Proofing Without a Hydrometer: The Bead, Gunpowder and Fire Tests

Good evening to you, deacons and drunkards alike, from the log fortress of Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike in Pittsfield, where the river runs brown, the mill whistle blows at six, and Barnaby the black bear lies chained beneath my window, mostly on my woodpile. He has this morning eaten a peck of windfall apples and the hind end of a Chichester ram, and he will not be getting the jar.

My subject is the proving of spirit without a hydrometer: how the old-timers told strong from weak with no brass instrument and no government tables. They had three tests, the bead, the gunpowder and the fire, and each has burned, blinded or swindled a better man than you. Treat what follows as the natural philosopher treats his notes, for every run at your copper is an experiment, and these are the records of experiments that went wrong.

Whence Cometh the Word "Proof"

When a man says "proof" he means "proved." Before anybody floated glass and brass in a jar, a buyer poured spirit over a pinch of gunpowder and put a flame to it. If the powder still lit, flashing and smoking through the wet, the spirit was proved. If it sat there sulking like a deacon at a dance, the spirit was under proof, and somebody had been at the well with a bucket.

Here is the joke of it. Powder soaked in spirit generally will not light unless the spirit stands above about fifty-seven parts in a hundred of pure alcohol, which is why the old English proof sat hotter than ours. The story goes that pursers of the Royal Navy proved the sailors' rum ration with powder before the men's own eyes, so no sailor could claim he had been cheated with water, and thence comes "navy strength." Mind you, calling spirit proved because it lit a pinch of powder is like calling a man honest because he did not explode in church.

The English, weary of setting their customs houses afire, turned to instruments: first Mr. Clarke's hydrometer in the last century, then by act of Parliament in 1816 the Sikes hydrometer as the lawful one. It is a brass float with weights that measures how heavy the liquor is. Alcohol is lighter than water, so the higher it floats, the weaker your spirit; the deeper it sinks, the stronger. Here in America proof spirit is reckoned half alcohol by measure at sixty degrees by Mr. Fahrenheit's glass, for spirit swells when warm and shrinks when cold, the same as a sheriff's opinion of himself. A reading in a hot August barn will not agree with one in a January cellar. Thus every Concord gauger carries a brass hydrometer in one pocket, an ivory-backed thermometer in the other, and a little book of tables, making him the only man in New Hampshire who can insult your liquor with arithmetic.

The Gauger, the Bear and the Brass Float

Which brings me to Mr. Thaddeus Pomfret, a gauger of the Concord sort, thin as a rake handle, in spectacles and a waistcoat the colour of old mustard. One November he came up the turnpike after a cask he had heard of, and found it by my still-house window, for I am honest about where I keep things. He drew his sample into a tall glass jar, uncased his lovely brass hydrometer, set the jar on the sill for the light, and bent to read the float with his coat-tails out behind and his hindquarters aimed square at the dooryard. Barnaby's chain reaches exactly to that window. I measured it myself, purely for science.

The bear took the coat-tails first, with a sound like a sail splitting in a gale, then went through broadcloth, trousers and a good pair of red flannel drawers, and came away with a mouthful of Mr. Pomfret's left hind cheek about the size of a breakfast steak. The jar shattered, the thermometer went into the snow, and the hydrometer dropped into Barnaby's open mouth like a communion wafer. Pomfret ran for the Barnstead line, his bare stern flashing like a harvest moon, while every child in Pittsfield came out to watch. I hear he wrote his report standing up.

Three days later Barnaby passed that hydrometer, brass shining and not a dent in it. I scrubbed it an hour at the brook with tongs and lye soap, floated it in a jar of known spirit, and it read true to the mark: the only government instrument in Merrimack County ever to go through a bear and come out honest. It sits on my mantel still. Pomfret never answered my letter offering its return.

A Bead That Lies

Most men in these hills never had a hydrometer, unless they got one from a bear, and so they shook the jar and watched the bead. My master coppersmith, Silas "Hacksaw" McAllister, tells of a Barnstead tavern keeper, Ebenezer Hodge, whose whiskey wore the handsomest bead in three townships, fat and round as peas and standing all afternoon. Silas's Uncle Jedediah, a brass and copper man, judged it too handsome. He carried a dram home, poured it on a sheet of fresh-scoured copper, and watched it dry, not to next to nothing as good spirit will, but to a slick white crust like the ring on a washtub. Ebenezer had been dropping lye soap into his whiskey to puff up the bead while he watered it by the bucket, and lye burns, which may explain why half of Barnstead coughed that winter. Given a choice of the rail or the whole pint before the company, Ebenezer drank, spent the next day blowing bubbles from both ends, and sold honest whiskey ever after.

