The Great Pittsfield Mash Flood of 1866: A Burst Vat and Lessons in Safe Distilling

A Barrel That Has Grown Proud

Every April my bear Barnaby catches the smell of sour mash on the wind and licks the window glass of Fort Wilkins as though it were 1866 all over again. A bear forgets his own mother, but he never forgets a free drink. Pittsfield remembers too, though the town tells the tale in a whisper and holds its nose. This is the story of the Great Pittsfield Mash Flood, and of what every man at his own apparatus may learn from it.

The English, as they like to remind us, got there first. On the seventeenth of October, 1814, a great porter vat at Meux's Horse Shoe Brewery, near Tottenham Court Road in London, burst its iron hoops. A wave of beer heavy enough to knock down a brick wall poured into the cellars of the poor folk who lived behind it, and eight souls died, drowned or crushed. When I first read of it I laughed, and then I stopped laughing. A vat is only a barrel that has grown proud.

Consider how one is built. Staves of wood are raised side by side like the ribs of a cow, and hoops are driven down over them to squeeze them tight. Wet wood swells and seals itself; a vat left empty and dry shrinks and weeps. Let one iron hoop rust unnoticed and the whole weight of the mash leans on the hoops that remain. A gallon of mash weighs a little over eight pounds. Six hundred gallons is two and a half tons of sour porridge pushing against a few strips of iron.

The Borrowed Hoop

My great vat came from a cooper in Epsom: white pine staves, three iron hoops. That winter I borrowed the middle hoop, borrowed being the word a Yankee uses when he means took. Deacon Batchelder's mare wanted shoeing, the iron dealer in Concord wanted cash money, and the hoop sat there looking idle. I bound two hickory withes about the vat in its place and told myself they would hold till spring. So I became the first man in Merrimack County to shoe a horse with his own flood.

The mash within was sour mash, done properly, after the method of the late Dr. James Crow of Kentucky, a Scotchman and a physician like myself, who died in 1856. Crow did not invent souring, but he measured it and ran it like a man of science. When a run is finished you keep back part of the spent stillage, the backset, sour as a widow's tongue, and stir it into the next batch. It keeps the mash steady, keeps out the wild bacteria, and makes each batch taste like a cousin of the last. I had kept that vat going on backset since the fall, and the stink of it could knock a crow off a fence a quarter mile off.

The eleventh of April, 1866, was deep in mud season, when the frost leaves the ground and the roads turn to chocolate pudding. The war was a year gone, the two-dollar whiskey tax still hung like a stone about every honest neck, and the mill girls walked up Main Street at noon holding their skirts out of the mire. A little after eleven that morning I heard from the vat shed a sound like a pistol fired inside a church organ. One withe let go, then the other. The staves sprang open like the petals of a great ugly flower, and six hundred gallons of fermenting corn and rye, warm as a dog's belly, went downhill. Fort Wilkins sits above the road, the road runs down to Main Street, and Main Street runs down to the river.

The First Church of the Holy Runoff

Our town drunk, whom I shall call Ezekiel Pound, lay asleep in the gutter outside the harness shop with his hat over his face. The mash came down that gutter like the Red Sea going back where it belonged, lifted him clean off the ground, turned him over twice, and set him down before the Congregational meeting house with his mouth full of corn. He sat up in the river of it and proclaimed to the whole town that the Lord who turned water into wine at Cana had turned Main Street into breakfast at Pittsfield. Then he got down on all fours like a cow at a trough and drank. When Elder Tilton came to scold him, Ezekiel announced the founding of the First Church of the Holy Runoff, a church of one pew, one preacher and one sacrament, all lying face down in the gutter.

The mill girls screamed. A deacon's wife showed more ankle crossing the street than Pittsfield had seen since the Revolution. Hiram Sanborn's hogs broke loose and went in snout first, and the trout and suckers of the Suncook grew so drunk that the boys caught them barehanded. Two of the fish asked for credit.

