The Thrilling Adventures Hooch Cooperage, Federal Agent

I ended the hoochinoo post by suggesting aging in a sugar maple barrel “for no particular historical reason besides vibes.” But fam, the vibes were wrong.

The problem is that maple is not a Pacific Northwest tree, let alone an Alaskan one. Acer saccharum is an eastern North American species whose only real connection to distilling is the Lincoln County process, where sugar maple is burned to charcoal and used to filter whiskey rather than to hold it. I had picked it because I liked the idea of it; because sugar maples grew on my street growing up. But it’s the wrong barrel for the hooch project.

Hooch Cooperage doesn’t exist and can’t hurt you

The first thing to admit is that there is no historically accurate barrel, because there was no historically accurate aging. Morris is explicit that the distillate “appears again at the end of the worm beyond the barrel in drops, and which the Indians drink while warm.” An eyewitness account reprinted elsewhere in the same report is even blunter about the apparatus: “The liquor is caught in a tin cup.”¹

Nobody was barrelling hooch. It was made in a five-gallon coal-oil can and drunk hot out of a cup, and any cask I put it in is a counterfactual.

But “counterfactual” is not the same as “arbitrary,” and it turns out that “what barrel is historically appropriate” actually conflates three distinct questions:

1. What would the spirit actually have been historically aged in? Nothing. A tin cup.
2. What was physically available for aging? (If a distiller at Fort Wrangell in 1879 had, for whatever reason, decided to put a run of hoochinoo into wood, what wood was within arm’s reach?)
3. What would a legitimate American distiller have done in 1879? A real and answerable question, which has nothing to do with Alaska.

Being both an army base and set in olden longform writing times, the record is actually much more available than you might imagine regarding what kind of cooperage would have been available: let’s go down the list.

Two Hundred Barrels of Molasses

“The steamer which carries the United States mail from this port to Sitka and Wrangel is the principal common carrier of most of the molasses which is converted into rum. The custom-house records show that during the months of August, September, October, November, and December of the present year, there was exported in this steamer from this place to Sitka 4,889 gallons of molasses, and to Wrangel for the same period 1,635 gallons, nearly all of which it may safely be said has been manufactured into ‘Hoochenoo,’ gallon for gallon.”²

Elsewhere in the same report:

“I have to add that the steamer California, on her last trip, landed in Sitka, for the traders there, 200 barrels of molasses; enough to make 200 barrels of liquor.”

And, in the middle of a complaint about the futility of trying to regulate the trade:

“a schooner was cleared at Sitka for a trading voyage among the Indians at Takow, Chilkaht, and other large villages, with 18 barrels of molasses on board, and this only a short time previous to our arrival.”

Assuming a period-correct molasses barrel was somewhere between 31.5 gallons and 50 gallons, those 1,635 gallons delivered to Fort Wrangell converts to between thirty-three and fifty-two empty molasses barrels accumulating at Fort Wrangell over five months, and upwards of a hundred at Sitka, on the mail steamer alone. This is the single most abundant class of empty container in the territory, and it was emptied in exactly the buildings where the stills were running, by exactly the people running them.

Molasses was understood to be the controlling input, too, and was rationed accordingly:

“on the plea that the Indians distilled whisky or rum from molasses, the commander of the military at Sitka issued orders that no person should be permitted to purchase more than one pint of molasses at a time.”

What Isn’t There

The negative evidence is as useful as the positive. Across all 211 OCR’d pages, “cask,” “hogshead,” “puncheon,” “demijohn,” and “stave” all fail to appear whatsoever. “Keg” appears once, specifically discussing a container for gunpowder.

“Oak” appears five times, and every one is botanical, in passages comparing the forests of British Columbia to those of Norway and the British Isles. No oak grows natively in Alaska. There was no local tight cooperage, and there was nothing to make it out of. Quercus garryana, Oregon White Oak, which is sometimes used in modern distillation, does not reach that far north.