The bead is like judging a molar by its shine; I have pulled pearly teeth black with rot beneath. Sugar changes the bead, oil changes it, and so do cold and heat. It is a rough guess and nothing more.

Powder and Flame: Three Roads to the Burying Ground

My own first gunpowder test I made at fourteen behind my father's barn, with a spoon of his cider brandy, powder borrowed from his horn without asking, and a cookstove splinter. It went WHOOMPH and took the hair off my right forearm to the elbow and the lashes off one eye, so that for a month I seemed to be winking at the whole town. My father whipped me for the powder, not the brandy.

Silas saw worse at the Gilmanton muster, where Sergeant Asa Dudley, moustache like a broom and eyebrows to match, proved a seller's whiskey on a heap of powder in his left palm, his full horn hanging open on his belt below. The slow match lit the heap, which proved the whiskey, and a spark found the spout of the horn. A big orange cough of flame went up his front, and when the smoke cleared his eyebrows, moustache and forelock were gone, the parade ground smelled of singed hog, and his hand stayed blistered a month. He drew new brows with burnt cork, a trifle high, and a Loudon widow so admired his attentive face that she married him that October. The moral is not to set fire to your face to get a wife. Black powder will go off from a spark, an ember, a nail scraping a rock or a hard rub on a dry day, and this test puts open flame, explosive and spirit together in one place.

The fire test is no kinder. Silas's cousin Abner lit a spoon of spirit in a pewter dish at a July noon to impress a buyer. An alcohol flame in daylight is pale blue and thin, and in that sun it could not be seen at all. Abner judged it out and tipped the jar to pour more, and the flame ran up the stream like a squirrel up a tree, out the neck, and onto his spirit-soaked cuff, burning unseen while his arm hair curled. Silas tackled him into the horse trough; they lost the jar but kept the cousin. Thereafter Silas hammered a copper proving spoon with a three-foot handle and a bowl holding a thimbleful, and the family rule was this: test in the shade or the dark, pour off a little sample and cork the main jar well away, keep clear of still, barrels and fermenters, and never pour onto a flame, even one you are sure is out.

Where Proof Belongs at the Still

I set this down as history and instruction, not invitation, for making spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of the United States. In the old Merrimack rye, a bushel of cracked rye goes into soft water just too hot for the hand, stirred slow and held there to swell the grain; cooled to finger-warm, a peck of barley malt turns the starch to sweetness; cooled to blood warm, it is barrelled, yeasted, covered and left to work several days until the bubbling stops. Strain the wash, charge the pot with liquid and not solids, which scorch, seal the joints with flour paste and run on a LOW fire, for a roaring fire pushes heads into hearts.

Throughout the run the strength falls steady. Old hands shook each jar for a bead, and when the beads grew small and would not stand they knew the tails were knocking; some passed a drop over a candle across the room with Silas's long spoon. Such tests tell you strength. They NEVER tell you safety, for wood alcohol beads and burns like good spirit. Pour out the sharp, glue-pot foreshots, set the harsh heads aside in small jars, keep the clean, grain-sweet hearts, and put by the oily tails. As for copper, it grabs the sulphur up in the cap, arm and worm, so keep it bright. Cut with soft water, slow, and if your whiskey turns milky, Silas says: "The water's just showing you your own greed."

Ash, Oak and the Blue Flame

Cletus "Rabbit" Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, sent word up by rail asking: "My uncle swears old-timers used to throw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads." Rabbit, your uncle is making laundry. Water through hardwood ash in the farmhouse hopper is lye, and hickory makes the strongest, so his keg brews a weak lye that turns liquor slippery and soapy and fakes a bead, Ebenezer's swindle by accident. Red oak's pores run the length of the wood like pipes, which is why coopers build honest barrels of white oak; its shavings lend colour and tannin bite that make young whiskey look old. It dresses the liquor; it does not clean it. The only cure for bad heads is at the spout, every run.

Nor does a blue flame mean safe. Good grain spirit burns pale blue, and so does wood alcohol, and flame colour is no test for lead either. Bead, powder and fire speak of strength alone. Safety lies in clean copper with no lead, a low fire, no open flame near the vapour, and foreshots and heads thrown out. That is the alchemy. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.