Heads, Hearts and Tails: How to Make the Cuts of a Moonshine Run

Barnaby, my black bear, is lying outside the cabin window as I write. He has had his breakfast, half of mine and a fair piece of the woodpile, and now he sulks on his chain like four hundred pounds of grudge. He has earned his place in this article, as you will see. I have put my subject to him and to myself as the most important question in the whole art of the still: where to cut. Heads, hearts and tails. I mean to set it down so plain that a farmhand with manure on his boots and a Concord banker with manure in his soul will both close this magazine knowing it.

First, the lawyers must have their say. Making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of these United States. All that follows is for history and education only. Now that the lawyers have stopped crying, to the copper.

A Procession, Not a Single Liquor

Here is the first truth, and the farmhand should paint it on his barn door. Liquor does not come off a still as one thing. It comes off in a procession, like a funeral in Pittsfield: the loud, useless fellows first, then the decent family in the middle, then the drunk uncles staggering behind.

The reason, for the banker and for any man who calls himself a natural philosopher, is this. The wash in the pot holds a mess of different spirits and oils, and each one boils at its own heat. The light, sharp stuff climbs out early. The good spirit comes in the middle. The heavy oils drag along at the end. So the distiller does not catch one liquor. He catches a parade, and every run is an experiment in deciding who gets a seat at the table.

Remember, too, that the still makes no alcohol at all. Before any fire is lit, the mash is fermented into a weak wash. The yeast does the making; the still only gathers up what the yeast made and sorts it. The cut is only as good as the run, and the run is only as good as the metal and the mash.

The Four Companies of the Run

The very first drops are the foreshots. Throw them away, every time. They carry methanol, which is wood spirit, the stuff that blinds a man and can kill him. The foreshots are like a deputy at a church supper: first in line, loudest in the room, and nobody wants them there.

After the foreshots come the heads. They smell sharp, like a varnish pot or a fresh-painted sleigh. That is acetaldehyde and ethyl acetate and their cousins, the harsh volatile stuff that splits your skull the next morning. The heads are discarded too, never drunk. A man who keeps his heads is like a man who marries his wife's cousin to save on the wedding: he saves a little up front and pays for it the rest of his natural life.

Barnaby can testify. He once got into the heads bucket out of the discard pile behind the still-house. He spent the afternoon apologizing to a stump, then tried to court a rain barrel, and come evening he was lying on his back with all four paws in the air, moaning like a Presbyterian at a dance. And he only licked the rim.

Then come the hearts: clean, sweet and smooth, the middle of the run and the only part a respectable maker keeps. Hearts are the only honest part of a run, which makes them the only honest thing ever produced on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, myself included.

Last come the tails. As the run winds down, the heavy fusel oils come over, and the liquor turns greasy on the tongue and smells of wet cardboard. Tails taste like a wet sheepdog that has been reading Methodist tracts. Set them aside or run them through again with the next batch, but never pour them into the good jar.

For the banker who wants a ledger, here it is. Column one: foreshots, the first trickle, to the discard. Column two: heads, sharp and solvent-smelling, also to the discard. Column three: hearts, sweet and clean, kept. Column four: tails, oily and dull, set aside to run again. And for the farmhand, plainer still: the first is poison, the second is a headache, the third is the harvest, the fourth is the chaff.

The Row of Numbered Jars

Now, how does a man know where one company ends and the next begins? Here is the old trick, and it is the heart of my sermon. Do not catch the run in one big crock. Catch it in many small jars, numbered in a row. I keep mine in a row the way a Concord banker keeps his ledgers, except my jars balance.

Wait until the run is finished and your nose has rested. Then walk the row and judge each jar on its own, smelling from the first to the last. Note where the varnish smell fades into clean grain or fruit, and where the clean smell turns to wet cardboard. Set your cuts there, and leave yourself a margin of safety on the heads side. When in doubt, throw it out. No jar is worth an eye.

A distiller who cuts by the clock instead of the nose is like a dentist who pulls teeth by the calendar: somebody loses the wrong molar. I have practised dentistry long enough to have seen both.

The Revenue men have their own way of judging spirits. The gauger carries a hydrometer, a little weighted glass float. Drop it in and it rides high or low depending on how much alcohol is in the liquid. The British made the Sikes hydrometer their official excise instrument in 1816, and our federal gaugers swear by their own glass bobs now that Mr. Lincoln's tax men are poking into every barn. The gauger's hydrometer floats higher than his morals, and that is a low bar for a glass bob.