Captain L. A. Beardslee, who commanded USS Jamestown at Sitka in 1879 and 1880 and whose reports were printed a couple of years later, independently confirms the shape of this.³ He describes “a druggist, who among his drugs keeps barrels of molasses,” and describes an episode in which the Sitka merchants agreed among themselves not to order molasses by the September steamer (the embargo intended as liquor control) only for one of them to break the compact, take delivery of a large stock, and corner the market. Cartel formation as temperance policy, defeated within a single sailing by arbitrage. Sic semper capitalism, I guess.

Beardslee also tells us what liquor cooperage looked like when it did appear, and it is not encouraging: “I have known of whisky being brought in boxes of eggs, in passengers’ valises, in casks nominally of beer.” Spirit casks in Alaska were contraband: disguised, in small format, and they left again with the smuggler.

As a point of historical comparison for those of us (me) failed by the American educational system who had to look this up: Prohibition in the United States began in 1919; we are here interested in the period 40 years previous, on the Imperial periphery. There were several successive temperance movements prior, (all of them chronicled in wikipedia in excruciating detail,) but of particular note is the overlap of indigenous temperance activists in the early 1800s seeing the effect the rapid introduction of alcohol had had on their communities, with the often-paternalistic white temperance activists (like Morris and Brady) seeking to ban the sale of alcohol to Natives for religious or racist reasons.

The Other Barrels

There was one other large population of casks in the territory, and it is worth mentioning only to rule it out. Alaska in 1879 was starting to pack salmon, and packing salmon takes barrels:

“Baronovitch at Cassair last year, with the aid of only 4 men, put up, in splendid order, 700 barrels of salmon, and had to cease the catch ere the season was half over, he having no more barrels to fill.”⁴

Seven hundred barrels in a partial season from one four-man operation. Morris elsewhere notes that the cost of the export trade is essentially “the value of salt (or vinegar), barrels, and freight.” These were made on site where possible: the salteries kept coopers on site who constructed barrels out of native wood (which in Southeast Alaska likely means Sitka spruce and western hemlock) with only the iron hoops shipped north.

However, these barrels did not need to be watertight and more to the point, was wood that had spent its working life full of salt fish in brine.

That leaves the third question: what would a real distiller, somewhere with actual infrastructure, have done in 1879?

The answer, charred new oak, although the timeline here surprisingly tight. The earliest American reference anyone has turned up is from 1826, and it is notably tentative: a Lexington grocer, writing to a distiller he had just bought a hundred barrels from, passes along a rumour that “if our barrels should be burnt upon the inside, say only the 16th of an inch, that it will much improve it, of this however I presume you are the best judge.”⁵ Nobody hedges like that about standard practice.

By the end of the century, aging bourbon and rye in new charred oak was routine, and the sources are consistent in attaching it to a particular provenance: Kentucky and Pennsylvania whiskey.

This is all to say it while was an industrial practice of the whiskey belt, in 1879, it was not available at Fort Wrangell. New cooperage on a frontier post is expensive, and the nearest oak tree was a thousand miles south.

There is a second, subtler reason charring is wrong here: a molasses barrel was never charred. Coopers heat staves to bend them, so any cask carries some incidental toast from its own construction, but nobody deliberately chars the inside of a container intended to hold molasses. If the cask that was actually in the room is a molasses barrel, then a charred barrel is not a closer approximation of it. It is a different object.

Every contemporary source calls this Hooch “rum”. Morris heads his recipe “Molasses rum, or hootzenoo.” The Leavenworth piece calls it “hoochenoo rum, a vile distillation made from molasses and sugar.” Beardslee describes Alaskans who had “learned from the whites the secret of making very powerful rum from flour and molasses.” And the Secretary of the Treasury’s Annual Report on the State of the Finances for the same year, describing why a purpose-built revenue vessel was needed in Alaskan waters, names the target as “illicit traffic in fire-arms and rum.”⁶

Rum was the trade spirit in Alaska, everyone involved classified hoochinoo as a rum, and it is a molasses distillate, which is the actual definition. Aging it in an ex-rum cask is the obvious move, and it is the closest commercially available analogue to an emptied molasses cask.

