but i'm sure she was just told, you did something. so she just she came through big time. so. you're welcome. any questions. >> one last question. >> thank you so much for coming. appreciate it. [ applause ] coming up this weekend on american history tv on c-span3. saturday at 10:00 p.m. eastern on reel america, the 1947 war department film "don't be a sucker" about hate filled speech. >> i'm just an average american but i'm an american american and some of the things i see in this country of ours make my blood boil. i see people making all of the money. i see negros holding jobs that belong to me and you. i ask you, we allow this things to go on, what's to become of us real americans. >> on sunday at 6:00 p.m. eastern on american artifacts,

we'll tour the president's vehicle collection. and then at 8:00 p.m. eastern on the presidency, herbert hoover scholar george nash talks about the relationship between the 31st president and calvin coolidge. >> just four days before the election coolidge ever the party regular finally gave hoover an endorsement in a prearranged program that invoked sensational newspaper head lines. hoover had shown his fitness to be president. hoover said coolidge was able, experienced, trustworthy and safe. >> american history tv all weekend every weekend only on c-span3. this week on c-span, tonight at 8:00 with the budget for congress to handle, we'll look at pending proposals for the federal budget. and friday, a profile interview

with agriculture secretary sonny perdue. >> my political history was, i tell people when i was born in perry, georgia, they stamp democrat on your birth certificate. in 1998 i made a decision to change parties and became a republican at that point in time. >> followed at 8:30 p.m. with a conversation with deathconfounder jeff moss. >> only people doing security were people in the military or banks. this is really a hobby. there were jobs and people were putting things online and there was money at risk. all of the sudden hackers started getting jobs doing security. >> watch on c-span and c-span.org and listen using the fre c-span radio app.

each week american artifacts takes viewers around the country. next located about three miles from george washington's mount vernon estate in virginia is a reconstructed 18th century whiskey distillery. i'm the vice president for preservation here and we're stand in front of the reconstruction of george washington. most people have no idea that washington not only was first in war but he was also one of the first. and he, as it turns out, he operated a major distillery here and it was a very important part of the plantation economy. and historians had known this for a long time.

about ten years ago we decided that we wanted to explore that and came out here with archaeologists, excavated the site and found where the distillery had been located. did five years of excavation and research and decided that we had a wonderful opportunity to bring this back and to show what an 18th century whiskey facility was like and you can't see it anywhere else in the country. >> there's a gristmill here too. >> the reason that the distillery is here because washington had a gristmill located here. it was a major part of the preservation. made lots of money off of it over the years. in 1797 the end of his second term as president, he hired james anderson to be his plantation manager. appare

as soon as he was on the job me lobbied washington and said if you'll pay for this, i can make you a lot of money by distilling whiskey, and washington, you know, initially say i don't know much about that but we have letters that he wrote to friends of his asking their advice. and he said as long as he can make a good product there's no doubt it will be successful. so he agreed and in 1797 they started here sort of in a small way, using an existing building and they bought a couple of stills. by the end of the year they were convinced that it was going to be successful so washington agreed to build the building behind it. so they bought three more stills and set it up and by the early spring of '78 it was up and running. >> this is a large building, looks like it was expensive to build. how did you get the funding for this and how did you decide the architecture of it? >> again, we've got great records. and the archaeology gave us the footprint of the building. when we go inside you'll see

where the stills are located. we have five stills in here that you see behind me. each one of them is located where the archaeologist found evidence orb it either in the form of the evidence of brick base of the furnace or heavily burned where the fires had been. we have two stills here and a third one in the middle and two more on either end. then we found evidence of the brick floor, found evidence of the broiler to keep the water for the mashing operation and then where all of the mash tubs are located beyond the boiler. the stone floor comes from the archaeology evidence. and that gave us the footprint of the billing and allowed us to position the different parts of the process. and the documentary evidence gave us other information. we knew the size of the stills because we have the records of when he bought them. we know that the stone mason

