How the Scotch-Irish Ulster Settlers Brought Whiskey Making to America

Draw close to your apparatus, brother alchemist, for this is a family history. It is the history of the family that taught this continent to make whiskey: the Scotch-Irish, Ulster Presbyterians and sons of the Lowlands, the hardest-headed, hardest-drinking, psalm-singing people ever to step off a ship and pick a fight with a mountain. They brought the copper, the worm and the stubbornness, and the gauger came over on the next boat.

The Ulster Men Cross the Water

The tale begins in 1609. King James wanted a Protestant Ireland the way a farmer wants a cow that milks itself, and so he opened the province of Ulster to settlers. Lowland Scots crossed the narrow sea by the thousand. They were Presbyterians, flax-growers and weavers, and they brought oats, barley and the copper pot their grandfathers had used to boil barley into uisge beatha, the old Gaelic for water of life. A Scotsman will tell you that name proves God approves of whiskey. A Methodist will tell you it proves the Devil is good at languages.

For a hundred years Scot and Irish lived side by side and taught each other two things. One was how to make poitin, the little-pot spirit of the Irish hills. The other was how to hate the gauger, who measured your casks with his rod and then measured your purse with his fingers. Then the trouble came. Landlords racked up the rents every time a lease ran out, the Test Act of 1704 shut Presbyterians out of public office, and drought, sheep rot and failed flax finished the work. In the summer of 1718 five ships sailed from Ulster into Boston harbour, full of hungry Presbyterians with hard hands and harder opinions.

Londonderry, a Day's Ride from Pittsfield

Boston did not want them, and the Puritans regarded them as my bear Barnaby regards a turnip. So sixteen families came up into New Hampshire to a tract called Nutfield. In 1722 they renamed it Londonderry, after the city their fathers had held through the great siege, and it lies about a day's hard ride from my anvil. Those Londonderry folk are credited with the first potatoes planted in New England, and they wove linen fit for a bishop's bedsheet. Whatever any honest historian may say, there was not a cellar in the township without a pot and a worm in some corner of it. They gave this state John Stark, who whipped the British at Bennington, and Matthew Thornton, an Irish-born doctor who signed the Declaration of Independence. He was a doctor, mind you, and not a dentist, which is why that document has no teeth when the tax man comes.

Rye, Packhorses and the Whiskey Rebellion

Most of the Ulster folk landed at Philadelphia, shipload after shipload, and pushed west into the Pennsylvania hills. Barley took unkindly to that ground, so they turned to rye, and rye whiskey became the coin of the Monongahela country. When they ran short of elbow room they went south down the Great Wagon Road, through the Shenandoah and into the Carolina backcountry, and there they met Indian corn and married it.

Any natural philosopher should consider the arithmetic. A packhorse on a mountain trace carries a few bushels of grain, and by the time he is over the ridge that grain is worth less than the oats he ate on the way. Turn the grain to spirit and the same horse carries the value of many times as many bushels in two little kegs slung over his withers. Out there whiskey was not a vice. It was a bank draft that sloshed. Preachers were paid in it, debts were settled in it, and weddings were paid for in it, and the bride went cheap.

In 1791 Mr. Alexander Hamilton laid a federal excise on spirits, and the Scotch-Irish of western Pennsylvania took it the way a bobcat takes a bath. That September they caught the collector, Robert Johnson, cut off his hair, stripped him, and dressed him in hot pine tar and goose feathers. He came out of it plucked like a Christmas goose and twice as pink. In 1794 President Washington rode out with nearly thirteen thousand militia, and the rebels went back into the hills like smoke up a chimney. Twenty-odd prisoners were taken and two men were convicted of treason, and then Washington pardoned them both. It was the most expensive way of doing nothing this republic ever tried, until Congress perfected it.

The Deputy Who Knew His Granny's Mash

I will tell one story against my own hide. At my first arrest the Merrimack County sheriff brought along a young deputy named Hugh McNeil. He was Scotch-Irish, his people came up out of Londonderry, and he had a nose like a ship's figurehead. The sheriff poured a tin cup of my rye as evidence, and McNeil sniffed it, sipped it, and went white as a bleached molar. 'Sheriff,' said he, 'that's my great-grandmother's mash. Rye and barley malt, with a fistful of oats for the body. That's the Antrim way.' I had got that recipe in 1849 from an old Londonderry peddler, in trade for pulling three of his teeth.

McNeil was so taken with his ancestry that he went poking round the still-house window, past the chalk line I had drawn in the dirt. Barnaby does not read chalk. He hooked one great paw into the seat of McNeil's good wool breeches, and the deputy went up the woodpile like a squirrel with the gout. I paid my fine and sewed up the breeches with dental silk, and McNeil bought a jug from me every Christmas until he moved to Manchester.

