The Tinsmith's Quarrel: Sheet Copper, Solder, and the Boston Supply Wagon
Back in Civil War era Pittsfield, New Hampshire, Alchemist G. G. Wilkins follows sheet copper from Paul Revere's rolling mill and the Lake Superior mines all the way to his anvil, and then has it out with the Barnstead tinsmith who sold him thin copper at a fat price. A soft-soldered seam on his moonshine still nearly burns down a February rye whiskey run, and the story shows why heavy-gauge copper and proper brazing matter in distilling. There are also tales of short-weight sheet and faked brazing from a master coppersmith, and Barnaby the pet bear keeps watch outside.
In this episode
- How sheet copper was mined, rolled and annealed for 1860s copper stills, from Lake Superior to the Revere mill at Canton
- Copper gauge explained: why 16 oz and 20 oz sheet copper matters for a moonshine still bottom
- Civil War copper prices and the Boston rail and Concord wagon supply route into New Hampshire
- Wilkins's feud with tinsmith Hezekiah Tubbs over short-weight copper sheet
- Why soft solder fails on a still seam and the safety lessons from a near-fire on a rye whiskey run
- Coppersmith Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister on painted fake brazing, short-weight sheet and a crate of roofing tin with a goose inside
- Mailbag: hickory ashes and red oak in the thump keg, and the blue-flame burn test myth debunked
- Old-time distilling history, homemade coin stamping and Barnaby the pet bear at Fort Wilkins
Dr. G. G. Wilkins follows sheet copper from the Revere rolling mill at Canton and the Lake Superior mines, by Boston rail and Concord wagon, to his anvil in Pittsfield. He tells of his feud with Hezekiah Tubbs, the Barnstead tinsmith who sold him thin sheet at a fat price, and of the soft-soldered seam that nearly burned down a rye run. Master coppersmith Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister brings new stories of short-weight sheet, painted fake brazing and a Boston crate that turned up full of roofing tin and a goose. In the mailbag, Wilkins answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, NC on hickory ashes and red oak in the thump keg, and knocks down the blue-flame burn test at the anvil.
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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! Settle your carcass down. That is a tinsmith's wagon on the turnpike, not your supper, though Lord knows the man is soft enough to chew. Down, I say! Down, you four-hundred-pound sack of grievances!
♦ Heavy bear grunt, chain dropping slack in the dirt
Wilkins: There. He has laid down on the woodpile like a bishop on a featherbed. Strike it up, boys.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth, swelling then settling under
Wilkins: Good evening, neighbors, sinners, deacons and deputies alike. Welcome to 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. I am your host, tooth-puller, blacksmith, coin-stamper and, if the county record is to be believed, a two-time guest of the Merrimack County sheriff. Tonight's sermon is called The Tinsmith's Quarrel: Sheet Copper, Solder, and the Boston Supply Wagon. We will follow copper from the mill to my anvil. I will tell you about a scoundrel in Barnstead who sold me sheet so thin you could read the Concord paper through it, and I would have, if he had ever sold me a paper that was not short a page. And I will tell you about the seam that very nearly burned Fort Wilkins to the cellar stones. But first, a word from the man with the loudest waistcoat in the county.
♪ Quick bright banjo sting
Announcer: A quick word, friends! Thin copper fails and heavy copper lasts. The Flame-Flow Still, protected under U.S. Patent 10,561,960, is hammered from heavy-gauge pure electrolytic copper that will outlast your mortgage and your mother-in-law. See it at moonshinestill.com, that's moonshinestill.com!
♪ Theme fades out
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, fire popping in a stove
Wilkins: SEGMENT ONE. Where does a New Hampshire stillmaker get his copper? Not from the ground under Pittsfield, I promise you. I have dug two wells and a privy pit and buried one revenue man's hat out back, and all I found was granite, more granite, and a Methodist button.
Wilkins: Copper comes to us by a long and thieving road. Most of it now comes out of the Lake Superior country in Michigan, great lumps of native copper so pure the miners cut it with chisels like cold cheese. Some masses weigh more than a team of oxen. They have been tearing it out of those hills since the forties. Closer to home, there are the Ely mines at Vershire over in Vermont, a stinking pit full of smelter smoke where men cough copper and spit green.
