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Appendix
Valuable Hints on the Distillation of Whiskey and New England Rum.
The process of distillation commences with the fermentation of grain or molasses by the presence of yeast, and this is called mashing, or preparing the mash.
Strictly speaking, indeed, the spirits are not produced by distillation; that is done by the previous step of fermentation, and distillation merely separates the spirits from the mixture in which they already exist. The object of fermentation is to convert the starchy principle of the grain into sugar, or to saccharify it. After being agitated for two or three hours, the saccharine infusion, called wort, is drawn off from the grains and cooled.
To this wort is now added a certain quantity of yeast or leaven, which induces the vinous fermentation, and resolves the saccharine matter into alcohol and carbonic acid, accompanied by a rise of temperature. The alcoholic mixture which results is called the wash, and is now ready for distillation.
How to Prepare Yeast for Rye Whiskey or New England Rum.
No. 1.
To prepare yeast for 80 gallons mash, take two pounds of wheat meal and dilute it with sufficient warm
This is a distiller's working note rather than a domestic recipe, and it cannot be followed today. The points below explain the vocabulary and why the procedure is off limits, not how to carry it out.
- Distilling spirits is not a home activityIn the United States and most other jurisdictions, operating a still to produce beverage alcohol requires federal permits and bonding regardless of scale; there is no household exemption comparable to the one for home brewing and winemaking. Fermenting a wash is one legal matter, separating the spirit from it is another entirely.
- The heads are the specific hazardA grain or molasses wash carries small amounts of methanol and other low-boiling volatiles that concentrate in the first fraction off the still. Judging and discarding that fraction is the whole craft, and this text says nothing about it, because it assumes a trained operator standing at a commercial still.
- Ethanol vapour and open heatThe vapour coming off a still is flammable at room temperature and heavier than air, so it pools. Distillery fires were a recognised hazard in the nineteenth century, and a kitchen with a gas flame or a pilot light is a far worse setting than the purpose-built stillhouse this text presumes.
- The text is a fragmentIt breaks off mid-sentence in the yeast instructions, and the mashing section gives no temperatures and no quantities of grain; the only timing offered is the two or three hours of agitation. Even taken at face value there is not enough here to work from.
- Mash, wort, washWorth knowing as vocabulary: the mash is grain and hot water together, the wort is the sweet liquid drawn off it, and the wash is that liquid after yeast has fermented it. Brewers still use the first two terms; wash survives almost only among distillers.
- "Wheat meal" and "leaven"Wheat meal is coarsely ground whole wheat, closer to today's whole-wheat flour than to farina. Leaven here probably means a live starter culture propagated from a previous batch rather than a purchased packaged yeast.
- If you want to read furtherThe chemistry described — saccharification of starch, then conversion of sugar to alcohol and carbon dioxide — is broadly the account a modern brewing text gives, though the passage loosely treats saccharification as the object of fermentation rather than of mashing. For anything you intend actually to make, use a current homebrewing reference.
Manuals of this kind circulated widely in the second half of the nineteenth century, and are generally thought to have found their market among saloon keepers, grocers and rectifiers who bought raw spirit in bulk and turned it into branded goods behind the bar. "New England rum" was a distinct article of commerce, distilled in Massachusetts and Rhode Island from imported molasses and generally regarded as harsher and cheaper than West Indian rum; the trade is often traced back to the colonial molasses shipping that made Newport and Boston fortunes. The appendix's presence in such a book says a good deal about the period: before the Bottled-in-Bond Act of 1897 and the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, the line between manufacturing a spirit and compounding a plausible substitute for one was a matter of the seller's conscience, and books like this one served both trades without apology.