Moonshine Names Around the World: Poitin, Aguardiente, Kill-Devil and More

Water of Life and Burnt Wine

Gentlemen of the copper and the coil: I mean to take you round the whole globe this evening without leaving my chair by the stove at Fort Wilkins. Barnaby, my black bear, is chained outside the window. He has four hundred pounds of appetite and not one ounce of manners, and he will not be coming with us. Our subject is names. Every country with a kettle and a grudge against the tax collector has a name for the clear stuff, and a man who studies his own apparatus ought to know what the rest of the world has called what drips from his worm.

Start with the Irish, since they started most of the trouble. They call it poitin, or poteen to a Yankee tongue. It comes from the Irish pota, a pot, so poitin is only 'the little pot stuff.' In 1661 the English Crown put an excise on Irish spirits. From that day every licensed distillery made 'whiskey' and every honest farmer up a bog made poitin. The word means outlaw the way 'deacon' means hypocrite. Nobody needs to say it aloud.

The Latin doctors and monks called distilled spirit aqua vitae, water of life. The Irish and Highland Scots said the same thing in Gaelic: uisce beatha, usquebaugh. Say it three times drunk and it wears down to 'whiskey.' The French say eau-de-vie, the Swedes and Danes akvavit, the Poles okowita, and every one of those means water of life. Half of Christendom has toasted its own health with the stuff for five hundred years and buried its uncles at forty-six.

The other half took the plainer view. The Dutch said brandewijn, burnt wine, which we cut down to brandy. The Swedes have brannvin, burnt wine as well. The Spanish and Portuguese say aguardiente, burning water. So half the world calls it water of life and the other half calls it burnt, and any man who has drunk both kinds will tell you both are right. The Italians distil the leavings of the wine press, skins and seeds and whatever the treaders' feet left behind, into grappa, and a Boston man pays dearly for that toenail broth. In the Balkans they make rakia from any fruit that falls off a tree and slivovitz from plums. Those fellows have fought the Turk for four hundred years on plum brandy, and I cannot say whether it made them brave or only too stiff to run.

Kill-Devil, Iron Bottom and Taos Lightning

In the sugar islands in the last century, the Barbados planters boiled up skimmings and molasses and got a spirit so hot they called it kill-devil. Some say 'rum' comes from rumbullion, meaning a brawl, a tavern uproar with the furniture taking part. Kill-devil to begin the evening and rumbullion to end it.

Far off in the Sandwich Islands, men distilled the root of the ti plant around 1790 and called it okolehao. I am told it means 'iron bottom,' after the iron try-pots from the whalers that served as their stills. I have had nights like that, and so have you.

Out west, before the Mexicans lost New Mexico, the beaver trappers bought a raw wheat whiskey called Taos lightning, which came down out of the mountains like a mule kicking. A trapper would swap a winter's pelts for a keg of it and wake in April with no pelts, no keg, a Ute wife, and a powerful wish to die.

We Yankees name the stuff after what it does to us: rotgut, bust-head, coffin varnish, tangle-leg because you walk like a crab, and forty-rod because it drops a man at forty rods. I have sold spirit that dropped him at my counter and saved him the walk. The Irish named it for the pot, the Scots for the dew, and the Yankee for whatever it did to him the next morning.

Pots That Crossed the Ocean

Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister hammers the copper at the Fort Wilkins foundry, and he has never once let me cut a corner. The mills have filled Manchester with people of every nation, and as Silas puts it, "Copper doesn't care what language you curse it in."

Two winters back a widow from Donegal, a loom hand at the Amoskeag, brought him her late husband's poitin pot. It held maybe eight gallons, its bottom had been hammered in some cabin in the Irish hills, and she had carried it across the Atlantic wrapped in her wedding linens. Her man had patched a split in the bottom seam with near a pound of lead, smeared on like butter. Silas would not put a hand to it while that lead was in it, since lead and spirit make a poor marriage. He cut the whole patch out with snips and a cold chisel, dressed the edges, riveted in a good copper piece peened tight, and proved it with water. She paid him a loaf of soda bread a week for a month, and a curse on the excisemen of Ireland that named every one of them back to Cromwell.

A Portuguese cooper off the New Bedford whale ships brought him an alembic with a beaked head in the Moorish style, like a heron leaning over a pond, which he used to make aguardiente from whatever fruit was cheap. The word alembic comes from the Arabic al-anbiq, from the Moors who held Spain and Portugal. He sealed the joint between head and pot with a paste of rye flour and water, pressed in like putty. As the still warms the paste bakes hard and tight. It is an old practice going back centuries, with no solder and no poison in it, and when the run is done you knock it off and feed it to the hens.