Wilkins: From the mine the metal goes to the rolling mills, and the greatest of these near Boston is the Revere works at Canton, Massachusetts. Yes, that Revere, the same Paul who rode about shouting at farmers in the middle of the night, which in Pittsfield would get you shot or married. In 1801 old Revere set up the first proper mill in this country for rolling sheet copper. His sheet went onto the bottom of the frigate Constitution and onto the dome of the State House in Boston. So when a Boston politician tells you his house is gilded and noble, remember there is a coppersmith's roof over his head and nothing much under his hat.
Wilkins: Here is how it is done. They cast copper into cakes, heat them red, and pass them through great iron rolls turned by water wheels, squeezing them thinner and thinner like a miser squeezes a cent. Copper gets hard and cranky as you work it, so between passes they heat it again to soften it. That is called annealing. Then they shear it square and stack it, and sell it by the weight to the square foot. Mark that, because it is the whole heart of tonight's quarrel. Sixteen-ounce copper weighs one pound to the square foot, about two hundredths of an inch thick. Heavier sheet is thicker, and thicker is what you want under a fire. Thin sheet in a still bottom is like a thin sole on a boot in mud season. It may get you to the barn, but it will not get you to church.
Wilkins: Now, the war has made copper dear as a virgin in a lumber camp. Every cartridge case, every brass fitting and every ship's bolt for Mr. Lincoln's navy eats copper, and the price went up like a startled pheasant. A stillmaker in Merrimack County pays near half a dollar a pound or worse, and if he buys from a middleman he pays that middleman's rum bill on top of it.
Wilkins: And the road! There is talk of a railroad up the Suncook Valley to Pittsfield, but talk is all it is, and you cannot ship copper on talk. So the sheet leaves Boston by rail, passes Lowell and Nashua, rides up to Concord on the cars, and then it is loaded onto a wagon and jolted up the turnpike through Epsom, over ruts deep enough to drown a calf in April. A crate of copper changes hands more often than a Concord bank note on a Saturday night. A teamster, a tavern keeper, a hostler, a second teamster, and by the time it reaches me it has passed through more crooked hands than the collection plate at a horse auction. Which brings me to the man I most enjoy despising.
♪ Low, sly fiddle bridge
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, Barnaby snoring outside the window
Wilkins: SEGMENT TWO. Legends, outlaws, and one tinsmith from Barnstead who deserved worse than he got. I will call him by the name his mother gave him and the Lord has regretted ever since: Hezekiah Tubbs.
Wilkins: Tubbs kept a tin shop up the road toward Barnstead, a squat little shop smelling of rosin and lies. Tin cups, lanterns, milk pans, and, under the counter, sheet copper he bought cheap off the Concord wagons and sold dear to men like me who could not wait three weeks for Boston. The winter the price of copper went to the moon, I needed sheet for a new pot bottom. Tubbs swore on his mother's grave, and she was alive in Northwood at the time, that it was twenty-ounce copper, heavy as a church bell. He charged me a war price on top of the war price and called it patriotism.
Wilkins: Tubbs measured his sheet the way a widower measures his grief: generous in the telling and mighty thin in fact. I should have known. When I dropped that sheet on my shop floor it did not ring with a deep note. It went 'plink' like a cheap spoon. But I was in a hurry and he was talking, and Tubbs could talk a hen out of her eggs and then sell her the shells.
Wilkins: I had no time to braze the bottom proper, so I let Tubbs's boy seam it with soft solder, tin and lead, the same stuff you mend a milk pan with. That is the sin of this story. Soft solder melts at a few hundred degrees, and the bottom of a still over an open firebox does not care a fig for your schedule. Soft solder on a fire-side seam is like a deacon's promise at a barn dance: it holds fine until things get warm.
♦ Crackling fire, low roar of a firebox
Wilkins: So there I was one February night with a pot full of fermented rye wash, the fire low and patient the way I like it, the cap pasted down tight with rye flour paste, and the first drops coming. Then I heard it. A thin whistle like a teakettle with a cold. That still sang at me like a Methodist choir with a leak in the bellows. I put my ear down and smelled hot spirit where no spirit ought to be, out the side seam low on the pot, right above the firebox. The solder was weeping. Little silver beads of it were rolling down the copper like sweat on a sinner's lip.
