Prohibition Is Coming: Wilkins Predicts the 1920s
In 1860s Pittsfield, New Hampshire, moonshiner and dentist Dr. G. G. Wilkins sits on the porch at Fort Wilkins and traces America's whiskey history, from Hamilton's 1791 excise tax and the Whiskey Rebellion to the Dedham striped pig and Neal Dow's Portland Rum Riot. Then he predicts national Prohibition sixty years before it happens: Carrie Nation's hatchet, the income tax amendment, the Volstead Act, poisoned industrial alcohol and the 1933 repeal. Retired revenue man Captain Donald Vance adds three stories about smugglers who hid copper stills, plus distilling advice on the thump keg and the truth about the shake-test bead myth.
In this episode
- Whiskey Rebellion history: Hamilton's 1791 whiskey tax and Washington's 13,000 militia
- The Massachusetts Fifteen-Gallon Law and the Dedham striped pig that sold free rum
- Neal Dow, the 1851 Maine Law and the 1855 Portland Rum Riot
- A prediction of Prohibition: the WCTU, the Anti-Saloon League, Carrie Nation and the 16th Amendment income tax
- The 18th Amendment, the Volstead Act's half-percent rule, poisoned industrial alcohol and the 1933 repeal
- Revenue man Captain Donald Vance: a copper worm in a temperance lodge organ and a graveyard headstone trick
- Thump keg tips: hickory ashes and red oak shavings, answered for a moonshiner in Wilkesboro, NC
- Moonshine bead test myth debunked, plus Barnaby the pet bear at Fort Wilkins
With his boots on the porch rail at Fort Wilkins, Dr. G. G. Wilkins walks through America's whiskey history, from Hamilton's 1791 excise and the Whiskey Rebellion to Dedham's striped pig and Neal Dow's Portland Rum Riot. He then predicts national Prohibition about sixty years early, naming the hatchet-swinging crusader, the income tax amendment, the Volstead Act, poisoned industrial alcohol and the 1933 repeal. Retired revenue man Captain Donald Vance joins him with three new stories: a temperance lodge organ hiding a copper worm, a temperance lecturer who was a bootlegging widow's best customer, and a graveyard 'headstone' that hid a trick. Wilkins also answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, NC about hickory ashes and red oak shavings in the thump keg, then knocks down the shake-test bead myth.
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Full episode transcript
♦ Audible wax cylinder surface crackle, slow drip of clear distillate into a glass jar
♦ Barnaby the black bear grunting and chain clinking outside log cabin window
Wilkins: Barnaby. BARNABY! Quit rattling that chain like a Concord ghost with a grievance. You've had your supper, you've had the cooper's dog's supper, and I'll thank you not to make a third course of my recording horn. Settle!
♦ Long, sulky bear exhale; chain slumps into the dirt
Wilkins: There. Four hundred pounds of pout and fleas, and he sulks like a deacon's wife at a dance.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth
Wilkins: Good evening, neighbors, sinners, and the two of you from the revenue office I can hear breathing. This is Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, broadcasting from the log fortress of Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, in Pittsfield, New Hampshire. Tonight I'm out on my porch with my boots on the rail, a jar of yesterday's hearts at my elbow, and the Suncook River gurgling down below like a drunk humming in church. Tonight, friends, I'm going to do what no dentist, blacksmith, or bootlegger in Merrimack County has ever dared to do. I'm going to tell you the future. Prohibition is coming. Not the little state laws the Maine men keep passing and every Yankee keeps ignoring. I mean the whole nation, bone-dry, from sea to shining sea. It won't be in my day, and maybe not in yours, but it's coming as sure as a rotten molar comes loose, and I'll tell you the very year. Stay with me.
♪ Theme swells, then fades under
Announcer: A quick word, friends! Before the prophet starts prophesying, cast your eyes on the Flame-Flow Still, United States Patent 10,561,960, handcrafted of pure copper by Moonshine Stills! See it at moonshinestill.com, or at the Fort Wilkins Showroom on Route 28!
