Spring Water vs. River Water for Making Whiskey: Why Granite Springs Win

Half of Every Jar Is Water

Every greenhorn who comes up the Suncook Valley Turnpike with a mule and an ambition asks me about corn, rye, apples and sugar. Hardly one of them asks about water. Yet put your jar on the scale and half of it is plain water, and on the hearts of a run a good deal more than half by the time it is proofed for drinking. My grandfather preached the sermon and I have never improved on it: water is half the whiskey.

Look at your apparatus as a natural philosopher would. Grain is the body of your whiskey, fire is the temper, copper is the conscience, and water is the blood. Bad blood makes a sick man, no matter how handsome his face. Here in Pittsfield a distiller has two sources to choose from. One is the Suncook River, which runs through the village. The other is the granite springs that bubble out of the ledges around Catamount Mountain, cold as a widow's welcome. That argument was settled long ago, and the springs won it hands down.

Clear Water Hides Its Sins

The Suncook rises in the lakes of Barnstead and Gilmanton and comes down past farms, sawmills, the tannery, the privies of every God-fearing household on its banks, and the cotton mill in our own village. Everything Barnstead does in the Suncook, Pittsfield drinks on Tuesday and Epsom drinks the Tuesday after, and Epsom has never once thanked us. My bear Barnaby fished it below the tannery one spring and came home smelling like a boot that had been to a funeral: hemlock bark tannin, hide scrapings, and lime from the hair pits. That water would curdle a Baptist.

You will say the river looks clear on a bright day. So did the water at the Broad Street pump in London in 1854, and it was killing Londoners by the hundred with cholera. A physician named John Snow sat down with a map and a stack of death records and found the dead clustered round that one pump like flies on a dropped pie. He had the parish take the handle off, and the dying slackened. The old saying in these hills that clear water is clean water is false. Clean water comes from a clean source, protected and cold, with no barnyard above it and no privy beside it.

Nor does it matter which way a spring runs. There is an old granny's notion that a spring running north is purer for being nearer the Pole Star. The water does not know which way it is pointed. The rock it came through and the filth it passed on the way decide whether it is good. My own spring runs a little east of south, and it is the best water in Merrimack County.

Granite, Limestone and Ink

Our New Hampshire bedrock is granite, hard and close-grained. Water that soaks down through the hills and comes out of a ledge has been strained through sand and gravel for a long while, and it carries very little dissolved mineral. We call it soft water. A deep spring also keeps near the same temperature summer and winter, about the average warmth of the whole year in that place, which for us is somewhere in the forties. In January it steams like a horse's flank, and in August it will make your teeth ache. I would know, having pulled most of the aching teeth in this county.

I will give the Kentuckians their due. Their water runs over limestone and picks up lime, which is calcium, and the yeast and the mash are fond of it. Limestone country is also mighty poor in iron, and that is a gift to a whiskey man. Kentucky has limestone and fine horses. We have granite and stubborn men, and only one of those ever won a horse race.

Why does iron matter? Ask any clerk with ink on his cuffs. Common writing ink is iron salts mixed with oak gall, and oak gall is tannin. Bring iron-heavy water together with oak, whether a barrel, a stave or a handful of chips, and you are brewing ink. I once tasted a jar from a Northwood man whose well ran red with iron and who had aged it in a new oak keg. It was blue-black as a parson's Sunday coat and tasted like licking a cannon. As for our downstream neighbour Epsom, it is named for Epsom in Surrey, England, whose mineral spring carried so much bitter salt that the English bottled the residue and sold it as a purgative. I will not proof my whiskey with the waters of Epsom.

A Coppersmith Reads the Water

Nobody knows what water does to metal better than the man who hammers the metal. Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister is a third-generation coppersmith with hands like two hams that lost a fistfight with a forge, and he learned this at his father's elbow. Before the elder McAllister would quote a price on a pot, he asked for a jug of the water the buyer meant to use. He set it in a little iron kettle at the back of the forge and boiled it dry, every drop. Whatever the water carried stayed on the kettle bottom. A chalky white crust meant lime, which is hard water and leaves scale in a pot. A rust-red ring meant iron, and whiskey that would come out looking like stove blacking. A bottom that came up near bare, with only a faint film, meant a granite spring, and that man got a good price because his pot was going to last. Any reader may repeat the experiment at his own hearth.

