and stir it up and get it all together. and you would continue to do that until this was filled up. and by doing that, essentially, what you're trying to do is cook the grain to turn the starches that are in the grain into sugars. and then once that happens, you introduce the yeast and the yeast works on the sugars to produce the alcohol, takes three to five days to do that. once that's all done, then you're ready to distill, you take it over to the stills, and then the idea is there is that you're separating the alcohol from all the liquid so you wind up with a much higher concentration of alcoholic spirit when you're done doing that. >> my name is steve bashore, and i manage the department at mt. vernon, and that involves the gristmill and distillery

operation as well as the blacksmith shop and the pioneer farm site. so we basically take care of those living history elements of mt. vernon. as we know, washington made apple and peach brandy here at mt. vernon. we're doing that these next three days and the apples would have been grown in orchards on his property. and you can see some of them here. the type we're using are the newton, the pippen, and the russette and one other variety. the first step would they'd have to be pressed or crushed in an apple press which includes a device to crank and crush up the apples into chunks, and then that would be put into a large press, which in the 18th century would've had a big rectangular press with a wooden jack screw that was basically hand cranked down to squeeze all of the apple chunks. the pulp is basically what you're squishing and from that excretes the juice. and that would be fed down and collected in buckets. and then from that point on, you're going to ferment that juice. and in this case, what we're doing is fermenting this large barrel here called a hog's head.

so this is about 5% to 6% alcohol content when you're done. so the fermentation process for apples takes longer than it would for making a whiskey, which was also made here, which was the main commodity. you're looking at 14 to 30 days, perhaps, of fermentation depending on the types of yeasts that are used. in this case, what we're doing this time, we were fermenting with a champagne yeast which is a little faster acting. it really took about 10 to 14 days to complete the fermentation. but in washington's time, they didn't know a lot about the science of the yeast. today that's very much a trade secret in many distilleries in places. they'll tell you everything about what they do, but they're not going to discuss the type of yeast. and they all usually have labs. which they work on these yeasts. but in washington's day with an orchard, there's naturally occurring yeast. he may have well had the apple juice all pressed and let it sit in barrels in an orchard, and

let that naturally occurring yeast get in there and do its job over a period of weeks. when i refer to the 6%, that's when it's in its stage at the end of fermentation. so we're going to then distill it. and so that's going to get the proof up to much higher alcohol content by volume. so by running it through these big pot stills as we're doing now, we're going to get this proof upwards 80, 90, 100 proof. through doing two distillations. right now we have all five stills charged with the 6% juice, which is the fermented apple juice. and as the stills run, this first run today, we'll bump that up, might get to 50 proof, maybe 60 proof. we'll collect all that first run distillate and then run it through on wednesday. we'll double everything. we'll run it a second time through the still. each time you distill, you gain proof, but you lose volume. our goal is to try to get 50 to 60 gallons at the end of the process of hopefully some 90

something proof apple brandy. >> was this something that a lot of farmers would've done to make apple brandy? or was that unusual? >> no, it was a drink at the time. a lot of people, farmers are distilling, as well, various things. because really, a still is a piece of farm equipment in the 18th and 17th century, even the 19th century. if you're a small farmer, you're going to probably make a little whiskey on the side. you may do some apple jack, hard cider or brandy and the amount of orchards some of these farms had, it was a natural side business to be in. a lot of alcohol is also legal tender in this time period. you could sell that cider for a pretty good price. you could trade it for other goods. it's a good, small commodity to be involved in even if you're a small farmer. we have a number of staff here that are on the historic trades department that work for me, a couple of full-time people are here and some of our part-time staff. so these are interpreters that regularly give tours of the distillery and farm and the

blacksmith shop an and the mill. and several of these guys have made the whiskey runs, so they know how to operate all the equipment. and then we have the master distiller, dave pickerell, who is here who is our main consultant for doing whiskey and these brandies. dave used to be the master distiller at maker's mark. he's now independent. and many over the last 25 years, many people are familiar with how micro brew beer really took off. well, there's a movement now in craft distilling going on in the country. and so dave is involved in a number of entrepreneurial projects because he's a chemical engineer designing distillery for people. so he brought a couple of friends here who are distillers. one runs catoctin distillery. this is in this area. and another young man from the hudson river valley of new york that is just beginning the process of building his distillery. they're here to learn with dave and get a taste of the history of distilling as well as help us. >> i encourage people to name their stills all the time. this one is pam.