♪ Short fiddle sting
The Prophet'S Credentials
Wilkins: Now, a prophet needs credentials, and mine are these: I've spent twenty years looking into the mouths of New Hampshire men. Show me a man's teeth and I'll tell you what he's been eating, and I'll tell you which tooth goes next. This Republic has a mouth full of whiskey, friends, and I've been watching the gums.
♦ Chair creaks; jar lid unscrews
Wilkins: Start at the first rotten tooth. In 1791 Mister Alexander Hamilton, a clever little man with a face like a well-groomed ferret, talked Congress into an excise on home-distilled spirits. It was one of the first internal taxes this young country ever laid on its own people, and it fell on the backwoods farmer who turned his corn and rye into whiskey because whiskey is grain you can carry over a mountain on a mule.
Wilkins: Well, the western Pennsylvania boys took that tax about as kindly as a tom cat takes a bath. They tarred the collectors and feathered them, and I'm told they did it the old way: hot pine tar ladled on bare skin, so it blistered and stank, and goose down slapped into the wet. One collector, so the story goes, had the tar in his ears so thick he couldn't hear for a fortnight, which I count a mercy given what they were calling him. In 1794 President Washington, the father of his country himself, called out about thirteen thousand militia and rode over the mountains at their head to collect a whiskey tax. Washington marched thirteen thousand men to collect a whiskey tax. I have had dentistry patients run farther than that to avoid paying me.
Wilkins: The rebels melted into the hills like lard on a griddle. Two men were convicted of treason, and Washington pardoned them both, being a distiller himself in later years and knowing which side his bread was buttered on. Then Mister Jefferson came in and threw out the internal taxes, whiskey and all, in 1802. They brought it back for the War of 1812 and dropped it again in 1817, and then, friends, the American distiller paid not one penny of federal excise for forty-five years, until Mister Lincoln needed a war chest in '62. You see the pattern? When the government's hungry, it bites the jug. When it's fed, it lets go.
♦ Distant bear grunt
Wilkins: But there's a second rot in the mouth, and that's the temperance men. You'll remember the Massachusetts Fifteen-Gallon Law of 1838. Under that statute you couldn't buy spirits in any amount smaller than fifteen gallons. Think on that. The rich man in his Beacon Hill parlor could buy a whole barrel and drink himself blind, but the poor teamster couldn't buy a glass to warm his gizzard. That's Massachusetts justice for you: a law against small drinkers.
Wilkins: And that's where my favorite Yankee in all history comes in, the fellow at the Dedham militia muster that same year. He put up a tent and charged admission to see a striped pig, a remarkable creature never before exhibited. You paid your coin, you went in, you looked at an ordinary hog somebody had painted stripes on, and you were handed a free glass of rum for your trouble. The rum was free, you understand. You were only paying for the pig. It's the first honest admission price in Massachusetts history, and the pig was painted. The legislature tossed that law out in 1840, and people say the striped pig did more to kill it than all the lawyers in Boston.
Wilkins: Then came Maine. In 1851 the mayor of Portland, Neal Dow, a man with a face like a disappointed ledger, got his state to pass the first statewide prohibition law in the Union. And in June of '55, when word got round that Dow's own city agency had a stock of liquor locked up 'for medicinal and mechanical purposes,' a crowd gathered outside to ask why the mayor's whiskey was holier than theirs. Dow called out the militia, the militia fired, and a man named John Robbins lay dead in the street with several others wounded. Neal Dow fired on a crowd to protect the city's liquor, which makes him the only temperance man in history to shed blood defending the whiskey.
Wilkins: So there are the two rotten teeth: a government that taxes the jug when it's hungry, and the cold-water men who want the jug smashed outright. And here's my prophecy, friends, as I read it in the beads of this jar and the twitching of Barnaby's paws while he dreams.
♦ Jar swirled; beads hiss faintly; bear snores
Wilkins: First. The women will organize. Not a sewing circle, either: an army. I see them, eight or ten years hence, out in Ohio, marching into the saloons, kneeling on the sawdust in their bombazine, and praying out loud while the bartender tries to pour round them. And out of that a great union of Christian women will be born that'll make the Sons of Temperance look like a boys' whittling club.
