Never Leave a Running Still: Mash, Cuts and the Blue-Flame Myth

I write this account against a promise I made to the selectmen of Pittsfield, that I would never tell it in public. In this town that is about as strong as an oath gets. But the tale has a lesson in it for every man who keeps a copper pot, so I will set down how my bear Barnaby got loose on town meeting day. First, the plain truth, for a doctor gives the bad news before he takes up the forceps. Making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of the United States, and what follows is offered as history and instruction. A chained bear is a tall tale of the Suncook Valley and no plan for a household. A wild animal fed by hand forgets to fear you, and on the day it forgets, you are its dinner.

The Warrant on the Meeting-House Door

In New Hampshire the government does not come out of a marble building. It comes out of a drafty hall on the second Tuesday of March, smelling of wet wool, horse liniment and two hundred men who have not bathed since the first snow. Ahead of the day the selectmen nail up a warrant listing the articles: a moderator, a town clerk, selectmen, treasurer, highway surveyors. After those come the small offices, and they are the real treasure of the day. We elect hog reeves to catch loose pigs, field drivers to take up stray beasts and drive them to the town pound, fence viewers to settle line-fence quarrels, a surveyor of lumber, a sealer of weights and measures, and a pound keeper. By a custom older than the Republic, every man married since last March is made hog reeve, so the town may watch a bridegroom fall in pig muck in front of his in-laws.

These war years the meetings have turned grim. Every March the town votes bounty money so Pittsfield men may volunteer before Washington drafts them, and I vote aye with my hat off. There is also the town liquor agent, who under this state's dry law sells spirits for medicinal, mechanical and chemical purposes only. Every year somebody moves that the agent be Wilkins, the hall laughs for ten minutes, and the motion dies. This past March the warrant carried an article I had not seen coming, and I tore it off the door and kept it: 'Article Fourteen. To see if the town will vote to require Dr. G. G. Wilkins to remove his bear beyond the limits of the town, or take any action thereon.' They would have sent him off the way you would send off a smallpox case or a Democrat.

Four Hundred Pounds on Article Fourteen

A bear comes out of his winter den thin, sour and as hungry as a lawyer's widow. Barnaby had slept since the first hard frost in a hollow under my woodshed. That Tuesday the sun struck his side of the yard, and a south wind carried the meeting-house dinner down the turnpike to him: beans, brown bread, salt pork and the widow Tuttle's mince pies. He sniffed once, and the ring bolt I had sunk in the oak sill came out like a rotten molar.

I sat in the third row while Deacon Ezra Pottle gave the speech he had worked on all winter, calling a bear a menace to public order and a terror to Christian women. He had just got to Sodom when the back doors opened. Four hundred pounds of bear came down the center aisle, dragging three feet of broken chain, and went straight to the dinner table by the stove. He ate four of the widow's pies and the plate of a fifth, and the crockery cracked between his back teeth like river ice in April. Deputy Horace Plumb drew a horse pistol that had not been fired since the Aroostook War. Barnaby took him by the coat-tails and shook him like a terrier with a rat. The buttons flew, the trouser seat tore loose, and Horace went up a lit stovepipe. His drawers still carry the scorched shape of the damper.

Moderator Josiah Haynes, a man of iron procedure, gavelled the meeting to order with the remark that the Chair saw the bear was present. The Deacon began again, Barnaby looked at him, and the speech dropped out of his hand. Barnaby ate it, three pages of Scripture and slander. On a division of the house, every man went to the left, and the Deacon got there first. Article Fourteen failed with no one voting yea and one bear abstaining. The town then raised fifteen dollars for a stouter chain, and old Asa Blake, drunk since the second article, put Barnaby up for field driver. I seconded. Nothing in the statutes forbade it, so the motion carried, and he has caught strays better than the last man did.