Tales from the Brushy Hills

I learned the worth of the cut the hard way. The Merrimack sheriff once sniffed my tails jar during a raid and called it the finest whiskey in the county, which told me all I needed to know about his nose and his wages. He took the tails as evidence. I let him. Let the county drink its own punishment.

Junior Vance, a runner from the Brushy hills of North Carolina and as quick a hand on a mountain road as ever lived, lately stepped around Barnaby to sit at my table. Barnaby looked at him like the second course. Junior tells me a hauler's reputation rides in the back of his load. Carry bad liquor once and every buyer from the hills to Charlotte knows your name by Sunday. He could tell a careless maker by the cork: one sniff of varnish and the cork went straight back in.

He once pulled a cork and near lost his eyebrows. The maker confessed he had poured the whole run into one tub, start to finish, to save on jars, with foreshots, heads, hearts and tails all married together like a bad family reunion. "I told him I don't haul poison, and I drove off empty," Junior said. A man with principles, or a man with a bad back. He allows it was a little of both.

Another sharp old cuss up in the Brushies did not throw out his heads. He bottled them separate and sold them as harness liniment for the sore shoulders and hocks of mules. One day a customer with a toothache figured liniment was liniment and drank a good swallow. He came running down the road hollering that he had gone blind in one eye. As it turned out, he had mostly scared himself and kept that eye squeezed shut for a day and a half. But his toothache was not cured, he could not sit a mule, and the old maker quit the liniment trade that same week. Speaking as a dentist, a man with a bad tooth needs forceps and a sensible friend, not a swig of varnish.

Best of all was a buyer outside Charlotte who kept a shelf of shame. Whenever somebody sold him a bad jar, heads-sick or tail-greasy, he did not pour it out. He set it on a shelf behind the counter with the seller's name painted on the lid in big red letters. Makers drove forty miles to beg him to take their names down. "Bring me ten good jars and I'll take down one bad one," he would tell them. He cleaned up half the county's liquor that way and never needed a sheriff. That man understood the free market better than the Treasury.

Junior's granny was the sternest judge in three counties. She would not buy a drop from any man unless he showed her his row of little numbered jars. A man who caught everything in one big bucket, she held, was hiding something, the same as a man who wears a coat in July. She and I would have got along famously, or killed each other.

Copper, Fire and Prudence

The copper of the pot does a quiet service along the way. It catches the sulfur stink, so what comes over is cleaner. Keep the copper clean and bright and it works for you. Let it go green and it works for nobody.

Mind the fire as closely as the jars. The vapour of a still will burn, and alcohol fumes creep low and far. Keep your joints tight and your fire under control, and never let an open flame near a leak. I once saw a still-house in Barnstead go up faster than a deacon leaves a tavern when his wife comes in. The man got out with his life and his trousers, but only one of them was in good condition.

Ashes, Oak Shavings and the Blue Flame

A letter came up by the Wilkesboro post 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. Rabbit wants to know whether there is truth in it or only swamp medicine.

Ash has real uses, and New Hampshire knows it better than anywhere. Our grandfathers burned whole forests of hardwood, soaked the ashes, boiled them down to potash and shipped it off as one of this state's chief cash crops. Soak ashes in water and you get lye, and lye makes soap. So the uncle's people knew ash did something. They only guessed wrong about what. Ash in the thump keg does not take out methanol: not hickory, not maple, not the ashes of the uncle's love letters. The only cure for bad heads is to cut them off and throw them away. Ashes in a thump keg do about as much good as a sermon in a hog pen. The hogs feel no cleaner and the preacher smells worse.

Red oak shavings will change the liquor. They colour it and give it tannin and a woody taste, as a barrel does over the years. That is flavour, not cleaning. Put oak in a bad run and you have a bad run that tastes like a fence post.

While the anvil is warm, let us kill one more myth: the blue flame. Some fool lights a spoonful of liquor, sees a pretty blue flame and declares it safe. Nonsense. Burning a spoonful tells you nothing about whether it will hurt you, and methanol itself burns with a pale blue flame you can hardly see. The blue-flame test tells you about as much about your liquor as a sheriff's oath tells you about his Saturday nights.

For the best question of the month, Rabbit Miller is owed a penny fresh-stamped G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. Tell your uncle he is a good man with a bad theory, which describes most uncles and every congressman.

So remember the ledger: foreshots and heads to the discard, hearts to the jar, tails set aside. Respect the law, keep your copper clean, your cuts honest and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.