and this one is sarah. and that's maggie. and this is sandra, and that's elizabeth. so it's please send me spirit, elizabeth. that's the pneumonic. today we're having a lot of fun doing first-run apple brandy distillations. and this is one of our five copper stills. they orient themselves from my right to my left in order of size. the smallest one of the stills is about 62 gallons and the largest one is about 95 gallons. this is just the very top of the rather large semispherical top and then a conical shape still. the still itself is probably that big. it's probably 4 feet across inside. and then it runs all the way

down to about here. for the base. so it's -- this is a 95 gallons in here, the size of the bathtub in volume. i've been coming here now for nine or ten years. and one of the things that i was just fascinated with is that the level of detail that the archaeologists went to in uncovering the site. and for me it was really fun because i'm not an archaeologist, i'm a chemical engineer and i make whiskey for a living. but it was fun because even uneducated me could stand and look at the archaeological site and say obviously the boiler went here, the fire boxes for the stills went there. this was the mash floor. the site laid itself out very nicely for us. and a tremendous amount of information was easily discoverable. there are things we learned about the operation here that are transferable into modern craft distilling. things like the use of hops as a natural antibacterial agent.

people think hops are only in beer. but as a craft distiller, i can tell you that there are times i use hops when i need bacterial control. things like how to make a really high percent rye mash because rye is a grain. and it gets too thick too quick and if you don't get it -- if you don't get it all stirred into the mash hot enough, it foams. we've had -- the first time we came here, we made the foam that ate manhattan. it foamed all night long and it was 2 feet deep and 6 feet wide when we came in in the morning. and it didn't stop until -- until we distilled it. and so we finally learned how to control it by studying what they did. and they actually got lard and put it on a paint brush and they would hit the foam and it breaks the foam. then eventually we learned how to not make the foam in the first place.

and that was much better. but all that came from studying the antique techniques. >> there are a number of manuals on distilling that were written during this time period the late 18th and early 19th century that describe how you lay out a still house and the most efficient way of doing things and so we were able to look at these manuals and this all fits very well with what's going on sort of in the larger distilling industry at the time. >> it's kind of a delicate balance. these are direct-fired stills which is really rare today, but in george washington's time this was ubiquitous. so we've got -- we go through different phases during the process. first thing we do is take what we call the onion which is the top part of the still and we just remove it and we charge the still with the liquid to be distilled. and then you start on low fire. you basically build a fire with the intent on getting the flame hot enough that it gets the heat

going up the flue properly, because otherwise you wind backing smoke up into the room. once we've got the fire established in the firebox, then we establish the water flow in the condensers. and this is an old what we call a worm-style condenser. the vapor comes down the line arm. and then it runs down and turns and then coils around inside the condenser. and then it comes out the bottom in the back in this little tube right here as a liquid. and then it's all about balancing the amount of heat that we're putting in the still and the amount of water that we're running through the condenser. >> it was off. and so it just needs to be balanced. and then also keeping track of the amount of heat in the

firebox so that we can manage the process with the still. don't try this at home, but the way that we've managed the heat is we feel the still to see where the heat is in the still. and on this particular still, it's slightly uncomfortable to have my hand resting right here. and it's starting to move its way up what we call the onion. well, as the heat wave kind of moves, it will move up the onion and then it will move out the line arm, and then finally when it gets to this knuckle joint, we've got about five minutes until we got product coming out the back of the condenser. oh, nice. this one's all the way up the

line arm already. >> yeah. >> okay. way to go, mr. perky. >> well, we really limit ourselves in how we operate here. we still boil water in the boiler. we still add hops when we're making the rye. we bucket water with wooden buckets. we stir with a wooden mash rake. use the old-style fermenters. we don't use thermometers or hydrometers when we're making the judgments about adding the grain into the mash tub. we just do it with visual and taste clues. when we're done fermenting, we bucket it over to the stills a bucket at a time. it's very, very much somewhat so. when we do the full production days we'll work a few weeks at a time just at full-scale production. we can understand why george washington had the staff that he did here. because that's the staff level that it takes us to do it.

once we start getting liquid out the back end, we monitor the quality. and the first or four shots that come off the still we call heads. and it's inferior quality, and it's high in aldehides. that material we collect up and get rid of. this is going to turn into a stream pretty quick here. >> the pace is already picking up. >> yeah. this definitely heads in the jug. >> that is tasting pretty nice, though. >> yeah, cut. >> i'll do this.

