by gillmang » Mon Feb 11, 2008 4:46 pm
Chuck, thanks.
This is a concentrated piece of writing which requires a certain amount of technical and historical knowledge of distilling to make sense of, but that said, it is nothing less than fascinating.
The log-and-copper still mentioned, or one such still, is still used I know in Guyana, to make rum. It is fashioned of wood and metal and packed with stones or some other type of packing to provide the function the plates do in a modern column still.
There is a picture of it on the website of a Guyana rum distiller, I'll try to find it. (It may have been posted here before).
Note the mingling of low wines with high wines when barreling under the first method described, double copper pot distillation. This would also have been done for sweet mashes distilled in such equipment. That must have made for some gutsy whiskeys since low wines - the first run in a wash still - would be dilute, congeneric spirit.
The "Bourbon steam" method seems quite close to what we know as bourbon today. I wonder if "Bourbon" perhaps described or came to describe the kind of whiskey made by the related technology in Bourbon County, which may explain why the term became renowned. Because, of all the methods described except the fourth, copper steam, it seems the only one that did not involve using or mixing singlings for the barreled whiskey. I read the log-and-copper method as using singlings because there is no reference in the description to a second run and this kind of primitive still would not have produced a very high proof. I exclude in this conjecture method 6, highwines, because albeit double-distilled it does not result in what we know today as bourbon, but rather just "whiskey". Note highwines is the only method mentioned where aging is in "unburnt" casks. And apart from that I would think highwines was whiskey produced at the highest proof of any method, like a modern grain whisky in Scotland, say.
The fourth method seems a variation of the fifth involving a first step of condensation and reboiling. It may have been a predecessor in Bourbon County of the Bourbon steam method, or perhaps was more generally used outside Bourbon County as it was in circa-1870. Even though condensate is produced in a doubler - I am speaking now of the fifth or Bourbon steam method - this approach seems to have been regarded as a more efficient way to distill than distilling successively in two stills. There is less wastage presumably when the spirit is condensed and re-vaporised within an enclosed vessel (doubler) than when it is condensed in the atmosphere through a coil and then re-boiled. This is what the article is getting at I think when it refers to the absence in the fifth method of condensing through a coil or worm before the doubling. So, method five was an efficient no-singlings method and I wonder if the fame of Bourbon whiskey can be attributed to that fact, to the point where that method became utilized everywhere in Kentucky and to this day.
On the other hand, we know the term Bourbon acquired cachet decades before 1870, before the all-metal "American still" (obviously a column still) existed. Perhaps though in Bourbon County but not elsewhere in Kentucky, no matter what still was used, the spirit was always barreled at a high enough proof to exclude the impurities contained in singlings but low enough to make what we know today as traditional whiskey. And this could have been so even when Bourbon County was a sight bigger than it was in 1870.
Alternatively, it may have been a coincidence that Bourbon steam whiskey happened in 1870 to be associated with an (indeed) shrunken Bourbon County.
Gary