Hooch

The Xutsnoowú Ḵwáan,¹ a tribe of the Tlingit people located on Admiralty Island, Southeast Alaska, is unfortunately best know to white America for one thing: they are the origin of the word “hooch.”

When researching claims of pre-contact fermentation practices in the Pacific Northwest, I came across the following quote:

“Public efforts at prohibiting liquor to the Indian population of the coast were further complicated by the purchase of Alaska by the United States in 1867. The American troops sent to occupy the area, as well as others attracted to it, proved to be poorly disciplined and given to drunkenness, wild depredations, and gross immorality. Smuggling of liquor to the new territory became a common practice, along with bootlegging to the Indian population. However, perhaps an even more significant event was the introduction to the Indians of a technique for home-brewing liquor, reputedly by an intemperate soldier who had deserted or had been discharged from the military post at Fort Wrangell. This brew, known as hoochinoo, was concocted from a variety of ingredients, such as molasses, flour, dried apples, rice, potatoes, salmonberries, blackberries, yeast powder, and sometimes hops. Sufficient water was added to the selected ingredients to make a thin batter. After fermentation took place, a sour, muddy, highly alcoholic liquor was produced. Distillation was accomplished through using coal-oil cans for retorts and kelp for condensation tubes. The Alaska Indians distilled hoochinoo for the white trade as well as for themselves, the technique soon diffused southward throughout the coastal area and inland and became the source of liquor for many bands.”²

This initially tickeled me because I found the concept of a still made of an oilcan and a kelp trunk endearing, when I went to reseatch this tangent in more detail I fell into a whole rabbithole around what essentially amounts to a historical moonshine.

Lemert footnotes his description of hoochinoo with the following comment:

“The term hoochinoo apparently was derived from the name of a Tlingit Indian tribe that lived in the southwestern part of Admiralty Island off the Alaskan coast, a tribe notorious for its truculence and manufacture of fiery home-brew. Sheldon Jackson, Alaska and the Missions of the North Pacific Coast, pp. 241-242. Another translation of the term is “bear’s nest,” referring to the kind of place in which the drink was made. Jeanette Nichols, History of Alaska, p. 106.”

This is incorrect in multiple respects. While “Xutsnoowú” does indeed mean “fortress of brown bears,” this fact is unrelated to “the kind of place in which the drink was made.” Several other sources similarly claim that the Ḵwáan was named after the drink, rather than vice versa. However, transliterations of the name can be found at least as far back as 1818, when Fedor Ivanovich Shemelin’s “Journal of the First Voyage of Russians around the Earthly Globe”³ recorded that in ca. 1802, “Судно Глобусь, Капитань Кюннень-Жеинъ зимовало подь Хуцновскимъ жиломъ” (The ship Globus, Captain Künnen-Zhein, wintered near the Khutsnovsk settlement). In this sentence, “Хуцновскимъ” (Khutsnovskim) is the instrumental/locative adjectival form of “Хуцнов” (Khutsov), a transliteration of the Tlingit Xootsnoowú. The name was therefore demonstrably in use over half a century before the American introduction of distillation to the Tlingit.

I also just don’t like describing an entire Ḵwáan as “notorious for its truculence” – especially when the description is in the context of similar descriptions explicitly identifying that truculence with some immutable and undesirable trait of the people themselves (possibly due to over-imbibing) rather than the political stance of a community facing the violence of a colonialist takeover.

William Gouverneur Morris, in his 1879 Report Upon the Customs District, Public Service, and Resources of Alaska Territory, laments the effects of the drink, writing (TW for 1879-style extreme racism):

“The natives manufacture by distillation from molasses a vile, poisonous, life and soul destroying decoction, called ‘Hoochenoo,’ which saps the very essence of the human system, producing crime, disease, insanity, and death. When drunk and crazed from the deleterious effects of this accursed drink, the natives, Aleuts, half-breed Russians, and mongrel population, are in a condition bordering upon phrensy, and at this time is to be dreaded the perpetration of outrage and outbreak which will surely be the result if this infamous traffic is continued.”⁴

A few pages later, he continues ranting, helpfully including a recipe, nominally for the purposes of proposing new contraband categories.

