How to Build a Copper Pot Still: 1860s New England Coppersmithing Methods

Why Copper, and Not Iron or Tin

Hammer, rivet and worm. Those three words built every honest still in New England, and I mean to set each one before you as I would before a green apprentice with a sore thumb and a worse attitude. I write from the bench at Fort Wilkins, my log fortress on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, which the surveyors call Route 28, in Pittsfield, Merrimack County, New Hampshire. Barnaby, my black bear, is grunting at his chain outside the window and does not wish to be left out of the lesson. Treat what follows as natural philosophy, reader. Your apparatus is a laboratory, and every run is an experiment in copper, heat and vapour.

First comes the question every gentleman asks me and every sheriff pretends not to ask. Why copper? Why not iron, which is cheap, or tin, which shines? Copper takes the heat of the fire and spreads it quickly and evenly across the whole belly of the pot, so your mash does not sit scorching on one hot spot like a deputy on a stump. It does a second thing that no other metal does so well. It reaches into the vapour and pulls the sulphur stink out of it. The old hands knew nothing of the chemistry. They knew only that liquor run through copper tasted sweet, and liquor run through iron tasted like a wet horse blanket. They were right, and the chemistry has since caught up with them, which is more than the law has done.

Raising the Pot: Heat, Quench, Hammer

You begin with a flat sheet of copper and hammer it into a bowl. We call that raising. Lay the sheet on a stake or a block and strike it in rings, working from the edge inward, and the metal flows and rises under the hammer like bread dough under a farmer's wife.

Here is the trick that separates a coppersmith from a man who merely owns a hammer. Copper work-hardens. The more you strike it, the stiffer it grows, until it fights you. Keep hammering and it cracks, and three days of labour fly across the shop floor in two pieces. So you anneal. Heat the work to a dull red, plunge it in water, and it goes as soft as a Concord widow's heart at a funeral. Then you hammer again. Heat, quench, hammer. I have done it a hundred times on a single pot.

Listen while you work. Sound sheet copper under the hammer rings clear, like a church bell with bad news. When the ring goes dull and flat, the metal has hardened and wants softening. A smith who cannot hear his metal is deaf in the one ear that matters.

Rivets, Hard Solder, and the Sin of Lead

A pot of any size is made of more than one piece: a body, a shoulder and a bottom. Where those pieces meet, the joint must be tight enough to hold hot vapour and hot liquid both. We use soft copper rivets, set through overlapped edges and peened flat with the hammer until they sit as tight as ticks. Then we seal the seam with a hard solder or a braze, a metal that melts at a high heat, flows into the joint and locks it.

I will say this plainly, and twice if I must. Never, never use lead solder in a still. Lead is a poison. It leaches into the spirit, and it will sicken a man or kill him, slowly and quietly and without so much as an apology. I have seen what lead does, and I will not describe it at supper. Use a clean hard solder, and test every seam with water before a drop of mash goes near it.

A leaky seam is like a Suncook Valley preacher. It sounds fine going in, and by the third hour everything is coming out the sides. Nor is a leak in a still a mere nuisance. It is a catastrophe with a fuse on it. The vapour of spirits will burn, and when it escapes near the fire it does not drip politely onto the floor. It lights. I knew a man in Chichester who lost his eyebrows, his beard and most of his dignity to a pinhole leak in a pot, and the last I heard he was still telling the story with no eyebrows to raise at the punch line.

The Cap, the Lute, and the Worm

Next is the cap, or head of the still: the dome that rises on top and narrows toward the neck. It is raised and shaped the same way as the pot, only smaller and fussier. You fit the neck to the pot with a collar or a lute, a paste of rye flour and water that seals the joint. The shape matters. A tall neck lets the heavier vapours fall back and run down again. That is called reflux, and it makes a cleaner spirit. A short, stubby neck sends over everything, wheat and chaff alike, and the liquor shows it.

Then the worm. It is a long copper tube coiled round and round like a sleeping snake and set in a tub of cold water. The vapour runs down through the coil, the cold water steals its heat, and it turns back to liquid and drips out the bottom into your jar. To make one, wrap a hot tube around a wooden form, whether a log, a post or a barrel stave if you are poor, and bend it gently while the metal is soft. I fill the tube with sand or pitch first so it will not kink flat on the bend. Kinks are the death of a worm. The vapour chokes, the pressure builds, and I need not tell a distiller what a pot of boiling mash does when it has nowhere to go.

