Wine Gallon vs. Imperial Gallon: A History of Short Measure in Spirits

The Gallon That Wasn't

Friend and fellow alchemist, you would think a gallon was a gallon the way a molar is a molar. It is not. Every man in Merrimack County swears his jug holds more than it does, and every woman in Merrimack County has learned to smile and say nothing about it. Before I go further, I will say plainly what the Collector at Concord has made certain I know, twice over: making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of the United States, and what follows is set down for history and education only.

When this country was still English, England kept three gallons going at once. There was the wine gallon of two hundred and thirty-one cubic inches, fixed by a statute of Queen Anne in 1707. There was the ale gallon of about two hundred and eighty-two, for a brewer wants more room for his foam. And there was the corn gallon, the dry gallon, of around two hundred sixty-eight and eight-tenths, for measuring grain. That is two more gallons than an honest man needs and one fewer than a lawyer can bill for.

In 1824 the British, never content, threw all three out and made the imperial gallon of about two hundred seventy-seven and four-tenths cubic inches. A gallon bought in Montreal therefore holds about a fifth more than one bought in Pittsfield. A Canadian gallon is like a Canadian winter: bigger than ours, and the fellow who brings it down will not stop talking about it.

Sealers, Gaugers and the Proof Gallon

Our Congress took up the matter by joint resolution in 1836, directing the Treasury to send every state a set of standard weights and measures. An old Swiss surveyor named Ferdinand Hassler fussed over the brass and settled us upon Queen Anne's wine gallon of two hundred thirty-one cubic inches. From the state the standards trickled down to the towns, where every New Hampshire town chooses a sealer of weights and measures, a man paid about fifty cents a year to be hated by every merchant on the turnpike. He tests your pewter quart against the true one and stamps it if it measures honest. If it measures short he is supposed to condemn it, unless the tavern keeper is his brother-in-law, and in Merrimack County everybody is somebody's brother-in-law.

Since Mr. Lincoln's tax came in, the revenue men have joined the fight. The government no longer merely counts your gallons; it counts proof gallons, so that a stronger spirit owes more than a weak one. The gauger comes up the lane with a long notched gauging rod for your casks and a glass hydrometer bobbing in a tin cup for your strength. His rod is the only stick in New Hampshire a man is gladder to see go into somebody else's barrel.

And barrels! By the wine gallon a barrel ought to be thirty-one and a half. One cooper in Barnstead swears his whiskey barrel holds forty; his cousin in Epsom swears forty-two, and nobody has caught either sober enough to check. A good salt-glazed stoneware jug, like the Bennington pots from the Norton works in Vermont, wears a cobalt-blue 1, 2 or 3 on the shoulder to say its gallons. But a potter throws by eye and thumb, and his 2 means two gallons, give or take a pint, depending on how his wife spoke to him that morning.

One warning, given straight. Keep spirits, cider and vinegar out of cheap lead-glazed redware. The acid draws lead out of the glaze and into the drink, and lead will sour your belly and rot your wits slower than any sheriff. Salt-glazed stoneware is the honest vessel. A redware jug of hard cider is a coffin with a handle.

A Bear's Justice

One summer a Barnstead fellow decided Fort Wilkins jugs were worth counterfeiting. I sell nothing to nobody, as the Collector well knows, but this rascal bought stoneware, scratched my name on the shoulder with a nail, and peddled barn-cellar swill up and down the Suncook as Wilkins' Best. He had no shame, no chin and no front teeth, and I know about the teeth because I pulled two of them in '59 and was never paid.

One moonless night he crept behind the still-house to fill his fakes from my own cask, four jugs on a rope clanking like a tinker's cart. He forgot that Barnaby, my black bear, sleeps with one ear cocked toward that cask. Barnaby took him by the coattail, which gave way like wet birch bark; then by the seat of his trousers, which gave way too; then by what lay underneath, which did not give way at all. The fellow went down upon all four of his jugs and rolled in the crockery like a hog in a nail barrel.

I called the bear off with a ham bone, the only bribe he takes, and spent two hours by lantern light with the thief bent over my anvil while I fished fourteen shards from his hindquarters with my molar forceps. The last was the size of a dollar and still bore a cobalt-blue 2: the only honest measure he ever carried. I punched one of my coppers, G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., set it in his palm as his change, and told him that if he scratched my name on another jug I would scratch it on him.

