How to Blend Moonshine by Nose and Ear: Eight Old Tasting Rules

The Parade from the Worm

The river runs high past Fort Wilkins, the mill wheels of Pittsfield are turning, and Catamount Hill has taken her first frost. On my bench stand thirty-two jars in a row like a mouth full of teeth. Outside the window Barnaby, my black bear, has fogged the glass with his snout since noon, for he knows what the evening holds. I mean to set down my eight rules for blending by ear and nose. Not one of them is scientific. I own that at the outset, and I shall show where each one goes astray.

First, the law, which I have heard read from the bench often enough to know by heart. To distil spirits meant for drinking without a federal permit is against the law. What follows is history and instruction. Read it as a scholar, and do not act on it as a fool.

Folks reckon the art lies all in the copper and the fire. It does not. The copper makes the spirit, but the nose decides which of it you keep. A run does not come from the worm all of one quality. It comes in a parade. First come the foreshots, which go to waste. Then the heads, sharp enough to strip paint. Then the hearts, the sweet sermon you came to church for. Last the tails, the long dull benediction while the deacons nod. The blender stands at the end of that parade like a natural philosopher at his instrument and decides where the good part begins and where it ends. My own instrument has been broken three times: once by a mule, once by a Barnstead fiddler, and once by my wife, who was aiming for the mule. Each break left it a little crookeder and a little more honest.

Varnish, Green Apple and Wet Hound

You never taste foreshots, and you never taste heads. Those you smell from a distance, set aside, and keep away from every cup in the house. Uncork a jar from early in the run and it strikes you like a cabinetmaker's varnish pot: glue, lamp spirits, and a mean green-apple sourness, like a pippin picked in July by a boy who could not wait. The chemists lay the green apple to acetaldehyde and the varnish to ethyl acetate and his cousins. Folks once cleaned harness buckles and paintbrushes with such stuff, and you would no sooner drink it than drink from a cobbler's glue pot.

The tails come at the far end, quieter and sneakier. They smell of wet wool, a cellar after a spring flood, a newspaper left out in the rain, a hound that rolled in the Suncook and came home proud of it. On the tongue they feel oily, as though the spirit had put on an overcoat. These are the fusel oils and heavy matters that creep over late, when the pot is growing weak and the distiller is growing greedy.

Barnaby's nose is a far finer instrument than mine. A bear can smell a ham bone through two feet of snow. Two autumns ago a dandy of a revenue man came up the turnpike from Concord with his hair slicked down in Boston bear's-grease pomade, smelling of bergamot and dead bear, and he crept within reach of Barnaby's chain. Barnaby took him for a long-lost cousin who wanted grooming and pulled up a palm-sized flap of scalp, still combed and parted. I stitched it back down with waxed fiddle string, eleven stitches, and the fellow never saw my bench. Mind you, a chained bear is no watchdog and no joke to the man who meets him, and any reader who keeps a wild animal at his door is a bigger fool than that revenue man.

Eight Rules, and Where They Go Wrong

Rule one: number your jars like a tooth chart, thirty-two to a run. Catch them small and in order, and mix no drop until you have smelled them all in a row. As in a mouth, the trouble starts at the back. I am ashamed to say this one is halfway scientific. When you find a sour jar you may set it aside rather than ruin a whole crock.

Rule two: taste before supper, never after pie. Sugar and grease coat the tongue, and pepper and pipe smoke deaden it. Come to the bench clean. Take the smallest sip of hearts, watered down, hold it on the tongue, and spit it into the slop pail like a Methodist spitting out a rumour.

Rule three: whatever makes Barnaby sneeze goes on the other shelf. But he also sneezes at pepper, goose down and the Methodist minister. The true rule is this: varnish, glue or green apple means heads, and heads stay out of the drinking jars whatever the bear may think.

Rule four: listen to the still. When the fire is right and the hearts are running, the spirit falls from the worm in a thin, steady thread and patters in the jar like rain on a shake roof. Toward the tails the thread thins and stutters, and the thump keg changes its tempo like an old man climbing stairs. But the ear only tells you that something is changing, not what it is. The drip changes with the fire, the weather, and the wood the hired boy shoved in while you were not looking. The ear says go and check. The nose does the checking.

