Still-House Fire Safety: The Old Firebox, Hardwood vs. Pine, and Alcohol Vapour

The Oldest Killer of Still-Houses

Ask any old hand in the trade what kills a still, and he will name the revenue man before he has finished drawing breath. He is wrong. The true answer is fire. For every still the government ever broke with an axe, I would wager two were turned to ash by their own owners. Every one of those owners believed he could run a hot fire and keep his good sense at the same time. My own eyebrows have been burned off so many times that the last pair grew back gray out of pure exhaustion, so you may take what follows as the testimony of an injured party.

Fire is the distiller's oldest friend and his oldest enemy. It warms the pot and cooks the mash. Turn your back on it and it will eat your still-house, your boots, and the eyebrows off your face. Here in Pittsfield, incorporated in 1782, every mill along the Suncook falls learned that lesson the hard way. Fire and spirit live in the same house the way a cat and a dog do: they can get along, but only if somebody stands between them with a broom. I have seen a still-house go up on the shoulder of Catamount Mountain so bright you could have read your Bible by it from the village, if any man in this valley read his Bible, which none of them do.

The old still of New England and the mountain South alike was a copper pot on a firebox. You laid up a hearth of brick, fieldstone or plain clay, set the pot in it like a hen on her nest, built a fire beneath, and ran a flue or chimney to carry the smoke and sparks out the roof. That was the whole contraption: a pot, a fire, and the smoke, which good masonry carried away from your face. The big distilleries of Boston and Philadelphia have gone more and more to steam heat and water-jacketed pots. These put the open flame in another room altogether, or wrap the pot in hot water so the heat comes gentle and even. It is safer, and it is costly. So in the hill country we still keep the old way: a firebox, a woodpile, and a man who is awake.

The Deputy on the Roof

A chimney has a law of its own, and one Merrimack County deputy learned it at my expense, or rather at his. It was the dry back end of one October, a fine smoky evening. This young officer, whose name I will spare because his mother still buys liniment from me, meant to catch me at the pot without ever setting foot past Barnaby, the black bear who keeps my gate on the end of a chain. His plan was to climb my roof, stuff a wet feed sack down the chimney, and smoke me out the front door into his waiting arms like a fox out of a den.

Up he went, quiet as a cat in sock feet, and down went the sack. But whatever goes down a chimney comes back up, straight into the face of the fool who sent it. My hearth backed up for about as long as it takes to say the Lord's Prayer badly. Then the draft turned, the sack began to smolder, and a column of greasy black smoke boiled out of the chimney mouth and swallowed him whole. He coughed like a consumptive goose and swore words I had not heard since the Mexican War.

Barnaby does not hold with fire of any kind. He smelled the smoke, rose to his full length, which is longer than a church pew, and took one swipe at the ladder. Down it came. The deputy spent the next quarter hour clinging to my chimney like a tick on a dog's ear. His trousers caught on the flashing and tore from belt to knee, and the whole of Route 28 got a moonlit view of a part of county government it had never voted for. When he slid down at last, Barnaby sniffed him over and declined to eat him on grounds of seasoning. I gave the poor fellow water, a rag and my old work trousers, and sent him home. He left his warrant on my doorstep. It lit the next morning's kindling, and I can report that it burns faster than pine, gives off less heat, and smells worse.

Hardwood, Pine, and the Hen Fire

Everything starts with the wood. The Yankee distiller of my father's day burned seasoned hardwood: maple, beech, oak, and a stick of ash if he had one. Hardwood burns steady, gives a long even heat, and settles into coals a man can manage. Pine is another animal. It is full of pitch, so it flares, spits and throws sparks up the flue. It also coats the chimney with black creosote, which will one day catch and roar like the Devil's own bellows. A pine-knot fire is like a Concord politician: it makes a grand blaze, throws sparks at everybody, and leaves nothing behind but soot and a smell.

Miss Clara Higgins, an herbalist who came up the turnpike from the Blue Ridge of Virginia to sit by my fire, told me of one Ephraim Lusk of Floyd County. Ephraim was tight with a dollar and lazy about his woodpile. One cold morning he wanted his pot hot in a hurry and shoved in a whole armload of pitchy pine knots. The pine went off like a powder keg and blew out the firebox door with a sound like a mule kick. The flare took off the left half of his beard clean to the skin. Ephraim was too proud to shave the right half to match, and wore it lopsided to meeting for a month. In those mountains, a man who runs his fire too hot and pays for it is now said to have been half-Lusked. I have been half-Lusked twice and fully Lusked once, and the full one happened in front of a widow I had hoped to marry.

