Distiller's Mailbag: Potash, Applejack Headaches and Moonshine Slang

Grievances, Telegrams and a Jealous Bear

Barnaby, my black bear, has taken to chewing the mailman's satchel. He believes every letter inside is a love note from a she-bear in Gilmanton, and I have not the heart to tell him they are mostly from tooth patients who want their money back. Still, among the grievances that come down the six-oh-three, four-seven-one, fifty-five ninety-seven line are a good many sound questions from men and women who work their own copper. The boy at the telegraph office copies each one out by hand, God help his wrist. I set down the best of them here and answer them with more honesty than the law requires.

So that nobody misunderstands me: making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of these United States, and what follows is history and education. I say it every time, and every time Barnaby yawns.

Potash, the First Patent and the Devil's Breakfast

Hezekiah Platt of Barnstead writes that his grandfather swears New Hampshire was built on potash before it was ever built on cider. The old gentleman is right as rain. When our forefathers came up the Suncook and the Merrimack they had more trees than sense and no money at all. So they cut the forest, piled it up and burned it. Whole hillsides smoked for days, and you could see it from Catamount Hill to Gilmanton. They shovelled the ash into hoppers, poured water through, caught the lye that dripped out, and boiled it down in great iron kettles until a gray cake lay at the bottom. Ash in a pot, which is to say pot ash. It went down to Portsmouth and Boston and from there to England for soap and glass. Our forefathers burned down half of New Hampshire to make soap, and judging by the deputies I have met, none of that soap ever reached Merrimack County.

When Congress first passed a law for patents, in 1790, the very first patent of these United States went to one Samuel Hopkins for a better way of making potash and pearl ash. It was signed in George Washington's own hand. The young Republic's first great invention was neither a cannon nor a clock, but a cleverer way to boil a burnt tree.

The Widow Prudence Locke of Epsom asks whether her late husband's morning hard cider, which he took every day until he was eighty-one, was truly the devil's breakfast, as her pastor holds. Hard cider was the table drink of New England from the first Pilgrim apple onward. Children drank it weak, farmers drank it strong, and preachers drank it in the cellar where the congregation could not count the mugs. Old John Adams, who was no drunkard, is written down as taking a tankard most mornings of his life. If cider is the devil's breakfast, then the devil signed the Declaration of Independence.

Why Jacked Applejack Keeps a Man Abed Till Thursday

Jotham Card of Loudon asks why it is called applejack and why it gives him a headache that lasts until Thursday. Those are the same question. The old way was called jacking. You set your barrel of hard cider out in the December yard and let the frost do the work. Water freezes before spirit does, so every morning you knock out the ice and throw it away, and what remains grows stronger by the week. There is no fire, no copper and no still. It is a lazy man's brandy.

Look at it as a natural philosopher would. At a proper still you throw away the foreshots and heads at the front of the run and set aside the oily tails at the end. Freeze the cider instead and you throw away nothing but water. Every bit of methanol and every drop of greasy fusel oil stays in the barrel and grows more concentrated. The headache that follows arrives on Tuesday, unpacks its trunk, and keeps the spare room until Friday. The devil has no part in it. It is plain arithmetic.

The Sheriff, the Molar and the Bear

Obadiah Fenn of Chichester wants to hear about my first arrest. It was hot as a smithy's apron. I had Asa Bickford, a hog farmer, in my chair with a lower molar as black as a stovepipe and as loose as a Concord promise, and he was clutching a jar of the medicinal like the Gospel. In came the Merrimack County sheriff with a warrant. I told him he might have my wrists when I had finished with the molar, and the fool chose to be helpful and hold the lantern close. I rocked the tooth twice. The roots let go like a carrot pulled from wet clay, and a spurt of blood and pus, black as tar and twice as rank, landed square across his waistcoat. He went white, then green, and then down like a felled hemlock, lantern and all. I stamped out the fire, packed Asa's jaw with lint, hitched my own wagon, and drove the sheriff to the courthouse in the back like a sack of meal. When the clerk asked which of us was the prisoner, I said, 'The one who's awake.'

Ransom Pike of Northwood asks whether Barnaby has ever caught anybody. On a moonless October night a thief out of Manchester crept round the still-house in his stocking feet. I did not hear him, but Barnaby did. The man got one leg over the sill, and the bear came out of the dark at the end of his chain like a locomotive made of hair. By lantern light the fellow's calf was laid open from knee to ankle. I sewed him up on my kitchen table with silk thread and a darning needle, thirty-one stitches by candle, and sent him off down Route 28 on a borrowed crutch with a bill he has never paid. I will add that no man in his right mind should keep a bear.