Wilkins: Second. Some years after the women, a league against the saloon will spring up in Ohio, run with ledgers and lobbyists like a railroad. They won't care whether a congressman is pious. They'll only care how he votes, and they'll break any man who votes wrong. That's how you take a country: not with a sermon, but with a tally sheet.
Wilkins: Third. Out of Kansas will come a woman near six feet tall carrying a hatchet. She'll walk into barrooms and smash the mirrors, the bottles, and the bartenders' pride, and she'll call it 'hatchetation.' I'd marry her for the word alone if she wouldn't kill me on the wedding night.
Wilkins: Fourth, and this is the true root of it. Mister Lincoln has an income tax on the books right now to pay for the war, and they'll let it lapse. But mark me: some day they'll write the income tax into the Constitution itself, and once Washington can pick every working man's pocket directly, it won't need the whiskey dollar anymore. Today the jug is the Treasury's milk cow, friends, and nobody shoots the milk cow. Once they've got a new cow, the old one goes to the knacker.
Wilkins: Fifth. A great war across the ocean against a German king, and Congress will say it's unpatriotic to put good grain in a still while the boys in the trenches go hungry. They'll dry the country up for the war, and when the war ends, they won't give it back.
Wilkins: Sixth. Sixty years from now, more or less, and I'll say January of 1920, there'll be an Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, and the entire nation will go dry by law. A congressman from Minnesota with a mustache like a hay rake will put his name on the enforcement act, and that act will define 'intoxicating' as anything over one-half of one percent. Half of one percent! By that measure my mouthwash is a saloon and Barnaby's breath is a felony.
♦ Bear snort, as if offended
Wilkins: And what comes after? Every cellar becomes a still-house and every parlor a saloon, with a password at the door and a peephole like a Catholic confessional. The rich will drink smuggled Scotch brought down from Canada, right through our own North Country, faster than any sugar sled. Doctors will write whiskey prescriptions, which is the only medicine a man ever begged his doctor to make stronger. And here's the black part, friends, and I won't joke it away. The government will order the industrial alcohol poisoned so nobody can drink it, and folks will drink it anyhow and die. A few years after that, some crook will doctor Jamaica ginger extract with an engine chemical, and tens of thousands of men will walk with a flop-footed, slapping gait they'll call 'jake leg' for the rest of their days. Prohibition won't stop the drinking. It'll only stop the honest making.
Wilkins: And then, after thirteen dry and bloody years, in December of 1933, they'll repeal the whole business with a Twenty-first Amendment, the only amendment ever written to kill another one, and they'll ratify it by state conventions because they won't trust the legislatures. The thirty-sixth state to vote the dry law dead will be Utah. Utah! Don't ask me how I know. The bear dreamed it.
♪ Banjo roll transition
Legends, Outlaws, And A Hatchet In The Night
Wilkins: Now, you may think I'm guessing. I'm not. I've already met the future, and he came up my turnpike last October with a hatchet. He was a traveling lecturer out of Concord who called himself Brother Ezekiel Pure. He had a voice like a rusty pump handle and a beard you could have stuffed a mattress with. He'd preached at the Pittsfield town hall the night before about the Demon in the Jug and gotten himself worked up, and around midnight he came creeping up behind my still-house with a hand-axe to stave in my mash barrels and save my soul.
Wilkins: Trouble is, Brother Ezekiel came round the north side. And the north side, friends, is Barnaby's side.
♦ Low, rising bear growl; chain pulled taut
Wilkins: I heard it from my bed. First the axe biting oak, thunk, thunk, and the hiss of my good mash pouring out onto the leaves. Then a sound like a wet sail tearing top to bottom. That was Brother Ezekiel's trousers. Barnaby had him by the seat and gave one shake, the way a terrier shakes a rat. The broadcloth went, the drawers went, and a fair strip of the Brother himself went with them. Something the size of a pork chop, by the look of what Barnaby was chewing on in the morning. The scream that came out of that man went up two octaves and stayed there. The Methodist bell in town wouldn't have dared ring after it.
Wilkins: I got out there with a lantern in time to see a pale, bare, bleeding backside go whipping off through my blackberry canes like a peeled onion fired from a cannon. He left the axe stuck in Barnaby's water trough, half a temperance tract on the path, and one boot. Brother Ezekiel came to save my soul with a hatchet and left without the seat of his trousers, so I'd call it a fair trade, since neither of us got what he came for.