Worst of all, an assistant assessor of the internal revenue had driven up from Concord that very morning to measure my liquor. I shall call him Mr. Crump. He stepped down from his hired buggy at the foot of my lane just as the mash rounded the shed. It took his legs out from under him like a scythe through timothy, and by the grace of an eddy he slid uphill and fetched up exactly at the end of Barnaby's chain. Barnaby had been lapping the mash by his post, and a bear full of sour mash is a philosopher for about four minutes and a devil after that. He licked the assessor from chin to hairline, taking his eyebrows and a fair piece of his dignity. When Crump rolled over to crawl away, Barnaby bit, and a piece of Concord the size of a breakfast pancake came off along with the wool, linen and drawers that covered it. I stitched the man up in my dentist's chair with silk thread and the strongest dose of hearts I could pour, and he signed a paper saying he slipped. The sheriff came next morning to seize the evidence, and I told him it had left for Barnstead by the noon river. I paid every shopkeeper on Main Street in coppers stamped at my anvil, G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. Ezekiel demanded his share as well, for clergy services.

Ducks, Bonnets and Apple Palsy

Miss Clara Higgins, a herbalist of the Blue Ridge of Virginia, came north to the fort and told me the mountain folk know such floods well. Her Uncle Asa of Floyd County kept a hogshead of persimmon beer, ripe fruit mashed with wheat bran and left to work, in his springhouse. One spring a hoop let go, the branch ran pink for a mile and a half, and the Widow Akers's ducks swam in circles till a drake staggered off to court the preacher's wife's Sunday bonnet. Of Ezekiel she gave me the proper mountain word: "We'd say he was mash-struck, Doctor. That's a man so overcome by the smell of a spill that he gets religion and the hiccups at the same time." Ground where mash has soaked in, she says, is a hog-heaven patch. Main Street was one from the meeting house to the bridge.

Miss Higgins brought two warnings with her. Applejack frozen out of hard cider keeps everything foul in the cider, for only the water is thrown away with the ice, and her great-grandmother called the shaking sickness that followed apple palsy. And persimmon brandy wants patience and a frost. Her cousin Lem picked his fruit green in September; the mash hardly worked and the spirit tasted like a tanned harness strap. Wait till the fruit is soft as pudding and sweet as Sunday.

The Mash and the Still

Making spirits without the government's permit is against the law of these United States, and what follows is history. Cook cracked corn in water until it is thick and swollen, for raw starch is locked tight against the yeast. Cool it a little below scalding, then stir in malted barley or rye, whose ferment the French chemists Payen and Persoz named diastase in 1833; it turns starch to sugar. Cool again to blood-warm or a touch under, add yeast and about a quarter of the volume in backset, and let it work. Overheated or starved yeast works angry and breathes out rotten-egg gas. In three to five days the cap drops and the bubbling slows to a whisper. Do not let the wash stand too long, and keep all three hoops on the vat.

Strain the wash off the heavy grain so it will not scorch, and charge the pot no more than three-quarters full, lest it puke into your worm. Rye paste cracks when it dries and leaks when it does not. Alcohol vapour is heavier than air: it creeps along the floor toward your firebox like a cat. Never walk away from a lit still, not for a woman, a sheriff or a bear. Keep the copper of your helmet and lyne arm bright, for it takes up the sulfur from the vapour. A dull helmet is a lazy policeman.

The Cuts, and Three Idols Knocked Down

Bring the fire up slow. The foreshots come first, sharp as a druggist's back room, and they belong on the ground or in the lamp. Methanol boils at about 148 degrees by the Fahrenheit glass and ethanol at about 173, but they run together and never come off neatly apart, so throw away the heads generously as well. Fruit carries pectin and yields more methanol than corn, so fruit brandy wants a heavier hand on the cuts. Keep the sweet hearts, and set aside the tails when the spirit smells of wet dog and old cardboard. A tooth-puller knows half a pull is worse than none. Make the whole cut.

Cletus "Rabbit" Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, writes that his uncle throws hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads. Hardwood ash is the potash our grandfathers leached and shipped to England for glass and soap. It may alter acids and taste, perhaps toward soap, but methanol walks right past it. Red oak is open in the grain, its pores running end to end like straws, which is why tight barrels are white oak and red oak holds flour and nails. In hot vapour it gives you tannic pucker and a muddy colour, and not one drop of safety. As for the blue-flame test, flame colour cannot reliably reveal lead, and methanol burns as pretty a pale blue as any honest spirit. The only proof worth having is a still with no lead solder anywhere in it and a distiller who makes his cuts.

The assessor lived, and I am told he sits sideways at church. I rebuilt the vat with three new hoops and nothing borrowed. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest and your fire low.