Running Apple Spirit by Concord Stagecoach, and the Thump Keg Bead Myth

A Coffin on Wheels, Built in Concord

Before I take you aboard, you should know what sort of conveyance I trusted with my liberty. The coach on our line was a Concord coach, built just down the road by the Abbot-Downing Company. Lewis Downing and J. Stephens Abbot have been turning them out since 1827, and they now ship them clear to California and beyond. They are made of ash and oak, painted as red as a harlot's garter, with landscapes on the doors fit to hang in a bank. The clever part is that there are no iron springs. The body hangs on thoroughbraces, long straps of ox-hide laid layer on layer, so the whole coach rocks fore and aft like a cradle. That suits it, since every man aboard is crying for his mother by Chichester. If you lack a sailor's stomach you will see your supper twice, once going down and once going out the window onto some farmer's stone wall.

Every coach has a boot, a leather-covered hold, one up front under the driver's feet and one at the back. It carries the mail sacks, the express box, ladies' trunks and a parson's hatbox. On certain moonless nights it also carries ten gallons of something that would make the parson take off his hat, and maybe his trousers.

Toll Gates, Shunpikes and the Want of a Railroad

Around the turn of the century this State chartered turnpike corporations the way a drunkard makes friends: freely, and with no thought for tomorrow. Each one hung a pole across the road and set a fellow in a shack to take your pennies. Most of those corporations went bust, and the towns took the roads over and made them free. But a toll keeper is only a highwayman who has given up the horse and taken up a chair, and some never heard that the corporation had died. They kept the gate, the chair and the pennies. A few were toll bridges with a town charter. Others were nothing but a pole, a lantern, and a mean old man with a musket full of nails and no paperwork whatever.

So the Yankee farmer invented the shunpike, a cart track cut through some poor fellow's woodlot to get around the gate. It is the only road in New Hampshire built entirely of thrift and spite, and the best kept in the State. A stagecoach cannot take one, though. It weighs better than a ton of wood and iron and runs on a schedule printed in the Concord paper. The coach goes where the coach goes, gates and all.

Why not the railroad? The Concord Railroad reached the capital back in '42, but nobody has laid an inch of rail up the Suncook Valley. There is talk of a valley line, always talk. Until a locomotive steams through Pittsfield, the stage is how a valley man gets to Concord, and how his merchandise gets there too. Concord is where the thirsty legislators, lawyers and hotel keepers are, and the hotel keepers do not like paying the Washington gaugers their due. Mind you, the law of the United States forbids distilling spirits for drinking without a federal permit. What follows is history: what a scoundrel did, not his map.

Three Gates, One Keg and a Mule Named Obadiah

It was a black October night. I had ten gallons of double-run apple spirit in a little oak keg, cut honestly: heads in the slop bucket, hearts in the keg, tails set by for the next run. It was promised to a Concord hotel keeper on Main Street, who will go unnamed because he still owes me four dollars and his teeth are poor. I paid the driver two dollars and a jar of something extra. He stowed the keg in the rear boot between a sack of Pittsfield mail and a trunk of corsets bound for a Concord dressmaker, wrapped in a horse blanket so it would not slosh. I climbed inside and found myself knee to knee with Mr. Orrin Gage, cousin to the Merrimack County sheriff and a Cold Water Army man. He was a pledge-signer and hymn-howler, and he had preached temperance so long his liver had turned Quaker. When he asked my business, I told him there was a molar in Concord asking for me by name.

Behind the coach on a lead rope trotted Obadiah, a gray mule I had sold to a Concord teamster. His saddlebags were said to hold horseshoes but in fact held two half-gallon jugs of my Pittsfield finest. Owls frightened Obadiah, and so did lanterns. He took his own shadow for a revenue man in disguise. He had the constitution of a Concord legislature: one loud noise and everything he was holding came out at once.

At the Chichester gate a little weasel named Haskell wanted his toll. I paid him with a large cent I had stamped on my own anvil, G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. He bit it, then sniffed and asked what the smell was. I told him it was clove oil for the toothache, a whole case of it, and up went the pole. Past that gate the October ruts threw us about like dice in a cup, and the bung worked loose. The smell rose through the floorboards like the Holy Ghost at a Methodist camp meeting. Gage informed me it was not clove oil. I offered him my flask as a medicinal gum rinse, to be held in the mouth and spat out. Then a deep rut pitched the coach, he grabbed the flask to steady himself, some went in, and he did not spit it out. A temperance man is only a drunkard who has not yet been introduced.