Mind the tub water as well. As the vapour gives up its heat, the water warms. Let it get hot and the worm stops condensing, and raw steam and vapour shoot out the end and across the room, and you will be wearing your supper. Change the water and keep it cold. That is the whole sermon on worms.

A Knock from Wilkes County

I lately had a visitor from a country where they hammer the road harder than they hammer copper. Mr. Junior Vance is a retired runner out of North Wilkesboro, North Carolina, who hauled illicit liquor from the Brushy Mountains down to Charlotte and is known in those hills as the fastest hand on a mountain road. Barnaby decided to like him, which is the bear's way of saying he had not yet decided to eat him.

Mr. Vance told me of an old Wilkes County coppersmith who tested a pot by tapping it with one knuckle and listening to the ring, going round every seam like a preacher thumping a melon at a church supper. Once this coppersmith handed a pot straight back to its maker, saying it "sounded sad." I have pulled teeth on less evidence. The old fellow was right. A hairline crack was hiding under a rivet, and the pot would have wept all over the fire on its first run.

Mr. Vance once carried a coiled copper worm in his back seat, wrapped in a quilt like a sleeping baby. A preacher flagged him down at a crossroads, looked in the window and offered to bless it, and Mr. Vance let the good man go through the whole prayer, figuring he could use it. His first honest labour, at twelve years old, was mixing rye-flour paste for sealing seams. He stirred the gummy stuff all day and came home with it in his hair, and the cat licked it out. That is the very lute I described above, and it seems fit for felines as well. He tells me the cat never did leak.

He also gave a sad lesson. In his day some boys ran liquor through old radiators for condensers, and those radiators were full of lead solder. Folks went blind and folks died, and he lost a cousin that way. His rule is plain: "only clean copper, only clean solder, no salvaged junk. Anything else is slow poison with a pretty label."

First Runs, Scorch, and Honest Cuts

A new still is a nervous creature, and you do not simply fill it with mash and light the fire. The first run is a cleaning run: water and a little vinegar, perhaps a scrap charge, to wash out the flux and tallow, the copper dust and the sweat of the man who built it. Throw out all of it. It tastes like a penny chewed by a blacksmith, and I should know.

Scorched mash is the other sin. Grain settles on the bottom, the fire finds it, and it cooks to a black crust that gives the whole run a burnt, bitter, ruined taste, which no amount of praying or cussing will lift. The cure is a steady low fire, stirring when you can, and a pot with a good thick bottom. Use heavy copper, I say, and do not skimp. A double boiler, a bath of water around the pot, will save a careless man from himself, though it is slower, and impatient men hate slow.

When the run goes properly, you make your cuts. The foreshots come first, the first spoonfuls off the worm, and they carry methanol and sharp volatile stuff that will blind a man. Throw them away. Next come the heads, harsh and smelling of solvent, and you throw those away too. Only then do you reach the hearts, the sweet middle of the run. Last come the tails, oily and dull, which you set aside. A distiller who skips the cuts does not make liquor; he makes trouble. I will add what I always add, and what the Revenue Bureau would add if it could spare the time from collecting. Making spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of the United States, and all I set down here is for the history of the craft and for your education alone.

Hickory Ash and Hope

Cletus Miller of Wilkesboro, whom they call Rabbit, wrote that his uncle swears the old-timers threw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads. His uncle is right and wrong at once. Hickory ash and oak charcoal are hardwood, and hardwood char can take up some of the harsh, oily compounds in a spirit. The old hands knew that by taste before any professor wrote it down. But ash thrown into a boiling charge does not make a bad head safe, and it does not pull methanol out of a foreshot. The only cure for a bad head is the cut. If you must, filter the finished spirit through a bed of clean charcoal, and leave the ash in the stove where it belongs. Mr. Vance says some in Wilkes County used ash mostly for show, while the good runners cut properly and threw the front end to the hogs. The hogs mostly survived, and one went to the Baptist church.

So that is the bench. Raise the pot with the hammer, hold the seams with rivets, solder clean and never with lead, give the cap a tall neck, and coil the worm long and keep it cold. Watch for leaks, watch for scorch, watch your fire, and cut your run honestly. Copper does not forgive carelessness, but it rewards patience better than any banker I have met.