However.

Two problems, one archival and one chemical.

The archival issue is that the documentary record simply does not support it. Rum casks were in the territory, but they arrived full of contraband and left with the smugglers who brought them. Nothing in Morris or Beardslee describes an empty rum cask sitting around in Sitka or Wrangell. Molasses barrels are described by the hundred.

The chemical concern is more interesting. My concern going in was that residual rum would swamp a delicate distillate. It won’t, and the reason is that “ex-rum barrel,” at the small-cooperage scale, almost never means what it sounds like. The one I was looking at is built, by the maker’s own description, “from the head of a bourbon barrel that had a second life aging Canadian whiskey before being sent to the Caribbean for rum,” manufactured around 1955.

That is a fourth-fill piece of wood, seventy years old.

First-fill casks carry high concentrations of extractable vanillin, tannin, and oak lactone, and they give up bold flavour within months. Refill casks have already surrendered most of it; extraction is slower and gentler, and distillers reach for refills precisely because they let the spirit’s own character dominate. The rule of thumb in the trade is that a first fill gives you something like 80% wood and 20% distillate, and a refill closer to 60/40. A fourth fill is well past the end of that scale.

So the risk is not that the rum shouts over the hooch. It is that a barrel this exhausted contributes very little of anything, while whatever it does contribute is an unattributable blur of bourbon, Canadian whisky, and rum laid down over seven decades, from a broker history the maker is candid about not fully having.

And there is one final argument against using a rum barrel that has nothing to do with exhaustion. Hoochinoo, for all that I have stretched the historical record to keep it from being just a garbage-tier rum, is still a molasses spirit. Rum congeners are not foreign to it; they are the same family. Therefore the problem with a rum barrel, even a second-run one rather than fourth-, isn’t a clash, it’s redundancy. Rum character would reinforce exactly the axis this spirit is already loudest on, while masking the parts that make it hoochinoo rather than rum: the grain from the flour and the barley, the fruit esters off the apple and the berries, and the trace bromophenols the kelp contributes, which sit at nanogram-per-litre thresholds and are the easiest thing in the glass to bury.

And so I come back to a molasses barrel for cooperage: new American white oak, medium toast, no char, and seasoned with molasses before you fill it.

The historical argument is now more than vibe-based. Tight cooperage in nineteenth-century America meant clear white oak, split from the dense heart of the tree, and the contemporary sources name its contents explicitly: spirits, molasses, whale oil. Every one of those thirty-odd barrels that piled up empty at Wrangell between August and December was white oak, and none of them was charred. If you want the cask that was in the room, that is the cask.

Seasoning it is straightforward, with one trap: you must not season with a low-proof sugar solution. Molasses is nutrient-rich, and a warm barrel full of dilute sugar will ferment or sour on you, and in the worst case explode the barrel. Use alcohol.

1. Swell and leak-test the new barrel per the cooper’s instructions. A dry small barrel will weep.
2. Build the charge from your feints: the heads and tails you were going to discard anyway. Roughly three parts feints at about 40% ABV to one part molasses by volume lands you near 30% ABV, which is comfortably past any microbial risk while still carrying a heavy molasses load.
3. Hold three to four weeks at cellar temperature, rotating now and then. You are seasoning, not aging; longer just spends oak you wanted for the spirit.
4. Dump and drain thoroughly. Do not rinse with water, which will pull back out what you just put in.
5. Fill with hearts.

One piece of arithmetic to close on: seven gallons of wash at 8.6% ABV holds about 2.28 liters of absolute alcohol. Assume a realistic 65% hearts recovery through a pot run with honest cuts and you are left with roughly 1.48 liters of ethanol, which at a 62.5% entry proof is about 2.4 liters of spirit. A 6.4-litre barrel therefore takes the hearts of nearly three full batches of the recipe as written to fill.

The upside is that the schedule arranges itself: batch one’s feints season the barrel while batches two and three are still fermenting.

Ok, actually two more things.

“Or,” not “And.”

