Why Copper Stills Beat Iron: Heat, Acid, Lead Solder and Honest Cuts

The Fire and the Metal

Every man who has stood over his own pot by lamplight has heard this question argued in a tavern. I have argued it myself from Epsom to Gilmanton Iron Works, and the name of that last place ought to tell you the locals there have been misled. Why does every honest still in New England shine like a new penny, when iron is cheaper and harder and lies in heaps behind every forge in the county? We will settle it the way a natural philosopher settles anything: at the apparatus, with the fire lit.

Begin with heat. Copper carries heat near five times faster than iron. Hold a copper rod and an iron rod in the same forge and the copper will burn your fingers while the iron is still thinking it over. In a still this gives you an even fire. Heat goes into the bottom of a copper pot and spreads the way gossip spreads through a Pittsfield sewing circle: quickly, evenly, and everywhere at once. Iron hoards its heat in one spot, as a miser hoards his coin. You get a hot place over the coals, the mash sticks there and scorches, and the scorch rides up the vapour into your jar. Then you are drinking something that tastes like a church social that burned down with the beans still on the stove.

Next comes the acid. A fermented wash is sour, as sharp as a widow's opinion of her late husband, and that acid eats raw iron. It rusts the inside of the kettle, and the rust goes into the run with a taste like licking a wagon tire in February. Iron is the Baptist of metals: it is fine for a fence, but it goes sour the minute you put spirit in it.

The third reason is that iron and oak are enemies. When iron meets tannin, the bitter part of oak bark and oak galls, the two turn blue-black together. That is iron-gall ink, the ink Mr. Lincoln signed his proclamations with. If a man runs his spirit through iron and then keeps it on oak, he is not making whiskey. He is making stationery.

Potash Kettles, Lead Worms, and the Dry Gripes

New Hampshire knows iron kettles well. Fifty or sixty years ago every farm from here to the Connecticut River was burning stumps, leaching the ashes, and boiling the lye down in great cast-iron potash kettles to sell to the soap-boilers and glassmen. A good many of those farmers looked at that big iron belly and decided they could cook something merrier in it. They did, and what came out was dark, harsh and metallic. If a man wants his whiskey to taste of horseshoe he is welcome to it, but I will sell him the horseshoe cheaper.

Lead is the devil's own solder, and its story is an old one. In 1723 the Massachusetts colony passed a law forbidding lead heads and lead worms in stills. The Boston rum men had been running spirit through lead pipe, and their drinkers were struck with the dry gripes: belly cramps that would make a mule pray, constipation like a corked cannon, and wrists so limp a man could not lift his own hand. Old Ben Franklin, in a letter of 1786, recalled the New England complaints of the dry bellyache from leaded stills and warned that lead does its murder quietly. In England the farmers of Devon suffered a sickness called the Devonshire colic and blamed their cider, until in 1767 a physician named George Baker proved the fault lay in the lead of their presses and fittings. The apple was innocent. The plumbing was the murderer.

Who worked all of this out before any professor in a waistcoat did? The coppersmiths. A coppersmith knows that copper hardens as he hammers it, and that if he heats it red and quenches it in the water tub it goes soft again, which is the opposite of steel. He anneals and hammers, anneals and hammers, a hundred times over a single pot. The most famous of them was Mr. Paul Revere, whose real trade was metal. In 1801 he opened a copper-rolling mill at Canton, Massachusetts, and his sheet copper went onto the bottom of the frigate Constitution and the dome of the State House in Boston. They call her Old Ironsides, yet she wore Revere's copper under her waterline. Iron gets the name and copper does the work. A coppersmith knows more chemistry than a Harvard professor and gets paid in turnips.

The Tinker's Pot

I have learned this lesson in my own yard. Two autumns back a tinker named Absalom Crouch came up the Turnpike from Lowell way. He was a skinny, wet-lipped article, and his wagon rattled like a Methodist's conscience. On the back sat a fat pot shining copper-red, and he offered it to me at half the honest price. I paid him, God forgive me. That evening I scraped the inside of it with my dental scaler. The red came off in a curl as thin as an onion skin, and under it was grey, hungry iron. I knew the trick: dip an iron pot in a bath of blue vitriol and the copper plates onto it in a skin no thicker than a lie, which lasts until the first sour wash eats through it.

At two in the morning Crouch crept back to steal the pot again. He did not know about Barnaby, my black bear. I came out with a lantern and found the tinker on his belly in the mud. Barnaby had his jaws locked on the seat of Crouch's breeches and was shaking him like a terrier with a rat, so that his head knocked against the chopping block on every pass. The breeches gave way, and Barnaby swallowed them, tobacco twist and all. On his way off, one claw opened the man's calf from knee to boot-top. Being a professional man, I stitched him shut with horse-hair, eleven stitches, and while I was at it I pulled a rotten molar and charged him extra. Then I took my money back out of his wagon and sent him down the road in his shirt-tail. I punched one of those refunded cents with my stamp, G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., and nailed it to the iron pot, which still hangs on my barn as a warning. It is the only honest copper the thing ever wore.

