Moonshiner's Second Arrest, a $20 Fine, and How to Make Safe Distilling Cuts

The Statute Before the Crime

A man cannot appreciate a crime until he has read the statute, and so I begin as any natural philosopher must, by setting down the conditions of the experiment. The Revenue Act of 1862, signed by Mr. Lincoln, created the Bureau of Internal Revenue and laid the first federal excise upon distilled spirits, to pay for the war against the Southern rebellion. The rate began modest, then rose and rose as the war dragged on, until by 1864 a gallon carried two dollars of tax. That is more than most farmers in the Suncook Valley saw in hard money in a season.

And hard money was scarce, mind you. People hoarded silver and copper like squirrels, which is why I took to stamping my name on the few honest coins that passed through my shop here at Fort Wilkins, on the Suncook Valley Turnpike in Pittsfield. A steel punch, a large cent, a good clang, and there it stands: G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., so a man would know whose copper he was holding. Remember that punch, reader. It will matter later.

Meanwhile the revenue assessors came through Merrimack County with ledgers under their arms and pinched faces, counting stills the way a hen counts chicks, and finding fewer each time they counted, for stills, like Methodist husbands, are very good at disappearing when company calls. My first arrest I will save for another day. I will say only that it taught me a man in handcuffs should keep his mouth shut. The second taught me the opposite: a man before a magistrate should talk until the magistrate forgets what the charge was.

A Tin Cup for the Sheriff

It was a muggy August morning, the kind that makes a log cabin smell like a wet dog and a dead mouse in conference. I had a double run going, the second pass coming off clean and pretty, dripping into the jar like a very slow, very expensive confession. Up the turnpike came the sheriff, a lean fellow with a mustache like a dead caterpillar, and two deputies who had been to my place before and had the good sense to look worried about it. The tall one still limps when it rains, and I will not say why, except that Barnaby, my black bear, is a creature of deep affections and very sharp ideas about trouser legs.

You would think a man with a four-hundred-pound bear chained at the window would be spared a second arrest. You would be wrong. The sheriff had planned for the bear. He came up the back way through the sugar maples, quiet as a mortgage, and got the drop on me while Barnaby snored on the wrong side of the cabin. That is the one flaw in the whole defensive system: a bear cannot be everywhere at once, and he sleeps like a drunk deacon.

Did I run? I did not. A man who runs from a sheriff admits the sheriff is right. I wiped my hands on my apron, took down my best tin cup, poured it full of double-run, clear as a Quaker's conscience, and told the sheriff of Merrimack County that he had walked a long way in the heat, and he would take a drink or he would insult my hospitality, and I would not have both.

A lawman is also a man, and he has a throat, and the throat is a very bad witness for the prosecution. He looked at the cup, at his deputies, at the cup again, and drank it like a man handling a lit shell, one slow careful swallow with his eyes wide open. Then his face did a thing I have seen only on men who have had a tooth pulled with a root like a fence post: a dawning, surprised peace. He pronounced it the finest drop he had ever put in his mouth. One deputy reminded him they were there to arrest me, and the sheriff replied that he was aware of the order of operations, Elias, thank you.

He arrested me anyway. He is a man of principle, if a flexible one. But all the road down to town he kept asking me about the still in a lowered voice, as though his deputies might not notice a sheriff taking notes for his own improvement.

The Natural Alchemical Rights of a Free Yankee

A Merrimack County courtroom in August smells of wet wool, old pipe tobacco and perjury, and I contributed the only honest odour in the building, a half-pint of evidence in my coat pocket that nobody searched. The magistrate was a heavy, solemn fellow who held his gavel like a man disappointed by juries and wishing to take it out on furniture. The charge was read: unlicensed distillation, and sale of spirits without paying the federal excise.

I rose and asked leave, with the greatest respect to the court and to the late Mr. Lincoln, to argue the natural alchemical rights of a free Yankee. Somebody coughed. A woman in the gallery crossed herself, and I do not think she was even Catholic. For four thousand years, I said, men have been separating the spirit from the grain. The Egyptians did it. The Greeks did it. The Arabs gave us the very word, alembic, al-ambiq, the still head, and the old philosophers held that the spirit lives in every fermented thing and is the right of any man with the wit to draw it forth. When the Almighty put the sugar in the apple, the yeast in the air and the fire in the stove, did He write in the margin that a Washington clerk must be paid two dollars for the result?

Then I turned to the sheriff and asked whether he, a man of honour who had tasted the work, had detected any poison, adulteration or fraud upon the public. Caught in a trap of his own politeness, he allowed in a very small voice that it was a fine product. The magistrate banged for order. Not for silence, mark you, but for order, which meant he was already thinking.