From the eyewitness still account: “They sour the molasses with yeast, apples, and the like. When they can’t buy molasses they purchase sugar, and if they fail in procuring that they use berries or potatoes for a mash.” Elsewhere, a report of “a very fair quality of liquor, which an Indian woman had distilled from dried apples, and in the berry season they distill a liquor from the fermented juice.” Molasses, sugar, berries, potatoes: a fallback chain, not a shopping list. Lemert’s “a variety of ingredients, such as…” can in retrospect also be read this way.

I am going to keep making it as a single wash anyway, and I don’t think that’s indefensible. Morris’s own recipe is a combined one: molasses and flour and yeast-powder, in one can, and the apple souring is documented in the molasses wash too. Only the rice, the potatoes, and the berries need a hand on the scale. And the military order rationing molasses to a pint at a time supplies the motive: a distiller who can only buy a pint at a go has every reason to stretch it with whatever else in the pantry will ferment. Perhaps this is a hand-wave. But as I said both in my original post and just a few paragraphs ago, I don’t want this to be just the garbage-tier rum toilet-wine that the record could be reasonably argued to describe, and my powers of motivated reasoning are strong.

Morris glosses “salmonberry” as Rubus chamaemorus.

…Which is cloudberry, not salmonberry (Rubus spectabilis).

“All these berries, but especially the salmonberry, or ‘morosky’ of the Russians (Rubus chamaemorus), are excellent anti-scorbutics. They are preserved by the Esquimaux in large wooden dishes or vessels holding five gallons or more; covered with leaves, they undergo a slight fermentation, and freeze solid when cold weather comes.”

Morosky is Russian моро́шка, and моро́шка is cloudberry. This passage sits in the report’s northern section and describes Yup’ik and Inupiat practice, so the naming may well be regional – in Southeast Alaska “salmonberry” almost certainly does mean R. spectabilis, and Lemert is a 1954 secondary source who may have meant either. But it is a good reminder that nineteenth-century Alaskan berry names are not to be trusted without checking. Crowberry, Empetrum nigrum, is still commonly called “blackberry” in Alaska, for example, and isn’t even the same genus.

I went looking for the historically accurate barrel and found that there wasn’t one. I want to be careful about what that means, because “there is no authentic version” has a very specific nuance, which isn’t exactly correct.

Four contemporary witnesses, two of them federal officers writing in the same year about the same territory, and no two of them describe the same drink.⁷ This is not sloppiness on their part.

There is a name for the fallacy that would have you believe otherwise. Popular food history is full of what one writer calls the myth of the monolithic recipe: the assumption that behind the variation there sits a single period-correct formula waiting to be recovered, when in fact “historical recipes were notoriously vague” and the competing primary texts describe “a chaotic spectrum rather than a single standard.”⁸ I have shown four sources contradicting each other, but that does not necessarily imply that any of them are wrong.

Dishes and recipes are different objects

The philosopher Andrea Borghini draws a distinction that clears most of this up: a dish is the stuff, a recipe is the idea.⁹ A dish is this specific tray of tiramisu on this counter; a recipe is the set of repeatable aspects that would deliver another one of the same sort. Authenticity, he argues, is properly a property only of dishes: an authentic dish is one that authentically reproduces a recipe.

“When they can’t buy molasses they purchase sugar, and if they fail in procuring that they use berries or potatoes for a mash” is not a recipe with variations. It is a recipe whose content is whatever ferments. The stable part is the technique: the coal-oil can, the bull kelp worm, the barrel of cold water. The technique is also the only part every source agrees on.

Borghini gets there from a different direction, borrowing Nelson Goodman’s distinction between autographic arts (a painting cannot be represented by anything but itself) and allographic ones (a score stands in for the music). Cuisine looks allographic, since we write recipes down, but he points out that no written recipe can substitute for the execution, so cooking retains “a fundamental component of creativity too, an adaptation of a generic procedure to circumstances.”

He continues:

“Out of material necessity, each dish employs novel ingredients: food is perishable and transient; taste is a destructive sense, as it destroys what it experiences; and cuisine is a destructive endeavor, as it irreversibly transforms what it prepares to be consumed. Thus, whoever creates a dish, even on the score of a recipe, will be employing ingredients that are unique.”

