There’s no use mincing words. During prohibition, perhaps even afterward, my great-great grandparents Fred Pickering and Marie Gingras distilled their own whiskey.
How do I know this? Well, my cousin and I discovered a strange contraption in the basement of their home in San Francisco when the current owner was kind enough to take us on a tour. She had no idea what the apparatus was. Neither did we.
Leave it to my cousin and intrepid genealogist, Karyn, to figure that out. After happening to meet with a “whiskey expert” on a recent vacation in Ireland, she wrote to him:
Dear Mr. Moriarty,
My husband and I recently enjoyed a whiskey tasting at the Park Hotel Kenmore. It was clear that you were very knowledgeable on all things whiskey. So that is why I write to you today.
My grand grandparents lived in a large home in San Francisco during America’s Prohibition era. The new owners of the home found what I call a “contraption” hidden in a basement. I am attaching it for your review. Do you think it was any sort of a device to produce booze?
Your expert opinion will be appreciated.
Moriarty was quick to respond, despite being laid up in a hospital after a cardiac event. Apparently, we had discovered a priceless relic worth further research.
Karyn,
Without a doubt, it is a kind of still. These are very precious and must be preserved.
Go through the property with a fine tooth combe. Often walls held bottles of spirit. These items are so important to our shared distilling history.
It’s impossible to say what exactly it was for.
So, Americans used stills to make wine, beer, and whiskey. I guess they were generic enough that you couldn’t tell by looking at what they produced.
More importantly, who would have guessed that the devoutly religious Marie Gingras liked her whiskey? Maybe, on the other hand, we should have known. Considering their wealth, the couple probably made whiskey for own consumption, though there’s an outside chance they were bootleggers for organized crime, like so many Americans at that time. I wouldn’t bet any money on that one.
I had no idea that in-home booze-making was so common during prohibition, which started in about 1920 and lasted until 1933. The federal government confiscated nearly 700,000 stills in the first five years of prohibition and thousands more after that. Apparently, they missed the one in the Pickering-Gingras household. Some were small contraptions owned by homeowners who could buy them in hardware stores. Large-scale commercial bootleggers operated much bigger stills.
It may have been illegal to make booze, but you could go to a store and buy gallon stills, bottles, malt syrup, corn sugar, corn syrup, hops, yeast, bottle cappers, and concentrated grapes. Bootleggers would ferment a mash of corn sugar, fruit, beets, or even potato peals. Then they would mix the alcohol with “glycerin and a touch of juniper oil as a flavoring with the final ingredient being water,” according to one website. Easy peasy.
These stills contained telltale elements. You would put the fermented liquid to be distilled in a boiler with a heat source. On top of the boiler, you’d find a capital, also known as a helmet or dome. This piece has the job to pass or not to pass, depending on the form of the capital, alcohol vapors.