. Still, it took an apothecary of St. Petersburg, Russia, one Tobias Lowitz, to show that the stuff could clean a liquid. In 1785 he reported that wood charcoal took the color and the stink out of the liquids he was working on. Picture the man up to his elbows in foul brine. He drops in a lump of coal out of pure frustration, and the stink simply gives up and leaves. Every alchemist dreams of a day like that. Mine have mostly ended with a deputy at the door.

The sugar refiners caught on next. Early in this century they took to running raw syrup through bone char, which is charcoal made from charred animal bones. That means the white sugar in your Sunday cake was strained through the burnt skeletons of oxen. Pass the frosting. Sailors knew the same principle in their own way. On a long voyage they charred the insides of their water casks, because charred wood helped keep the drinking water from going foul. A man six months out of New Bedford will take any small mercy, and a sweet cask was one of them.

The Colliers of the Granite Hills

Every forge in New Hampshire, mine included, ran on charcoal before the coal barges came, and the iron furnaces went through it by the mountainside. The Franconia Iron Works burned whole forests to feed its stack. The colliers who made the coal stacked cordwood in a great cone around a chimney of split sticks and covered the pile with leaves and dirt. Then they lit it down the middle and smothered it, so that it burned with almost no air for days, sometimes two weeks. A collier lived beside his mound in a brush hut and never slept a full night. One breath of air in the wrong place made the mound flare, and a month of chopping went up as smoke.

Here is what the schoolbooks leave out. When a soft spot opened, the collier climbed onto the smoking heap and stamped it down with his boots, and sometimes the crust gave way. One collier up past Gilmanton went through to the knee. I will keep his name to myself, since his grandchildren still buy nails from me. The cold air hit his trouser leg, the coals flared like a bellows, and the wool cooked onto his skin. I treated him with lard, laudanum and a bucket of cold Suncook water. He lived, and he went back to coaling inside a month on account of a mortgage. We will not let a little hell keep us from paying the bank.

Miss Clara Higgins visited the fort lately. She is a Blue Ridge herbalist and a scholar of the old talk, and she is the only soul who ever made Barnaby sit like a dog. She told of Long Tom Ballard of Rockfish Gap, six foot five and none of it brains. One windy night he went through his pit to the hip, and they roped him out with a log chain hitched to a mule. He walked like a heron for the rest of his life, stiff-legged and all knees, yet he went back to coaling inside a year. His reason: "I've been to hell knee-deep, and they had nothing down there worth staying for."

Tennessee Tubs and Blue Ridge Fools

Charcoal and whiskey were truly married in Lincoln County, Tennessee. A cattle drover passing through Concord told me how they do it there. They burn sugar maple into coal, pack it into tubs taller than a man, and drip the new whiskey through it a drop at a time before it goes to market. They call this leaching. The whiskey goes in with a bite like a wet dog and comes out as mellow as a parson after his second helping. Three families each swear that their granddaddy started it, which tells you it was probably none of them.

Charcoal has also been a good friend to the dishonest trade, because nobody wants to search it. A deputy will dig through hay and apples, but he will not put his good blue sleeve into a wagon of coal. I once sent forty jars of hearts toward Barnstead under twenty sacks of maple coal. At the town line a deputy poked one sack with a stick, pulled the stick out black, and announced to the road that he had discovered charcoal. Then he wiped the stick on the collier's mule and let us through.

Miss Higgins swears that charcoal has made more fools in her family than whiskey ever did. Her great-granny Dorcas left good persimmon brandy for nine days in a washtub of corncob coal. It came out clear as springwater, with not a lick of persimmon left in it, and the family named it gone-to-glory brandy. A circuit judge then praised it on the courthouse steps at Lovingston as the purest liquor in Virginia. Her Uncle Absalom was too lazy to burn his own coal. He scraped it off a smokehouse floor where hams had hung over hickory since the Revolution, and the result was a breakfast dram that drew every hound in Nelson County to the meeting house. Her mountain vocabulary is worth learning too. Liquor that ran slow through the coal and came out soft is coal-cooled. A jar with black specks from unwashed coal is a sooty Sally, and the man who sells one gets sung about at the frolic. The finest word of all is petticoat-strained. It comes from a brush-arbor revival near Massies Mill, where the strainer blanket fell into the fire. The preacher's own wife lent a red flannel petticoat to take its place, on the condition that it be boiled first and returned on Tuesday, washed.