spent a certain amount of time raising the walls. we knew there were 10-foot high walls. we had records from the carpenters and other workmen. we were able to pull all of that together to get a good picture of what we think washington's distillery would have looked like. when you go inside, i think it's very very accurate to what washington's building would have looked like. we know that there were two d m dormer windows because there's records of that. so lots of information about it. although this building was gone by 1814. it seems to have burned at that time, only about 15 years you know after it was built. and the support we got for this was very important. mount vernon really couldn't have done it on their own. but the council of the united states, the folks that represent the liquor entry in this country, they came, we got together with them early on in the project and told them we have this wonderful educational

opportunity to tell a great story about george washington and it's also a great story about the heritage of american spirits and history. they supported that and came up with over $2 million to support the research and then the reconstruction of the distillery. so what washington was making was a rye whiskey. we knew the res ki was 65% grain, 35% corn and then 5% malted barley. that was a popular recipe from the time period. and rye is a little different. most whiskey that folks drink today is made of corn which yields a sweeter product. rye is spicier, a little sharper. but it was the popular grain at the time. and how they would do this is they would take all of the different grains and mix them in these large barrels called mash tubs. and they would put them in and add boiling water. and behind us here, this is the

boiler where the water gets heated up and then you would actually have to dip that out and bring it over to one of these large tubs and deposit the grain in here, put the boiling water in and then you take this mash rake and you would stir it. and stir it up and get it all, you know, all together. and then you would continue to do that until this was filled up. and by doing that, essentially what you're trying to do is to 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 day 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 that you're separating the alcohol from all of the liquid. so you wind up with a much higher concentration of

alcoholic spirit when you're done doing that. >> my name is steve bayshore and i manage the historic trade department at mount vernon and that involves the gristmill and distillery operation as well as the blacksmiths shop and the pioneer farm site. we basically take care of the living history. we know that he made apple and peach brandy here. the ams would have been grown on the orchards on his property. you can see some of them here. the we're using one other variety that we knew washington grew. the first step in the process is that it has to be pressed or crushed in an apple press that includes a device to press and crank up the ams in chunks and then that's put in a large press which in the 18th century would have had a rectangular press with a wood. jack screw that was hand cranked

down to squeeze all of these apples, the apple chunks. and that was collected in buckets and from that point on you're going to ferment that juice. what we're doing, 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, the main commodity. you're looking at 14 to 30 days of fermentation depending on the types of yeast that were used. in this case, what we're doing this time, we're fermenting with a champagne yeast, a little faster acting. so it took about 10 to 14 day to complete the fermentation. but in washington's tame they didn't know a lot about the science of the yeast. today that's very much a trade secret in many distilleries.

they'll tell you everything that they do but they're not going to discuss the type of yeast they're using. and they have labs where they work on the yeast. but with washington, there's a naturally occurring yeast. he may have had the apple juice pressed and let it set in barrels and let the naturally occurring yeast get in there and do it jobs. when i refer to the 6%, that's the stage at the end of fermentati fermentation. we're going to then distill it and that's going to get the proof up to a much higher alcoholic con tept. by running it through the pots, we're going to get the proof upwards 80, 90, 100 proof. right now we have all five filled with 26% juice which is a fermented apple juice. and as the stills today, we'll bump it up to 50 proof, maybe 60. we'll collect all of the first run and then we'll run it

through on wednesday, we'll double everything, run everything that we make the first two days the second time. each time you distill you gain proof but you lose volume. so your proof is to get 50 to 60 gallons into the process of hopefully 90-something proof apple brandy. >> is this something that a lot of farmers would have done to make apple brandy or was it unusual? >> it was the drink of the time. farmers are distilling various things. a still is a piece of farm equipment in the 18th, 19th century. if you're a small farmer you're probably going to make some whiskey on the side, maybe some apple jack as they called it. you think of if orchards that the farms had, it was a side business yop u cou business. you could sell the cider for a good price. it's a good kmoodty to be