“Molasses rum, or hootzenoo, is made by the whites and Indians in Alaska in the following manner: An empty five-gallon coal-oil can is procured, on one end of which and about the center is made a nozzle about three inches in diameter, and which projects about three-fourths of an inch. A cap or cover for the nozzle is then made, the cap having a hole in the center about one inch in diameter. A worm six or seven feet in length, sometimes straight, but usually zigzag, is made of tin about one inch in diameter, one end of which is fastened by soldering to the cap that fits the nozzle of the can. The still is now complete. The mash is made generally by the following recipe: One gallon of molasses, five pounds of flour, one-half box of yeast-powder; add sufficient water to make a thin batter; place the mixture alongside a fire, and when it has fomented and become sour, fill the can three parts full and begin boiling. The worm being fitted to the nozzle of the can, then passes through a barrel of cold water, and the steam from the boiling mixture passing through the pipe or worm, on reaching the cold pipe in the barrel, condenses and appears again at the end of the worm beyond the barrel in drops, and which the Indians drink while warm. One gallon of the mixture will make three-fourths of a gallon of hootzenoo, and the three-fourths of a gallon will craze the brains of ten Indians. This is about the most infernal decoction ever invented, producing intoxication, debauchery, insanity, and death. The smell is abominable and the taste atrocious.”

There is no reason to doubt that this description was at least generally accurate – we know that, with the exception of hops, all the ingredients referenced by Lemert and Morris were easily available to a soldier stationed even on the outskirts of empire, in mid-1800s Alaska, because they were mandated by contemporaneous Army regulations as part of the ration of enlisted men.

1190. A ration is the established daily allowance of food for one person. For the United States army it is composed as follows: twelve ounces of pork or bacon, or, one pound and four ounces of salt or fresh beef; one pound and six ounces of soft bread or flour, or, one pound of hard bread, or, one pound and four ounces of corn meal; and to every one hundred rations, fifteen pounds of beans or peas,^† and ten pounds of rice or hominy; ten pounds of green coffee, or, eight pounds of roasted (or roasted and ground) coffee, or, one pound and eight ounces of tea; fifteen pounds of sugar; four quarts of vinegar; one pound and four ounces of adamantine or star candles; four pounds of soap; three pounds and twelve ounces of salt;^† four ounces of pepper; thirty pounds of potatoes,^† when practicable, and one quart of molasses. The Subsistence Department, as may be most convenient or least expensive to it, and according to the condition and amount of its supplies, shall determine whether soft bread or flour, and what other component parts of the ration, as equivalents, shall be issued.

1191. Desiccated compressed potatoes, or desiccated compressed mixed vegetables, at the rate of one ounce and a half of the former, and one ounce of the latter, to the ration, may be substituted for beans, peas, rice, hominy, or fresh potatoes.

† Beans, peas, salt, and potatoes (fresh) shall be purchased, issued, and sold by weight, and the bushel of each shall be estimated at sixty pounds. Thus, 100 rations of beans or peas will be fifteen pounds, the equivalent of eight quarts; 100 rations of salt will be three pounds and twelve ounces, the equivalent of two quarts; and 100 rations of potatoes (fresh) will be thirty pounds, the equivalent of half a bushel.⁵

Flour and Potatoes

Both Lemert and Morris cite flour as a chief ingredient, and Lemert additionally references potatoes and rice. This would not be noteworthy except for the fact that neither description references any source of amylase with which to break down these starch sources into fermentable sugars. While knowledge of amylase as a specific enzyme was still in its infancy and restricted to the scientific community (Wikipedia asserts that “In 1831, Erhard Friedrich Leuchs … described the hydrolysis of starch by saliva, due to the presence of an enzyme in saliva, … [but] the modern history of enzymes began in 1833, when French chemists Anselme Payen and Jean-François Persoz isolated an amylase complex from germinating barley and named it ‘diastase.’”), the necessity of malted grains to ferment starches has been known since ancient times. So where is it here?

