Corn Mash, Spent Grain, Copper Stills and Making Cuts: A Bear Tale

A Bear Taken in Lieu of Molars

I write to you from Fort Wilkins, my log fortress on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route Twenty-Eight, in Pittsfield, Merrimack County. Here I practise as tooth-puller, blacksmith, inventor and distiller, and the sheriff knows me by my first name and my last warrant. My subject is corn, copper, and the finest woodpile guard God ever put in a fur coat.

Some years back a trapper from up Pittsfield way owed me for six molars and a very ugly bridge. He paid in the only coin he had, which was a cub the size of a ham with a temper like a wet cat. I named him Barnaby, after a deacon whose tooth I once pulled, and both of them bit me before the afternoon was out. He now stands four hundred pounds in his stockings, and he takes a dislike to anyone with a clean collar.

Spent Grain and the Secret of the Woodpile

Here is the lore, and the man at his own kettle should mark it. Every run of corn mash leaves something behind. That is the spent grain: the hot wet corn cooked to mush at the bottom of the kettle, with the alcohol boiled out of it and most of the sugar gone too. Farmers across New England feed it to hogs and cattle, and it serves them well, provided it is cooled first and fed in sensible measure. Hot grain straight from the kettle will scald a mouth worse than a Methodist sermon on a hot day.

One fine October Barnaby caught that sweetcorn smell drifting off the kettle. He rose on his hind legs and sang, by which I mean he made a noise like a dying bellows and a rusty hinge at the same moment. I scraped out a bucket of cooled grain, set it down, and backed away like a man leaving a church. He plunged his snout in up to the eyeballs. When he came out there was grain in his ears and his whiskers, and I swear one kernel in each nostril.

From that day the bear was mine. A fed bear does not forget the hand that fed him, nor the woodpile that hand sat upon. Each evening he takes his bucket and lies in the shadow of the pile, chin on his paws and eyes half closed, a picture of contentment. When a deputy comes creeping up the turnpike, Barnaby opens one eye, then the other, and then the rest of him follows.

A hired boy from over Epsom way once decided that a few split birch logs were free to whoever needed them. He crept in at dusk, and Barnaby let him come, for a bear is a patient creature. The boy had a log under each arm when the chain went taut with a sound like a church bell cracked in half. He screamed a note I have heard only from a pig at slaughter, and his trousers came away in Barnaby's jaws like a banner at a county fair. He ran home in his drawers over three stone walls and a pasture of cattle, and the whole village learned what Fort Wilkins firewood costs. I have not lost a stick of kindling since 1861.

Now let me speak soberly, as a man of learning. A bear is a wild beast. Feeding him makes him bold, not tame, and a chained bear is a danger to everyone within reach of the chain and a few yards beyond. I would not give Barnaby to my worst enemy, and I have a good many of those, mostly in the sheriff's office. Keeping a bear is like keeping a fire in your shed. Do not do as I do. Stay home and keep a dog.

The Mash Tub and Its Silent Gas

Now for the craft behind the bear. Take cracked corn, either sweetcorn or field corn, and cook it in water until it opens up like a boiled egg. Let it cool to blood heat, add your yeast, and let it work for a week in a good wooden tub with a loose lid.

Mind this more than any Revenue Act. A fermenting tub breathes out a gas that is heavier than air and gives no warning before it reaches you. It collects in cellars, pits and closed sheds. I have heard of men who went down to look at their mash and did not come up. Keep the air moving, keep the door open, and never put your head into a tub of working mash. Of all my sermons, that is the one I would most have you remember.

A Revenue Man at My Fireside

By every law of nature, Captain Donald Vance of Manchester ought to be my mortal enemy. He spent twenty-eight years as an officer of the federal revenue, hunting copper kettles through the White Mountains and the Green. Yet he sat in my parlor with his hands kept where Barnaby could see them. He told me my file was thicker than his mother's family Bible and a good deal more entertaining.