A Revenue Man's Town Meetings

My guest was Captain Donald Vance, a retired revenue man out of Manchester who chased copper through the White Hills and the Green Mountains. In one Vermont hill town he brought a federal warrant into meeting and found that the man he wanted was the moderator, who ruled him out of order and had the paper tabled until the next March. The Captain took his man that night at the supper table, where a plate had been saved for him. In a New Hampshire hill town he found a red heifer reeling and lowing in a stone pound, and under the brush in the corner a copper still and a mash barrel. The pound keeper was the distiller's brother-in-law. Nobody looks in a pound, because it is full of other men's cows. In the Pemigewasset country a sow bear just out of her den drank a mash barrel dry and lay snoring across the trail. His posse ate hardtack on a log for two hours rather than step over her, and by the time she woke the distiller was halfway to Canada. When I asked what a decent man owes his town, the Captain answered: 'Honest copper, honest cuts, and no poison in the jar.' A town will forgive a man a good deal, he said, but it will not forgive him a dead neighbor.

Never Leave a Running Still

Now for my real shame that day. It was not the bear. I had left the still running when I went to vote. On his way out Barnaby rubbed against the still-house door frame and knocked the condenser line loose. If a fresh charge had been coming up hot, the alcohol vapour would have found the firebox, and I would have come home to a black chimney and a cooked bear. As it was, the fire had burned low, and God loves a fool in moderation. So here is the first law of the laboratory, before mash or cuts: never leave a running still, not for town meeting, church or the President. Vapour and open flame will burn a house to its cellar hole.

The Old Way: Mash, Cuts and Copper

As history, here is how the old distillers worked. Crack the corn coarse and boil it in water until it is soft and thick as porridge, which breaks open the starch. Yeast cannot eat starch, so let the pot cool to about a hundred fifty degrees, the heat of a good hot bath, and stir in ground malted barley. Its digesting virtue turns starch to sugar, and after an hour or so of warmth and stirring you will taste the mash go sweet. Cool it to lukewarm, about the heat of milk from the cow, before you pitch the yeast, because hot mash kills yeast. Let it work loosely covered for four or five days in a warm room with a good draft, since fermenting mash breathes out a choking gas.

The result is a sour, beery wash of a few parts in a hundred alcohol. Run it in the copper pot over a low fire. The schoolroom says wood alcohol boils at about a hundred forty-eight degrees, good spirit at about a hundred seventy-three and water at two hundred twelve. In a real pot they come over mixed and smeared together, so the old hands did not trust a thermometer alone. They threw out the foreshots generously, a fixed measure for the size of the charge. They caught the heads in small jars and judged them by the nose: sharp and solvent-like, like a cobbler's glue pot. Those go on the ground. When the smell turns sweet, clean and grainy, you have the hearts, which you keep. When it goes oily and smells of wet dog, those are the tails, and you set them aside. I scrub my pot bright after every run with vinegar and salt, rinse it well and dry it. I want heavy-gauge copper, which spreads the heat evenly and does not scorch the mash, and no lead solder anywhere, not in the seams and not in the worm.

Ash, Oak and the Blue Flame

Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, asked whether his uncle was right that hickory ash or red oak shavings in the thump keg clean out bad heads. The uncle is half right, which is the most dangerous kind of right. Wood ash in water makes lye, a strong alkali. It can turn some of the sour, vinegary acids into salts that stay in the pot, but the poison in the heads is not an acid, and ash does not touch it. Lye burns, too. A Barnstead man who caught hot lye water in the eye from his doubler wore a patch for a month. Oak gives tannin, colour and a woody taste, so the spirit comes out darker and seems older. Darker does not mean cleaner, any more than painting your barn gets you a new horse.

The blue-flame test is the same kind of nonsense. Wood spirit burns as blue as a church candle, so the colour of the flame cannot tell you whether a spoonful will blind you, and a burning spoon is no reliable test for lead from a bad solder joint. The only proof of a clean spirit is a clean still, honest cuts and no lead anywhere in the copper. Barnaby now wears his fifteen-dollar chain on a ring bolt that goes clear through the sill, with a nut I peened over on my own anvil. He has looked at it in a meaningful way. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest and your fire low.