Amylase Sources

Barley for malting would be easy to come by, if anyone had been skilled enough of a distiller to know to look for it: it was fed to the horses.

1121. The forage ration is fourteen pounds of hay and twelve pounds of oats, corn, or barley. For mules, fourteen pounds of hay and nine pounds of oats, corn, or barley.

1122. The allowance of forage to mounted officers will apply for mules equally as for horses, when the exigencies of the service make it necessary to use the former instead of the latter.⁶

That said, these were not brewmasters stationed at Fort Wrangell. Alternatively, Morris seems to have been something of a teetotaler, and unlikely to have known enough about brewing to necessarily identify the most critical components if they were used in small quantities. It’s equally possible that the wannabe distillers were unaware of the necessity of malted grain, as that it was unintentionally omitted by Morris.

Of course, there’s a simpler if less exciting explanation: none of those starch sources actually fermented. While I dislike this solution because it posits that nearly half the recorded ingredients did essentially nothing for the ferment, you have to admit it’s a tidy answer. Even contemporary sources seem to have identified hoochinoo as a type of moonshined rum rather than a unique combination of ingredients: see for example this newspiece from 1879, which neglects entirely the confounding ingredients like flour and potato.

“HOOCHENOO RUM. It was remarked on all sides that the root of the present difficulty was the consumption by the Indians of the villainons hoochenoo rum, a vile distillation made from molasses and sugar. Russians, half-breeds, whites and the Indians themselves engage in its manufacture. Crazed with this drink the Indians have had several bloody fights among themselves, and the whites were naturally afraid of being attacked. [Captain] Brown, [of the United States steamer Alaska,] who was recently killed at Hot Springs, had a big still in operation at the time of his violent death, and was probably killed by Indians who were under the influence of his own liquor. Capt. Brown seemed determined to destroy every still in the country that he could reach. and thus rid Sitka of its curse. He will not leave until he has heard what both the Indians and the whites have to say, and will supply the revenue marine steamer Wolcott with whatever she may require in the way of coal, stores, ammunition and men, until the government shall have made further dispositions for the protection of Sitka.”⁷

“Yeast Powder”

While researching what consitutes “one-half box of yeast-powder” (likely 8 oz, as yeast powder came most commonly in 1 lb cans), I came across something that further complicated this already odd recipe: yeast powder contains no yeast.

Instead, “yeast powder” was the common and trade name for what we would now call baking powder: Specifically, Eben Horsford’s marketed baking soda made from monocalcium phosphate, sodium bicarbonate, and cornstarch as “Horsford’s Yeast Powder” beginning in the mid-1860s, before later rebranding it as “Rumford Baking Powder.” The “yeast” in the name was indicative of the effect – like yeast, it caused bread to rise.

Meanwhile, powdered yeast as we use it today did not exist at the time. Fleischmann and partners established the first U.S. factory producing compressed yeast cakes in Cincinnati in 1868. At the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, Fleischmann’s “Model Vienna Bakery” introduced visitors to compressed yeast for the first time. This was, critically, only three years before Morris’ report. Even worse, Fleischmann’s compressed cakes were highly perishable, requiring refrigerated railcars and rapid delivery to reach consumers before spoilage. Distribution concentrated in eastern urban areas served by rail networks.

Frontier Alaska was accessible only by multi-week sea voyages from San Francisco: fresh compressed yeast would have arrived spoiled or dead. Active dry yeast was a World War II invention, not developed until 1943 by Fleischmann’s for military field use.