He found that I had operated an illegal still, that the government had a legitimate interest in the excise, and that I had been unhelpful to the Union treasury. He further found that it was August, that the Concord jail was full of men who had done worse than make a good drink, and that a month's sentence would oblige him to feed me, and he was told I eat like a Baptist at a funeral. Twenty dollars, for an offence that a thorough assessor would have tallied in the hundreds of back excise. Some say the sheriff whispered to him. Some say the magistrate kept a jar at home. I say no man in power wished to explain to every farmer in the Suncook Valley why they could no longer have a tooth pulled by a man with steady hands and a bad attitude. A dentist, a blacksmith, a patriot and a nuisance: that is the full set of qualifications for permanent civic immunity.

What the Docket Remembers

My visitor Miss Clara Higgins, a mountain herbalist out of the Blue Ridge of Virginia, keeps every name the hills ever hung on a jar: white lightning, mountain dew, rotgut, and panther's breath, because it screams at you all the way down. She went digging through the Merrimack County docket and claims my fine was paid in two ten-dollar notes plus one jar of blackberry cordial for the clerk's cough. I distinctly recall paying in coin, and I will not have my memory slandered by a clerk with a cough. That same clerk, she says, entered the seized goods as medicinal tooth tincture, and the phrase became local slang for anything poured behind a closed door. A man would say he was going to see about his tooth, and his wife knew better than to ask which one.

Her great-aunt carried samples to court in hollowed gourds labelled sassafras tonic, and handed one to the jury foreman to settle his stomach. It settled it so fine he was nodding not guilty before the prosecutor sat down, for a real mountain run smells like autumn rain on ripe sweetcorn. Miss Clara's moral I set down whole: “the law and the jar have always walked hand in hand. Folks just dress it up in nicer names so everybody keeps their dignity.”

At the Apparatus: Mash, Copper and the Lead Question

Now to the anvil, for a man who talks only of the crime and never the craft is a gossip. A still is not complicated, and that is why it is beautiful: a pot, a head, an arm, and a worm or condenser. Fire under the pot, vapour rising, vapour cooling and falling as liquid. Everything else is judgment. The mash comes first, and a good mash is a patient one. Cook your corn, rye or a little barley with water until the starch gives up its sweetness, cool it, add yeast, and leave it a few days or a week. The yeast eats the sugar and breathes out carbon dioxide and alcohol, and you have a wash of only a few percent, no stronger than weak cider, stinking like a wet barn. Every honest distiller loves that smell, and every wife hates it.

Why copper? The sulphur compounds off a fermenting wash make spirit taste of boiled eggs and rotten cabbage, and copper reacts with them and pulls them from the vapour. The old distillers knew the result if not the chemistry: copper makes a sweeter spirit than an iron pot, and a tin pot tastes of nothing but tin. Copper also takes heat beautifully and works under the hammer like warm butter. But hear me plainly: never use lead. No lead solder, no old pipe of unknown origin. Lead builds in the blood, bones and brain and makes a man stupid, then sick, then dead. Clean copper, clean silver solder or proper fitted unions, and nothing else. And mind your fire, for a still is a pot of flammable vapour under pressure, and a leak near an open flame is not a mishap but an obituary. Keep the fire low, the joints tight, the room ventilated, and never leave it unattended for a trip to the privy.

The Cuts, and a Letter About Hickory Ash

The cuts are the heart of the experiment. First come the foreshots, carrying methanol, which blinds and kills: throw them away, do not taste them, and do not offer them to a sheriff. Then the heads, harsh and smelling of paint and solvent, set aside for a lamp or a cleaning cloth. Then the hearts, sweet and clean, the part a craftsman is proud of. Last the tails, oily and tasting of wet cardboard and old socks, kept apart and perhaps redistilled with the next batch. The cut is made by smell, taste, temperature, experience, and a little by prayer. A man who knows his cuts is a distiller; one who does not is a poisoner with a hobby. And let it be recorded that making spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law; practise the craft lawfully, for fuel, essential oils or the instruction of the young.

A correspondent, Cletus Miller, called Rabbit, of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, writes: “my uncle swears old-timers used to throw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads.” Your uncle is half right and half pickled, Rabbit. The thump keg sits between still and worm; hot vapour bubbles through a charge of liquid and is distilled a second time, giving a stronger, cleaner spirit in one run. But it is a doubler, not a filter. Hardwood charcoal properly made does adsorb some harsh compounds, which is why some whiskey is filtered through charcoal and a charred oak barrel mellows young spirit. Loose ash or raw shavings, however, remove no methanol. Only an honest cut does that. Discard your foreshots and heads, run your hearts, keep your tails apart, and if you want the smoothing of wood, age the finished spirit in charred oak and be patient, for patience is cheaper than ash and works better.

As for my twenty dollars, I paid it in coin, every piece first counterstamped G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., so that for years the Merrimack County treasury circulated my name in the pockets of honest citizens: the only advertising a man of my stature requires, and paid for by the state. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low.