Double-Run Rye, Copper Stills and Making Cuts: A Country Dentist's Lessons

A Molar on a Tuesday in March

By day I follow the honourable art of the extracting dentist, and since my reader is a natural philosopher at his own copper, I mean to begin at the dentist's chair and end at the worm. The two trades are nearer cousins than you might suppose.

Picture a Tuesday in March. The mud on the turnpike lies as deep as a dead man's debts. A farmer, whom we shall call Ezekiel, comes through my door with his face swelled up like a Thanksgiving squash. One whole side of his jaw is the colour of a bruised plum, and his breath alone could strip the varnish off a pulpit. He has an abscessed molar far in the back, and I can smell the rot from the doorway, sweet and foul together, like a sick calf.

In the year 1846, up in Boston, a dentist by the name of William Morton put a man under with ether before the learned gentlemen at Massachusetts General Hospital. It was a great day for science and a great day for Boston. Here in the backwoods of the Suncook Valley, nearly twenty years on, we have not seen a drop of the stuff. Ether is a Boston luxury. Out here we have courage, a stout pair of forceps, and a jar of my best double-run rye.

I sat Ezekiel on a stump chair in my workshop, beside the anvil. In the old days a dentist used the turnkey, a wicked hooked contraption fastened over the tooth and wrenched sideways like a man starting a stubborn pump. The turnkey could break a jaw. I knew a man in Chichester who had his whole lower bone cracked clean through, like a dry chicken wing. I will not use it. I use forceps, a good steel pair of my own forging, the beaks shaped to the neck of the tooth.

I dipped the forceps in clear spirit, wiped them dry on my apron, and told Ezekiel to look at the ceiling and think of his wife's pie. Tight on the molar, rock it forward, rock it back, twist, and then came the sound: a wet, grinding crack, like a boot pulled out of a clay bank, followed by a gush of yellow-green matter that went down the front of my apron and a good deal of it into my beard. Ezekiel's scream set Barnaby, my black bear, jangling his chain against the logs. The tooth had three roots, black as a miser's heart. Ezekiel went whiter than a sheet on the line and asked whether that was all him. It was all him, and the wicked part of it too. My fee was a dollar and a ham.

What the Jar Is Good For, and What It Is Not

I am a careful man in the matter of the jar, and you should be as well. Spirits are a poor anaesthetic. They dull the edge, they loosen a man's nerve, and they make him a little braver than his body deserves, but they do not numb the root. A fellow who drinks himself half-blind before the pulling will bleed like a stuck hog, because strong drink thins the blood. I have seen it go badly. My patients take one mouthful to settle the shakes and no more. Afterward they rinse the wound with a splash of clear spirit. The rinse does clean the hole, though it burns like the devil's own handshake.

For the revenue men who may be reading over your shoulder, I will say it plainly: what follows is for history and education. Making spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of these United States. I am a Pittsfield dentist, blacksmith, inventor and numismatist of the anvil, and I stamp my trade, G. G. Wilkins, Pittsfield, N.H., on copper large cents. I am telling you stories. Stories are not taxable. I have asked.

A Coppersmith's Curiosities

My neighbour Silas McAllister, called Hacksaw, is a master coppersmith and thumper builder of Pittsfield, and he hammers the pots at my own foundry. He works twenty-four-ounce electrolytic copper, beating pots, swan necks and dephlegmators by hand. He holds that metal does not lie to you. A pure sheet rings true under the hammer, and a poor weld shows itself the first time the heat comes on.

His grandfather once made a tooth-key, the very turnkey I spit upon, because the New Hampshire historical society wanted a replica so folks could see what their great-grandparents sat through. He made it from a scrap pot lid, hooked claw and all, and fitted it with a rosewood handle. "Said even a torture ought to be well made," Silas told me. It now sits under glass with a little card, and children press their noses to it until their mothers pull them off by the collar.

In Silas's shop there is a pot with a dent shaped exactly like a molar, crown, neck and all. It came off the anvil that way. He named her Old Wisdom, after the tooth that comes late, aches long and pulls hardest of the lot, and he has turned away several fat purses. "A man ought to keep one piece of work that answers back," says he.