>> and then once the aldehides peak and drops off again, we get to what we call the hearts. and we collect the hearts and then the hearts are coming off we're really delicately managing the heat in the still, we don't want to overrun it, because it will push too hard on it. we don't want to underrun it because it will slow it down. you can actually see the stream volume change if you can put too much or too little heat in a still, so we're managing that to keep the hearts run just nice and flat and smooth. just lay that in there. and -- >> there you go. >> there. okay. that will do it. that way you cooled the line arm a little bit more. all the water comes from the -- comes actually what will come from the mill rates and then it would have gone down and found its way back out to the creek. in washington's day the mill race was fed by a mill pond that was a mile from here? >> two miles. >> two miles from here. a great big mill pond which is a

hollow log that's got a trough in it, and the water flows from the mill race down the trough. and then you can see valves stuck up at the end. denny, do you want to go up and reach and point to a valve? maybe adjust it a little bit. just so you can open and close that valve. it's the same kind of valve that are down here on the condensers that allows you to adjust how much water is coming out of the mill race. >> they did only 60 to 80 gallons of brandy on a couple of occasions. they did apple brandy one time and peach brandy and sold a little of it, but it seems the records indicate that most of it was used at the mansion. so washington is entertaining a lot of people. this is after the presidency. he's supplementing his other stores of alcohol with homemade stuff. the whiskey is a different proportion totally. this whole building was built as a commercial distillery to make rye whiskey.

so washington's men in 1798 the first year that it's open made 4,500 gallons of rye whiskey. in 1799 almost 11,000 gallons. this little brandy component's a very small measure compared to the whiskey business. >> but we've got lots and lots of plantation records, accounts. we know who was buying washington's whiskey, how much they were paying for it. 60 cents a gallon, by the way, for the twice-distilled stuff, up to a dollar a gallon for the good stuff that was distilled a few more times. and almost all of it was used here locally. the crew here, the folks that really made it work would have been african-american slaves. there were six young black men who were assigned to the distillery. and so james anderson's son john and his assistant would have been directing it, but all the work done here would have been done by those six men. and it would have been a lot of work carrying grain around. doing the mashing. then transferring the mash in

the stills, doing all of that. so, it was a labor-intensive occupation. >> normally in washington's time they didn't age whiskey. it went into a cask but it was an uncharred barrel and went right to market and people drank it as a clear alcohol. in our case what we do when we make a whiskey run we'll go ahead and bottle half of it unaged to keep it in the tradition that was done here and we'll sell that. we've sold three different batches of unaged rye whiskey the last two years and usually we only have 400 or 500 bottles available and they usually sell out in a day. but now october 22nd for the first time we're offering the aged rye whiskey so when we do those runs we'll bottle half unaged and barrel the other half in a charred barrel that it sits two years minimum and then we'll sell it. so, we bottled that earlier this spring and the color's very nice, what you'd expect in a modern alcohol, amber color, really nice taste, so we're looking forward to people trying that. >> well, when we started this

project we really had no idea that we were going to get into the whiskey-making business. lots of good whiskey being made out in kentucky and elsewhere, but people's interest has been so great. almost from the very beginning people were just really curious what the whiskey that washington made would have tasted like. and so over the years we've done a number of demonstration projects, and in the last couple of years we've actually made enough whiskey that we can sell it to folks, and so it's actually available, we're an abc store here and you can come and you can buy it. >> we'll be giving tours today as well so there will be visitors coming through, and that's not always the case when we make whiskey. we usually do whiskey in the off-season because you can look around there's a lot involved. a lot of hot copper. we want people to be safe. but today, you know, because it's a special thing we're doing with the brandy, we have it going on while we're open.

>> so this was a commercial enterprise, but did washington himself like whiskey? >> well, whiskey was the most popular distilled spirit in the country in the years following the revolution. before the revolution, it had been rum. but because of the revolution, rum became more expensive because a lot of that was coming from britain, or from british colonies. and americans were growing lots and lots of grain. so it really became a popular thing. popular thing. this was a commercial venture, though, and there were a lot of people distilling but washington's distillery as we found out from our research was one of the largest in the country. now, that doesn't mean that it was washington's favorite spirit. you know, whiskey was cheap. it was very popular among the masses. but washington really was sort of in that tradition,

madera, port, wines were his favorite spirit. rum punches, things like that. although we know from the records that he did drink whiskey but i don't think it would have been his first choice. >> we'll get big proof because we're 60% alcohol in all of these, guys, and i don't think proof. i don't think we have gotten 6% on any of our fermentations yet. we fry to hit 8%. we never really got there yet. okay. okay. >> it's coming out nice and steady now. >> yeah. >> you can watch american artifacts and american history tv programs at any time visiting cspan.org/history. >> this weekend on book tv, on afterwards, seth jones documents the war against al qaeda since

