The Bear Who Wouldn't Leave the Still: Barnaby's Winter at Fort Wilkins

Neighbors, rogues, widows and gentlemen of uncertain employment: I set down for you here the highest and hairiest piece of lore Fort Wilkins owns. This is the winter Barnaby, my four-hundred-pound black bear, drew his staple, shouldered open my boiler-room door, wrapped himself around my thump keg like a drunk around a hitching post, and would not leave until the peepers sang in April. He was there four months, in a warm room, and he broke wind like a field cannon and snored like a sawmill with a broken belt. I offer it as history and as education. Making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of these United States, and I tell you so with the straight face of a man who has been arrested for it twice.

The Apple Before the Bear

Before you can understand what the bear was running from, you must go back to the apple. Long before any Scotch-Irishman coiled a worm in these hills, New England ran on cider. Our great-grandfathers planted orchards before they built meetinghouses, and a colonial farm put up barrel after barrel of hard cider every fall. The children drank it watered, the parson drank it straight, and the hired man drank whatever the parson left behind the pulpit.

Now try an experiment of Nature's own. Leave cider on a north porch in a Merrimack County January and the water freezes first, while the spirit does not freeze so readily. The old-timers let a barrel freeze, knocked a hole through the ice crust, and drew off the dark, strong heart pooled in the middle. That is jacking, and what comes out is applejack. Mark what Grandpa never told you, because Grandpa was usually face-down in the woodshed. Jacking takes out nothing but water. The fusel oils, the harsh alcohols and the dose of wood spirit all stay in the jug and only get packed tighter. A still lets you separate the bad from the good. A frozen barrel hands you the whole sinful congregation in a smaller pew.

Apples are worse than grain in this respect. They carry a deal of pectin, the stuff that makes your wife's jelly set, and in fermenting it breaks down into more wood spirit than a plain corn mash ever makes. The fruit-brandy man must therefore be the most careful cutter in the trade.

The Night Barnaby Drank the Porch

December of 1864. The boys were still in the trenches before Petersburg, and up here the cold came down so hard the ink froze in the town clerk's bottle. I had three barrels jacking on the north porch, just where Barnaby's chain could reach if he stretched. He stretched. He hooked a claw in the first bung, pried it the way I pry a molar, and sucked the slush heart out of all three barrels in one night.

By morning he was on his back in the snow with all four legs in the air like a dead mule, moaning like a Gilmanton tenor at a funeral. Then he gave back about two gallons of half-thawed applejack and a raccoon I did not know he had eaten. It froze to the porch boards, and I chipped it off with my bridge-work chisel.

The next morning his iron staple had been drawn clean out of the log like a rotten tooth, and my boiler-room door hung off its leather hinges. The boiler room is the lean-to behind the brick wall where my firebox lives. The firebox heats the water bath my pot sits in, and the pipe runs through the wall to the still proper. It is the warmest room in Pittsfield, and there lay Barnaby, curled round my thump keg with his chin on the swan neck. He ate the molasses trail I laid to the door, then the pail. Hosea Leavitt played Old Dan Tucker at full gallop on his fiddle and the bear slept through it, which is the most honest review Hosea's fiddling has ever had. A wintering bear does not truly sleep as a woodchuck does. I timed his heart against my pocket watch and found it slowed to near nothing. But he can wake, and when he does he comes up mean, stupid and fast, all three at once.

A Deputy Mistakes a Bear for a Buffalo Robe

January of '65 brought a black, moonless night. A county deputy I shall call Thorne crept in through the woodlot with a warrant in his coat and a dark lantern shuttered. He felt his way along the brick of my boiler room until his hand found a big soft heap of fur draped over what he was certain was my thump keg. Taking it for a buffalo robe thrown over the evidence, he got a good two-fisted grip and yanked.

Barnaby came off that floor like a chimney falling upward. One swipe opened Thorne's greatcoat from collar to tails like a gutted trout. The second took his trousers, his drawers, and a slab of hindquarter the size of a church hymnal. The deputy's scream cracked a jar of hearts on the shelf, and that jar was worth more than his salary. He ran bare-bottomed down the Turnpike in eleven-below, leaving one boot in Barnaby's mouth, and I found him half a mile down Route 28 sitting in a snowbank, steaming like a boiled pudding. I hauled him home on a hand sled and stitched his backside on my kitchen table with waxed linen thread, nineteen stitches. He bit his leather strap so hard he cracked a molar, so I pulled that as well and charged him nothing for either. Barnaby ate the warrant, which makes him the only creature in the county ever to digest the law.

