George Washington's Rye Whiskey Distillery at Mount Vernon

Readers of this magazine know that I enjoy a hypocrite the way my bear Barnaby enjoys a ham hock, slowly and with my eyes closed. So I can offer them no finer subject than the most famous distiller this republic ever turned out. It pains me to say he is not myself. He is General George Washington, the Father of His Country and the man on your three-cent stamp, and he spent his last years making rye whiskey on the banks of the Potomac by the barrel and the wagonload. He was a moonshiner with a permit. Before we take up his whiskey, though, the reader must understand how much he hated the stuff before he came to love it.

The General Who Marched Against Whiskey

Go back to 1791. The young republic was as broke as a Hooksett fiddler, and Mr. Alexander Hamilton of the Treasury, a man so clever he could pick your pocket and charge you for the lesson, put an excise tax on distilled spirits. Out in western Pennsylvania, past the mountains, a farmer could not haul his grain to market before it rotted on the wagon. So he did the sensible thing and boiled it down into whiskey, which keeps forever, rides easy, and grows more cheerful with every mile. Whiskey was money in that country. A man paid the parson in it and paid the doctor in it, and when he died they likely washed him in it.

When Hamilton's collectors came over the ridges with their ledgers, the Monongahela boys met them with hot pine tar and goose down and sent them home looking like Christmas chickens that had sinned. One collector had his house burned. By 1794 it was open rebellion, and President Washington called up near thirteen thousand militiamen and rode out at their head. He is the only President ever to lead an army in the field while in office. The rebellion melted like lard on a stove lid. There was no grand battle, two men were convicted of treason, and Washington pardoned both of them. He was a gentleman even when he was a bully.

A Still-House on Dogue Run

Three years later, in 1797, the old General retired to Mount Vernon. His farm manager, a canny Scotsman named James Anderson who had learned the trade in the old country, pointed out that the General had a gristmill, grain and water, and could make a fortune in whiskey. The man who had marched thirteen thousand bayonets against whiskey asked to hear more. I call that a conversion worthy of a camp meeting.

They began with two stills that spring. Before long five copper pot stills were working in a stone still-house about seventy-five feet long and thirty wide. It stood right beside the gristmill on Dogue Run, so the grain went from millstone to mash tub without a wagon in between. Every man who builds a still-house should study that arrangement. Grain, water, mill and still were all in one place.

The mash bill was near sixty parts rye, thirty-five parts corn and five parts malted barley. The rye gives pepper and bite, the corn gives sweetness and body, and the barley malt does the converting. That is a Potomac rye, and a good one. In 1799 the still-house turned out nearly eleven thousand gallons and cleared about seven thousand five hundred dollars, which made it one of the biggest distilleries in America. Most of it went out white and unaged as common whiskey for the Alexandria merchants. Some was run again to make it finer, and some was flavored with cinnamon and other things for gentry who liked their liquor to taste like pie. They made brandy as well, from apples, peaches and persimmons. I once ate a green persimmon and it turned my mouth inside out like a woolen sock, so I would have paid to watch the first man try to ferment one. The General also paid the federal tax on his own stills like an honest man. I believe that was the last time anybody in this trade did so on purpose.

The Hands That Made It

Now for the part the Fourth of July speechmakers leave out. The hands that ran those stills were not Washington's. The plantation records name six enslaved men who worked that distillery under Anderson's son John: Hanson, Peter, Nat, Daniel, James and Timothy. They hauled the grain, stoked the fires, mashed the tubs and made the cuts in heat that would cook a ham, and they received no wages and no glory. Any man who tells this story and leaves them out is lying by omission. Those six made that whiskey, and they were master hands at it.

The end came quickly. In December of 1799 the General took a putrid throat after riding out in the sleet, and his physicians bled him like a Thanksgiving hog, pint after pint, to cure a sore throat. He was dead in a day, so his best year at the still was also his last year above ground. The distillery passed out of his hands, and around 1814 the building burned to stone and ashes. In 1858 a South Carolina lady, Ann Pamela Cunningham, and her Mount Vernon Ladies' Association bought the old estate to save it from rot. All through the late war, Blue and Gray alike walked those grounds with their weapons laid aside. I like to think a few of them took off their hats where the still-house had stood, and then went looking for a drink.