The Captain's Casebook

Captain Donald Vance spent most of his life in the revenue service hunting copper in these hills, and he is the only revenue man Barnaby has let pass untasted. His first lesson was that the eye lies, and so does the potter. At a Gilmanton farm he lifted a gray jug marked with a cobalt 1 and found it light in the arm. He weighed it full and empty on the miller's scale; a gallon of water runs about eight and a third pounds, spirit a touch lighter, and the jug came up nearly a quarter short. The farmer had paid the potter to throw the foot as thick as a church Bible. Three quarts in a gallon jug.

A Rochester tavern keeper kept two pewter quarts alike in every dent, one honest for the sealer each spring, the other with a hammered false bottom half an inch high, told apart by a single file notch on the handle. Only he and his wife knew it, until he sold her best Sunday bonnet to pay a horse debt. She marched into the Captain's office with the short measure in one hand and the file in the other, declaring, "he may sell my hat, but he will not sell me short."

A peddler from Stanstead, in Canada East, declared his kegs in imperial gallons, which the Captain converted to our wine gallon, making his ten better than twelve. The fellow argued that bigger gallons were more patriotic and ought to be taxed less, then paid in Queen Victoria's coppers and our pennies mixed, counted one at a time onto the Captain's boot. A Pembroke merchant, more cunning still, bought only in January's cold and sold only in July's heat, gaining near three gallons in every hundred because spirit swells when warm. That is why the law reckons proof at sixty degrees.

The last tale is graver. In an Epsom cellar a crock of new cider had been corked and wired tight. Cider keeps working, the gas had nowhere to go, and as a young deputy bent to read the potter's mark the crock let go like a six-pound gun, taking the top of his left ear clean off. He wore the recovered piece on his watch chain for years. As the Captain put it, "a stopped crock of working cider is a bomb that smells nice. Let it breathe."

At the Apparatus: Copper, Cuts and the Shrinking Gallon

Treat the run as the old alchemists treated the marriage of mercury and sulphur, with fewer lies. Your grain or fruit is fermented into a wash of a few parts in the hundred of alcohol. Never fill the pot to the brim; leave a quarter empty at least, for a charge that foams into the cap and arm will plug the vapour path, and a plugged copper still is a cannon pointed at your own belly. Bring the fire up slow and keep it low. Alcohol vapour is heavier than air and rolls along the floor to find the stove, so keep your jars well away from flame, lantern or pipe.

The copper that matters most is what the vapour touches on its way to the worm: the cap, the head and the arm. There the sulphur stink is caught and held, so keep it bright and scrubbed.

Do not run into one great crock. Catch the run in many small jars, a pint or less apiece, numbered as they come, and judge each by the nose. Throw out the foreshots every time and generously; the old rule was better than a gill for every five gallons of wash. Then the heads, sharp and smelling of varnish and headache, go out too. Then the hearts, clean and sweet. Last the tails, oily and wet-dog smelling, set aside to run again with the next charge.

When you bring the hearts down with clean water, add it slow and stir. Here is a fact to win a wager: a gallon of spirit and a gallon of water poured together make less than two gallons, the particles nestling among each other like puppies in a basket. Measure cool, at about sixty degrees, and put the result up in clean salt-glazed stoneware or glass, never redware nor anything soldered with lead.

Ashes, Oak Shavings and the Lying Bead

Cletus "Rabbit" Miller of Wilkesboro wrote that his uncle swears the old-timers threw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads. Ash in water makes lye, as the first settlers learned boiling down potash from whole burnt forests of these hills. Lye is caustic; it eats skin, pits metal, and might blunt a little sourness, but it does nothing to the poison in the heads. As for red oak, put your lips to a stave and you can blow bubbles out the far end into a pail. It is too porous for a tight whiskey barrel; white oak is what holds spirit. Oak in spirit gives colour and tannin over weeks and months, but that is ageing, not cleaning. The only thing that cleans out bad heads is the man at the jars throwing them away.

Lastly, the bead. The turnpike buyer shakes his jug and trusts a big, lingering bead to mean strength. There is a grain of truth in it near half alcohol, but sugar, oils and a hot or cold day all change the bead, and it tells you nothing of whether the heads were cut. The city rectifiers even sold beading oil to fake a fat bead on watered whiskey, which is face paint on a corpse. Judge spirit by honest cuts, an honest hydrometer and an honest maker, never by the bubbles. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low.