A Revenue Man's Testimony

Captain Donald Vance, a retired revenue officer of the Granite and Green Mountains, sat in my parlor lately with more good stories than a government man has any right to. In Grafton County he followed rumours of whiskey that ran black as a stovepipe. The trail led him to a schoolhouse whose inkwells smelled like a tavern, because the schoolmaster had been buying the black run cheap to use for ink. At a nearby farm the Captain found an old cast-iron potash kettle with oak chips thrown into the run for colour. Iron and oak together had made ink by accident, and that ink was a better product than the whiskey.

He once carried three seized pots to an old coppersmith in Lisbon. The smith ran his thumb over the hammer marks like a blind man reading a face, named the makers of two, and then laughed until he had to sit down on his quench tub, because the third was his own work, sold twelve years before to a deacon. As the Captain recalled it, the smith told him, "a coppersmith's hammer is his handwriting, and a man can no more disguise it than he can disguise his own snoring."

His saddest story came from the Androscoggin country. He found a family there grey in the face. The old man's hands hung from the wrist like wet mittens, and his wife was bent double with cramps. A peddler had patched their leaking copper worm with soft lead-and-tin solder. The Captain had the joints cut out and the worm hard-soldered with silver, and he told them to throw out every jar. Months later the old man wrote to say he had buttoned his own coat for the first time in a year. The Captain still keeps that letter. As for his merriest story, he once crept up on a Green Mountain still-house at dusk and ordered a broad, glowing figure to surrender in the name of the Treasury. It was his own face, mustache and all, reflected in a copper pot polished as bright as a looking-glass.

From Mash to Jar

First the lawyer's piece: making distilled spirits for drinking without a permit is against the law of these United States, and what follows is history and education only. For the mash, cook cracked corn in water until it is as thick as porridge, then stir in malted rye or barley while it is warm, and the malt will turn the starch to sugar. Cool it to blood warm, add yeast, and let it work some days in a warm, airy room. Keep a door open, because the gas it breathes out will smother a man in a closed cellar. What remains is the wash, a sour, weak beer, and its sourness is exactly why your vessel must be copper.

The pot should be hammered and annealed, with the seams riveted and hard-soldered with silver or brass spelter, never soft lead. On top of it sits the cap, or helmet, then the arm that carries the vapour over, and then the worm, a long copper coil sitting in a barrel of cold running water. Here is the true alchemy. The wash gives off a sulphur stink of rotten eggs and boiled cabbage. When that vapour rolls across bright copper, the sulphur seizes the metal and stays behind as a black sulphuret crust, so the stink remains in the still and not in your jar. Iron will not do this. So after every run, rinse the still hot, scrub off the black crust and any green verdigris with vinegar and salt, and rinse again with plenty of clean water. Bright copper works. Crusted copper only looks expensive.

Now the fire and the cuts, which is where men die. Charge the pot no more than three parts full. Bring it up slowly on a low, steady fire, and never walk away from it. Keep the worm barrel cold, because warm water lets uncondensed vapour escape, and one spark will make your still-house a bonfire with you inside it. Throw out the foreshots, which are sharp, smell of solvent, and carry the methyl spirit that blinds and kills. Throw out the heads too, which are still harsh and smell of varnish. Keep the hearts, which are sweet and clean. Set aside the tails, oily and smelling of wet dog, to run again with the next batch. Judge the cuts by smell and by a drop rubbed between the palms, and catch the run in many small jars so that a single mistake spoils only one of them.

Ash, Oak, and the Burning Spoon

A question came to me from Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina: "my uncle swears old-timers used to throw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads." His uncle is half right. Hickory ash is potash, and potash is alkaline. A little of it in the keg can catch some of the sour, vinegar-sharp acids in the vapour and hold them back as salts, which softens the taste. The wood alcohol cares nothing for potash, though, and comes straight through. Ash smooths the taste of the poison without removing a single drop of it. Use a light hand besides. Deacon Ebenezer Tilton, a neighbour of mine up toward Catamount Mountain, shovelled a whole bucket into his keg. The ash and the oily tails made plain lye soap, and white lather poured from his worm into his jars, over his boots, and halfway to the barn. Oak shavings give tannin, colour and a woody flavour, like a barrel in a hurry, but they clean nothing, and in an iron keg they make the Captain's schoolhouse ink.

Finally there is the barroom rhyme, "lead burns red and makes you dead." It is good rhyme and bad chemistry. Enough dissolved lead to ruin your wrists will not show itself plainly in a burning spoonful, and the deadly wood alcohol burns with a pale blue flame almost exactly like good spirit. The only test that counts is a still with no lead in it: copper in the pot and the worm, silver or brass in the joints, and the foreshots and heads thrown out. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low.