The oddest thing he ever found on a raid was a mule. Eleven men came down on a hollow before dawn with lanterns and a warrant. Every soul there woke shouting or running except one mule, who had got into a barrel of sour mash and lay flat in the straw, snoring like a sawmill. A shot fired into the air did not stir him, and the officers stepped over him while he slept on. Procedure demanded that he be entered in the log, so the Captain wrote it down plain: "one mule, unavailable for questioning."

Up in the Green Mountains, the Captain once set his clipboard on a fence post while he measured a tub. A Newfoundland dog as big as a hearthrug, with a face like a kindly bishop, took it in his jaws and strolled into the woods as though he had business elsewhere. Three days later the dog sat at the same gate with the clipboard at his feet, slightly chewed and tied with a ribbon. The farmer swore he had never taught him a thing, and the Captain kept that ribbon in his desk for twenty years. I told him my Barnaby would have returned the clipboard with his hand still attached, and no ribbon. There is a difference in breeding.

In Vermont, a swarm of bees set up housekeeping in an abandoned mash barrel behind a barn. The owner was not a man to waste an opportunity. He sold what he called barrel-proof honey at the county fair every September for ten years running. The Captain bought a jar every year. He calls it the best evidence he ever collected, and says he ate all of it and never had to testify.

Honest Copper: Pot, Head and Worm

I asked him how a man in his trade told an honest still from a dangerous one, and he said the copper told him most of it. A man who builds clean, with good copper and tight joints, takes pride in his work, and the Captain respected that even while he did his duty. The radiator outfits, built with lead solder and scrap metal, poisoned people, and he shut those down without a moment's sorrow. His men could smell a smoking pine-knot fire three miles upwind on a November morning. He summed up his whole view in one line: "Respect the metal, and the metal will respect you."

Consider the apparatus as a natural philosopher would. A still is a pot, a head and a worm. You heat the wash in the pot, and the vapour climbs into the head. From there it runs down the worm, a coil of copper cooled in a trough of water, where it turns back into liquid and drips out as spirit. Copper is the metal of choice because it reacts with the sulphur compounds that rise in the vapour. It pulls them out of the spirit the way a good pair of forceps pulls a rotten tooth. Without copper the spirit tastes of rotten eggs and regret. With it, the spirit is as clean as a Quaker's conscience.

Never use lead solder on a still, and never use a salvaged radiator. Lead sickens the blood and kills the brain. I have seen men go mad from it, drooling by the fire like a wax figure left too near the stove. Keep your fire low, your joints clean and your metal honest.

The Cuts, and the Matter of Hickory Ashes

The cuts are the part every young distiller wants to skip, and the part that matters most. The first spirit off the still is the foreshots, and then come the heads. These carry the methanol and the nasty volatile oils, and a man who drinks them is asking for headaches, blindness or the grave. Foreshots and heads are thrown away. They are never drunk, never used as a rinse, and never sold to a friend you like. Next comes the hearts, the sweet clean middle of the run. Last come the tails, which taste of wet cardboard and old socks and are set aside for another day.

The law of the United States forbids making spirits for drinking without a federal permit. I set all this down for history and education, as a man speaks of the Crusades or of Mr. Napoleon's retreat.

That brings me to a postcard from Cletus "Rabbit" Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina. His uncle swears the old-timers threw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads. The uncle is a good-natured fellow and a poor chemist. Hickory and oak charcoal does adsorb some of the harsh compounds in a spirit, the way a charcoal filter strains a muddy creek, and that much of the tale is true. But ashes thrown into a boiling thump keg do not remove methanol. Methanol is a cousin of ethanol and boils at nearly the same heat, so it goes along with the vapour no matter how much oak you toss in. The only cure is to cut the foreshots and heads and throw them away. Distillers have sworn by the ash trick for a hundred years, and they have sworn by it for the wrong reasons every time. I send my regards to every holler between Wilkesboro and the Yadkin.

Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest and your fire low.