Steady heat matters for more than your whiskers. A pot run too hot, or one that swings from cold to hot like a drunk on a fence rail, will puke. That is the trade word, and it is as pretty as it sounds. The charge foams up the neck and spews into the worm, and you get slop that tastes like a wet dog's dinner. Run hotter still and the solids scorch on the bottom, and every drop tastes of burnt toast and regret. Miss Clara's great-grandmother Delphy ran her fire by ear. When the pot hummed low like a beehive in clover she fed it a stick, and when it whistled and chattered like a jaybird she pulled one out with the tongs. Her people distinguish two sorts of fire: "A hen fire is low and patient. It sets steady, never squawks, and turns out a good egg every time. A rooster fire is the other sort. It's loud and proud, it crows at sunup, and by noon it's burnt the barn to the ground."

Vapour That Hunts Along the Floor

Now to the natural philosophy of the matter. Alcohol vapour is heavier than air. It does not rise politely like woodsmoke. It sinks and creeps along the floor into the low corners, like a cat hunting a mouse, until it finds a spark. More than one still-house has been blown apart by a stray drip at the collecting end and a lantern set on the floor. So the old masters laid out a still-house for fire before anything else. Firebox and flue sent the smoke up and away, and the place where spirit left the worm stood well off from the flame, out of the draft and away from the hearth. Miss Clara's grandmother never let a lantern sit lower than her own shoulder, which shows she knew her physics better than half of Harvard College.

Worse still, a spirit fire may be invisible. Miss Clara told of a neighbor in the hollow below her grandmother's place who knocked over a crock at the tail of his still one bright summer afternoon. It ran downhill through the leaves to a lantern left burning on a stump, and it caught. In that sun no flame showed at all, only a shimmer like heat on a summer road. The fire ran back up the wet track to his boots. Nobody knew anything was wrong until they smelled singed felt and his boy hollered that Pap was smoking like a ham. Two men rolled him down a sand bank into the branch, and he came up wet, mad and alive, with a bald spot shaped like the state of Tennessee. After that the grandmother hung a flour sack of creek sand by every still-house door on the mountain. She called it the parson, because it was the only thing in the hollow that could put out hell.

Five Principles at the Firebox

I speak here as a historian and a metal-man, not as your teacher. The law is plain: making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is illegal in these United States. What follows is for licensed men and for those running water and herbs for oils and tinctures.

First, lay out the house for fire, as described above. Second, bring the heat up slow and keep it steady. Copper carries heat as eagerly as a gossip carries news, which is a blessing to the patient man and a curse to the hasty one. Third, never leave a running still alone: not for a pipe, not for supper, not for the prettiest widow in Barnstead. If a line clogs with mash or a joint is sealed too tight, the pressure builds until something gives. Then scalding, flammable liquor sprays straight over an open fire. Fourth, check your joints and seams cold, before the fire is lit, and never by waving a candle along them while the pot runs. That is how I lost the eyebrows I mentioned. Use clean copper with joints made by a proper smith, and never lead solder or scavenged junk. Fifth, keep your parson ready: dry sand by the door, a barrel of water beside it, a good blanket, and a clear path out. Wipe up spills at once, well away from the hearth. An unwatched still is a widow-maker with a copper hat on.

Fire and cuts walk hand in hand. A steady fire lets a man see his cuts clearly as the run comes over. The foreshots and heads are thrown away and never drunk, the hearts are the good spirit, and the tails are set aside. A rooster fire smears them all together, and that endangers your customers, not merely your reputation. As Miss Clara put it, "A hot fire makes a liar out of an honest pot."

Ashes in the Doubler and the Blue-Flame Myth

Cletus "Rabbit" Miller wrote up from Wilkesboro, North Carolina, to ask whether his uncle was right that old-timers threw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads. Rabbit, hickory ash is not a cure. It is a chemical. Pour water through hardwood ashes and what drips out is lye, the same lye your grandmother boiled with tallow for soap and soaked corn in for hominy. Put it in the doubler and you are not cleaning out bad heads. You are putting washing day into the liquor. The red oak shavings are only show, and they do the poison no harm. The true cure is a slow, steady fire and honest cuts with the heads thrown away. Hickory belongs in the firebox, under the pot, and nowhere inside it.

While I had my punch out, stamping one more large cent with G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., I put another old myth on the anvil. Some men touch a match to a spoonful of spirit and swear that a blue flame means the spirit is safe, or that the colour of the flame will warn of poison. Bosh. The flame tells you only that the spirit is strong enough to burn. Methanol, the wood alcohol that blinds and kills, burns with a pale blue flame of its own. Worse, the men who play this trick usually play it right beside the still, with vapour creeping along the floor and an open jug at their elbow. I have known a man to light a spoon to prove his liquor and end up proving his still-house would burn. If a burning spoonful proved purity, every barn fire in Merrimack County would be a certificate of it.

So remember: hardwood, not pine. Keep a hen fire, not a rooster, never leave the pot alone, and keep the parson by the door. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low.