Ballads, Oatmeal and Communion Tokens

From the far end of the Great Wagon Road came Junior Vance of North Wilkesboro, raised in the Brushy Mountains of Wilkes County among McNeills, Fergusons, Clearys and Presbyterians. His great-aunt Ossie lived on the ridge above three still-houses and sang 'Barbara Allen' at her churn, slow and pretty. When a stranger came up the county road, or a fellow in a hat that was too clean, she jumped from the first verse straight to the one where Barbara dies. Every man in the holler knew to throw creek water on his fire. Once a revenue man stopped to praise her singing. She sang him the rest of the ballad, and by the time she was done there was not a warm stone left in the hollow.

Junior's people came over from County Antrim with a sea chest holding a copper still cap, the domed head, which his granddaddy's own father had hammered. They packed it in oatmeal so it would not rattle and give them away to the ship's master. The voyage ran long and rations ran short, so the family ate the packing a spoonful at a time until they struck copper. As the old man put it, 'You can find oats on any farm in America but a good cap takes a lifetime.'

That same granddaddy listened to his mash through a hollowed cow horn set against the stave, like a doctor at a sick man's chest. While it fried like bacon he let it be, and when the frying quit and the cap fell, she was done talking. And an old Presbyterian elder in the Brushies kept a can of lead communion tokens left over from a church that had closed. When a man came up short on a jug, the elder hung a token on a nail behind the door. To get it back, the debtor had to stand in the yard and recite the Twenty-Third Psalm from start to finish. That elder was the only banker I ever heard of who made a man pray before he paid.

An Ulster Double Run at the Copper

With my hand on my anvil: distilling spirits for drinking without a federal license is against the law of these United States. What follows is history and natural philosophy.

To malt barley, steep it a day or two, spread it on a clean floor, and turn it while it sprouts until the rootlets show and the grain tastes sweet. Then dry it gently over a low fire. That malt carries the diastase, which turns starch to sugar. After Britain taxed malt in 1785, Irish distillers began mixing raw barley in with the malted, and the habit gave Irish pot whiskey its oily, spicy character. That is the only good a tax has ever done.

The Pennsylvania men made rye meal their main grain, with barley malt as a fifth part or so to do the converting and perhaps some oats for body. Stir the meal into hot water and keep it warm and covered, and within a couple of hours it tastes sweet. Then cool it, because if you pitch yeast into hot mash you have boiled your workers alive. Wait until the mash is blood-warm, so that you can hold a finger in it and count to ten without cursing. Then pitch the yeast and let it work three or four days, or longer in a cold cellar. Give the room air, because a working barrel breathes out a gas that will smother a man in a closed pit.

What you have then is the wash, a sour, beery liquor with only a few parts in a hundred of spirit. The stripping run goes fast and rough and gives you the low wines, or singlings. Throw out the first trickle as cheap insurance. Then return the low wines to the clean pot and run them slow and low for the doublings, and make your cuts there. The foreshots come first. They smell sharp, like a varnish shop, and they carry methanol, which blinds and kills. For every five gallons of wash, throw away a good couple of ounces at the very least. The heads come next. They are harsh and smell of solvent, so set them aside and never sell them. The hearts are sweet and clean, and they are your whiskey. Last come the tails, oily and smelling of wet dog. Save them to run again with the next batch.

Copper carries heat quickly and evenly, so the mash does not scorch, and the bright metal takes the rotten-egg stink out of the vapour. Never use lead in the joints. I have pulled gray, loose teeth from men who drank from bad ones. Never seal the pot, because a still is a kettle and not a cannon. Keep the fire low, never leave a still running alone, and keep water and a sack of sand by the door.

Hickory Ash, Red Oak and the Blue Flame

Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro writes that his uncle swears the old-timers put hickory ash or red oak shavings in the thump keg to clean out bad heads. Ash is mostly potash, the stuff our grandmothers leached into lye for soft soap. It may knock back some sourness, but it leaves a bitter, soapy taste in the doubler and does nothing at all to the heads. Red oak is as open-pored as a sponge, which is why coopers make their barrels of white oak. Its shavings add tannin and colour and make raw white spirit look older than it is. That is not cleaning. It is putting a Sunday coat on a drunk.

The blue-flame test is worse. The rhyme says 'lead burns red and makes you dead,' and that blue means safe. But wood spirit burns with a pale blue flame of its own, and a few grains of lead will not reliably colour a flame at all. Make your spirit from clean grain in clean copper and throw out the foreshots and heads. That is chemistry, and chemistry does not rhyme. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low.