Silas once built a sixty-gallon pot, riveted and silver-soldered, for a Gilmanton man. Six weeks later the man hauled it back in an ox cart and swore the copper was bad. The whole belly had gone a dull black, like the inside of a chimney. It was sulfide. The man's water came from a spring behind his barn that never froze, which his grandmother swore by for her rheumatism, and Silas could smell it from the road. 'That is hydrogen sulfide coming up out of the ground,' he told me, 'and copper takes sulfur to itself greedily and goes black doing it.' The man moved his still water to a granite seep a quarter mile up the hill. Silas scoured the pot with sand and vinegar, and two months later it ran as bright as the day it left his bench.

Another time a Barnstead river man wanted a whole rig from him: pot, cap, arm and worm. He proudly showed Silas the hundred feet of lead pipe he had laid from the Suncook bank to his still-house. Silas would not build him so much as a cap until that pipe was out of the ground. Lead goes into water, worst of all into soft water or sour water that stands in the pipe overnight. From there it goes into the man a little at a time, and it never leaves. First his belly aches, then his hands shake, then his wits wander off. I have seen the blue-gray lead line on the gums of house painters. Silas sat on the man's stone wall and smoked his pipe until the last length was on the cart. A wooden trough went in instead, and the man's wife later told him he had stopped being so peevish.

The Four Duties of Water

First, the law of the house. Making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of these United States, and what follows is set down for history and education.

Water does four jobs in a still-house. The first is the mash. Heat soft spring water until it is too hot to hold your hand in. Stir in a bushel or so of cracked corn slowly so it does not ball up into dumplings, and keep stirring while the starch swells and the kettle goes thick as a Thanksgiving pudding. Let it cool, and many hands then add malted grain to turn the starch to sugar. Whatever is in the water goes straight into the mash, so a tannery taste in the river means a tannery taste in the corn.

The second is the yeast. Pitch it when the mash has cooled to about blood warm. Soft granite water ferments well but gives the yeast less mineral, so keep the fermenter warm and the mash well fed. Some old Yankees throw in a little of the last batch's spent mash to keep things lively. Keep the room aired, for the bubbling mash gives off a gas that will smother a man in a closed cellar before he knows to be afraid.

The third is the worm. During a July heat wave a few summers back, Silas set two twin copper worms side by side, same copper and same turns. One sat in a plank trough fed by a spring running out of the ledge on Catamount. The other sat in a barrel of river water. The spring water came off nearly as cold as it went in, and the spirit ran cool and steady and smelled of clean grain. By noon the river barrel was as warm as dishwater, and the air around it smelled sharp as a tavern. That smell is your whiskey going off into the sky as vapour, and vapour near a fire is how still-houses burn down. Keep your fire low and steady and every joint tight, and never let an open flame near a leak.

While the spirit runs, make your cuts. Foreshots and heads come first. They carry methanol and sharp volatiles that smell like a varnish pot and bring a blind headache or plain blindness, so every drop goes in the discard bucket. Next come the hearts, smooth and sweet, and those are your whiskey. Last come the tails, oily and smelling of wet dog, which you set aside to run again. Any sulfur in the water or mash is taken up by the copper as it passes, so scour your copper after every run with sand and vinegar, then a clean water rinse, and never use lye.

The fourth duty is proofing, and here the granite spring wins the whole war, because this last water goes in raw with no still to clean it. Hard, limey water may cloud your spirit with minerals. Tails left in the hearts will cloud the jar the moment water touches it. Clean hearts and soft water give a jar clear as a February sky over Catamount. A curiosity for the scholars: mix fifty quarts of spirit with fifty of water and the jar warms in your hand, and you will have less than a hundred quarts.

Ashes, Shavings and Other Swamp Medicine

From Wilkesboro, North Carolina, Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller writes that his uncle swears 'old-timers used to throw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads.' Water poured through wood ash makes lye, the potash every farm wife boils with tallow for soap. In a thump keg it knocks down some of the sour smell of a poor run, and that is why the old-timers' noses were fooled. It does not touch the methanol. Red oak shavings will turn white spirit the colour of weak tea, which makes a counterfeit barrel for a buyer who pays old-whiskey prices for amber, but they clean nothing. Red oak is the wrong oak in any case. Its pores run open end to end, so you can blow through a short stick of it, while white oak's pores are plugged and hold liquor tight. If your water carries iron, those shavings will also give you ink. Bad heads are cut out at the spout by a man who is paying attention. I struck a copper cent on my anvil for every myth knocked down. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low.