The Evolution of Frontier Distilling

 

"Moonshine Still 1" by Daniel Eskridge

When the livelihood of most people is subsistence farming, as it is on the frontier, communities are important, but households must be self-sufficient in food production and other basic needs. Survival is often precarious. The better you are at using what you have, and what you can find around you, the better your chances.

Because the new continent was so vast, America had a frontier from the beginning of the 17th century until the end of the 19th, nearly 300 years.

On that frontier, a typical homestead grew one or more cereals, an assortment of fruits and vegetables, and kept animals for work, transportation, food, textiles, hunting, and companionship. They foraged and hunted too. 

One of the first specialists to emerge in a community of grain farmers is a miller and since frontier millers usually are paid in grain, many became distillers. A farmer might take grain to a miller-distiller and instead of taking it back as milled grain, take it back as whiskey (less the miller-distiller’s cut). Whether by farmers themselves or by miller-distillers, most of a frontier community’s surplus grain was distilled into whiskey eventually.

Another early specialist in a typical frontier community was the metalsmith. Blacksmiths made, sold, and repaired iron tools and implements. Coppersmiths made, sold, and repaired copper items, mostly cookware, including stills. An alembic still is, after all, just a pot with a tight-fitting lid, like a pressure cooker. A trickier piece of equipment is the worm, a coiled copper pipe which, submerged in cold water, is used to condense alcohol vapor back into liquid.

Blacksmiths were usually rooted in the community, but coppersmiths often became itinerant peddlers.

A still that held ten or fifteen gallons of mash was big enough for a household supply and maybe a little to trade, depending on how big your family was and how much they drank. A bigger still was usually on the wish list. 

Although copper has always been preferred, stills can be made from other materials. J. W. Dant allegedly made a still from a hollow log. If true, his log still was likely an expedient, quickly replaced with something more suitable. 

How does that even work? The log is hollowed out, as you would a canoe. That’s your fermenter and your still. When fermentation finishes, you place it over hot coals, hot enough to vaporize the alcohol but not so hot as to burn a hole through the log. Then you cover the opening with a heavy wool blanket. When the blanket becomes saturated you wring it out into another vessel. If your still holds out, you can try raising the proof with a second distillation. 

If the whole thing sounds crazy that’s because it is. Don’t try this at home.

A practical still can be made from wood and many were. Commercial-scale wooden stills were common before Prohibition but didn’t come back after repeal.

In time, some farmer-distillers and miller-distillers evolved into full-time distillers. The Beam family claims Jacob Beam made the transition in 1795. The presence of two or more stills in a household’s inventory usually indicates a commercial-scale operation.

There are no good records as to who did any of these things first, just legends and oral histories passed mostly through families. 

We know the first people into a place, as soon as they got their hands on something fermentable, they fermented it. European colonists brought beer and wine with them on their voyages to the New World and tried to make beer from the indigenous grain they called ‘Indian corn’ almost immediately. 

Corn beer didn’t catch on, so they imported barley then grew it.

Once they had fermented more of something than they could drink right away, they distilled it. 

Individuals with the necessary skills were not rare. Almost everyone raised on a farm, which was almost everyone, knew the basics of fermentation and distillation. Some city folks did too. Before refrigeration, fermentation was a kitchen skill for preserving fruits and vegetables, and for making cheese, as well as for alcoholic beverage production. 

Some people, of course, were better at it than others. 

A note about the image: Although its title is "Moonshine Still," the setup depicted is a fair representation of a distillery on the American frontier in just about any period, though probably nicer than most.