Rule five: never blend by candlelight. You cannot judge a jar's colour by a candle. Worse, strong spirit gives off a vapour that catches fire easier than a Concord rumour. I have seen a man uncork a jar beside a lantern and lose his eyebrows, his moustache and the respect of his children in one bright whoosh. Blend by daylight, and keep stove, pipe and lantern on the far side of the room or out of it altogether.

Rule six: smell your own sleeve. After four or five jars the nose tires and stops reporting the smells it has just met. Step outside between jars, take a breath of turnpike air, and smell the back of your wrist or the wool of your sleeve. It sets the nose right again, as a patient rinses before the next tooth.

Rule seven: my wife's nose outranks mine. She can smell a tails jar from the bottom of the stairs. I have no science for it, only twenty-two years of marriage and a scar over my left ear.

Rule eight, the best of them: rest the blend a fortnight before you judge it. Here is real alchemy. Pour spirit and water together and the jar grows warm in your hand. And the mixture comes out a little less than the sum of what you poured, so a quart of each will not fill a half-gallon. The two are settling into each other like an old married couple into a feather tick. If a jar turns cloudy as dishwater when you cut it, that is tails talking. Heavy oils stay dissolved while the spirit is strong and come out of hiding once it is weakened. A cloudy jar is confessing that you cut too deep.

The Smelling Porch at Rockfish Gap

Miss Clara Higgins, a mountain herbalist of the Blue Ridge of Virginia, came to Fort Wilkins by rail, stagecoach and an ill-tempered ox cart, and Barnaby promptly ate half a pound of her sassafras root. At Rockfish Gap, she told me, three old men sat on the smelling porch every Sunday after meeting: Uncle Amos with the best nose in the county, Mister Dabney with the worst teeth, and a schoolmaster nobody liked but everybody needed, for he could read the jar tags. They judged by nose alone, the prize was a blue ribbon cut from a hymnal marker, and any judge who swallowed was put out of the contest. Uncle Amos's rule, with the cussing taken out, was that "any fool can drink, but it takes a Christian to smell and spit." When Dabney swallowed in the summer of '58, his chair was set out by the hog lot, and folks said his scores improved.

In Nelson County the widow Tolliver kept a nose book of birch-bark strips scratched with a nail, one smell to a strip: a wet blackberry cane for good, a churn left out in August for bad, and her late husband's boots for very bad. Her boys had no supper until they found the named smell among the jars. The mountain folk had words for spirit gone wrong: pop-skull for a greedy cut into the front end, tangle-leg for a greedy cut into the back, who-hit-John for a careless blend that laid a fellow flat, and stump water for jars stretched with water.

Fruit men had to be the strictest, Miss Higgins said, since apples and persimmons carry pectin and a fruit mash throws off more bad spirit than grain does. A peddler near Lynchburg sold a persimmon brandy the colour of a sunset, stretched with tails. Judge Rives rubbed a few drops between his palms, cupped them over his nose, and hollered, "Wet hound!" The man was laughed out of the county. The trick is sound. Rubbed between the hands, the light alcohol flies off first and leaves the heavy, oily, sour matter alone on the skin. Her grandmother had a test of her own: four tin cups, three of them proper spirit and one plain spring water. Any young man who praised the water's smooth finish went back to hoeing corn.

Lye and Lumber in the Thump Keg

Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, asks whether hickory ashes or red oak shavings in the thump keg will clean out bad heads, as his uncle swears. Wet wood ash makes potash lye, the same your grandmother boiled with hog fat for soap. It knocks down some sour acids, but it leaves the run slippery, soapy and bitter, and it does nothing to methanol. Red oak has open pores running the length of the grain like a bundle of soda straws, which is why no cooper makes a liquor barrel of it. White oak is the barrel wood. Red oak shavings give colour and a rough, tannic bite. Putting apples, peaches or wood in the thumper is an honest custom for flavouring a run, but flavour is no cure. No powder, shaving, ash or prayer turns bad heads good. Find them by nose and set them aside.

Three Coins Against the Bead

For each blow at the bead test I struck a coin, G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. Old-timers shake a vial, and big beads that vanish quickly mean strong spirit while little beads that linger mean weak. As a rough guess at strength it will get you into the right county. But the bead knows nothing of heads, tails or wet hound, and a jar of pop-skull will bead as prettily as a church choir. I have never met a bubble with a palate. To learn strength honestly, use a hydrometer. The British excise adopted the Sikes instrument in 1816. For everything else, use your nose. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low.