A Seam Soldered to a Bear's Snore

No man spent more hours with Barnaby that winter than Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister, master coppersmith and thumper builder of Pittsfield. "Some smells stay in a man's beard like a debt," he says, and he still smells this one. In February the thump keg wept liquor at a side seam. I drained it, rinsed it and aired the room a full day first, because you never bring flame or solder near a vessel that has held spirit until it is empty, washed and aired. The bad seam lay on the side the bear was sleeping against, so Silas slid in on his back beneath the keg, and Barnaby laid his whole belly across his shins. For three hours Silas cleaned the seam bright, fluxed it and ran silver solder, never lead. He learned to tap with his planishing hammer between snores, and the seam held tight for years.

A week later Barnaby rolled against the firebox door and singed off a patch of fur the size of a dinner plate. I put the fire out with my hat. Silas hammered a curved copper guard rail and set it on iron pins a hand's width off the door. The bear licked it nightly like maple candy until one patch shone like a mirror while the rest went green as a frog. In March Barnaby took the condenser tub for his private necessary. Silas pulled the worm coil by coil, scoured it with sand and vinegar, rinsed it, scalded it, rinsed it again, and then dumped and scrubbed the tub. Nothing touches spirit until it is cleaner than it was new.

The Sparrow That Did What No Man Could

Late in March I fired up for the first run of spring. A sparrow had nested in the flue cap, and a winter of shed bear fur had packed in behind the nest. Within a quarter hour Silas's head was splitting and his eyes swam, though he smelled nothing out of the ordinary. Barnaby staggered out through what was left of the door, and Silas crawled after him into a drift. I pulled the stovepipe with a pole and hook. I say this without a joke: a choked flue in a closed room fills it with fumes you cannot smell, and men die of it every winter. Keep your chimneys swept, your flue caps clear, and fresh air in any room with a fire. Silas fitted the door with his grandfather's Barnstead bear latch, which you must lift and then slide sideways. "A bear will push all day and pull all night, but he never thinks to go sideways." Barnaby never went back in.

Copper, Heat and the Cuts

The boiler room exists for good reason. A pot over open fire scorches thick mash or pomace with a stink no cut removes, but a pot set in a water bath can never get hotter than boiling water. Alcohol vapor is heavier than air and creeps along the floor until it finds a flame, so my fire sits behind brick and my condenser outlet and jars are on the far side. Never leave a running still alone, and never seal it. A still must always breathe out through the end of the worm, for a sealed pot is a bomb with a handle on it.

For apple brandy in the old New England way, pick sound apples, sharp and sweet, cut out the rot, then grind and press them in straw for sweet cider. Barrel it with a loose bung or water seal in a cool cellar for two to four weeks until it is hard, dry and still. Rack the clear cider off the dead yeast. Strip it gently in the water bath until it runs weak, and that gives you your low wines. Run those again, slow. Throw away the foreshots, at the very least a good cupful from every five gallons, and more if in doubt. With apples, always be in doubt. Set aside the heads, which smell of varnish and green apples. Keep the hearts, which smell like a September orchard. Save the tails, flat and oily like wet wool, to run with the next batch. Proof the hearts with a hydrometer, lay them in white oak, and scrub your copper bright between runs. Silas adds that you should check every seam and joint before each run, since a leak you cannot see is how the floor fills with vapor.

Hickory Ash, Red Oak and the Blue Flame

Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, asks whether hickory ashes or red oak shavings in the thump keg clean out bad heads, as his uncle swears. Hickory ash is mostly potash, which is lye, and that alkali can hold back a little sour sharpness, so the old-timer tasted a smoother run. But bad heads are light vapors that boil out early, and lye stops none of them. Worse, lye meeting any fat or oil makes soap that foams over into your worm. Red oak is too open in the grain to hold spirit, which is why barrels are white oak. Its shavings give color and tannin quickly, a flavoring trick and not a cleaner. As for the blue flame, wood spirit itself burns a clean blue, and lead will not reliably show itself in the color of a fire. The only proofs are clean copper, no lead anywhere in the rig, and honest cuts. Rabbit, a large cent struck G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. awaits you. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low.