Why Your Still Weeps: Finding and Sealing Leaks with Flour Paste

Few sights in a still-house are sadder than a slow green tear running down the side of a copper pot. I mean the drip from the seam, the wisp from the cap, the weep that cries away your profit and calls every revenue nose in New England straight to your woodshed. A weeping still is like a weeping widow: it costs you money, it draws a crowd, and sooner or later the law comes around to ask questions. You who stand at your own apparatus are natural philosophers whether you claim the title or not. Every run is an experiment in copper, heat and vapour, and a weep is your apparatus telling you the experiment has gone wrong.

Where the Weeping Began

Weeping stills began wherever a man first put a lid on a pot and expected it to keep its mouth shut. In Scotland and Ireland the highland men and the poteen-boilers in the bogs had no fine machined fittings. They had a pot, a head, a worm and a bowl of oatmeal. They mixed oatmeal or barley meal with water into a thick dough and pressed it into every seam between cap and pot to keep the vapour from sneaking out. The Scots-Irish carried the habit to the Pennsylvania hills, the Carolina mountains and our own granite country. Down South the mountain men call it slobber. In Merrimack County we call it paste, and anybody who calls it slobber at my table can eat outside with the bear.

Copper was a scarce thing for a colonial New England distiller. Until Mr. Paul Revere opened his copper rolling mill at Canton, Massachusetts, in 1801, nobody in this country could roll a proper sheet of it. All of it came over from England, dear as a bishop's dinner. Revere rolled the copper that sheathed the bottom of Old Ironsides and covered the dome of the Massachusetts State House. Before him, a cider-brandy man in Exeter or a rum boiler in Medford might work one pot for forty years and patch it until it was more patch than pot and wept from every seam like a congregation at a hanging.

The honest coppersmiths of that day joined their seams by brazing. That is hard soldering with spelter, a brass solder, and a pinch of borax for flux, worked in a fire hot enough to make the joint glow. A brazed seam takes the heat of a run and laughs at it. A lazy or cheap man used the tinker's soft solder instead, and soft solder on a still is like a cold wife: it looks like it is holding right up until you put some heat to it. Since I pull teeth as well as distil, I will put it in dental terms. A weeping seam is a bleeding gum. The blood is not the trouble. It only shows you where the trouble is, and underneath you will find a crack, a rot or a bad fit.

The Ruin of Ebenezer Crotchett

Ebenezer Crotchett of Epsom, long gone from these parts and his eyebrows gone before him, would not spend a nickel on spelter if a dime's worth of pitch could do the job badly. When his cap seam began to weep he smeared it with pine pitch, slapped soft solder over the top, wrapped the works in a wet rag and tied it down with fence wire. Then a wad of mash clogged his worm. The vapour had nowhere to go, and for once in his life Ebenezer had done a thorough job. His dog ran into the woods, and his wife, who had more sense than the whole Crotchett line, went out to the privy and stayed there.

The cap went up through the shed roof with a bang they heard in Chichester, and the boiling mash came out after it in a scalding brown fountain. It boiled him pink as a Christmas ham from the collar up and took the skin off his left ear, which he peeled for a week and fed to his hogs, because Ebenezer never wasted anything. The lesson is not that Ebenezer was a fool, though he was. He sealed his still so well it could not breathe, and a still that cannot breathe will blow.

What the Wind Carries to Concord

It is seldom the smoke that hangs a moonshiner. It is the smell. A weeping still sends out a sweet, sour, corny breath that drifts across a valley like gossip. A couple of winters back an assessor came up the turnpike from Concord on a hired gray mare, wearing a fur collar and trousers so tight across the seat they looked painted on. My worm connection was weeping that week, and he caught it on the north wind half a mile off. He crept round the back of Fort Wilkins like a heron after a frog, following his nose so closely that he never looked at his feet, and his feet carried him straight over Barnaby's chain.

Barnaby, four hundred pounds of wet black sin, was busy with a frozen ham bone and did not care to be interrupted. He took the whole seat of those trousers, drawers and all, and the man went down the turnpike with his bare hindquarters bouncing like two boiled turnips in a sack, hollering about the Constitution. Barnaby kept the fur collar a week and slept on it. I will speak plainly here: a chained wild bear is a danger to every soul nearby, the owner included, and no one should keep one. The moral is not to get a bear. The moral is to fix your weep before the wind carries it to Concord.