Burning and Washing Your Own Coal

Most of what goes wrong is settled before the fire is ever lit, so begin with the wood. Sugar maple is the queen of filter coal. It burns clean and even and leaves a mild, sweet coal. Hickory is the king, harder and with more opinion to it. Beech and white birch will serve in a pinch. Never use pine, spruce or hemlock, because their pitch makes a tarry coal that puts turpentine in your spirit. Also keep out painted boards, tarred barn timber, soaked fence rails and nailed mill scraps. Strip off any poison ivy vine, because its smoke carries the poison into your eyes and lungs. Use clean hardwood with the bark off, split small and dry.

For a tubful you do not need a collier's mountain. Drill a hole the size of a goose quill in the lid of an iron kettle and pack the kettle with split maple. Set it in a hot fire outdoors, well away from the still-house. A jet of smoke and gas will hiss from the hole and often burns there like a little torch. That is the wood giving up everything that is not coal. When the jet sputters out, pull the kettle from the fire, plug the hole with clay, and leave it shut until morning. If you open it hot, the coal goes up in front of you.

Mind the fumes. Smoldering charcoal gives off a fume you cannot see or smell. It puts you to sleep and you do not wake. Every winter the newspapers report whole families found dead after warming a tight room with a pan of coals. Make your coal and cool it outdoors, and never bring hot coals into a closed room, still-house or cellar. Fresh coal can also heat itself in a heap and catch fire in the night. Spread it out and let it cool and air for a day or two before it goes in the bin. I learned this by losing a woodshed in '59, and Barnaby's eyebrows grew back crooked.

Next, crush the coal in a feed sack on the anvil until the pieces are about the size of peas or beans. Use a wooden mallet, never a hammer. Sift out the fine dust through a riddle. Then wash the coal with clean spring water, stirring and pouring off again and again, until the water runs clear instead of like a Concord inkwell.

The Tub, the Trickle, and What Goes Wrong

Use a clean crock or a sweet oak keg. Never use one that held kerosene, paint or pickles. Bore a hole near the bottom for a wooden spigot and lay in a pad of boiled wool blanket or good linen. Pack the washed coal firm and even, a foot or two deep. The Tennessee men go to ten feet, but they have more patience and fewer bears. Lay another cloth on top so the spirit spreads over the whole bed. Let the spirit through in a thin trickle. If it gushes, the bed is packed loose and the spirit has cut a channel straight through, so tamp it down and start again.

Now the plain truth: charcoal is a polisher, not a physician. Make your cuts at the still every time. Throw out the foreshots and heads, keep the hearts, and set the tails aside. Only the hearts go into the coal. Charcoal will not take out a single drop of methanol. It mellows the bite and takes up some of the oily, stinking matter, but heads poured through a coal tub come out as mellow poison. A blind man who drank smooth liquor is still blind. Copper and coal also do different jobs. The copper works on the hot vapour and takes out the sulfur stink. The coal works on the cooled spirit afterward. One is the barber and the other the tailor.

Here is what goes wrong, in order. Unwashed coal leaves specks in the jar. Spirit left on the coal too long comes out like gone-to-glory brandy, so taste as you go. Tired coal stops working, and when the spirit comes out tasting the way it went in, you lay in fresh. Coal keeps borrowed flavours: coal that leached apple brandy will hand some apple to the next run, and smokehouse coal hands you a ham. Wet coal left in a damp cellar grows mold. And never make coal near running alcohol, because spirit vapour and an open fire make a quick, bright end to a building.

Ash, Oak Shavings, and the Great Lie

Cletus Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, called Rabbit by his hollow, sent word that his uncle throws hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads. The uncle has muddled ash with charcoal. Charcoal is wood cooked without enough air, and it is full of pores that catch things. Ash is what is left when wood burns all the way. Run water through ash and you get lye, the same lye that boils soap. Hot spirit pulls that lye out of the ash and gives the run a soapy, alkaline bite. Red oak is so open in the grain that coopers build whiskey barrels from white oak only. Raw red oak shavings bring bitter tannin, a lumber taste, and a dark colour that makes the liquor look older than it is. They do not clean out a single bad head. The thump keg strengthens the run, but nothing thrown into it takes the heads out. The heads come out in the cuts.

That brings us to the tavern myth that charcoal draws the poison out of a bad run. It is a damned lie, and it has blinded better men than the ones repeating it. The only thing that draws the poison out of a bad jar is the undertaker. Black specks do not prove the work is honest mountain liquor either. A sooty Sally is a confession, not a badge. As Miss Higgins's granny put it, "charcoal is like a good husband: it'll take a lot of your bad off you, but it won't take any of the poison you brought into the marriage yourself." Wash your coal, mind your fumes, and keep your fire low.