Wilkins: Now mark me, because this is where men die. Spirit vapor is heavier than air. It does not rise up polite like chimney smoke. It sinks and crawls along the floor like a cat to the cream, straight toward your fire. I saw a little flicker of pale blue lick out from under the firebox door, and my bowels went cold as the Suncook in March.
Wilkins: I did not stand there admiring it. I raked the fire out the back door into the snow, threw wet grain sacks over the coals, flung the door wide for air, and only once there was no flame within ten feet did I slap a fat wad of rye paste over that seam. Then I sat in the snow and shook like a Quaker at a cockfight. I lost the run. I did not lose the building, my eyebrows, or my life, and that was a better bargain than any I ever made with Tubbs.
♦ Anvil being set with a clank
Wilkins: The next morning I cut a square foot off the leftover sheet and carried it to the post office scale. Do you know what twenty-ounce copper weighed on Uncle Sam's honest brass? Fourteen ounces. Fourteen! A man who sells fourteen-ounce copper as twenty-ounce will tell you his wife is a widow just to sell you her late husband's boots.
Wilkins: So when Tubbs came up the turnpike to collect the balance of his bill, I paid him. I paid him in coin, every piece struck at this anvil with my own punch, G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., and weighed exactly as honestly as he weighed his copper. Every dollar came in about six cents shy, and he complained like a Christian.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Then he made his great mistake. He went around the back of the still-house to find where I kept the rest of my money, and he stepped over Barnaby's chain. Now, Barnaby had been asleep in the woodpile, and a bear woken in February has the temper of a man woken by his creditor. I heard it from the shop. First a sound like a wet canvas tearing, which was Tubbs's coat. Then a sound like a cork pulled from a jug, which was Tubbs's dignity. Then a long, high note you would not believe could come out of a grown man, a note to curdle milk in Gilmanton.
Wilkins: When I got around the corner, Barnaby had the seat of Tubbs's trousers in his jaws and a fair portion of the meat that had been sitting in them. He was shaking it like a terrier with a rat, and the snow was speckled red as a strawberry social. Tubbs was clawing at the frozen ground, his bare hind end shining at the heavens like a full moon over Catamount Hill. I got Barnaby off him with a ham bone and a good deal of language my mother never taught me. Barnaby took the seat of Tubbs's trousers, a fair share of what was underneath, and the last of the man's dignity, which was the thinnest gauge of all.
Wilkins: I sewed him up myself with waxed thread at my dentist's chair. Eleven stitches, and he bit through a leather strap doing it. Tubbs walked home to Barnstead sideways for a fortnight, like a crab that owes money. He never sold me copper again, and I never needed him to. That is when I started buying straight off the Boston wagons and weighing every sheet myself, and that is also when I met tonight's guest.
Wilkins: He hammers copper at the Fort Wilkins foundry. His people have been beating metal since before Tubbs's grandmother was weaned. Please welcome Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister.
♦ Heavy boots on plank floor, chair scraping
Silas: Evening, Doctor. Evening, folks.
Wilkins: Silas, you heard about my Tubbs sheet. Tell the people how a careful man tells good copper from bad before he hands over his money.
Silas: You weigh it, Doctor. You do not trust the stamp and you never trust the man. My father hung a steelyard from the main beam of our shop, and every sheet that came through the door went up on that hook before a dollar went out of his pocket. One spring a Boston drummer came up with a wagon of what he swore was sixteen-ounce. Father cut a square foot, hung it, slid the weight along, and it balanced at thirteen ounces.
Wilkins: Three ounces shy! What did your father do?
Silas: He did not shout. He was never a shouter. He set that whole stack of sheet on the drummer's head, said, 'You carried it up here, you can carry it back,' and walked him out to his wagon in a cold April rain. The drummer was folded up under that copper like a bent nail, and the rain drummed on the sheet like a tin roof the whole way. Folks in the street came out to watch. Father said a man with copper on his head learns humility through the scalp.
Wilkins: A Boston drummer will shake your hand with his right and take your watch with his left, and charge you for the handshake. Now, Silas, my real sin was the solder. Tell them the difference.
Silas: Soft solder is tin and lead. It runs at low heat, and it is fine for a lantern or a cup that never sees a fire. But you never put it on a fire-side seam, and lead has no business touching anything a man drinks. A proper kettle seam is cramped and brazed. You cut teeth along one edge with the shears, like a comb, and lay them over and under the other edge, interlocking like your fingers in prayer. Then you hammer it tight and flow in spelter, which is hard solder of the brass kind, with borax for flux. That joint will stand a red fire for ten years. Soft solder will stand it for ten weeks, if you pray.
