The Whiskey Rebel

“You’ve come to enjoy your whiskey,” Skye said, before I could drink.

“I don’t think enjoy is the right word,” I said. “But it is part of life here.”

I took a sip of the drink, but I immediately took the cup away in astonishment. I’d had whiskey before, in quantities I would not have credited in my former life, but here was something entirely different. It was darker, I saw by the light of the fire, amber in color and more viscous. And its flavor-it was not merely the sickly sweet heat of whiskey, for there was a honey taste to it, perhaps vanilla and maple syrup and even, yes, the lingering tang of dates.

“What is this?” I asked.

“To answer that,” said Skye, “to fully answer your question, we must first make sure you understand what whiskey is. Do you know why we make whiskey? Are we merely hard-drinking men, reprobates who ca

“Would you catechize me?” I asked.

He smiled. “Oh, yes. You see, I’ve been pla

“It is the only way to profit from your harvest.”

“A woman who reads the Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce misses very little,” my husband observed.

I took another sip, attempting to dissect its intricacies. “You grow your grain, but beyond what you need for your own use, there is nothing to be done with the surplus. There are no good roads, so the voyage east is too long and too difficult, and ultimately too expensive to transport large quantities of grain. You ca

“Quite right,” said Skye.

“There is always a market for whiskey,” I continued. “It becomes popular back east, and the army is increasingly replacing rum with whiskey, and though it is cumbersome to transport grain, it is far less to transport whiskey by the barrel. That is why whiskey stands as a substitute for money. At some point it may be exchanged for specie and thus is useful for barter.”

“And that,” said Mr. Skye, “is where your husband has become so useful.” He pointed at Andrew. “He almost at once recognized that there was more flavor to be got into the drink. ’Tis a barter economy, but right now all whiskey is held equal. No one’s drink is lauded above another’s. But what if we could produce something that was better than what anyone else had?”

“Of course,” I interrupted. “You introduce something more scarce; it generates more desire; you get more for your trade.”

“Exactly so once again, lass,” Skye said. “Now, Dalton and I have been in the whiskey trade for some time, and we thought that Andrew here, with his skill as a carpenter, could be of use to us. We’ve long known you get more flavor out of whiskey by storing it in barrels rather than jugs, but the difference is not significant. More flavor, but the flavor is not always good, and an abundance of bad flavor does not add much value. Beyond that, the barrels are harder to transport, and the wood absorbs some of the whiskey, leaving you with less product for the market.”

“But sometimes barrel storage is desirable,” said Dalton. “Jugs can be hard to come by in large quantity, and wood is plentiful. If you have enough surplus, it is better to lose some to barrel storage than have no place to store it at all. When we explained all this to your Andrew-well, he had other ideas than mere coopering.”

I looked at him. “Is that right?”

He smiled, somewhat sheepish.

“Let’s show her the still,” Dalton said.

We exited the cabin and went to what Dalton called the outhouse, though it was a cabin twice in size to the one he lived in, a kind of rusticated warehouse or factory. In it was a profusion of pots, jars, and tubes that jutted out from one another and crisscrossed the room in a fowling-piece blast of confusion. Wooden barrels lined the walls, small fires burned in contained furnaces, steam boiled out of pots in tight little puffs. It smelled rich and rank in there, a kind of sweet and decaying smell, combined maybe with something less pleasant-like wet waste and fleshy decomposition. It was enticing and revolting.

“The principle is fairly simple,” Dalton said. “You start with a kettle full of fermented corn, what we call the wash. Then we boil it there, over that fire. The lid goes on the kettle. You see that tube coming out of it? That catches what burns off, since ’tis the strong stuff that burns off first-the spirit, if you will, which is why we call strong drink spirits.”

“So the drink that comes out of that tube is whiskey?” I asked.

“No,” Skye said, “that’s what we call low wine, which is run through the still once again. Now it comes out in different strengths. The first of it, the foreshot-well, that ain’t for drinking, let’s say that. ’Tis nasty and foul and strong. You can add a little bit of that to the final produce to give it some strength, but no more. After the foreshot comes the head, which you can drink, but it still ain’t good. Then comes the clear run. It looks like this.”

He handed us a glass bottle, and inside was a near-colorless liquid.

“That is more the whiskey I’m used to.”

“Aye, it is,” said Skye. “The flavor and color of ours come from the barrel. The longer it sits in the barrel, the more flavor and color it gets, but there was more to it than that.”

“It seemed to me,” said Andrew, “that more of the barrel’s flavor could be brought out by charring its insides. And so it is. The whiskeys we’ve been experimenting with the past few months are more flavorful than any we’d ever tasted before.”

“He’s done more than that,” said Mr. Dalton. “He’s been meddling with the recipe too, adjusting the proportions of the grains, adding more rye than corn to the mash. We’ve made your husband a partner in our still, and unless I’m mistaken he’s made the lot of us very rich.”

Dalton took out a bottle of the new tawny whiskey and poured us all a glass, with which we toasted our future. We had come west as victims, but now, it seemed, we would be victors. It was what we believed at the time and what we ought to have believed, because this was the America we had fought for, where hard work and ingenuity must triumph. We did not know that at that moment, back east, Alexander Hamilton and his Treasury Department schemed to take it all away from us.

Ethan Saunders

The previous night I had not been so abstemious with drink as might be desired of a man in pursuit of reform, but I nevertheless awoke early and with an eagerness I had not known in years. I had before me a remarkable day because I had things to do. I had not had things to do in years. I’d had things that needed doing, that ought to get done, that had better be taken care of, but they were usually of the if not today then fairly soon variety. I had safely hidden away the stolen message inside an orphaned second volume of Tristram Shandy; the silver ball itself sat upon my desk like a monument to all that had changed in my life. I was alive and vibrant and I had things to do, monumental things, and I intended to do them.

Of the greatest importance was a visit to the City Tavern to begin my quest for William Duer. It seemed to me he was at the heart of everything. It was his man, this mysterious Reynolds, who had arranged to expel me from my home. Hamilton had identified him as a mischief maker, and the note I had recovered the night before seemed to allude to him. Granted, the D might well have been another man, but I did not think so. Hamilton had assured me Duer was not to be found in town, but I was not confident Hamilton had been honest on that score, not when the mere mention of the name Reynolds sent him into spasms of rage.