Wilkins: As for Barnaby, he licked up every drop of the spilled mash, lay on his back for three days with all four feet in the air, and grunted like a Masonic choir. I patched up the barrels, and I sent the Brother's boot back to Concord with a note: 'Your other one is in the bear.' So when I tell you the hatchet-women are coming, I've seen the advance guard, and it bled on my blackberries.
♦ Wax crackle; footsteps on porch boards
Wilkins: Now, to tell me whether my prophecy holds water, or whiskey, I've got a guest on the porch who's spent a long career on the wrong side of my sort of business, and the right side of it too, when the copper was clean. He's a retired federal revenue officer out of Manchester, and he's hunted stills from the White Mountains clear over to the Green. Please welcome Captain Donald Vance. Captain, mind the third board. It's rotten, and so is the man who sold it to me.
Captain: Evening, Doctor. I've stepped over worse than a rotten board coming up your road. I stepped over your bear's leavings, and I'm told those used to be a lecturer.
Wilkins: Ha! Only a bit of him. Sit down, Captain. Will you take a jar?
Captain: I will take a chair, Doctor, and I'll look at the jar with professional interest. Just looking. A man my age has learned that most trouble starts with a jar and a chair.
Wilkins: Captain, you've heard my prophecy. National Prohibition, the whole country, sixty years off. You're a revenue man. Shouldn't you be cheering?
Captain: Doctor, that's the one thing the cold-water preachers never understand about my trade. A revenue man would rather collect a tax than enforce a ban. A tax, a man can pay. He grumbles, he pays, he goes home, and the government gets its money. A ban, a man can only dodge. And when every honest maker has to dodge, the honest ones quit, and the ones left are the scoundrels who'll cook with anything and sell to anybody. I'd rather be a toll collector than a dog-catcher.
Wilkins: Spoken like a man who's been bitten by the dog. Tell me about these temperance folk, Captain. You must have run across a few in your rounds who didn't practice what they preached.
Captain: Doctor, I could fill your bear with them. Here's one. Some years back I got word of a still running in a Vermont village, and the tip said the smoke came out of the Sons of Temperance lodge hall. Well, I thought the tipster was having sport with me. That hall had a sign over the door, 'Cold Water, Clear Conscience,' painted in letters a foot high. But I went in on a lodge night anyway and sat in the back row like a pilgrim.
Wilkins: In your Sunday collar, I hope.
Captain: Starched to the ears. And they opened with a hymn on the reed organ, 'Rock of Ages.' Now, I've heard many an organ wheeze, but that one wheezed rye. Every time the chaplain pumped the pedals, a little puff came out of the bellows that would have put a dent in a deacon. So after the meeting I opened up the bellows chest, and coiled inside it, neat as a sleeping snake, was a copper worm. Silver-soldered, beautifully made, run through a cistern behind the wainscot. The still was in the cellar right under the pulpit, and the chaplain had been running the vapor up through the organ case because the case kept it cool and nobody ever looked inside a hymn.
Wilkins: The organ played 'Rock of Ages' and the whole lodge got a little rocked themselves!
Captain: The whole lodge, Doctor. Half of them didn't know. The other half had been singing louder every week and couldn't say why. I seized the still and the worm and left the organ, since the Lord's music hadn't done anything wrong. In my report I wrote down the worm as 'well made, wrongly employed.' I won't destroy good copper with a happy heart. It's the man's judgment I faulted, not his workmanship.
Wilkins: Now that's a Christian revenue man. Got another?
Captain: Over in the Ammonoosuc country there was a widow who ran a small, clean pot. Her husband had been a coppersmith and left her a tidy outfit. She sold a jug here and there, no trouble to anybody. Her best customer, regular every Saturday after his week of lecturing, was a traveling temperance man. Wore a white ribbon in his lapel and carried a satchel of pledge cards. She called his Saturday visits 'the collection.'
Wilkins: Oh, that's rich. That's a woman who understood the clergy.
