The Louisville Free Public Library has a pre-Prohibition trade magazine, The Wine and Spirits Bulletin, as part of their collection. Fortunately, Brown-Forman paid to have the originals reproduced for preservation purposes about 20 years ago. This was necessary as many of the pages were trashed as people cut articles and advertisements out of the magazine in the past. The magazine is not indexed so searching them can be time consuming. I have spent many hours sitting in the library paging through a volume to see what I can find. One of the items of interest I did find was this illustration of the log still used by the Kentucky distiller, Richard Wathen.
In the early 19th century, copper stills were an expensive piece of equipment. Most were being made in Pittsburgh and the cost of the still included a fee for having it shipped to Kentucky. Many distillers could not afford this expense so they came up with an alternative – the log still. Their idea was to hollow out a large log as the pot holding the beer and to heat the beer with steam heat. This became known as “running it off a log” distilling. They still used copper pipes to steam heat the beer and for the worm. This investment in copper pipe was relatively cheap compared to that of a complete copper still. The distiller could purchase the pipes and make these pieces themselves as opposed to paying a skilled coppersmith to make a complete still.
There were many small farm distilleries using this technology. Unfortunately, we don’t know the names of most of them. There are two distillers that used this technology that we do know about: J.W. Dant and Richard Wathen. J.W. Dant was proud of his humble beginnings and used the story of his first still in advertising his product. Richard Wathen, we know because of the story published in the Wine and Spirits Bulletin that included this illustration. Other distillers using log stills are lost to history for now, but as more families revive their distilling heritage and explore old family papers, we will probably discover that the use of log still technology was more widespread than we realized.
A talented distiller could make good whiskey using a log still. We know this because both J.W. Dant and Richard Wathen sold enough of their whiskey to eventually invest in copper stills of greater capacity. Moonshiners also used this technology. The Filson Historical Society has a moonshine still seized by government agents in the 1920s that uses some of this technology. The pot itself is hand made from a sheet of copper, but the head and part of the worm are made of wood. Moonshiners would be attracted to the idea of the low cost of these stills, but more importantly, they were probably easier to hide from authorities looking for illicit stills.
Log still technology has deep roots in Kentucky’s distilling heritage. They offered a less expensive alternative to people who wanted to make whiskey. It is an alternative that works well on a small scale, but for those distillers who were successful, they quickly invested in large and more expensive copper stills.
April 11, 2020 at 11:42 am
Thanks for posting the sketch of Richard Wathen’s vertical 1852 log still it is an instructive illustration to what was probably one the last of the log still designs. I presume figure [G] refers to the doubler.
This drawing is the first multi-level log construction I have seen.
As an historical aside, the most popular log still configuration used a hollowed-out single, solid tree trunk, laid horizontally with pipes connecting between the beer wells or compartments for the passage for the steam to constantly strip the volatile compounds while allowing distilled vapor to finally pass through a third doubler chamber before being directed towards the condensing worm tub or flake stand. I would expect Joseph Dant to have a used version of this basic horizontal log design when he started distilling in the mid-1830s. Walthen’s vertically stacked trunks may have been his invention?
Log stills are fascinating and a unique invention to North American whiskey distilling industry, especially in the remote rural areas. In the early 19th century, farmers with little capital working the land in Virginia, Pennsylvania, Kentucky and Tennessee could turn to the log distillation if they could not afford or gain access to copper distilling pots, or coopered chambered stills. If scarcity is the mother invention, the lack of copper and its high cost forced these hinterland farmers to construct wooden stills from the abundance of native hardwoods at their disposal. It was not until 1814, Baltimore erected America’s first copper smelter, so the import costs and high tariff the US Government placed on British copper was an impost to all-copper distilling plant. The inspiration for these rustic log fabrications came from the development in the 1790s from triple chambered wooden stills. These wooden stills originally made from wooden tubs, probably inspired by converting mashing and fermenting vessels needed the commercial appearance of the newly invented steam boilers tomake wood still distillation possible. The first US patent granted was to Alexander Anderson on September 2nd, 1794 for his new method of distilling, which was ideally suited to American mixed cereal mashes distilled on the grain, not the wort. Wooden stills required a boiler to generate the constant external steam pressure to work the fermented mash through the stripping process*. Distillers had to outlay money for a cast iron boiler and also the essential copper worm, as expensive as the pot still in the late 18th and early 19th centuries; subject to its length and thickness. By using a log or by investing in a cooper to fashion a triple chambered charge still, it reduced the cost of the distilling apparatus by a third. Savings could also be made on fuel and labor.
The first log stills cut from tree trunks appeared in 1810 (the poplar was the preferred hardwood log and still used as bung wood for bourbon barrels) when Robert Gillespie of Seneca New York obtains the first patent for his perpendicular steam log still, on April 2nd. He called the invention the Columbian Independent Log Still probably after Columbia Pennsylvania where it’s prototype likely made or a more primitive version in use. He lived and travelled in a number of distilling States, gaining exposure to new ideas and processes.
A log still, say of 24 feet in length (7.3m), hollowed into series of three chambers of 10-inch diameter (25cm), each could take 180 gallons (680L) per charge and make 60 gallons (227L) of whiskey in 24 hours; presumably around proof strength. The limitation was the capacity of the wells as each run or charge took about two hours, plus cleaning the unhooped tree trunk of the beer slops and residuals. One log design had set iron sheets or plates into the trunk to situate a very crude boiler within the log. A carefully constructed furnace was a key necessity to direct the heat to avoid setting the log on fire. Similar to the triple chambered charge still it used heat and fuel more efficiently as it was a semi-batch process, employing a series of connected compartments to continuously vaporize the beer through two wells and the doubler compartment. With no direct heat the beer did not scold on a copper base or tinned copper cucurbit, which meant no spoilage due to empyreumatic flavors in the spirit. A few other inventors were also modifying log formats and applying for patents, such as James Wheatley of Fauquier County Virginia on November 13th, 1813. Gillespie, now living in Nashville enlisted Thomas Jefferson in 1814 to help protect the right to his patent, to no avail.
The superiority of traditional common pot stills, to a lesser extent the triple chambered wood stills, and after the Civil War, the invention of the continuous beer column, meant log stills were the poor man’s still and whiskey of poorer quality. The quality of the distillate from wooden stills, especially the log stills using a corn recipe were very oily, crude and fiery to the taste. Fermented wash with a corn mash was dense in corn oil; some of the oil could be scooped off after fermentation, although oil remained suspended in the beer. With no method to catch or separate the oil using this semi-continuous distillation, it added to high fusel alcohols to the final distillate (especially amyl alcohol with a much higher boiling point to ethanol). There was also the issue of minimal copper contact to remove sulphur compounds (as copper sulphate), due to the small copper head, short lyne arm or connecting pipe to the worm in the flake stand (condenser). If the distillate was not stored for a long period in the barrel – needing time to breakdown and filter some of the fusel and sulphur compounds (assuming interior staves are freshly charred) – the finished whisky would remain very oily and fierce on the palate. Which explains why charcoal filtration was so popular and necessary during the 19th century in Tennessee, Kentucky and other distilling States
*Heated stones have been reported as a heat source as a substitute for steam boilers by impoverished and resourceful distillers, although this would have been an inefficient method for the production of continuous steam and a major inconvenience by dropping the hot stones into a hollowed-out chamber filed with water to act as the boiler.