On the Loudon road a great ox of a keeper had hung his lantern at the height of a mule's nose. Obadiah saw it swinging in the dark like a hanged man's eye and lost his mind. He reared and kicked, and as the keeper ran in to seize the rope, Obadiah's bowels gave up everything he had eaten since Sunday, all over the man from the collar down. That keeper went home wearing more mule than coat, and he waved us through to be rid of us. I still had the toll in my pocket.

At the toll bridge over the Merrimack, Gage was singing 'Oh! Susanna' out the window. When the keeper asked about the boot, the sheriff's own cousin hollered that there was nothing in it but the Lord's own clove oil, then fell asleep on my shoulder like a schoolgirl on a sleigh ride. The keeper wanted no part of a drunken sheriff's cousin, and the keg reached Main Street by two in the morning. I hear Orrin woke in a Concord hotel with his pledge card in one boot and my flask in the other.

Crape, Whips and a Hymn-Loving Mule

Miss Clara Higgins, a Blue Ridge herbalist and scholar of rough mountain words, sat by my fire not long ago with stories of her own. On the Valley Turnpike a driver called Hoot Cragg tied black crape to his coach, because no keeper would charge a grieving widow toll on her husband's corpse. He kept it on for near a year. Under the widow's trunks rode three kegs of apple brandy, and the widow was Hoot's sister-in-law, who could weep on command. Hoot also signaled with his whip. Two cracks meant the keeper ahead had been paid. Three meant revenue men, and every still in the hollow went dark. Then a green young driver who loved his whip cracked it three times every quarter mile and emptied a whole hollow. One man hid in a hog wallow for two days.

Her granddaddy's mule, Persimmon, would not cross a covered bridge over the North River until her granny sang 'Shall We Gather at the River,' Robert Lowry's new hymn of last year. After that, the whole family had to sing all three verses at every bridge. Her great-uncle Asa silenced a nosy keeper on the Staunton pike with a basket of green persimmons. As Miss Higgins put it, "his whole face folded up like a purse." She also gave me the soldiers' names for whiskey: tanglefoot, oh-be-joyful, and forty-rod, said to kill a man at forty rods.

Copper, Fire and the Honest Cut

Now to the apparatus, and remember that the law forbids making spirits to drink without a permit. Copper is a strange mistress. Hammered on the stake, it hardens and springs with every blow until it cracks. So you anneal it: heat it well and plunge it in the trough, and it comes out as soft as a bishop's handshake. Steel goes hard when quenched; copper goes soft. Many a country smith has ruined a pot by treating copper like iron.

Start with the ferment, cider or a grain mash, with the yeast kept warm and well fed. A starved yeast worked too hot in a thin mash belches brimstone. Copper's bright skin will grab that sulfur from the vapour, but a healthy ferment lightens the copper's labour, and you should scrub the pot afterward. Charge it no more than two-thirds to three-quarters full. Overfill it, or fire it too hot, and it foams into the arm and pukes, fouling the run. Never seal a still tight. The vapour must have its road out through the worm, and a burst pot will scald the hide off a man's face. Keep the fire low and steady, and keep any flame away from the spirit's outlet.

The stripping run goes fast and yields low wines. The spirit run goes slow, caught in a dozen or two dozen small jars, never one crock. Methanol boils at about one hundred forty-eight degrees, ethanol at about one hundred seventy-three, and water at two hundred twelve. The foreshots come first, sharp and loaded with methanol, and you throw them out. The heads smell of varnish and go to the slop bucket. The hearts, sweet and clean, are your keeper. The tails, oily and smelling of wet dog, you set aside. Freezing cider into applejack makes no cuts at all. Every drop of methanol and fusel oil stays in the barrel, and the old-timers called the result apple palsy. Cut honestly with fire and copper, or do not do it at all.

Ashes, Oak and the Bead That Lies

Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro wrote to ask whether his uncle was right that "hickory ashes or red oak shavings" in the thump keg clean out bad heads. Wood ash is potash, an alkali and cousin to lye. It may soften a little sour acid, but it makes the charge soapy and foamy, and a foamy charge pukes. It does nothing whatever to methanol, which is either gone in the foreshots or in your jar. Red oak is too porous for a tight barrel, which is why coopers use white oak. Its shavings give tannin, colour and bite. That is aging, not cleaning.

The shake test belongs in the same grave. Big, slow beads do show strength near one hundred proof, which is half alcohol by our American measure. They tell you nothing about whether the cut was honest, and cheats add bead oil and soap to fake them. A man who judges his spirit by the bead judges his bride by her bonnet. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest and your fire low.