still, pot

still, pot , is the oldest and most basic tool for separating and concentrating the alcohol found in a wine, beer, or other fermented alcoholic beverages. See distillation, history. That said, it is frustratingly difficult to give a simple description of the device. The Scottish American distiller John McCulloch accurately identified the problem in 1867, when he wrote that “anything is a still that will hold and sustain a continued and uninterrupted boiling of water, and at the same time save for collection and liquefaction the steam that is given off from it.” While such a device will often take the shape of the still that is enshrined in popular culture—a copper pot topped with a bulbous head that has a pipe leading from it to a condensing coil—it can and very often does take one of a multitude of other forms, from a tall, coopered wooden cylinder with a tin hat, to a stack of three clay pots, to a couple of old oil drums and some bamboo pipes.

At heart, the pot still must have two components: the pot where the liquid is heated to the point that it steams, and the cover that catches and condenses that steam. A pot is a pot; the covers are where things get complicated. They can be divided into two main types: the ones that condense the steam inside the still and the ones that draw it off to be condensed separately (the copper-pot-with-coil is of course an example of the latter): internal condensation and external condensation.

The simplest form of the water-cooled internal condensation still is apparently also very old. Nothing more than a pot with the neck sealed off by a round-bottomed bowl of cold water (the vapor from the boiling wash condenses on the bottom of the bowl and drips into a cup propped up in the pot above the wash level), this most basic device requires no special equipment and is hence is almost invisible to archaeology. Its use has nonetheless been posited in cultures as widely separated as first-millennium bce India and pre-Columbian Central America, and documented in a belt stretching from Mongolia all the way west to Armenia. See cherry brandy. Adding an exit spout from the collecting cup running out through the side of the pot, one has the so-called Chinese still that some Oaxacan palenques use to make mezcal. See mezcal.

The external-condensation still is also of great antiquity. At its most basic, a pot with another pot that fits into its neck and has a tube leading out of the side, it dates at least to 1800 bce, the posited age of an example found at Pyrgos in Cyprus. In the Pyrgos still, the exit tube leads to a third jug, which is kept in a bowl of cold water; as the vapor leaves the still, it expands into the cold jug and condenses. The same system and still design were used at Shaikhan Dheri in India 1,600 years later, and indeed was documented to be still in use in parts of the subcontinent in the early twentieth century.

More efficient is the version of the external-condensation still that bathes the exit tube in a tub of cold water, generally after it has been bent into a spiral. This innovation—the “worm,” as it is known in Scotland—has been attributed to the Italian physician Taddeo Alderotti (ca. 1210–1295), although Michele Savonarola (1385–ca. 1466), who thoroughly explored the matter of distillation in the 1440s, believed that it was traditional knowledge and dated back to antiquity. In any case, this is the version that generally came to dominate European distilling and American distilling.

In the seventeenth century, copper became the primary material for pot stills, at least for commercial distilling, although tin, pewter, and—unfortunately—lead were sometimes used for the condensing coil and other fittings until the nineteenth century. That century saw numerous other innovations, including a mind-bending variety of different still shapes. Some took root: the tall still head, to create more reflux (favored in Scotland); heating by steam coil rather than firebox; the wine warmer used in cognac making; the use of a doubler or retort system. Others, including most of the eccentric shapes, fell by the wayside. See doubler and reflux. As distillation spread through the so-called world of villages in the twentieth century, pot stills took new forms and found new materials (the used steel oil drum is particularly popular), but they generally followed the external-condensation, water-cooled model. See Central and East Africa, and ogogoro. The average seventeenth-century Dutch distiller, after a quick lesson on heating, would have no problem producing spirit in any modern distillery using pot stills.

For a technology that is perhaps five thousand years old to persist, it must do something better than any other alternative. The pot still is far less efficient than the column still or even the three-chamber still at separating ethanol from water and the multitude of other compounds found in a fermented wash, with each style of pot still being inefficient in a slightly different way (no formal comparative study has been made, but personal experience has shown that internal condensation stills make a rounder, more pungent spirit and external ones a cleaner, more spirity one). That very inefficiency leaves room for flavor—for the character of the base material and its fermentation to persist. That can make for a rough or even foul result, but in the hands of an artist it results in beauty.

cognac; spirits trade, history of; still, three-chamber; whisky, Irish; and whisky, scotch.

Allchin, F. R. “Stamped Tangas and Condensers: Evidence of Distillation at Shaikhan Dheri.” In South Asian archaeology, ed. M. Taddei, 755–797. Naples: Istituto Universitario Orientale, 1979.

Butler, Anthony R., and Joseph Needham. “An Experimental Comparison of the East Asian, Hellenistic, and Indian (Gandhāran) Stills.” Ambix, July 1980, 69–76.

Mahdihassan, S. “The Earliest Distillation Units: Pottery in Indo-Pakistan.” Pakistan Archaeology 8 (1972): 159–168.

Needham, Joseph, Gwei-Jen Lu, et al. Science and Civilization in China, vol. 5, part 4, Chemistry and Chemical Technology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980.

Samorini, Giorgio. Distillatori arcaici. https://samorini.it/archeologia/varie/distillatori-arcaici (accessed April 6, 2021).

Savonarola, Michele. I trattati in volgare della peste e dell’ acqua ardente. Edited by Luigi Belloni. Rome: Società Italiana di Medicina Interna, 1953.

By: David Wondrich

Diagrams of the so-called “Mongolian” and “Chinese” type internal-condensation stills from Rudolf Hommel’s classic 1937 China at Work.

Wondrich Collection.

One of the distilleries owned by Pelisson Père & Co., in Cognac, with eight alembic Charentais stills arranged in pairs along the right wall, ca. 1900.

Wondrich Collection.

A Chinese still, photographed by Hommel in the 1920s.

Wondrich Collection.

Diagrams of the so-called “Mongolian” and “Chinese” type internal-condensation stills from Rudolf Hommel’s classic 1937 China at Work. Source: Wondrich Collection. One of the distilleries owned by Pelisson Père & Co., in Cognac, with eight alembic Charentais stills arranged in pairs along the right wall, ca. 1900. Source: Wondrich Collection. A Chinese still, photographed by Hommel in the 1920s. Source: Wondrich Collection.