Wilkins: And you have seen men cheat that too.
Silas: I have. A peddler came through Gilmanton with a little pot still on his wagon, bright as a new penny, every seam a lovely brass color. A farmer there asked me to look it over before he paid. I took my scraper to the inside of a seam, and under a hair of gold color it was gray. Soft solder, the whole thing, and he had painted it over with bronze powder stirred into varnish to make it look brazed.
Wilkins: Painting soft solder bronze is like rouging a corpse for the Sunday service. It fools the congregation and not the undertaker.
Silas: The farmer did not buy it. The peddler left town in a hurry, and I heard he tried the same trick in Alton and got his wagon wheels taken off in the night.
Wilkins: What about the wagon road? I have had crates come up from Boston lighter than they left.
Silas: We had one come up that was not even copper. We ordered a crate of rolled sheet from a Boston house. The teamster stopped overnight at a tavern in Hooksett and drank himself into the hayloft, and somebody opened the crate, took our copper, and nailed it shut again. When we pried the lid off in our yard there was a bundle of rusty roofing tin and a live goose.
Wilkins: A goose!
Silas: A white gander, fat and angry. He came out of that crate hissing and went straight for the teamster. Chased him twice around the woodshed and bit him on the back of the leg till he bled through his stocking. We never got the copper back. We kept the goose and named him Hooksett. He guarded the shop yard eleven years and outlived the teamster, who drank himself to death in Suncook.
Wilkins: Hooksett the goose was a better watchman than the teamster and a worse drinker, which is a low fence to clear on both counts. Silas, one more before the pitchman takes over. Tell them about the first time copper beat you.
Silas: I was fourteen. Grandfather set me to raise a dome for a still cap, which means hammering a flat sheet over a stake till it bellies up round. I was proud and in a hurry. I hammered and hammered and never put it back in the fire. Copper gets hard under the hammer, Doctor, and brittle as dry bread. Near the top I gave it one more blow and it split right across like a pie crust. A crack you could put your thumbnail in.
Wilkins: And your grandfather?
Silas: He did not say a word. He pointed at the forge and handed me the broken pieces. I sat up all night heating those scraps to a dull red, one at a time, and letting them cool, till every one was soft as a glove. He said, 'Now you know what a sheet feels like when it needs a rest. Feel it in your hammer hand.' I never forgot it.
Wilkins: Copper is like a Pittsfield wife: beat on it long enough without warming it up and it will crack on you and never forget it. Stay put, Silas. We will want your hands in the next segment. Folks, the pitchman has been chewing his watch chain for ten minutes, so let him loose.
♪ Brassy, rollicking medicine-show banjo and tambourine fanfare
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, a cane rapping on a wooden crate
Announcer: Gather close, friends, gather close! You have just heard what thin copper and cheap solder can do. A seam that weeps. Vapor that crawls toward your fire. A whole season's work gone in one cold night. Why gamble your shop on a Tubbs? Moonshine Stills is the proud home of the Flame-Flow Still, the flagship of authentic American craftsmanship, protected under United States Patent 10,561,960! It is built from heavy-gauge, high-purity electrolytic copper, the honest heavy sheet that rings like a church bell and not like a tin spoon. It is joined with precision CNC-machined brass unions, with no painted seams and no peddler's tricks. The Flame-Flow is engineered to maximize convective circulation for even heat and unmatched purity, whether you are drawing essential oils, preparing herbal tinctures, or putting on a traditional distillation demonstration that will make your neighbors gasp. The flagship Flame-Flow is only $899.00, friends. Weigh that against ten weeks of grief from a cheap pot! Order yours now at https://moonshinestill.com/products/flame-flow-copper-still. Or come see it with your own eyes at the Fort Wilkins Showroom on Route 28 in Pittsfield, New Hampshire, where the copper shines and the bear does not bite paying customers. Once more, that's https://moonshinestill.com/products/flame-flow-copper-still. Moonshine Stills: heavy copper, honest joints, built to last!