While baking powder is (very occasionally) used in distilling to help clarify distillate by hydrolyzing ethyl acetate, thus improving the taste and clarity of low wines.⁸ However, the sodium bicarbonate in baking powder corrodes any copper elements in the still, resulting in the formation of copper carbonates and a blue, ammoniac distillate. Baking powder in the fermenting wash also inhibits yeast growth. Yeast metabolizes sodium ions (Na⁺) as a stressor, actively pumping it out or sequestering it to manage osmotic stress and toxicity. By contrast calcium (Ca²⁺, supplied by calcium carbonate) is an essential nutrient that promotes growth and enzyme stability, but not included in baking powder.

So why was it included? There are two possible answers: either the recounting made a mistake, or the recipe did. It’s possible that Morris made a mistake in his report. and substituted the name of one baking ingredient called “yeast” for another. Alternatively, it’s possible that in the days before widespread standardization of biological yast, the hoochinoo brewers did the same. As with problem of the inclusion of potatoes and flour but no amylase, it’s possible that the baking powder was a misunderstanding that the recipe worked in spite of, rather than because of.

Fermentation

What, then, was the source of the Saccharomyces cerevisiae? There are two options: either there was a yeast source left out of the descriptions of the drink production (presumably because it was only included in such small amounts); or the ferment relied on wild yeasts from the atmosphere and/or on the surface of the additives.

Of these, the latter is probably likelier. Biological yeast was cultured via reusing dough starters, “barm” (brewer’s yeast foam), or “emptins” (beer/cider dregs used as starter). Contemporary writers such as Eliza Leslie, in Miss Leslies New Cookery Book (1857), make a distinction between chemical leaveners and “real yeast”:

“Yeast powders, used according to the directions that accompany them, and put in at the last, just before baking, are an improvement to the lightness of all batter cakes, provided that real yeast or eggs are also in the mixture. But it is not well to depend on the powders exclusively; particularly when real yeast is to be had. The lightness produced by yeast powders alone, is not the right sort; and though the cakes are eatable, they are too tough and leathery to be wholesome. As auxiliaries to genuine yeast, and to beaten eggs, yeast powders are excellent. But not as the sole dependence.”⁹

Lemert’s mention of hops might indicate that wild yeast was indeed intended. Hops was frequently used as an ingredient in culturing wild yeasts to prevent off flavors, as evidenced from the 1910 Manual for Army Bakers:

“In order to make yeast, all we need is a suitable food, moisture, and the proper degree of warmth. Free access to the air assists in its growth, and if hops, salt, or ginger are added certain undesirable acid fermentations are checked, thus preventing sourness in the bread and at the same time adding certain agreeable flavors.”

“Hops do not furnish food for the yeast plant, but they add a pleasant flavor. Their greatest usefulness, however, lies in the fact at they contain than element (called lupulin) which is active in checking the acetic and lactic fermentations that generally accompany the alcoholic fermentation which always takes place as an incident to the growth of the yeast plant.”¹⁰

Similarly, contemporary cookbooks specify that hopped yeast starter should be used to make beer:

“QUICK BEER: Fourteen quarts of cold water, one quart of molasses, one quart of hop yeast¹¹ and four table-spoonsful of ginger; mix it well, strain througk a fine sieve and bottle it immediately. In twenty-four hours it will be ready for use.”¹²

The confounding factor here however is that unlike the other ingredients of the hoochinoo, which were all part of standard soldier rations, hops at best would have had to be stolen from the army’s bakery, if it was available at all.

Sourdough?

Sourdough starter would have also been a good source of Saccharomyces, as well as other beneficial bacteria. We know that sourdough starters were essential to prospectors on the Alaskan frontier, and it’s often claimed that these prospectors would sleep with their starters in their pockets along with their hands to keep them warm during the freezing nights. But the biological plausibility that sourdough could ferment alcohol does not constitute evidence that 19th-century Americans did use it this way.

Indeed, what scant evidence exists seems to indicate it wasn’t used this way. All the contemporary cookbooks I could find refer to using barm or emptins to make beer, rather than sourdough starter. Barm and emptins were both used to start bread as well as beer, but the connection wasn’t bidirectional: bread was never described as being used to start beer.