9/11 in hunting in the shadows. he is interviewed by kimberly dosier, saturday night at 10:00 p.m. eastern. also your questions and comments for tom brokaw, sunday, live at noon eastern. book tv every weekend on cspan 2. >> each week american history tv sits in on a lecture with one of the country's college professors. you can watch those classes here every saturday at 8:00 p.m. and midnight eastern and sunday at 1:00 p.m. bowling green state university professor scott martin teaches a course on the history of drugs and alcohol in the united states. today's class focuses on the history of opiates in america. this is the first part of professor martin's class and it goes about an hour and 20 minutes. >> so tonight we're switching gears a little bit. the last few weeks we've been talking about early american

drinking and then alcohol use and reform roughly into the early 20th century. so tonight we'll turn again to drugs. we talked a little bit about the first week we did readings with david cartwright's forces of habit. we're reading another of his books tonight. but tonight we'll be talking about opium addiction in america and i hope this will work for me here. press this. no. again. there we go. so we're going start off by talking about different types of opiate use, different kinds of products that were available and in general circulation opium obviously comes from poppies, it's psychoactive properties have been known for centuries if not millenia.

and it's been taken orally for a variety of ailments, pretty much anything you can imagine would be treated with opium. a very potent painkiller, one that occurs naturally. probably the most commonly used opium product for much of the 19th century and even before that was a liquid called laudanum which is a tincture of opium. essentially opium dissolved in alcohol so you're getting -- it is about 46% alcohol. so it would be what, 92 proof even without the opium. but it's opium and alcohol. used for a variety of illnesses and complaints. obviously for pain relief, opium is a very powerful analgesic and painkiller. so for everything from broken bones to headaches to menstrual cramps to just about any kind of pain you can think it would have been prescribed.

it was also symptomatic relief for diarrhea. now, today diarrhea's kind of an inconvenience. it was a very serious problem, health problem in centuries past because they didn't understand what caused it. so if you had dysentery, for example, they had no way of knowing how to cure that or even how to prevent it, really. dysentery and diarrhea are also symptoms of other sorts of illnesses cholera, yellow fever. it slows down the actions of the bowels, it relieves diarrhea and makes you feel better. the big danger with diarrhea is that you get dehydrated which your kidneys can then shut down. so laudanum or opium to treat chronic dysentery or diarrhea was a very useful medical tool.

and then obviously as a sedative and for anxiety and symptoms of that kind. another form of opium dissolved in alcohol was called paregoric. this is camphorated tincture of opium. it's much weaker than laudinum, there's not as much opium in it. the camphor gave it an expectorant, it would break up congestion in your chest, it was often used for respiratory illness, as a cough syrup, that kind of thing. it could also be used for some of these other complaints as well. you just had to take more of it. and you could also just eat the opium once it was prepared and it would take the same kind of effect.

later developments in opiate products, morphine, which is an alkaloid of opium, more potent than simply eating opium, morphine itself was isolated chemically in 1804. it didn't come into general use until after the introduction of the hypodermic syringe. in 1857. so morphine was used much more for injection into the muscle or under the skin. not so much until later on was it injected directly into the bloodstream, into a vein. but the advantage of morphine is particularly when it's injected hypodermically, the action is very rapid. it goes right into your bloodstream, into your brain. and it's more potent than eating

opium or taking it in the form of laudanum. it's more rapid and more potent. and it was a real boon for doctors, surgeons, people recuperating from wounds, post operatively, and so on. so morphine becomes the opiate of choice really for medical treatment again for a variety of illnesses, not just sort of catastrophic illnesses and surgical wounds but also for menstrual cramps, headaches, other sorts of things. it was prescribed quite commonly later in the 19th century. it's not until roughly the 1870s that hypodermic syringes really become common. although they existed, for example, during the civil war. there was not much use of them.

they just didn't have that many of them. so it's only after the war that injection of morphine becomes common. and it really was sometimes doctors would even leave the syringe with the patient so they could inject themselves. and this obviously is a dangerous thing, as they found. and then finally heroin, which is synthesized in 1898 and manufactured bayer, the people who make aspirin, large pharmaceutical company. it was marketed, interestingly enough, as a non-addictive morphine substitute and cough suppressant. again it had the same kind offer action that paregoric would have. and that's the opiate calming the cough reflex. essentially, although this wasn't recognized as addictive for about ten years, which is

kind of hard to understand, hard to believe, essentially heroin is a quicker and more potent -- quicker-acting form of morphine. and more potent. but this was not recognized as such immediately. unlike morphine initially after 1898 for about the first decade is was not primarily an injectable drug but rather it would be taken orally in the form of a cough syrup or some kind of preparation. so i wasn't the same kind of heroin that when we think of heroin of somebody injecting themselves. so i want i have some images to show you what exactly is going on. on the left obviously is the opium poppy here. these are the bulbs there, the immature flowers that would open up into a flower. when they are at this stage the way yo