Down the road at Londonderry, where the Scots-Irish brought the potato to this colony in 1719, Silas knew a farmer who called his spirit 'mountain dew,' after the old Highland name. He ran a worm tub ice-cold from the brook, with a short iron pipe from pot to coil and very little copper anywhere. His dew smelled of boiled turnip and wet dog. Silas built him a copper vapour chamber to sit between pot and worm, and the next run came out sweet. The farmer named it after Silas's mother-in-law, calling it the first thing out of Londonderry that did not bite. She has not spoken to him since.

One more of Silas's: a Concord tavern keeper wanted every name for liquor he knew engraved round the shoulder of a new pot. Whiskey, brandy, usquebaugh, poteen, rum, aqua vitae, and so on. Silas lettered small and careful, round and round, and when he reached 'kill-devil' he ran out of copper. The tavern keeper allowed it was the right place to stop, since that is where every evening at his tavern ends.

Pot, Column and the Locked Brass Box

Every name above comes out of one of two machines. The old one is the pot still, the kind poitin was named for. You charge it, fire it, run it, empty it, clean it, and do it again, one batch at a time, the way a dentist works one mouth at a time. The newer one is the column still, a tall thing that runs continuously as long as you feed it. The best of them was patented in 1830 by Aeneas Coffey, an Irishman who had been an excise officer in Dublin and spent his days hunting poitin pots in the bogs. An exciseman inventing the column still is like a parson inventing a faster way to sin.

The Scots, after their Excise Act in the twenties, put a locked box of brass and glass on the licensed stills, called a spirit safe. The stillman may watch and test his spirit as it runs through, but he cannot take any out, because the exciseman holds the key.

The Highland Method and the Cuts

I give the old Highland way here for history and learning. Take malted barley, meaning barley that has been wetted, sprouted and dried, and crack it in the mill. Mash it in hot water, but do not boil it. Hold it at one hundred fifty to one hundred fifty-five degrees on Fahrenheit's glass, which is the heat at which the malt's own ferments turn starch to sugar. Pour boiling water on it and you kill the very thing doing the work. Hold it about an hour, stirring, then draw off the sweet wort. Cool it to blood-warm or under, pitch your yeast, and let it work three or four days in a warm, well-aired room until it stops talking. What you have then is the wash, a weak stuff that is really beer.

The stripping run gives the low wines, a cloudy spirit a quarter to a third strong. The spirit run is where a man shows whether he is a distiller or a murderer. The foreshots and heads come first. That is where the wood spirit gathers, which the chemists call methyl, along with solvent stinks that smell of a varnish shop. Pour them out, never into a jar and never down a man's neck, because that is how blind men and dead ones are made. Then come the hearts, sweet and clean, which you judge by tongue and palm and keep. Last come the tails, oily and dull, smelling of wet cardboard. The big Scots houses call these feints and return them to the next charge, but no man ever keeps the foreshots or heads.

Remember the Londonderry turnip. A worm tub gives the vapour less copper to touch than other condensers do. Run it cold behind an iron pipe and the sulfur, with its rotten-egg and cabbage stink, comes straight through. Copper grabs that sulfur and holds it on its face, so the more bright copper the vapour touches, the sweeter the spirit. That is why no iron, lead or pewter goes into any still this foundry builds, and why the copper must be cleaned after every run. Spirit vapour burns, too. Seal your joints tight (the rye paste does fine), keep the house aired, keep water and a sack of sand by the door, and never leave a lit still for a minute. I have buried men who thought they would be gone only a minute.

Ashes, Oak Shavings and Moonlight

Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, sent word of his uncle's lore: "old-timers used to throw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads." Soak hickory ash in water and you get lye, the caustic stuff of the farm wife's ash hopper and of hominy. It makes fine soap, but it does not touch the heads. Heads come off first because they boil easiest, and the only cure is to catch them in a separate jar and pour them out. Red oak is so open in the grain you can blow pipe smoke through a stave, which is why coopers keep it for slack barrels of nails, flour and apples, and use tight white oak for anything wet. The old boys did put apples, peaches or oak chips in the thump keg so the vapour bubbling through would pick up taste and colour, but that is seasoning, not cleaning. A rotten ham is still rotten with sage on it.

As for the word 'moonshine,' it was never made only by moonlight, or November clouds would have bankrupted every still in New Hampshire. In old England the word meant foolish talk, and then it came to mean the brandy smugglers ran ashore at night on the south coast. The Wiltshire men, caught raking a pond for hidden kegs, told the excisemen they were raking for the moon's reflection, and they have been called Moonrakers ever since.

Last, the blue flame. Wood spirit burns pale blue as well, nearly invisible. A burning spoonful tells you the stuff burns, not whether it will blind you. Only the cuts make it safe. All of this is offered for history and learning, since making spirits for drinking without a permit is against the law of the United States. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low.