How to Clean a Copper Still with Vinegar, Wood-Ash Lye and Elbow Grease

My bear Barnaby put his snout in the vinegar bucket this evening and came out with a face like a deacon who bit into the communion bread and found a lemon. That suits our subject, for this feature takes up the dirtiest, least glamorous and most necessary job in the whole craft. It is not the mash, nor the fire, nor the pretty drip into the jar. It is the scrubbing. Vinegar, ashes and elbow grease, and I will remind the reader that elbow grease is the only grease in Merrimack County that does not go rancid.

Potash, the Ash Hopper, and Grandmother's Chemistry

Long before any man in these hills scrubbed a still, his grandmother was scrubbing a kettle, and his great-grandfather was burning down half of New Hampshire to make her soap. When the first settlers came up the Suncook into Barnstead and Gilmanton, the land was all oak, maple, beech, ash and birch. A man had to clear it to plant, and with no road fit to haul logs he burned them in great heaps for days. Then he shoveled up the ashes, soaked them, drew off the lye, and boiled it down in iron kettles to black salts. Boiled further and baked, it became potash, and finer still, pearlash. That potash went by oxcart to Boston and onto ships for the soap-makers and glass-makers across the water. It was some of the first hard cash this colony ever saw, and so the trees that stood where Pittsfield stands went to London as soap.

Every farmhouse in this valley kept an ash hopper out back: a V-shaped wooden trough with straw in the bottom. Hearth ashes went in all winter, rainwater went over them in spring, and brown lye dripped into a crock. Grandmother tested its strength with a fresh egg or a potato. If it floated, the lye was ready; if it sank, she poured it back through the ashes. Boiled with a winter's hog grease, it made soft soap brown as molasses.

For her copper kettles she reached for the other weapon, the acid. Vinegar and salt in a paste, rubbed on with a rag, and the tarnish slides off like a sin at a revival. Lacking vinegar, she used sour milk or buttermilk. For a shine fit for the minister, rottenstone and a little oil. Ashes for the grease, acid for the tarnish, and a woman's forearm for the rest. The women of New England knew that whole science a hundred years before any Boston college man wrote it down and took the credit.

The Price of a Dirty Worm

The old cider-brandy men learned it the hard way, for apple pomace and cider lees bake onto a copper bottom like tar on a sailor. I give you Ichabod Tuttle of Barnstead as a warning. Ichabod held that washing a still was for women and Episcopalians, and he never once cleaned his worm. Scorched mash crept up the cap and into the coil year after year until it was choked like an old man's pipe stem. One cold October morning he built a hot fire, the vapour had nowhere to go, and the cap went off like a Union cannon at Fredericksburg, clean through his roof and into the churchyard, where it dented a headstone.

The steam took him across the arms and neck, and the skin came off his forearms like the peel off a boiled potato. I packed him in cold wet linen and poured spirit down him, and he lived, though he lived ugly. His wife said she would come home when the still was clean, and she has been in Gilmanton eleven years. Mark it, fellow experimenters: a clogged worm or vapour line builds pressure until the cap blows or the pot bursts, spraying scalding vapour that will catch fire. Cleaning is not vanity. It is what keeps your skin on your arms.

A Deputy Scoured, and a Captain's Handkerchief

The county once tried to slip a spy into Fort Wilkins dressed as a scrubber. Up the turnpike from Epsom came a fellow with a handcart, a sack of scouring sand, and a shingle reading KETTLES SCOURED, COPPERS BRIGHTENED, TEN CENTS. But he smelled of boot blacking, and no traveling tinker ever blacked his boots. I sent him round back to see my coppers, and did not mention that Barnaby was napping there. The bear smelled the blacking and rose like a stump with a temper. The first swipe opened the sand sack, and the second took the seat of the man's breeches along with a fair portion of what was in them. I stitched him belly-down on my tooth-pulling bench, eleven stitches in dental silk, charged him a dollar, and gave him his change in coppers stamped G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. He came as a kettle-scourer, and Barnaby gave him the first honest scouring of his life.

A better class of government man sat in my shop recently: Captain Donald Vance, retired revenue officer out of Manchester, twenty-eight years in the service. The Captain judged an outfit by a white linen handkerchief, laundered every Sunday and wiped round the inside of the cap. Clean or a little green meant a careful man, and a careful man rarely poisons anybody. Black and greasy meant a man to watch.

