Moonshining as a Fine Art: The Foxfire Americana Library (1) (6 page)

BOOK: Moonshining as a Fine Art: The Foxfire Americana Library (1)
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I
LLUSTRATION 14
The beer in this cooker is being heated prior to sealing on the cap. The swab stick resting in the cooker is used to stir the beer while it is heating to keep it from sticking to the sides and burning. Both this and the next three photographs were all taken at the same operation.

I
LLUSTRATION 15
The thump barrel and heater box. The drain pipe, when lowered, carries warm, fresh beer from the heater box to the cooker, the top of which is visible in the foreground.

I
LLUSTRATION 16
The heater box from the other side, showing the connection between the heater box and the condenser which is mounted in the metal drum.

I
LLUSTRATION 17
The whole operation from the heater box, condenser end. The wooden barrels on the right are rilled with fermenting mash. The furnace is hidden behind the heater box. The plastic gallon milk jar in the foreground is often used in place of glass jars for the finished product.

I
LLUSTRATION 18
This page reveals a heater box and a thump barrel in more detail. The barrel in the foreground of the photograph is the thumper. The pipe extending in the foreground is the long thump rod coming from the cap of the still. (This particular still did not have a dry or relay barrel). The large wooden box behind the thumper is the heater box. Arrow 1 points to the outlet which is blocked by the gate behind it. Arrow 2 points to the handle of this gate. Arrow 3 points to the wooden trough which is mounted into place when the operator is ready to transfer his preheated beer to the still for a new run. In the background, behind the thump barrel (bearing the number 4) can be seen the corner of the flake stand.

I
LLUSTRATION 19
(1) is the cap—usually a fifty-gallon barrel. (2) is a huge barrel (the still) which sits right on the ground. It has, in this case, a capacity of five hundred gallons. The sides are made of huge sheets of aluminum or copper, and both the top and bottom are made of plywood. There are three 2 by 4 supports inside the walls of the still which help support its great size (6). (3) is the firebox. The source of heat, in this case, is a huge gas burner mounted so that the flames point toward the still. Heat is drawn in, around the lower walls of the still, and out the flue (4). (5) is the furnace which in this case is a double row of concrete blocks sealed over (dotted line) with clay, or some other form of tight insulation. Space, of course, is left between the inside wall of the blocks and the outside bottom wall of the still for the passage of heat.
    The cap arm connects to a large thump barrel which connects directly with the flake stand. There was no heater box in this particular model.
    It is possible, by the way, to use a fifty-gallon barrel as the housing for the gas jets (3). It would be turned on its side with its end toward the still, and sealed to the concrete-block wall of the furnace with the insulating rocks, mud, and concrete.
    Those who use them say that the groundhog stills are much hotter than the other varieties, and thus make better stills.

I
LLUSTRATION 20
These diagrams illustrate perhaps the simplest still of them all—the “dead man” or “flat.” In all cases (
Diagrams A
and
B
) : (1) is the cap, (2) the still itself—a rectangular box, (3) the bottom of the box (the diagonally shaded area), (4) the firebox or source of heat, and (5) the flue.
    There are several differences between them, however, that make them interesting. In
A,
the cap is a twenty-five-gallon barrel, and in
B,
a fifty-gallon one. The firebox in
A
is simply a channel cut into the earth. The still sits on the ground directly over this channel. A hole is left at the back to serve as the flue. In
B,
however, two 7 inch pipes sit
inside
the still box, surrounded by beer, with their ends protruding out both ends of the box. A long gas line is fed into each of these pipes, and its top surface is perforated in the manner of gas burners on stoves. This design supplies heat directly to the beer thus making a faster operation.
    In
A,
the still stands two feet high, and six to eight feet long. A thin sheet of copper lines the outside of the bottom, and rises up two to three inches all around the sides. The rest of the box is made of wood. In
B,
the box is made of two 4-foot-square wooden boxes. They are mounted side to side, and the common wall is removed leaving a box four feet high, four feet wide, and eight feet long. The bottom is lined with copper as before.
    
Diagram A
at the bottom shows how concrete blocks could be used in lieu of digging a trench in the ground. The dotted lines represent the insulation (mud, rocks, cement, etc.).

The operation of a steamer still similar to the one in
Illustration 21
was described thus by one operator:

“It takes four men—a chief, a helper-pumper, and two haulers. We make our beer in six 4’ by 8’ boxes, and use two thousand pounds of sugar for every load. If we don’t get twelve cases out of every box, something’s wrong. And that’s only seventy-two cases a day. That’s not bad, but when I was running eight boxes I got ninety-six cases a day. And sometimes I could sell it for $60 a case. Not now. Price goes up and down—it depends.

“We use what we call ‘mule feed’ for malt, and we add beading oil to make it bead good. We use a radiator out of a Dodge truck in th’ flake stand, cleaned out good, of course.

“I just want to move th’stuff out—get it to th’ bootlegger quick as it’s made. That’s why I use haulers. I admit it’s not good liquor. It’ll give you a headache. But it won’t hurt you. I’ve drunk it myself before.”

Several things make a steamer still difficult. One is the amount of beer that must be on hand to begin with. From each 190 gallons in the Hodges Barrel, the yield will be approximately seven cases. Thus, in order to run off the ninety or more cases that can be run in a day, the main barrel has to be emptied and refilled about ten times. One man we talked to accomplished this with a pump and hose apparatus that he had rigged up. Contrast this with the old method of dipping the beer into the still with five gallon buckets and one can see how much things have changed. It still takes time, however, to prepare the beer. Thus a still like this one must lie unused for days at a time waiting for the beer to be ready to run.

Sugar presents another problem. Since anything over a hundred pounds must be signed for, sugar has to be bootlegged just like the whiskey.

In addition, the very size of the operation makes it more dangerous to run. Every effort is made to minimize the risk. One man, for example, told us that he never uses pegs in the outlet holes of his barrels. He has converted everything to valves. The reason: “Men
who use pegs get in th’habit of hitting them three times whenever they’re putting them back in th’ holes. They hit that peg soft th’ first time, a little harder th’ next time, and on th’ third time they really whack it. You can hear those three licks on th’ thumper peg for
miles.

I
LLUSTRATION 21
The Steamer: (1) is a spare tank for pre-heating water. Pipes (2) extend from the top of the furnace (6) into the bottom of the water tank, and as they get hot, so does the water. (5) is the main water tank. The coke burning furnace, which has a smoke stack (4), heats the water in (5) to the boiling point, producing the necessary steam. When this tank is empty, it is refilled with the pre-heated water through a valved pipe (3), and the spare water tank is refilled with cold water.
    Steam from the main water tank, which is made of one and a third 50-gallon metal drums welded together, moves directly into a long thump rod, and via it into the bottom of a huge thump barrel (8) which is filled with 190 gallons of fresh beer at the beginning of the run. The barrel is a wooden Hodges Barrel with a 220 gallon capacity. From here the steam moves into a recharger or relay barrel of fifty-gallon capacity (9) which can return “puke” to (8); then it goes into a dry barrel (10), and from there into another thump barrel (12) through another long thump rod (11). This barrel holds fifty gallons of fresh beer. From there the steam moves into a large heater box (13) which has the same function as those we have already seen, returning pre-heated beer to (8) through a valved line (17). The flake stand (14) is again, in this case, a large truck radiator. (15) is the filtering or straining barrel which is the repository for the final product. (16) is the water source for the flake stand. One informant told us that he could run ninety cases per day on a rig like this one.

BOOK: Moonshining as a Fine Art: The Foxfire Americana Library (1)
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