Forty-Rod, Bust-Head and Sermon Whiskey

Miss Clara Higgins, an herbalist and historian of the old Blue Ridge talk, sat by my stove to help with the Southern letters. Mercy Tuttle of Gilmanton Iron Works had asked what mountain folk call the stuff. Good liquor gets a pet name and bad liquor gets a curse, Miss Higgins says: rot-gut, bust-head, pop-skull, tangle-leg, and forty-rod, which is so wicked a man may drink it at the tavern door and drop dead before he has walked forty rods. In her granddaddy's county a tinker tested it before the whole porch. He made thirty-nine rods and a half, sat down in a ditch, and announced that he had been robbed.

Her stories ran on from there. A revenue man came up a Patrick County hollow dressed as a peddler. When old Aunt Lettie Bowman offered to trade for a pan if he had a dram of bust-head on him, he held out a packet of headache powders, and he was gone by noon. A shy suitor's only love letter rode up the mountain soaking in a broken jug of peach brandy. It won him his bride, who swore it improved with a second reading. Then there was her great-uncle Ambrose, who sat in the front pew every Sunday taking notes and named each week's batch after the sermon: 'Wages of Sin,' 'Jonah's Whale' and 'The Fiery Furnace.' The preacher rode up red in the face, looked over the jugs, and asked for 'Lot's Wife,' saying, 'Because it's the first time in eleven years anybody has listened to that sermon all the way through.'

Apple Brandy at the Alembic

Silvanus Drake of Gilmanton has more apples than pigs to eat them and asks how the old apple brandy was made. Grind the apples to pomace, press out the juice, and let it go hard in a clean barrel in a cellar that is cool but not cold, because yeast is lazy in the cold. In a few weeks you have a hard cider of a few parts in a hundred spirit, and that is your wash. For the stripping run, put it in the copper pot and run it off fast and coarse to get low wines, which are cloudy and rough. The spirit run follows, and it must be slow, slow, slow over a low fire. This is where a distiller earns his name or loses his eyesight.

First comes the foreshots, a small sharp splash smelling of a cobbler's glue pot. Throw out every drop. Then come the heads, harsh, smelling of varnish and hot pear, and they go to the waste and never down a gullet. Next come the hearts, sweet and clean with the smell of the orchard, and that is your brandy. Last come the tails, wet-dog and oily, which you set aside to run again. Fruit is full of pectin, which in fermenting gives off methanol, the wood spirit that blinds. Corn has far less of it, so the fruit man must be stricter with his cuts than the corn man. As Miss Higgins's granny put it, 'the devil drinks first, and you let him.' A greedy brandy-maker ends up a blind brandy-maker.

The vessel is the alembic. The word runs from the Greek ambix, a cup, to the Arabic al-anbiq, through the laboratories of the Moors and into Latin, and so to a log shed in Pittsfield. Rap it and hear it ring. Copper carries the heat evenly, bends to a hammer, and eats the sulphur stink out of the vapour before it reaches the worm, so scrub it out after every run before supper. Ira Sanborn of Northwood asks why his cousin's still-house burned flat. Spirit vapour is heavier than air. It creeps along the floorboards like a cat after cream until it finds the fire box. Keep the shed well aired and every joint tight, and never walk off from a running still to eat pie. More still-houses have burned for pie than for any revenue man.

Shavings, Ashes and Spoonfuls of Flame

Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, sent a wax cylinder asking whether old-timers truly cleaned bad heads out of the thump keg with hickory ashes or red oak shavings. They did not. Red oak has grain so open that a boy can blow bubbles through a stave. In white oak the pores are plugged by little growths the coopers call tyloses, which is why white oak holds spirit and red oak leaks it. Oak shavings of any kind lend tannin, colour and a quick counterfeit of age, but they do not fish methanol out of anything. Hickory ash is potash, a strong alkali. Country folk did sweeten sour kitchen work with lye and ash, and the notion was likely born there. But methanol boils out early in the run whether the keg holds ash, oak or Bible pages. Only the cuts remove it. Everything else is ceremony.

Jedediah Coffin of Gilmanton reports his father's test: set a spoonful afire, and if it burns blue it is good. Good spirit does burn blue, but so does methanol, with a pale flame you can hardly see by daylight. A blue flame proves only that a thing will burn, and so will my barn. The old saying 'lead burns red, and red means dead' is no better, because flame colour changes with the spoon, the wick and the light. The only sure guard against lead is to keep it out of the still altogether: no lead solder, no salvaged junk metal, nothing but honest copper and proper joints.

Little Hannah Batchelder asks why I strike pennies with a hammer. I stamp G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. on each one so that wherever it travels, somebody knows a man in New Hampshire was there first. Besides, I like the noise. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest and your fire low.