That said, there is a modern distillery in Alaska that uses sourdough starter to start their mash.

I have omitted the baking powder the original recipe calls for, and included both malted barley and a liquid yeast in this recipe. The reasons for baking powder’s absence should be obvious; and we’ve covered above arguments for the inclusion of malted barley, despite not being included in any contemporaneous recipe I could find.

In short, I thought it would make the decoction more interesting. While Morris does explicitly call Hoochinoo a “Molasses rum,” I didn’t want the flour and/or potato to go to waste, and instead chose to imagine a world where those contributed significantly to the brew, rather than at most supplying mouthfeel. As I have explained, it is not impossible that barley might have been acquired and malted by a knowledgeable-enough brewer, and for my semi-modernized hoochinoo, that was the direction I chose.

Finally, the yeast: You could also use sourdough starter, for example this heirloom Alaskan starter, but as we have discussed this likely wasn’t how it would have been made historically. If you wish to make a “hop yeast” starter, see footnote #11.

With that, the recipe:

Hoochinoo From Fort Wrangell, Alaska, ca. 1879, Partially Modernized

• 2.5 lbs potatoes (Russet or Yukon Gold)
• 3 lbs dried apples
• 5 lbs stone ground white whole wheat wheat flour, such as Sonora
• 1.5 lb malted barley, crushed (optional, and perhaps somewhat ahistorical, but encouraged)
• 1 gallon, B grade unsulfured molasses¹³
• 1 lb salmonberries, or salmonberry jam, pureed
• 2 lb fresh or frozen blackberries, pureed
• Pectic enzyme/Pectinex Ultra SP-L
• Liquid wild yeast, or some live beer
• Pacific Kelp, either Macrocystis pyrifera or Nereocystis luetkeana

Rehydrate dried apples in warm water overnight, then blend to a pureé.

Chop the potatoes into approximately 1-inch or smaller cubes add to about 2 gallons of water. Boil until soft (about 30 minutes) then mash thoroughly. Do not discard the potato water. Separately, make a slurry by adding the flour to 1 gallon cold water and mixing with an immersion blender. Add the flour slurry to the potatoes and potato water, and supplement with two more gallons of water to bring the total water to 5 gallons. Boil the mixture for 30-45 minutes, blending periodically to agitate the flour, until the starches are fully gelatinized.

Reduce the heat to 155°F (68°C) and add the crushed (milled) malted barley, continuing to stir to prevent dry clumps of grain from forming. Hold the temperature at around 152ºF for 30 minutes to allow the barley’s alpha-amylase to break down the large starches, and then at 148ºF for another 60 minutes to allow the beta-amylase to convert the smaller starches into sugars. Add the apple pureé.

After the 90 minute rest, add 2/3 of the molasses and stir to dissolve. Allow the mash to cool to around 131ºF (55ºC), and add the berry purees and pectic enzyme, then blend to combine. Hold the mash at room temperature for 12-24 hours, then strain and sparge the mixture and transfer to your fermenter. Check the specific gravity of your wort, and dilute or add reserved molasses as necessary until the SG is approximately 1.080.

Add the yeast and allow to ferment for about a week, or until the SG drops to about 1.000. Allow the wash to settle for 48 hours before distillation.

Note: Distilling alcohol at home may be illegal in some jurisdictions. Be sure to check your local laws and obtain necessary permits if required.

Coarsely chop the kelp and place in a gin/botanicals infuser in the vapor path of the alcohol. This is intended to mimic any flavors imparted by traditional distillation through a kelp stem. Running the still hot probably adds to the historical verisimilitude here – remember, “[the distillate] condenses and appears again at the end of the worm beyond the barrel in drops, and which the Indians drink while warm” – but feel free to instead distill normal style for a better product.

This hoochinoo would have traditionally been drunk unaged, but it will almost certainly be tastier aged. For no particular historical reason besides vibes, I suggest a sugar maple barrel.