Captain: I happened to be watching her barn one Saturday on another matter, and there he came, bold as brass, satchel in one hand and an empty jug in the other. I stepped out and asked him, very polite, whether that jug was for lamp oil. He said, 'Medicinal, Captain.' I said, 'Then you won't mind signing one of your own pledge cards right here for the lady to witness.' He took out the card. He took out the pencil. He read his own words back, 'I solemnly promise to abstain from all intoxicating liquors,' went white as a boiled shirt, and fainted dead away backwards into her rain barrel.
Wilkins: The most water I ever heard of a temperance man taking voluntarily!
Captain: The widow fished him out with a hay rake. I gave her a stern lecture, and she gave me a slice of mince pie, and I'll let your listeners decide which of us came out ahead.
Wilkins: The widow, Captain. The widow always comes out ahead. Now tell me about the graveyard. I hear there's a graveyard story.
Captain: Who told you that?
Wilkins: The bear. He hears everything.
Captain: Well, the bear's right. Up in Peacham there was an old farmer who believed just what you believe, Doctor, that one day the whole country would go dry. So on the back corner of his land, under a maple, he put up a little granite marker, and carved on it: 'Here Lies Hope, Awaiting the Dry Years.' No dates, no name. The neighbors said it was a dog. I said dogs don't get that much poetry.
Wilkins: You dug it up.
Captain: I had the town selectman dig it up, Doctor. I'm too old to dig, and he owed me a favor. Three feet down we hit a crate of stone jugs, corked and waxed, a dozen of them. I opened the first one with great ceremony, and it was cider vinegar. Every one of them, sour as a tax assessor. And tucked under the last cork was a note in a shaky hand: 'Captain, the real ones are under the hitching post where you tied your horse. Kindly don't let him paw.'
Wilkins: Ha! You tied your horse to the man's buried fortune!
Captain: And the horse got more out of the day than the government did. I looked at that hitching post a long while, Doctor. Then I untied my horse, wished the old man good day, and wrote 'vinegar recovered, twelve jugs' in my book. Every word of it true.
Wilkins: You're a crafty old fox, Captain. Last question. Do you believe my prophecy?
Captain: I'll tell you who made me believe it, and it wasn't you. Many years ago I raided a sugarhouse up near Mount Mansfield. A very old fellow ran it, and his copper was clean as a church spoon. While I was writing him up, he poured me a cup of hot syrup and said, 'Son, one day this whole nation will go dry, and on that day Washington will hire ten of you for every one it has now, and you'll still lose.' I laughed at him then. I've stopped laughing since. A tax can be collected, Doctor. A ban can only be chased.
Wilkins: A tax can be collected, a ban can only be chased. Captain Donald Vance, ladies and gentlemen. Captain, stay for the rest. Barnaby's on his good behavior tonight, mostly on account of the lecturer.
Captain: I'll stay, Doctor. Upwind.
♪ Fiddle reel bridge into ad break
Ad Break
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♪ Banjo flourish out of ad
Copper And The Craft, Or What A Man Should Know Before The Dry Years
Wilkins: Now, if Prohibition is coming, then the worst thing that can happen to this country is that the knowledge of honest making dies with the honest makers. When the dry years come, the jug won't go away. It'll just fall into ignorant hands. So I'm going to teach the craft the way my old master taught me, in the order a wash goes, and you'll hear the dangers named plain. One reminder first: making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of the United States, and every word on this program is history and education.
♦ Wax crackle; clink of copper being tapped
Wilkins: Start with the mash, and I'll give you a good rye recipe in the old Monongahela style. Take your rye, cracked coarse, with a fair share of cracked corn for sweetness, and stir it into hot water in your mash tub. Bring it up to a scald so the starch swells and the grain goes to porridge. Then let it cool, and here's the craft, friends. When it's cooled to about a hundred fifty degrees by the glass, somewhere between a hundred forty-eight and a hundred fifty-eight, stir in your malted barley. That barley carries a ferment of its own, a natural virtue in the sprouted grain, that turns the starch of the rye and corn into sugar. Hold it near that heat for about an hour, wrapped in quilts if the night is cold. Taste it. When raw starch has gone to sweet, the malt has done its work.