involved in even if you're a very small farmer. we have a number of the staff here that work for me. some of our full time and part time staff. these are the ones that regularly give the tours of the farm, the black shop and the mill. several of these guys have made the whiskey runs so they know how to operate it. and then we have the master disti distiller. dave used to be the master distiller at make's mark. so he's now independent. over the past 25 years, many people are familiar with how microbeer took off. there's a movement going on in the country and dave is involved in a number of entrepreneurial projects designing distilleries for people. he brought a couple of friends

here who are distillers. one runs a distillery in this area and a young man in new york who is beginning to process building his distillery. they're here to learn as as well help us. >> i encourage people to name their stills all of the time. this is pam, and this one is sara and that's maggie. and this is sondra and that's elizabe elizabeth. please send me elizabeth. >> today we're having a lot of fun doing first run apple brandy distillation. and this is one of our five copper stills. they orient themselves kind of from my right to my left in order of size. the smallest one of the stills is about 62 gallons, the largest one about 95 gallons. this is just the very top of the

rather large top and then the still. so 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. to the base. this is 95 gallons in here. it's the size of the bathtub in volume. i've been coming here for nine of ten years and one of the things that i wu fascinated with is that the level of detail that the archaeologist went to in uncovering the site. for me it's really fun. i'm not an archeologist. i'm a chemical engineer and i make whiskey for a living. even i could look at the site and say obviously the boiler went here, the firebox for the stove went here, this was the mash board.

and so the site laid itself out very nicely for us. and a tremendous amount of information was easily discoverab discoverable. there are things that we learned about the operation here that are transferable into modern craft distillery, things like the use of hops as a natural anti-bacterial 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 match. because rye is a brat of a grain and it gets too quick too thick. and if you don't get it -- if you don't get it all stirred into the mash, it foams. the first time we came here we made the foam. i mean literally 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 we distilled it. and so we finally learned how to control it by studying what they did. they actually got ladder and put -- got lard and put it on a paint brush. then we learned how not to make the firm in the first place and that was bet. that came from studying. there are a number of manuals on distilling that were written in the late 18th and early 19th century that describe how you lay out a still house and the most efficient way of doing things. so we were able to look at those manuals and this all fit very well what's going on in sort of the largest distilling industry at the time. it's kind of a delicate balance. these are direct buyer stills which is really rare today. but in george washington's time, this was e bik us to.

we go through different stages. first thing we do is take the onion, 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 out the flume properly or you end up 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 what they call the worm style condenser. vapor comes down the line arm and then it runs down and turns and then coils around inside of 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 to the condenser.

>> it was off. and so it just needs to be balanced. >> it was off. and so it just needs to be balanced. and then also keeping track of the amount of heat in the fire box. so that we could manage the process with the still. don't try this at home, but the way that we manage 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 on here. and it is starting to move its way up -- what we call the onion. as the heat wave kind of moves, it will move up the onion and

then it will move out the line arm. and then when it finally gets to this knuckle joint, we have about five minutes until we've got product coming out of the back of the condenser. >> oh, nice. this is already up in 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 and add hot when we are making the rye. we bucket water with wooden buckets. we stir with the wooden mash, use the old style fermenters and we don't use thermometers or hydrometer and making the jum about adding the -- the judgment about adding the grain and we just do it with visual clues.

when we are done fermenting, we bucket it over to the stills, a bucket at a time. it is very, very much similar. so when we do the full scale 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 is 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 of four shots that come off the still we call heads. and it is inferior quality and high in aldo hyde and that we collect and get rid of. this will turn into a stream pretty quick here. >> the pace is already picking up. >> yeah. >> it's -- it's definite heads

in the jug. >> that is tasting pretty nice, though. >> yeah. i'll do this. and then once the aldo hyde peak and drop off, then we get to what we call the hearts. and when the hearts are coming off, we're delicately managing the amount of heat in the still. we don't want to overrun because t, because it will slow it down. you could see the stream volume change if you put too much or too little heat in the still. so we're managing that to keep the hearth run nice and flat and smooth. just lay that in there. >> there you go. >> okay. that will do it.