♪ Fanfare ends with a banjo flourish
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, hammer tapping lightly on copper
Wilkins: SEGMENT THREE. Copper and the craft. Alchemical metallurgy, which is what I call blacksmithing when there is a lady present. Everything I describe tonight is history and education, friends. Making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of these United States, and I will not have a listener of mine end up in front of a magistrate on my account. That is my job.
Wilkins: First, the vessel. Silas, how is an honest pot made?
Silas: Heavy sheet on the bottom, where the fire bites. Lighter sheet is fine up the sides if you must save money, but never in the bottom. Raise your dome and anneal it every few courses so it never cracks. Cramp and braze every seam with spelter and borax. Rivet where the arm meets the cap if you like, and braze over the rivets too. Then fill it with water, heat it, and walk around it with a candle held well back, looking for weeps before it ever sees a drop of wash.
Wilkins: Why copper and not iron? The old men say copper sweetens the spirit, and for once they are right, though they cannot tell you why. Spirit from a foul wash carries sulfur stinks, rotten egg and boiled cabbage. Those stinks travel in the vapor, so it is the copper up top, in the cap, the swan neck and the arm, that does most of the scrubbing, not just the copper in the pot. A copper-bottomed pot with an iron cap is like a man who washes his feet and forgets his armpits.
Wilkins: Now the mash, the old Pittsfield way, as my father's neighbors did it. Take a bushel of rye meal and a good peck of malted barley. Scald the rye with hot water in a tub and stir it till your arm wants to fall off. Let it cool to blood warm, about as warm as a baby's bath, then stir in the malt. The malt turns the starch to sugar, which is a small miracle and better than most I heard of in church. Add yeast, either from the last batch or a cake from the baker, cover the tub with a cloth, and keep it warm. In four to six days it stops working and goes quiet and sour-sweet. That is your wash, a few parts in a hundred spirit, no stronger than hard cider. And keep a door open while it works, because a working tub breathes out a gas that will kill a man in a closed cellar.
Wilkins: Now the run. Strain the wash so no grain scorches on the bottom. Fill the pot no more than about two-thirds full. Fill it to the brim and it will foam up into the arm and puke dirty mash out the worm, and you will have wasted a week. Seat the cap, and paste every joint with rye flour and water. It bakes hard like bread crust and seals the vapor in. Bring the fire up slow. A low fire is an honest fire.
♦ Slow drip of distillate into a glass jar
Wilkins: Now the cuts, and listen close, because this is the part that keeps men alive and sighted. The first runnings are the foreshots. They smell sharp, like a glue pot and a varnish rag had a sickly child. They carry the wood alcohol, the methyl, and that blinds and kills. Throw them away. Every drop. Throw away a generous measure, and when in doubt, throw away more. Do not save it for the hired man, do not rub it on the horse, do not use it for a mouth rinse at the dentist's chair, God help us. Next come the heads, still harsh and solvent-smelling, the stuff of bad mornings. Set them aside and keep them out of anything you would ever drink.
Wilkins: Then come the hearts, sweet, clean and smooth, smelling of grain and honey. Catch them in small jars, one after another, and smell every jar, because your nose is a better clerk than any I have met at the county courthouse. Last come the tails, oily, flat, smelling of wet dog and old cardboard boxes. Set them aside for another run. Cut by small jars, and cut honest.
Silas: And watch your seams the whole time, Doctor. If you smell spirit where there ought to be none, you pull the fire first and patch after.
Wilkins: Amen. Vapor is heavier than air and it creeps along the floor. Keep the fire box away from the collecting jar and the worm's mouth. Keep a bucket of sand and wet sacks by the door. Never leave a running still to go see a man about a horse or a widow about a pie. I have seen a still-house in Loudon burn so fast the owner came out with his boots on fire and his jug still in his hand. And he saved the jug.
Wilkins: And as for solder, Silas told it plain. Fire-side joints get brazed or silver-soldered, never tin and lead, and lead never goes anywhere near a drink. A still well made of heavy copper and hard joints will serve ten years. A Tubbs still, thin and soft-soldered, will serve ten weeks and then try to murder you. Thank you, Silas.
Silas: My pleasure, Doctor. Mind your bear.
♦ Chair scraping, boots receding
♪ Slow, mournful fiddle bridge
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, telegraph-key clicking
Wilkins: SEGMENT FOUR. Myths, slang and the mailbag. Tonight we have a recorded cylinder from the call-in line, all the way from the Carolina mountains. Roll it, boy.