There is a golden tale as well. Long ago a patient with no coin paid the old Pittsfield dentist with a single gold watch fob. Years later the McAllister family melted that fob and inlaid it into the signature plate of their first still, so a bit of a bad tooth shines on the front of the first pot they ever sold. Pain became bullion and bullion became a nameplate, which is alchemy of the finest sort. Silas judges a seam mostly by the nose. If you smell solder fumes instead of flux, throw that fitting in the scrap bin, and never let lead anywhere near the joint.

Why the Still Is Copper

Copper is the old and honest metal. It conducts heat evenly and works well under the hammer. The alchemist's secret is that it reacts with sulfur compounds in the vapour. When the mash cooks, foul-smelling sulfur compounds rise in the steam and would give the spirit a rotten-egg stink. Copper catches them: the sulfur binds to the copper surface and drops out, leaving a cleaner vapour behind. That is why a copper still gives a sweeter spirit than iron or tin, and why a seasoned distiller regards a green crust of verdigris with a grim sort of affection. It is the copper doing its work.

Mash, Run, Cuts, Fire and the Double Run

I would teach this to an apprentice in five steps, for history and education only. The first is the mash, a mix of ground grain, hot water and yeast. In the Suncook Valley a farmer might use cracked corn or rye, with a little malted barley to turn the starch to sugar. Cook the grain in the water, let it cool to a gentle warmth, and pitch your yeast. The yeast eats the sugar and breathes out carbon dioxide and alcohol. In a few days the mash bubbles, sours and settles, and that sour stuff is called the wash.

The second step is the run. The wash goes into the still under low, steady heat. Alcohol boils at a lower heat than water, so it rises first as vapour, climbs the neck, passes through the worm, a coiled tube cooled in a tub of water, and condenses back to liquid that drips into your jar.

The third step, and the most important, is the cuts. They separate the craftsman from the corpse. The run comes off in four parts. The foreshots are the first few spoonfuls, stinking and sharp. They carry methanol and other harsh volatiles, and they are poison. Throw them out, or burn them in a saucer well away from your still. The heads come next. They are still sharp, smell like a hardware store, and are still unfit, so discard them. The hearts are the sweet, clean middle of the run and the good spirit. Last come the tails, oily and dull and tasting of wet cardboard, which you set aside to run again. Ignorant men who skipped their cuts have blinded and killed their fellows.

The fourth step is minding the fire. A still is a pressure vessel and can become a bomb, and the vapour burns. Keep the still clean, the joints tight and the fire low and steady, and never run it in a room without air. Leaking vapour meeting a flame has cost more than one distiller his eyebrows, his whiskers and his head. Never use lead solder, and never fit a salvaged car radiator into a still. Lead sickens and kills a man by slow degrees, and I have seen it happen. Use clean copper, clean brass, and silver solder if solder you must.

The fifth step is the double run. Pass your first distillate through the still a second time. The second run strips away more of the heads and tails and concentrates the hearts, giving a smoother, cleaner spirit. That is the double-run rye in my rinse cup beside the forceps. Never confuse it with the first pour, which must touch neither lip nor wound. Four years at the anvil taught me half of all this. Forty years of mistakes will teach you the rest.

Hickory Ashes in the Thump Keg

A wax cylinder came to me from Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, a Wilkes County man. His uncle swears the old-timers threw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads, and Rabbit wants to know whether that is truth or swamp medicine.

For the uninitiated, a thump keg, or doubler, is a sealed barrel set between the still and the worm. Vapour from the still bubbles up through a small charge of spirit in the keg, and that second pass concentrates the alcohol. It is a double run in a single sitting, and I salute the Carolina men who made it famous.

The uncle's claim holds a grain of truth and a bushel of nonsense. The grain is that hardwood charcoal does clean spirit. Charcoal is a great adsorber, holding certain harsh compounds on its surface, which is why Tennessee distillers leach their whiskey through sugar-maple charcoal, and why a good charred oak barrel mellows raw spirit over time. The nonsense is that raw ashes are lye, and lye in a boiling keg can foam, clog and turn the spirit soapy. Green shavings give only a woody, tannic smack. Neither one removes methanol, the real danger in a bad head, because methanol and ethanol are cousins too close to be parted by a handful of ash. The only cure for a bad head is a good cut.

So the uncle was half right and fully a romantic. Give me a sound pair of forceps and an honest cut over all the hickory in the Carolinas. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest and your fire low.