How the Mason Jar Replaced the Whiskey Barrel, Jug and Stoddard Bottle

When Spirit Rode in a Barrel

When my grandfather made spirit in this valley, nobody troubled to pour it into anything pretty. It went into a coopered barrel of white oak, hooped with iron or split hickory, and rode an ox cart to the tavern in Epsom or the store at Pittsfield Corners. There the keeper sold it out by the gill to farmers who had walked eleven miles in the mud to forget that they were farmers.

A barrel has one fault, and the fault is that it is a barrel. You cannot hide forty gallons of anything under your coat, and I have tried. I once laid a firkin of rum under a buffalo robe in the back of a sleigh, and the deputy asked why my blanket had hoops. I told him it was my wife and she had let herself go. He believed me, and so did she, and she has not cooked me a decent supper since.

The smaller trade therefore went into the salt-glazed stoneware jug. It was gray as a February sky and carried a little cobalt-blue flower painted on the side by some Bennington potter who was surely drunk when he did it. The glazing is a handsome piece of natural philosophy. The potter fires his kiln as hot as the hinges of perdition and throws common salt into the fire by the shovelful. The salt turns to vapour, the vapour settles upon the clay, and it leaves a glassy skin over the whole jug, rough as an orange peel, that will hold spirit until the Second Coming. Yet a jug weighs about as much as a Baptist's conscience. Drop one on a granite doorstep and it goes off like a cannon at Gettysburg. Worst of all, you cannot see through it. A jug keeps its secrets like a widow at a wake, and you do not know what is in it until it is in you.

Stoddard Amber and the Faithless Cork

Then there was glass. Here in our own Granite State, over in Stoddard in Cheshire County, they have been blowing bottles since the early forties: dark amber and olive, the colour of strong tea or a pond in October. That colour is no art of the blower. It comes from the iron and dirt in the Stoddard sand, the same way my complexion comes from my habits. Hold a Stoddard bottle to the lamp and it glows like a bear's eye in a dark barn. I have seen the latter, and I do not recommend it.

But blown bottles were dear and corks were dearer. A cork in a jolting wagon on the Suncook Turnpike is like a deacon at a dance. It holds firm at first, and it is out in the road by midnight.

Mr. Mason's Threads

In November of eighteen and fifty-eight, Mr. John Landis Mason, a tinsmith of Philadelphia, took out a patent on a glass jar with screw threads molded right into its neck. A zinc lid screws down and presses against a rubber ring on the shoulder, and the seal is so tight a ghost could not get in. You will find it pressed into the glass itself: MASON'S PATENT NOV 30TH 1858. The ladies bought them for their peaches and pickles. But a peach does not pay two dollars a gallon to Mr. Lincoln's tax men, and a peach need not be hidden in the woodpile. Men of my profession soon looked upon that jar the way my bear Barnaby looks upon a lame calf. In seven years Mr. Mason has done more for the Suncook Valley than the legislature has done since the Flood.

To the experimenter, the merit of glass is plain. Glass takes nothing from your spirit and gives nothing back. The old pewter mugs and flagons were often cut with lead, and lead will rot your brain, gray your gums and sour your temper. Glass is honest. Hold it to the window and you will see whether your distillate runs clear as spring water or cloudy as a drowned man's eye.

A Pocketful of Nothing

The jar changed the running trade more than the war did. Reason it out like a lawyer. If the sheriff finds a barrel, that is a confession. A jug is an excuse. A pint jar is a pocketful of nothing at all, Your Honor. It goes into a boot, a muff, a feed sack, a Bible with the middle cut out, or the hollow of a stuffed owl. I knew a woman from Loudon who carried six pints under her hoop skirt to the Grange supper and walked so stately that the minister asked if she had found religion. She told him she had found a considerable quantity of something, and it was keeping her upright.

Glass has its enemies, though, and the worst of them is a thief. Two winters ago a sneak from toward Gilmanton began taking my filled jars off the cooling shelf behind the still-house: one a night, then two, then three. I did what any Christian would do. I moved Barnaby's chain stake four feet closer to the shelf and greased the chain. On the third night, about two in the morning, I heard the squeak of a zinc lid, then a sound like a feather bed dropped from a hayloft, then a scream like a gelded hog at a revival.

When I came out with the lantern, Barnaby had the fellow pinned in the snow under one gentle paw. The jar was smashed and the whiskey had run down the man's sleeve, and that bear, who has a powerful thirst for anything that smells of corn, was licking him from fingers to elbow like a sugar-cured ham. A bear's tongue is like a rasp file. The forearm came out pink as a new piglet, three knuckles skinned, and the mitten swallowed whole. I dressed the arm with clean linen and charged him for jar, linen and mitten. He paid in coin, and I stamped that cent on the anvil, G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., so he would remember whose money he had lost. He crosses the road when he passes Fort Wilkins to this day.