that way you cool the line arm a little bit more. all of the water comes from -- from the -- what will come from the mill and then it would have gone down and found its way back out into the creek. and in washington's day, the mill race was fed by a mill pond that was, what a mile from here. >> two miles from here. >> it is a great big mill pond. that is a hollow log that has a trough in it and the water flows from the mill race down the trough and then you could see valves stuck up at the end. do you want to go up and reach and kind of point to a valve. maybe adjust it a little bit. so you could open and close that valley. it -- the valve. the same kind of valve that allows you to adjust how many is coming out of the mill. >> 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 was used at the mansion, so washington was entertaining a lot of people. this is after the presidency so he's supplementing his alcohol with home made stuff. the whiskey is different totally. this whole building was built as a commercial building to make dry wichgy. so the first year they opened they made 4500 gallons and in 1799, almost 11,000 gallons. so this little brandy components are 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 and how much they were paying for it. 60 cents a gallon for the twice distilled and up to a dollar a gallon that was zpdistilled a f

more times. >> and the crew here would have made this work would have been african-american slaves. there were six young black men who were assigned to the distilly and james anderson's son john and his assistant would have been directing it but the work done here would have been done by the six men and it would have been a lot of work. carrying grain around, doing the mashing and then transferring the mash to the stills, doing all of that. so it was i labor intensive occupation. >> in washington's time they didn't age whiskey. it wasn't in a cask. it was an uncharred barrel and went right to market and it was drank at a pure alcohol and when we make a whiskey run, we'll go ahead and bottle half of it unaged to keep in tradition of the history done here and we'll sell that and so we've sold three different batches of unaged dry whiskey the last two years and usually we only have 400 or 500 bottles at a time

available and they sell out in a day. but now on october 22nd we're offering the anyone dry whiskey so we'll bottle half and barrel the other half in a cared barrel and let it sit two years minimum and then sell it. so we bottle that earlier this spring. and colors are very nice. what you would expect in a modern alcohol amber color. a really nice taste so we're looking forward to people trying that. >> well when we started this project. >> we had nooid dwra we would get into the whiskey made business. there is whiskey being made in kentucky and elsewhere but people's interest is so great, from the very beginning people were 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 made enough whiskey that we could sell it to folks. so it is actually available, we're an abc store here and you could come and you could buy it. >> we'll be giving tours today

as well. so there will be visitors coming through. and that is not always the case when we make whiskey, we do that in the off season. there is a lot of copper involved and the heat and the brandy is 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 county in the years following the revolution. before the revolution, it had been rum. because of the revolution, rum became more expensive because that was coming from britain or british colonies and americans were growing lots of grain and so it really became a popular thing. this was a commercial venture

and a lot of people distilling but washington distillery as we found out from our research was one of the largest in the country. now, that doesn't mean it was washington's favorite spirit. whiskey was cheap, was very popular among the masses, but washington really was sort of in that tradition, madera, port, wines were his favorite spirit. rum punch, things like that. although we know from the records he did drink whiskey but i don't think it would have been his first choice. >> we're going to get some big proof. because we're at 6% alcohol on all of these guys. and i don't think that we've actually gotten 6% on any of our firmentation yet. >> okay. >> and we tried to hit 8% but we've never really gotten there yet. >> it is coming out nice and

smooth now. >> yep. >> you could watch american artifacts and other american history tv programs any time by visiting our website, c-span.org/history. next on c-span american history tv, the lives of the presidents. first a discussion about john f. kennedy presidential campaign. then a look at john quincy adams opinions about slavery. we'll hear from joe halderman, the white of the chief of staff bob halderman and a look at the life of the fifth president, james monroe. journalists are the authors to road to camelot in