Wilkins: Cool it to blood-warm, pitch your yeast, and feed that yeast well. Here's a thing most backwoods men never learn: when yeast is starved or overheated, it stinks. It throws off a rotten-egg gas that's pure sulfur. You can stop most of that stink before it ever gets into the still just by keeping your yeast happy, with good grain, clean water, and an even, gentle warmth. A sick ferment makes a sulfurous wash, and a sulfurous wash makes your copper work twice as hard.
Wilkins: Which brings me to the copper. Folks think it's the copper pot that matters. Not so much. It's the copper the vapor touches on its way up and over: the helmet, the lyne arm, the worm. That's where the alchemy happens, and that's where you want your copper bright. A man can have a fine copper belly and a poor worm and wonder why his liquor smells like a tannery. Clean the vapor path after every run with vinegar and salt, rinse it well, and dry it.
Wilkins: Now the run. The first pass through a pot still gives you low wines, weak and cloudy and not fit for anything but the second pass. Run those low wines a second time, slow and gentle, and you get high wines, and that's where the cuts get clean. Most of the trouble of the dry years will come from men who make one quick pass with a roaring fire and jug the whole of it.
Wilkins: On the second run, catch it in small jars, a long row of them, numbered in order. The first liquor out of the worm is the foreshots. Throw them away, every drop, and be generous about it, since a cupful too much thrown out never killed a man and a cupful too little has. Then come the heads, sharp and solventy, smelling like varnish and headache. Set them aside. They aren't fit to drink. Then the hearts, sweet and clean, and you'll know them by your nose. Then the tails, oily and wet-dog smelling, which you save to run again. When the row of jars is done, you smell each one, you taste the hearts with care, and you decide where your cuts fall. You don't guess with a thermometer. You judge with your senses, jar by jar.
Wilkins: And a word about proof, since every jug-seller in the dry years will lie to you about it. By the federal standard of 1848, proof spirit is half alcohol by volume, so a hundred proof is fifty percent. Double the alcohol and you've got the proof. The Englishmen have their Sikes hydrometer, a brass float on a stem. Get one. It's worth more than all the bead-shaking in Christendom, and I'll come back to that.
Wilkins: Now fire. Listen close. The vapor of strong spirit is heavier than air. It doesn't rise like smoke. It creeps along the floor like a cat, and if there's a flame at the end of that floor, it finds it. Keep your collecting jar well away from the firebox. Wipe up spills before you do anything else. Never leave a running still alone, not for a minute, not for a woman, not for the sheriff knocking. And keep a bucket of sand by the door, not water, because water on a burning spirit fire only spreads it.
Wilkins: And since this is the apple country, one more caution. Some of you make applejack the lazy way: set a barrel of hard cider out in a January freeze, chip the ice off the top, and drink what's left. That's called jacking, and it's no still at all. The water freezes out and nothing else does. Every bit of the bad spirit stays right there in the jug, concentrated. The old-timers called the shakes it gave them the 'apple palsy,' and they weren't wrong. A still lets you throw away the poison. A frozen barrel keeps it for you.
♦ Bear grunt, approving
Wilkins: Barnaby agrees. Barnaby's had the apple palsy. It took him a week to climb a stump.
♪ Short fiddle bridge
Myths, Slang, And The Call-In Cylinder
Wilkins: Now, the post-rider brought me a talking cylinder from the Carolina hill country, a voice shouted into a horn and sent the long way round. Let's crank it up. Captain, you might want to lean in. These Carolina fellows know their kegs.
♦ Cylinder crank, hiss, then a distant, scratchy recorded voice
Wilkins: Here he is.
♦ Recorded caller voice, faint and crackling
Wilkins: (reading along as the cylinder plays) That's Cletus Miller, called 'Rabbit,' from Wilkesboro, North Carolina, and he says: 'Alchemist, my uncle swears old-timers used to throw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads. Is there any truth to that, or was he just making swamp medicine?'
♦ Cylinder clicks off
Wilkins: Rabbit, God bless you and your uncle both. Wilkes County is good whiskey country, and any man from there who asks questions instead of just pouring is a man I'd let near my copper. Let's take your uncle's two medicines one at a time.
