tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-840930092789285091.post5693170338014722176..comments2024-03-19T20:31:23.141-05:00Comments on The Chuck Cowdery Blog: A Tale of Two JacobsChuck Cowderyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12191121480961526039noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-840930092789285091.post-10265994930129824932021-09-18T15:31:44.710-05:002021-09-18T15:31:44.710-05:00Thanks, Chris. I'm lucky to have such smart fr...Thanks, Chris. I'm lucky to have such smart friends.Chuck Cowderyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12191121480961526039noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-840930092789285091.post-69399035172370803742021-09-18T01:04:18.786-05:002021-09-18T01:04:18.786-05:00Jacob Myers Bourbon Furnace has a fascinating whis...Jacob Myers Bourbon Furnace has a fascinating whiskey addendum. <br /><br />As your diligent research for the Beam article reported, Jacob Myers started constructing the Slate Forge in March 1791 on the Slate Creek, the first blast furnace west of the Appalachians. Quite a remarkable technical and logistical achievement in its own right for someone with limited literary skills. He discovered a surface ore deposit (oolitic hematite) a couple of miles south of where he erected the charcoal blast furnace. On May 24th, he sold seven-eighths of his interest (£1,426, 8 shillings and 6 pence, or in today’s value £22,160 or $30,450) to John Cockney Owings & Company, a joint-stock company in Baltimore. The blast furnace started processing ore in 1792, using slave labor and vulnerable to First Nation attacks to reclaim their ancestral lands. As you highlighted, the furnace later made ordnance for the 1812 War; however, it first made pig iron for Kentucky blacksmiths. Owings expanded his inventory items under the employment of Robert Williams, potter (moulder of cast iron vessels) from June 1793 to manufacture cast iron pots, kettles, stoves, axe heads, horseshoes, plough blades, etc.<br /><br />By 1797, Owings was selling fifty-gallon kettles to distillers as a cucurbit, where a wooden capital or still head was mounted over the kettle to distil ‘whiskey’ or crude corn spirit. Even assuming the distillers had a copper doubler still and worm, the resulting distillate would have been quite unpalatable. Iron is hostile to whiskey. One imagines it was a very short-lived product extension.<br /><br />Only occasionally do frontier records report the ill-informed use of cast iron due to lack or the higher cost of copper for distilling. Even the famous Aeneas Coffey initially used cast iron frames on his 1830 continuous copper analyser and rectifying column stills in Britain. The noxious plumbago effect had him immediately abandon iron exposure to the low and high wines contact. Another such case was the Australian bushranger, Ned Kelly. Hiding from police, a gang member had his blacksmith brother who made a set of iron stills to distil, then illicitly planned to sell whiskey in his hide-out gully. Fortunately, before harvesting their small barley crop, the police found the bolthole. An ambush resulted in the murder of one of the troopers and Kelly's eventual arrest, and Kelly’s hanging. Otherwise, the gang would have also been charged with endangering and offending the public taste.<br />Chris Middletonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18195207495059398831noreply@blogger.com