How New Hampshire Survived the 1865 Whiskey Tax on Hard Cider and Applejack

Two Dollars on New Year's Day

The thermometer nailed to the door of Fort Wilkins reads eighteen below. It has given up and gone inside to get warm. The Suncook is froze so hard that the mill hands skate to work and call it a raise. On the first day of this January, 1865, Congress laid the full two dollars a gallon upon distilled spirits. Last summer it was a dollar and a half, and a year before that hardly sixty cents. That is the federal way of wishing a man a happy new year and picking his pocket during the handshake.

The Pittsfield farmer's corn went to the hogs and the army, and his wheat costs more than his daughter's wedding. The turnpike tavern keepers have marked up honest rye so high that a Barnstead teamster must sell an ox to get drunk, and then he has nothing to drive home. Here we get nine months of snow and three of poor sledding, and in such country a man without whiskey is looking for a reason to stay alive until mud season. So Merrimack County did what its grandfathers did and went down the cellar stairs.

Torturing the Cellar Cider

Every farmhouse from Catamount Mountain to Berry Pond keeps a row of cider barrels below. They were pressed in October from the windfalls and the wormy apples the pigs turned up their snouts at. Hard cider was the everyday drink of New England long before any of us were born. John Adams, a Massachusetts man and a President, wrote that he took a tankard of it in the morning. Look how the Republic turned out: mostly upright, a little sour, and given to hollering in the afternoon.

January cider is a thin, cold, cellar-bitter thing, so the old folks tortured it into something better. The first torture is flip. Take a great pewter mug of cider or beer and sugar it. Add a little rum if you hid any from the tax, and an egg if the hens are speaking to you. Then plunge in the loggerhead, a long iron rod with a ball at the end, kept red in the tavern coals. The mug boils and froths, smelling of burnt sugar and a blacksmith's apron. When the second mug went down and somebody said something about somebody's sister, the loggerhead came out of the fire for another purpose. That is why we say two men are at loggerheads.

The second torture is jacking, and the natural philosopher may take notes. Roll a barrel into the dooryard on a hard night. Water freezes before spirit does, so by morning a shell of ice surrounds a dark, strong, syrupy heart that will not freeze. Bore it out, draw it off, and you have applejack. It is the poor man's still, made of nothing but January.

But I pull teeth for a living, and I have smelled the breath of the jack-drinkers in my chair. Jacking cuts nothing away. At the still I throw out the foreshots and heads, where the wood-alcohol poison and the harsh oils ride. Freezing throws out only water. Every drop of poison and fusel stays in the jack, packed tighter than mourners at a rich man's funeral. That is the old applejack headache, the kind that makes a man's eyeballs feel two sizes too big for his skull.

Spite, and a Deputy on Snowshoes

Then there was spite. Consider a deacon of my own invention, though you all know a dozen like him. From Christmas to Candlemas he preached that cider was the devil's apple juice, and every night he carried a candle down to his own barrel to pray over it. His neighbor told the congregation, out of spite. The deacon sued him for slander, out of spite. The magistrate fined them both, out of spite, and kept the barrel as evidence. Spite is the only crop in Merrimack County that thrives at twenty below and never fails at harvest.

My bear Barnaby does not sleep the winter through. He dozes in the woodshed straw like a drunk on a pew, with one eye half open. Three Januaries back a county deputy came up the turnpike on ash snowshoes. Call him Orrin Pike: a face like a boiled turnip and brains to match. He had heard the bear was denned, and he meant to peep in my still-house window. Six feet from the woodshed, the straw heaved like a grave on Judgment Day. Out came four hundred pounds of black hair. Barnaby bit through the man's left snowshoe and shook his buffalo coat until it tore down the back seam. Then, being a thoughtful animal, he sat on him. At eighteen below a frightened deputy sets up quicker than mortar. By the time I came out with a ham bone, he was glazed from the belt down like a Christmas ham.

Pike had snapped two front teeth on my chopping block, so I drew the roots by lantern light and charged him half a dollar. He paid me with a copper cent I had struck myself, stamped G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. A note for the metallurgist: in deep cold, iron and steel go brittle and copper does not. A cold punch chips before the cent does, so I warm my punch in the forge until it is comfortable to hold before I strike.