Wilkins: First, the red oak shavings. Here's something every cooper in New Hampshire knows and your uncle maybe doesn't. Red oak is no good for whiskey. Look at the end grain of a red oak stave and you'll see it's full of open pores, little pipes running the length of the wood. You could blow soap bubbles through a red oak stick. That's why a cooper won't make a tight barrel of it. Red oak in a whiskey barrel is like a Concord politician holding a secret: it leaks out every pore. White oak has those pipes plugged up natural, which is why it holds liquor tight. And whatever oak does for whiskey, it does slowly, over months and years of the liquor working in and out of a charred barrel. A handful of shavings boiling in a thump keg for an afternoon gives you a little color and a little sawdust flavor, and fools the man who's buying.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: That's one myth struck. Now the hickory ash. Ash from a hardwood fire is potash, lye, friends. Before the turnpike was ever cut, half the farms in this valley were cleared by burning the forest and leaching the ashes into potash, and potash was about the only cash crop a New Hampshire stump farm ever had. It went out by the barrel for soap, glass, and saleratus to raise biscuits. So your uncle is putting soap-makings into his whiskey. Alkali like that might take a little sourness off the taste, but it does nothing about the bad heads. The bad stuff boils off early whatever you've thrown in the keg, and the only cure is a man with a row of jars and the courage to pour the first ones on the ground. Rabbit, your uncle's hickory ash won't clean the heads, but if he adds tallow it'll make a fine bar of soap, and that's the cleanest thing he'll ever get out of that keg.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Captain: Doctor, I'll second that. In my years I never found a still made safe by what was thrown in the keg. I found plenty made dangerous by what was thrown out, which was good sense.
Wilkins: Amen, Captain. Now, since we're striking myths, one more for the road: the bead. You've all seen it. A fellow takes a jar, gives it a hard shake, holds it to the lamp, and squints at the bubbles. Big beads that sit up and linger, he says, means good strong liquor, about a hundred proof. Little beads that vanish quick means it's weak. Well, that's true as far as it goes, which is about the length of my nose. The bead gives you a rough guess at proof and nothing more. It can't tell you whether the man cut his heads, whether his worm was soldered with lead, or whether his still was a washtub. A poisoned jug will bead just as pretty as a clean one. A man who judges his whiskey by the beads is like a man who judges his bride by her bonnet. Buy a hydrometer, and buy from a maker you know.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin, three quick strikes
Wilkins: There. Three cents struck, 'G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H.,' and one of them's going down to Wilkesboro with a jar of my hearts for Rabbit Miller, so his uncle can see what clean looks like. Rabbit, thank you for writing in, and give your uncle my respects and my condolences for his keg.
♪ Banjo picks up softly under
Sign-Off
Wilkins: Friends, we're near the bottom of the jar. Before the dry years come, and they're coming, mark me, somebody has to keep the honest craft alive. That's why I'll take on pupils for the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course right here at Fort Wilkins: the copper, the mash, the cuts, the fire, and the history of every fool law that ever tried to stop it. You'll learn to read a row of jars like I read a mouth, and you'll go home knowing which jar saves a life by getting poured out. Ask at the showroom, and mind the bear.
Announcer: One more quick word, friends! The Flame-Flow Still, United States Patent 10,561,960, handcrafted pure copper from Moonshine Stills, is waiting for you! Order at moonshinestill.com, or visit the Fort Wilkins Showroom on Route 28 in Pittsfield! And remember, making spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law. Craft wisely!
Wilkins: Captain Donald Vance, thank you for coming up my rotten road and over my bear's leavings.
Captain: Doctor, it was an education. If your prophecy comes true, I'll come back in sixty years and buy you a lawful drink.
Wilkins: If my prophecy comes true, Captain, there won't be a lawful drink for thirteen of those years, so bring your own and tie your horse somewhere else. Friends, sixty years from now, when they lock the saloons and pour the good stuff in the gutter, remember that an old tooth-puller on the Suncook told you so from his porch. And remember who kept the craft honest.
♦ Wax crackle swells; chair creaks; distant river
Wilkins: Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.
♦ Bear grunt and final drip into jar
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth, fading into cylinder hiss