Chapter 4: Black And Tan

     "Lottie girl, don't you go getting attached to those pups," Benny warns as he pours flaked maize into heated creek water in a copper mash pot. 

She lays upwind of the fire pit and is curled around four wriggling balls of black and tan, each latched onto a nipple. The little clearing beside the gurgling stream is edged by deciduous trees just beginning to turn in late September.  

"Those pure-breds will be ready to trade for twenty barrels in the time it takes this mash to mature," he explains while stirring in the barley malt. 

The coonhound looks up and whines as Benny completes his soliloquy: "We'll just give it a whirl every now and then before mixing in the yeast."

     The breed was a recent cross between a bloodhound and a Virginia foxhound. It's large size, tracker's nose, and imperturbability made it ideal for scaring up bears, wolves, and cougars in the early Appalachian settlements. It just so happened that the cooper's shop in Tazewell was ideally situated to stock settlers venturing into the high hollows of the southern Alleghenies. 

    Benny had tagged along to his father's still as soon as he could toddle up the hollow. From feeding the fire as a young boy, stirring the pot when a little older, and tending the fermentation bucket at age ten, he'd learned the whole process from his mother by the time she returned back east to her family home in Albemarle. On her way down off the ridge she'd called back "If'n they's gonna call me colored anyways, I'd just as well be one amongst kin."

    "Well sweetie, we're ready to crank up the still and get warmed up," Benny resumes two weeks later to the grieving dog already positioning herself beside the fire pit next to the tumbling headwaters. 

The forge site is now brimmed with deciduous yellows, oranges and reds while the surrounding high ridges are topped by the cyan of spruce, hemlock, and white pine.

"First drops are poison foreshots that we let go," he explains to the big dog silently watching his every movement.

"Stinky heads are next, my dear, and they go back into the creek too." 

"Then it's the hearts to collect in our kegs, old girl," he concludes as he rolls a barrel down to the tip of the copper tubing. 

The tall dog jumps up and trots beside the oak cask, nudging it along with her strong neck. 

"Whoa darling, don't knock it into that worm again. Preston's back tomorrow and I don't have time for another weld."