Counterfeit Relics and a Foaming Rye

So great a name draws frauds. Last October a Concord huckster with a waxed mustache rattled up the turnpike selling stoneware jugs at five dollars apiece, labeled “General Washington's Private Rye, Laid Down at Mount Vernon.” It held no grain of rye at all, only burnt sugar, pepper sauce and spite. He tried to pay for my own goods with a Confederate ten-dollar note and then left by way of Barnaby, who removed the seat of his trousers. In the wagon he abandoned I found a brass slug he had been passing as a silver dollar. I struck it on my anvil with G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., and it now hangs over my still-house door as a warning.

My Carolina friend Junior Vance, a whiskey runner of Wilkes County, has a family relic of the same kind. His great-uncle Ottis kept a brown jug that he swore held the General's own rye, and every Fourth of July the whole holler toasted Washington from it. When Ottis died, the family turned the jug over and found a potter's stamp dated 1858, when the General had been in the ground fifty-nine years. It seems Ottis had been making the holler salute his own creek-still liquor for thirty years.

Junior once ran a pure rye mash in four barrels filled to the brim. Three days later foam was boiling out like froth off a mad dog and lay in drifts on the ground, with a possum glued fast in the middle of one drift. He lost near half the mash, and ever after he cut his rye with corn and left a hand's width of headroom. “Rye'll teach you humility, Doctor,” he told me. “That and a possum.” The General's men knew this too, and that is why they put corn in with the rye. Junior also once hauled pint jars past a roadblock inside hollowed-out hymnals, with a preacher beside him who read the deputy the verse about wine that maketh glad the heart of man. The deputy closed the book and wished them a blessed evening.

Working a Potomac Rye at Your Own Copper

First a caution. Making spirits to drink without a federal permit breaks the law of these United States. The General had his permit, and you should get yours. Grind the rye, corn and malt coarse, about like meal for johnnycake. Cook the corn first, near the boil, until it is as thick and smooth as hasty pudding. Let it cool some, then stir in the rye, and keep stirring like your soul depends on it, because a sticky rye mash scorches into whiskey that tastes like a burnt church. The malt carries diastase, the ferment that turns starch to sugar, and too much heat will kill it. Wait until you can hold a finger in the mash for a moment without hollering, then stir in the malt and let it rest. You will watch the thick paste thin to a sweet gruel under your paddle, which is a true transmutation. Cool the mash to about blood-warm before you pitch the yeast. Many old hands add backset, the soured spent liquor from the last run, which keeps out bad bacteria and makes each batch taste like the one before. That is what sour mash means. Leave headroom in the tubs. In three to five days you will have a sour wash of a few parts in the hundred.

Strip the wash once to get cloudy low wines, then run them again more slowly, because the second run is where you make the cuts. The foreshots smell like a glue pot on a hot stove. They carry the methanol that blinds and kills, and every drop goes on the ground. The heads come next, harsh and smelling of shoemaker's paste and green apples, and you set them aside. The hearts are clean and sweet, smelling of black pepper and fresh bread, and they are your whiskey. Junior's granny judged rye by that very smell, rubbing a drop between her palms. The tails are oily and smell of wet dog, and you save them to run again. Copper is an active metal and takes hold of the rotten-egg sulfur stinks as the vapour passes over it, which is why Anderson built copper pots and not iron kettles. Scrub your copper bright after every run. Spirit vapour is heavier than air and creeps along the floor toward the firebox. Never leave a running still alone, never clamp it shut, keep the fire low and steady, and keep sand and a wet wool blanket close at hand.

Ashes, Red Oak and Wooden Teeth

Cletus “Rabbit” Miller of Wilkesboro asked whether hickory ashes or red oak shavings in the thump keg will clean out bad heads. Hickory ash is mostly potash, an alkali. It may knock down a little sour acid, and it will make your liquor taste like the washtub, but it does nothing about the methanol. Red oak leaks, because its pores run open from end to end, while white oak's pores are plugged by growths the wood men call tyloses. Red oak shavings add tannin, color and pucker, so the spirit looks cured without being cured. The only remedy is to catch the foreshots and heads in a separate jar and throw them away.

Last, a word from behind my dentist's chair. The General never had a wooden tooth. By 1789 he had one natural tooth left, and his dentist, John Greenwood, made him dentures of human teeth, cow teeth and hippopotamus ivory, set in lead and sprung with metal springs. He had to clamp his jaw to keep them in, which is why he looks so sour in his portraits. The brown stain came from age and port wine, since he liked his Madeira. His own ledger for 1784 records a payment to enslaved people for nine teeth, most likely pulled for those dentures. Remember that the next time someone tells you a cherry tree story. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest and your fire low.