Today it鈥檚 the Inland Revenue. Back in the 18th and 19th centuries, the person people most loved to hate was the Excise Man, the killjoy who measured the contents of every still, barrel and jug and then demanded money with menaces. Resentment against the Excise grew after the introduction of the Distilling Act of 1779, which imposed taxes based on the theoretical output of stills. Irish distillers suffered most and many went out of business. But for every legal distillery that disappeared, a host of illicit ones sprang up.
It鈥檚 hard to imagine a more unpopular man than Aeneas Coffey. Coffey鈥檚 job was to find illegal stills and jail the men who ran them. When he鈥檇 had enough of that, he took up distilling and invented a super-efficient still that allowed continuous production of almost pure spirits. Those Irish distillers who were still in business spurned Coffey鈥檚 invention, forcing him to sell it to the Scots. Within a few years, sales of Scotch whisky soared.
AENEAS COFFEY had a lucky escape. On 8 November 1810, Coffey and a handful of soldiers were on the trail of untaxed whiskey in the district of Inishowen in County Donegal. Coffey was the most senior excise officer in a county notorious for its illegal stills, and was leading the campaign to stamp them out. Suddenly, a mob surrounded the little troop, stole their weapons and beat them up. One of the crowd grabbed a rifle and stabbed Coffey twice in the thigh with the bayonet.
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No one was much surprised. The penalties for making illegal hooch were harsh. The fines were so huge no one could pay them. The alternative was jail. The excise men met strong resistance. Those due to give evidence at the local assizes frequently disappeared. If they were lucky, they reappeared after the case collapsed for lack of evidence. If they were unlucky, no one saw them again.
Coffey had been lucky. He survived and 10 days later, his employers posted a reward for the capture of his assailants. 鈥淲hereas on the 8th day of November, inst. Mr Eneas Coffey, officer of Excise, assisted by 5 soldiers of the King鈥檚 County Militia, while in execution of his duty 鈥� was attacked by a great number of persons, as yet unknown, who robbed the soldiers of their arms and caps and severely wounded the said Eneas Coffey and also beat and ill treated several of the soldiers. Now, the Commissioners of Inland Excise and Taxes in Ireland, being determined to bring the perpetrators of said outrage to undergo punishment, do hereby offer a reward of 拢200 to any person or persons who shall apprehend the person who wounded the said Eneas Coffey with a bayonet.鈥� There鈥檚 no record of what happened to the members of the mob, but a decade later Coffey became Inspector General of Excise for the whole of Ireland.
Under the harsh excise regulations imposed by the British government, only large stills could be licensed and even they struggled to pay their taxes. Small stills were effectively banned. The Irish saw the law as a symbol of English oppression. Treatment of the poor back-country distillers was so ferocious it produced an unlikely champion 鈥� a clergyman from one of Ulster鈥檚 ruling families and not a natural nationalist sympathiser. In 1818, the Reverend Edward Chichester of North Donegal published a pamphlet in London expressing his outrage at the brutality of the Excise. In his rebuttal, Coffey pointed out that Ireland鈥檚 outlaw distillers had produced two million gallons of illegal whiskey the previous year, much of it in the vicar鈥檚 own backyard 鈥� County Donegal. For every gallon, the government lost tenpence.
Coffey was more than just a strict enforcer of the law. He was a bit of an inventor too. Even legal distilleries sometimes fiddled their figures to avoid paying tax so Coffey invented tamper-proof devices to monitor the output of spirit from a still and prevent the operator adding or taking anything out without it being measured and recorded.
In 1823, Britain scrapped the old Excise Act and made it easier for small distillers to obtain a licence. Many of Coffey鈥檚 old adversaries turned legit and the Excise had far less trouble with renegades. Coffey resigned and took up a new career where he could make use of all he had learned in the Excise: he became a distiller. After so much experience with other people鈥檚 stills, Coffey was well aware of the inefficiencies of the traditional pot still. He decided to design a still that would produce a continuous stream of alcohol rather than one small batch at a time.
For centuries, whiskey had been made in pot stills, giant copper kettles with a curved condenser, or worm, at the top. To make strong spirit, the distiller filled the pot with 鈥渨ash鈥�, the liquid from fermented malted barley, and lit a fire under the pot. When the wash began to simmer, alcoholic vapour rose up into the worm, where it condensed into liquid. To make whiskey of the right strength, the distillate had to be returned to the pot and distilled a second and sometimes even a third time. It was a slow and wasteful process. Heating the pots required lots of costly fuel. And too much time was spent filling the pots, leaving them to cool between batches and scrubbing out the dregs that formed at the bottom.
Coffey鈥檚 still, patented in 1830, looked nothing like the traditional burnished copper pot. It consisted of two columns, the analyser and the rectifier, each divided into a series of chambers by a number of perforated plates. Cold wash was pumped in at the top of the rectifier and carried through the column in pipes bathed by the hot outgoing alcoholic vapour. By the time the wash reached the bottom, it was almost boiling.
The hot wash was then pumped into the top of the second column and allowed to cascade over the perforated plates while steam was pumped in at the base. As the rising steam met the falling wash it stripped out the alcohol, leaving the spent wash to run out from the bottom. The hot vapour, now a mix of steam and spirit, was piped to the base of the rectifier.
As the steam-and alcohol mixture rose up the column, it met the cold incoming wash and began to condense. The first fractions to condense were high in water and were diverted back to the analyser. Further up the column, heavy alcohols fit only for use in paints and varnishes condensed and were removed. At the top of the column came the good stuff 鈥� 90 per cent pure spirit.
Although the stills were expensive to install, once up and running they were remarkably efficient. The heat exchange system 鈥� the first of its kind 鈥� saved energy and kept fuel costs low. Maintenance was simple and the still was never idle. One still could turn out 2000 gallons of high-strength spirit a day.
The first few stills were a flop. Coffey had made them mainly from cast iron and the hot acidic wash reacted with the iron to create extremely nasty-tasting salts which gave the spirit a disgusting flavour. Coffey solved the problem by making the stills from copper, but his countrymen still weren鈥檛 keen. The spirit emerging from Coffey鈥檚 still was so pure it contained none of the vital molecules that gave whiskey its characteristic flavour. In fact it tasted of very little.
Coffey took his invention to London and by the 1840s orders were flooding in from English gin mills and Scottish distilleries. The Coffey still transformed the industry. To turn out such vast amounts of spirit distillers needed even vaster amounts of wash. To create the wash, they needed more grain 鈥� mountains of it. To begin with they threw in wheat and other locally grown cereals to bulk up the barley. Then, in 1848 the British government threw out the archaic corn laws which had kept grain prices artificially high and restricted imports. Now distillers could ship in cheap maize from North America.
The product 鈥� grain whisky 鈥� bore no comparison to a fine malt made in a pot but it was a fraction of the price. Soon, the Scots began to blend grain whisky with a dash of malt to give it more flavour. This new tipple took off in a big way. Many people preferred the lighter taste and everyone preferred the price. As sales of Scottish whisky boomed, sales of Irish whiskey plummeted. Coffey had achieved what he had set out to do when he first joined the Excise: the near destruction of the Irish distilleries. His ingenious arrangement of pipes and plates had proved far more effective than tough laws and a troop of militiamen.