From the Coppersmith's Bench

Our master coppersmith, Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister, confesses that the first Mason jar he ever handled, at a dry-goods counter in Concord, struck him as poor work. He took the threads for a casting flaw and set about filing them smooth with his burr file. He was halfway round before the clerk came over the counter to inform him that the threads were the patent. Silas paid for the jar, and it holds his pencils still, with half a neck, as a reminder that a man who knows metal does not know everything.

He atoned with an invention. A man filling jars off the worm has his eyes on the fire, the thump keg and the window, and the jar runs over and good spirit lies on the floor near the flame. So Silas hammered a narrow-necked copper funnel with a little reed set in the neck, like a boy's willow whistle. As the jar nears full and the spirit backs up, the air pushed out through the reed gives a peep like a chick. They call it the Tattler, because a Chichester man who borrowed one had a sheriff hear it peeping in his woodshed. The sheriff went in looking for a lost chick and found eleven jars instead.

Silas's great-uncle Abner once traded a twelve-turn, hand-hammered copper worm to a Stoddard glassblower for a wagonload of three hundred amber bottles packed in straw, and drove them home in March over frost-heaved roads. Eleven came into Pittsfield whole, and the wagon bed glittered amber for years. "The lesson was that copper bends and glass does not," as Silas tells it, "so you pack glass like you are carrying eggs to a bishop." And that is the very reason the jar won out: a thick-walled jar with a flat bottom stands up in a crate and does not roll about like a drunk in a ditch.

The Row of Numbered Jars

What follows is offered as history and learning only, for the law forbids making drinking spirit without the government's permission. A man ought still to know how the thing was done, and why it can kill a fool. The old Suncook mash takes about a bushel of cracked corn, cooked in hot water and stirred until thick as porridge. Let it cool until you can hold your hand in it, then stir in a few quarts of malted barley or rye, whose ferment turns the starch to sugar. At blood-warm, add yeast and cover it loosely with a cloth. Never cover it tight, and never set it in a shut-up cellar, for the working mash breathes out a heavy gas that pools low and will lay a man dead with no smell to warn him. In four to six days the bubbling stops and you have the wash, a sour beer of only a few parts in a hundred of spirit.

Copper is the vessel of choice. Iron rusts and lends a taste of horseshoe, but copper takes heat evenly and, above all, seizes the rotten-egg sulfur stink of the boiling wash and holds it on its own skin. That dark tarnish inside your pot and cap after a run is the copper at its work. Scrub it bright and it keeps working; let it go green and crusted and it quits. Seams must be riveted and hard-brazed or silver-soldered, never soft lead solder, which poisons a man so slowly he blames his wife's cooking.

Now the chief experiment. Do not run into one crock. Line a plank with small jars, number them in chalk, and change jars as each fills. First come the foreshots, boiling lowest and carrying the wood alcohol that blinds and kills. They smell sharp, like a cobbler's glue pot, and must be thrown out every run. The heads follow, harsh and solventy, and they too go aside. Then the hearts, sweet and clean with the smell of grain. Last the tails, oily and wet-dog smelling, saved to run again. With numbered jars you may walk the row and judge by nose where the heads end and the hearts begin; in one crock, poison and good would be mixed past recovering. Keep the worm tub cold so the spirit runs out cool to the touch, for warm spirit means vapour escaping, and vapour near a fire takes eyebrows, barn and life, in that order. A Northwood man who lit his pipe over a jar of foreshots went to church with no beard and a face like a boiled lobster.

Ashes, Shavings and the Bead

A recorded voice came to us from Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina: "My uncle swears old-timers used to throw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads." Pour water through wood ashes and you get lye, which the asheries of this valley boiled down to potash for soap and glass. Lye with grease and heat makes soap. It might soften a sour edge as baking soda calms a stomach, but it does nothing to the wood alcohol, which comes off the worm first whether the keg holds ashes, apples or old hymnals.

Red oak hides a truer tale. Old Tobias Pease, a Pittsfield cooper, would blow through a red oak stave and raise bubbles in a pail at the other end. Red oak is all open pores, which is why every honest barrel is white oak. Shavings in raw whiskey turn it brown as a saddle in a day or two, and rogues sold it to city men as ten-year-old Old Monongahela. That is a costume and not aging; it puts a beaver hat on a hog and calls it the governor. Burnt charcoal in a filter will take some rough taste from finished spirit, but no charcoal removes wood alcohol. Nor should you trust the bead, for a jar of foreshots beads up as pretty as a bride. Rabbit has a counterstamped cent coming in the mail, and his uncle may keep the ashes for the soap kettle and the shavings for kindling.

Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low.