Lessons from the Coppersmith's Bench

Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister works the forge at the Fort Wilkins foundry, and he has crawled inside more crying copper than any undertaker has seen corpses. He once dealt with a Barnstead farmer who packed a finger-long crack in his cap seam with chewed spruce gum, the good Maine kind Curtis has been peddling since forty-eight. It held while the pot was cold. With the fire lit, the gum softened and dripped into the vapour path, and every drop of that run tasted like a Christmas tree soaked in turpentine. Patching a still with spruce gum is like filling a tooth with fudge.

Silas also owns to a seam he ruined himself. He was about fourteen and apprenticed to his father, and he hammered a boiler seam cold for most of a morning without once returning it to the fire. Copper beaten cold work-hardens and goes brittle as a February icicle. His father rang the sheet with a wooden mallet. Good soft copper sings a bright note, but this one gave a flat, dead thunk, so the boy was handed the shears and made to cut the whole seam out. Since then Silas anneals whenever the metal stiffens: he heats it, lets it cool, and sometimes quenches it in the trough. "Soft copper bends and hard copper breaks, and a broken seam weeps."

Paste can fail too. A fierce widow up in Gilmanton stirred blackstrap molasses into her flour paste, and it baked onto her cap like brick in a kiln. Silas spent most of an afternoon getting it off with a cold chisel and mallet while trying not to scar the copper. Plain flour and water does the job and washes off with hot water. As Silas put it: "If it ever comes to a contest between the paste and the copper, you want the paste to lose." His strangest find was at a Chichester farm, where a fat orange tom curled up every night in the same spot by the worm connection. Wet vapour was seeping from a hairline gap there and keeping the metal warm after the fire went down. Under the dust lay a faint line of green verdigris. Silas brazed it that afternoon, and the cat has never forgiven him.

The Four Causes and the Flour-Paste Cure

A still weeps for four reasons. The first is a bad seam, meaning soft solder where brazing belonged, or a cold joint. The second is cracked or tired metal, either copper beaten hard and never annealed or a pot that is more patch than pot. The third is a poor fit at the cap, the arm, the thump keg or the worm. The fourth is heat. Copper grows when heated, so a joint tight as a drum at breakfast may open by dinner. A cold joint is solder that sat on the seam without flowing in. It looks dull, grainy and lumpy, like oatmeal left out overnight. To avoid one, scour the copper bright, use borax for brazing, and heat the work rather than the solder, so the metal draws the solder in the way a dry sponge draws water. Never use tinker's solder, which carries lead. Lead has no business in anything a person eats or drinks.

For the paste, take plain flour. I favour rye, but wheat does fine and the Reverend Sylvester Graham's coarse flour works as well. Work in water a little at a time until it is as stiff as bread dough or glazier's putty, then roll it into a rope as thick as your thumb. Fit the cap dry first so you know it seats true. Then lay the rope around the joint, set the cap down, and press the paste into the seam with your thumbs. Do the same at the arm where it meets the thumper and wherever the line meets the worm, and leave no bubbles or gaps. Bring the fire up low and slow so the paste bakes hard like a crust on a loaf. If you rush it, the paste cracks.

Never seal a still airtight. Keep fresh cold water on the condenser all through the run so the vapour always has an open road to the jar, and let the paste be your weak link on purpose. If it bulges or hisses, kill the fire and look for the blockage once everything has cooled. To hunt a leak, look for a wisp, smell for sweetness, hold a damp cloth near the seam to catch a wet bead, feel for a warm wet patch, and watch for green crust. Never hold a candle or match to your still, because escaping vapour catches fire. Afterward, soften the paste off with hot water, scrub away the crust and dry the copper, since old paste goes sour and breeds green rot. During the run, bring it up gently. The first spirit off is the foulest and must be thrown out. Take your cuts honestly and in order and keep your jars separate. And mark this fine print: making spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against United States law, and everything here is offered for history and education.

Ashes, Oak, and the Self-Healing Weep

Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, asked whether hickory ashes or red oak shavings in the thump keg will clean out bad heads, as his uncle swears. Wet ash makes lye, the potash your grandmother leached and boiled with hog fat for soap. Putting it in your keg adds a caustic to a drink. Oak does change spirit, but that happens in a charred barrel over months and years, not in one hot afternoon in a thump keg. The thump keg makes the spirit stronger. It does not sort the good from the bad. The foul first runnings come off first because of how they boil, and the only cure is the distiller's hand and his jar.

Last, the loafer's saying that a weep will seal itself once the pot gets hot. That is hogwash. Copper swells in the fire, and a weak seam usually opens wider when hot. Some fools call the loss the angels' share, but the angels take their share from a barrel in a cool cellar over years. What comes out of a crack in your cap is your own carelessness. Find it, bank your fire, let the pot cool, and fix it right. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low.