Yet a man can be too proud of clean. In Sandwich Notch a fellow kept the brightest pot the Captain ever saw, scoured weekly with vinegar and salt and finished with rottenstone, and set it in a sunny clearing on the south slope. One bright morning it flashed at the revenue men from two miles off like a lighthouse, and they walked straight to it. The Captain wrote him up as "convicted by vanity."

Chamber Lye, a Mouse, and a Widow's Chain

In Wentworth an old bachelor, having heard that wool-dyers and washerwomen used chamber lye, scrubbed his copper with months of his own saved urine. The ammonia in it attacks copper and turns the liquid blue. His rinse barrel was blue, his rags were blue, his hands were blue to the wrist, and the Captain could see daylight through the pot bottom in three places. He had pickled his own still in himself.

In Rumney, on the Baker River, the Captain split a pot that had not been washed since Mr. Polk was president. The crust was thick as pie crust, black over green, and sealed in the middle of it was a whole mouse, cooked into the crust run after run. The valley drinking that stuff had bellyaches, headaches, and one man had shakes so bad he could not hold a spoon.

Then there was the widow of Danbury, who could not get a rag inside her coil. She fed a length of light logging chain through the worm, tied a rope to each end, and sat on a stump hauling it back and forth an hour every week, singing hymns. It scoured the worm and built her forearms like a blacksmith's. She put the Captain's young deputy down at arm wrestling, once with her right and once with her left.

The Fort Wilkins Method, Step by Step

The law first: making spirits for drinking without a federal permit is unlawful, and what follows is for history and education. Now to the bench.

One: let the fire die, every coal out, the copper cool enough to lay your palm flat upon, and no spirit vapour in the room. Spirit vapour and live coals keep company only with the undertaker.

Two: empty the spent wash while warm and rinse with hot water before scorched mash cures like mortar. If you have scorched it, soak it overnight with water and lift the crust in the morning with a wooden paddle. Never an iron scraper, and never sand, for every scratch is a little ditch where crud settles in to raise a family.

Three: the ashes. Oily tails leave a yellow, greasy film in the cap and upper pot. Draw a weak wood-ash lye, weak enough that the egg barely floats, and wipe the greasy places. Lye is caustic and one splash can blind you, so wear greased leather gloves, keep your face back, keep clean water by to flush yourself, and rinse every drop from the copper afterward.

Four: the vinegar, for oxide, tarnish and green seams. Rag the inside of the pot, but for worm, thump keg, cap and lyne arm, make a vinegar run: one gallon of good cider vinegar to every three of clean water, charged into the pot over a gentle fire, so the hot sour vapour works through the whole rig. It comes out like pond water flecked black and green, and not one drop is drunk; it goes on the manure pile. Five: follow it with a plain water run to flush the vinegar. Vinegar does its work in an hour or so; left for days it breeds green copper acetate, a verdigris and a poison.

Six: the outside, with vinegar and salt paste or buttermilk, then rottenstone and oil for shine. Seven: pour clean water in the top of the worm and see that it runs out free and quick; if it dribbles, remember Ichabod. Eight: dry her lid off and mouth open, stored upside down or open to the air, or by August she will smell like a Concord alderman's boot.

Two things are forbidden. Chloride of lime, the bleaching powder, pits copper, and mixed with vinegar it gives off a green choking gas; the Captain found a Groton man on his knees in his dooryard from doing just that in a closed shed. Nor mix vinegar and lye in one bucket, for they cancel each other out and leave salt water. Lye for grease, rinse; vinegar for tarnish, rinse.

Seasoning, Hickory Ash, and Red Oak

Every tavern from Epsom to Alton Bay repeats that the black crust is seasoning, like Grandmother's iron spider. Hogwash. A skillet's baked-on fat protects the iron; a crusted still is choked with sulfur crust, burnt mash and old oily tails, smothering the copper and stinking every run. The Rumney mouse was seasoning too, if you care to talk that way.

A question came up the post roads from Cletus "Rabbit" Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, whose uncle swears the old-timers threw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads. The uncle has the right ash and the wrong hole. Hickory makes some of the strongest ash-lye there is, and it was used after the run on a cold, empty pot to cut grease from cap and worm. A few generations of storytelling turned cleaning the still into cleaning the whiskey. Lye in a keg of hot vapour will only foul the run. Oak belongs with whiskey in the barrel, after the run, where charred wood gives colour and tannin bite over the months. Bad heads come out one way: caught at the spout and thrown out.

The Captain left me with a sentence worth framing: "A man who cleans his copper is a man who thinks about tomorrow, and that is worth more than any jar." So go scrub something. Keep your copper clean and your fire low.