Every batch of hoochinoo was a different drink. As will mine be again.

Authentification

The sharpest tool in the literature of culinary authenticity is a terminological swap. Rather than asking whether something is authentic, Rebecca Sims, drawing on Peter Jackson (not that one), argues we should study authentification: “the process whereby people make claims for authenticity and the interests that those claims serve.”¹⁰

Every single source that describes what hoochinoo “really” was was a federal officer or a newspaper arguing for its suppression. Morris fixes it as “molasses rum” inside a document whose stated purpose is proposing new contraband categories. The Treasury names “illicit traffic in fire-arms and rum” while asking for a purpose-built revenue cutter. The Leavenworth piece defines the drink in a paragraph that concludes a gunboat would be better than a garrison. Beardslee’s ingredient list appears in the reports of a naval commander whose job was ending the trade.

Defining the drink was a step in the argument for controlling the people drinking it. Every recipe I have is downstream of an enforcement agenda, which is worth remembering before treating any of them as a neutral record.

The most useful thing I read while working on this is Emily Arendt’s history of “the jumble,” which traces one cookie recipe across two centuries of American reinvention and concludes that “there is no true ‘historical authenticity’ when it comes to cookery.”¹¹ Modern cooks doing historical cookery, she argues, “are instead creating dishes that are authentic to their own moment in time, not some essentialized version of the dish rooted in a mythic past.” Further, such recreations say “more about the taste preferences, political agendas, and social geographies of those cooks than those to whom they pay homage.”

Her formulation of what a reconstruction actually is speaks to this entire project: “what is created is not authentic to the moment we are uncovering, but instead is authentic to us and our attempts to interpret the past.”

Which is, I think, an accurate description of my recipe and more honest than the version where I pretend otherwise. I am putting every fermentable in Lemert’s list into a single wash, even though the sources point at least as strongly toward those being alternatives as toward their being a combination. I am doing it anyway, and the defence is not that it’s authentic, it’s that I want to. It’s that a distiller rationed to a pint of molasses at a time had every reason to stretch it with whatever else in the pantry would ferment, that the resulting drink is one somebody plausibly made, and that that recipe is more interesting to make than a bottle of molasses rum with a couple of apples in it.

The reason that’s defensible rather than merely self-serving is Arendt’s other point: the value of a reconstruction is in the questions the act of making it forces you to ask. Chasing barrel historicity produced the questions answered by the customs figures, the pint-at-a-time order, the merchants’ molasses cartel, and the discovery that the ingredient list may be a menu rather than a recipe. But it also forces me to confront questions of authenticity, of colonization, and of white morality policing.

This is not permission to appropriate. The line was never pure versus impure; it is adaptation within a tradition, with attribution, versus outsider extraction that erases where a thing came from.¹² This particular case sits at an odd angle to that framework and I want to be exact about it. Hoochinoo is not a Tlingit traditional food and I am not reclaiming anything. It is a settler technology, introduced by infantrymen from an American garrison, taken up under the conditions of a colonial occupation, and then named after a Tlingit ḵwáan by white writers who were using the association as an insult. The naming is the appropriation, and it already happened, in 1879, in the sources I have spent this post quoting. What I am reconstructing is a soldier’s moonshine that had somebody else’s name stapled to it.

There is a mirror to all of this, and I have already written about it.

Over-policing authenticity flattens a living, hybrid, endlessly-substituted practice into a single imagined original. But the opposite error is inventing a tradition and then propagating it as fact, which is exactly what I found when I went looking for a pre-contact Pacific Northwest fermented elderberry-and-chiton drink and traced the whole thing back to a Wikipedia mis-citation, with the ethnographic source showing the components were consumed separately and the altered state likely coming from alkaloids rather than fermentation.

Those two failures look opposite but represent the same failure. Both substitute a clean story for a messy record. One insists the past was more fixed than it was; the other insists it was richer than it was.