A Wartime Winter in the Blue Ridge

This January a guest came up from the Blue Ridge of Virginia. Miss Clara Higgins is a mountain herbalist and an authority on every rude name ever hung on a jug, and she had not felt her toes since Concord. Early in the war, she tells me, Richmond banned distilling grain and kept the corn and wheat for bread and the army. Meanwhile the government bought up whiskey for its hospitals. Her kinfolk drank frozen-barrel cider all winter and called it Assembly water, after the legislature that made them drink it. The soldier boys of both sides had names for their rotgut: tanglefoot, bust-head, oh-be-joyful, rifle knock-knee, and nockum stiff, which knocked a man as stiff as a fence rail.

Her great-great-granny Tabitha hid a stoneware jug of persimmon brandy every first snowfall. She buried it in a drift by the springhouse and marked it with a hickory stake, so that no revenue man or husband would find it. Every thaw, the hound Preacher dug down to it and bayed like a camp-meeting revival. "She said Preacher was the only Christian in the family, 'cause he always led sinners straight to the spirit," Miss Clara told me.

In this very month, her kin found two starved deserters in their maple sugar camp, one in blue and one in gray. The pair were sharing a jug of applejack they had found buried under the sap kettle. They kept score with notches on a single ramrod, so that neither drank more than the other, and argued for two days over the last swallow. In the end the Union boy poured it on the fire so the Reb couldn't have it, and the Reb shook his hand for it. The ramrod hangs over her granddaddy's door with thirty-one notches a side, even as a fiddle tuned. Spite down to the last drop, then a handshake over the ashes.

A January Apple-Brandy Run

Now to the apparatus. Making spirits to drink without a federal permit is against the law of the United States. What follows is history and the education of the curious. Any man who would try it should get licensed like a gentleman.

Keep the October cider near the chimney, cool but not cold. Cold yeast is lazy yeast and will sulk till April. When the bubbling stops, draw the cider off the lees, or that sludge will scorch to your pot with a stink like a burnt mitten. Fill the copper no more than three parts in four. Apple wash foams like a mad dog's lip and will puke froth into your arm and worm. Run it once over a low, steady hardwood fire and gather everything that comes over, the low wines. Then run those again, slower still, and make your cuts.

The foreshots come first. Throw out every drop, and do not give them to a deputy, however much he deserves it. The heads follow, sharp with lamp spirit and pear drops, and they go into a jar marked for the fire. Remember that apples are not corn. Fruit makes more wood-alcohol poison than grain does, because the pectin that sets your grandmother's jelly breaks down into it during the working. So throw away more at the front end, not less. Better a short jug than a short life. Keep the hearts, which are sweet and clean and smell of baked apple. Set the tails aside for the next run; they are oily, flat, and smell like a wet dog in a hay barn. Pack your worm tub with snow, the finest condenser water God ever shoveled.

Now the alchemy. Apple juice is sweet but starved food for yeast, and starved yeast gives off a rotten-egg sulfur. Run that through iron and your brandy smells like a spoilt duck egg. Run it through bright copper and the metal grabs the sulfur and holds it fast, and the spirit comes out sweet. Brighten the copper with cider vinegar and a handful of salt until it blushes like a bride. Then rinse it, and rinse it again, with clean water.

Mind the fire. A still-house shut tight against the cold fills with the stove's foul air, which has no smell and puts you to sleep for good, so crack a window even at twenty below. A joint leaking vapor near a lantern will send you to Heaven in one whoosh. Never leave a run alone. Keep the spout far from flame, and keep a pail of sand by the door. I lost an eyebrow in '58, and Barnaby still grunts at the bald side.

Ashes, Red Oak and the Blue Flame

Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, writes that his uncle swears by an old-timers' trick: hickory ashes or red oak shavings in the thump keg to clean out bad heads. The uncle is not crazy, only a hundred years out of season. Leached wood ash makes lye and potash, which was New England's first cash crop. The first patent the United States ever granted, in 1790, went to a Mr. Samuel Hopkins for a better way of making potash.

But lye and grease make soap. If there is any oil in the wash, ash in the pot makes soap, and soap foams. The foam climbs up the arm, into the thump keg and on into the worm, and plugs her while the fire is still burning. Ash takes out no poison; only throwing out the foreshots and heads does that. Red oak gives tannin and color, but color is not purity. A deputy in a clean coat is still a deputy. White oak has little natural plugs in its grain that keep the liquor in. Red oak is open-pored as a sponge, which is why coopers won't make liquor barrels from it.

Last of all, the blue flame. The good spirit burns blue, and the wood-alcohol poison burns blue too, pale as a ghost's nightshirt. A blue flame proves only that your whiskey will burn, and so will a revenue man's warrant. Your cuts are the only test that counts. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low.