Flavored Spirits in 1860s America: Peach Brandy, Bounces and Rectifiers

Raw Spirit and the Great American Cover-Up

Most of what a man drinks in this country was never meant to be drunk as it came off the worm. Raw corn spirit, fresh and unaged, tastes like a hot horseshoe dipped in turpentine. So ever since the first Dutchman landed with a kettle, Americans have been putting things into their liquor to make it go down. I have studied the subject with my own liver for thirty years here at Fort Wilkins, while Barnaby the bear gnaws peach stones on the woodpile outside. Some of what men put in is honest and some of it is a crime, and the natural philosopher at his apparatus must learn to tell the two apart. I will say plainly that making spirits for drinking without the federal license is against the law of these United States. What follows is for history and learning.

Begin with the honest kind. Before corn whiskey took over the frontier, peach brandy was the pride of the Southern planter and the Jersey orchard man. General Washington himself ran a distillery at Mount Vernon. It made rye whiskey mostly, but it made fruit brandies too, peach among them, and that brandy came from fermenting the fruit and distilling it. When the peach is in the mash, the spirit carries the fruit because it came from the fruit.

Then there are the bounces. Cherry bounce is a crock of cherries and a heap of sugar with spirit poured over the lot, left a month or two in the dark. Grandmothers all over New England keep one behind the flour barrel and swear it is for the croup. It is a fine drink, provided the spirit was clean before the cherries went in. A bounce flavors spirit that is already made. It does not distill anything, purify anything or forgive anything. Jerry Thomas's Bar-Tender's Guide of '62 is the same principle at length: page after page of sugar, bitters, lemon and nutmeg poured over spirit. I own a copy. Barnaby ate the chapter on punches, and his breath has smelled of nutmeg ever since.

The Rectifier's Cabinet

Now the dishonest kind. In the cities there is a trade called rectifying. The rectifier never made a drop of anything. He buys the thinnest and meanest neutral spirit by the barrel and dresses it. He darkens it with burnt sugar so it looks aged and adds prune juice for body. Then come drops of oil of cognac or oil of rye, bought by the vial from a druggist's wholesaler, so that it smells like something it is not. The meaner sort go further, with red pepper for the bite of an old spirit and plug tobacco steeped in the barrel for color and kick. A liquor dealer's manual came out of New York in '57 that reads like a cookbook written by the Devil's own grocer. Those barrels went west on the wagons and became forty-rod, so called because it will kill a man at forty rods. The rectifier who made it stands at forty-one.

Bitters belong in the same chapter. Hostetter's, and Drake's with its S. T. 1860 X painted on every fence from here to Ohio, were sold as medicine. The boys in blue carried Hostetter's by the case through the war, because a sutler could sell medicine where he could not sell whiskey. The roots and barks are real enough, but the bitterness hides what lies beneath. Here is the lesson of the whole matter: flavor can hide a bad taste, but it cannot hide a poison. A peach in bad whiskey is a Sunday bonnet on a hog. The hog is no better, and now the bonnet smells of hog.

A Drummer at the Back Door

Three autumns back, a Boston drummer with a waxed mustache and yellow gloves came up the turnpike selling essences: essence of rye, oil of pear, oil of peach, and something he called Jamaica bouquet. I told him through the window that I make my liquor out of grain and fire, not out of a druggist's cabinet. But a drummer cannot hear the word no, and he went around to try the back door, where Barnaby lives.

The bear woke smelling a whole case of oil of pear warm in the sun. He went for the case, not the man, but the case was clamped under the man's arm. Barnaby shook it as a terrier shakes a rat, and the drummer swung around like the clapper in a fire bell while the bottles burst. Then the drummer let go and ran, and a bear will chase whatever runs. One swipe took his wool, his drawers and a strip of hide the width of a razor strop. I dressed the wound with honest spirit, put in seven stitches of good silk thread, and charged him for every one. The sample case hangs on my wall as the bear's diploma.

From the Revenue Man's Book

Captain Donald Vance, retired revenue officer out of Manchester, sat by my fire with his own tales. A widow in Caledonia County, Vermont, too cold a country for peach trees, sold forty jugs a season of peach cordial. There was one peach. She dropped a single brandied peach into a jug of corn spirit overnight, fished it out with a darning needle and moved it to the next jug. Yet her spirit was clean, because she ran a little copper pot slow and threw away the front of the run. The Captain only made her paint the word peach smaller.

Up past Plymouth, an outfit ran fast and hot and put heads and all into one barrel. Then they steeped plug tobacco and a fistful of red pepper in it to hide the varnish stink. A keg went to a barn raising near Rumney. One man fell twenty feet from the plate beam and broke three ribs and his collarbone. Another went off into the manure pile. A young fellow sat down on a sill and said the sky had gone dark at noon, and he could not see his hand for the better part of a week. The Captain staved in every barrel, and nothing grew on that spot for three summers.

Near Stowe, the Captain followed the smell of scorched honey to a man who had poured six quarts of it straight into his pot. It burned like tar on a roof. And once, green as spring grass, he seized a judge's wife's brandied peaches, perfectly lawful Christmas preserves, and had to eat them at Sunday dinner while she counted every spoonful. "I would have preferred the rope," he told me. "The rope is quicker."

Peaches, Honey and the Cuts

To the apparatus, then. Take peaches ripe to sloppiness. Bruises are fine, but rot and mold are not. Pull every stone, because the kernel tastes of bitter almond, and that bitter is prussic acid waiting to happen. Mash the flesh in an oak tub with clean water to a thick soup, pitch your yeast, and cover the tub with a cloth, not a lid. Let it work seven to fourteen days, until it tastes dry and sour. Keep the room aired, because a working tub breathes out a gas that will put a man to sleep for good. Strain off the pulp, or it will scorch. Fill the pot no more than three-quarters full, and less for a fruit or honey wash, because these foam over into the worm, and a clogged worm with the fire under it makes a bomb of a kettle. Keep the fire low, and keep a bucket of sand by the door.

Then come the cuts, the heart of the alchemy. Fruit is full of pectin, which gives off wood spirit, methanol, in greater measure than grain, and that wood spirit comes over early. Throw out the foreshots, every drop. The heads smell like a carriage-maker's varnish pot, so cut them wide, because a little greed there can cost a man his eyes. Keep the hearts, when the peach blooms up soft and round, and run the dull tails again with the next batch. Bright copper takes up the sulfur that a hard-worked yeast throws off, so scrub it after every run. Honey goes in the fermenting tub or in the finished jug, never in the pot.

Ashes, Oak Shavings and the Blue Flame

Cletus "Rabbit" Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, asked whether hickory ashes or red oak shavings in the thump keg clean out bad heads. Ash is alkaline and might knock back a sour mash, but in the thumper it makes a cloudy lather and does not touch the wood spirit. Oak shavings add color and tannin, which is flavoring, not cleaning. Red oak is a poor choice anyhow, because its grain is so open no cooper will make a whiskey barrel of it. The only cure for bad heads is honest cuts.

As for the blue flame, wood spirit burns a pale blue of its own, so the spoon cannot tell poison from good whiskey. All it proves is that your eyebrows are in danger. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low.