♦ Cylinder hiss and warble, distant crackle
Cletus: Alchemist, this here's Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller from Wilkesboro, North Carolina. 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! A Wilkesboro man, all that way, through all that mud. Bless you, and bless your uncle, who has clearly never let a fact interrupt a good story, which makes him my kind of liar.
Wilkins: Let us take the hickory ashes first. Every farm wife in America knows what wood ash is good for. You pour water through it in a barrel and what drips out is lye, and lye makes soap. So when your uncle's granddaddy threw ashes in his keg, he was dumping lye into his liquor. Now, lye will neutralize a little of the sourness from a wash that has gone toward vinegar, so the old men noticed the spirit tasted less sharp, and they called it a cure. But lye also makes the whole business foam up like a mad dog's mouth, and it does not touch the wood alcohol, the methyl, one whit. That poison leaves the still at the very front of the run. Rabbit, your uncle's ashes will make you soap, and the soap will at least wash the taste of his advice out of your mouth.
Wilkins: Now the red oak. Here is a trick I learned from a cooper in Epsom. Cut a stick of red oak a hand long, put one end in a glass of beer and blow in the other, and you will raise bubbles. Red oak is full of open pores, like a sponge, which is why no cooper worth his adze makes a tight barrel from it. He uses white oak, whose pores are plugged up inside. So red oak shavings in a thump keg will give you tannin, a little color, and a taste like chewing a fence rail. They add flavor. They do not clean. Blowing smoke through red oak is a fine parlor trick, and blowing smoke is what your uncle has been doing about it for forty years.
Wilkins: The thump keg makes the spirit stronger, Rabbit, but it is no filter and no confessor. There is one cure for bad heads and only one. You make your cuts, you throw away the foreshots, and you set aside the heads. Ash, oak, prayer and a rabbit's foot do not do it, begging your pardon for the last.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: There, that coin is for you, Rabbit, stamped G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. And while I have the hammer warm, let me knock down a myth that kills more men than your uncle's ashes ever did. It is the burn test. A fellow pours a spoonful of liquor, sets a match to it, and says, 'Blue flame, she's safe. Red flame, there's lead.' Hogwash!
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: First strike. Wood alcohol, the methyl that blinds, burns with a pale blue flame of its own. The spoon cannot tell you the difference, and neither can you.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Second strike. A flame shows you that a spirit is strong enough to burn, and nothing more. It does not tell you how a man made his cuts, whether his seams were soft-soldered, or whether his worm was patched with something from a junk heap. Setting a spoon of liquor afire proves it will burn. So will a Concord lawyer's bill, and neither one is fit to swallow.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin, ringing out
Wilkins: Third strike, and the last word. The only test is honest work: good copper, hard joints, clean cuts and a careful nose. I struck that coin harder than Tubbs ever struck an honest bargain, which is to say I struck it at all. Rabbit Miller, of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, you are hereby an honorary citizen of Fort Wilkins. Barnaby sends his regards, and he says if your uncle ever visits, he should wear his thick trousers.
♦ Barnaby grunting, chain rattling
♪ Quick bright banjo sting
Announcer: One more quick word, friends! Do not trust your still to a Tubbs. The Flame-Flow Still, U.S. Patent 10,561,960, is heavy-gauge pure electrolytic copper with machined brass unions, built to last. See it at the Fort Wilkins Showroom on Route 28, or order at moonshinestill.com. That's moonshinestill.com!
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme returns softly under
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, fire burning down to embers
Wilkins: Well, neighbors, the fire is low, the jar is filling slow, and Barnaby is dreaming of Barnstead tinsmiths. If tonight's talk of copper and cuts has you itching to learn the craft properly, and lawfully, then enroll in the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. I will teach you copper and solder, mash and fermentation, how to read your foreshots, heads, hearts and tails by nose, and how to keep your fire, your eyebrows and your good name. You will learn more there in a month than Hezekiah Tubbs learned in his whole crooked life, and you will keep the seat of your trousers.
Wilkins: Remember, friends, everything on this program is history and education. Making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law, and I have been arrested twice so you need not be arrested even once. My thanks to Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister and his goose, God rest it, to Rabbit Miller down in Wilkesboro, and to every one of you listening tonight by lamplight.
Wilkins: Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.
♦ Bear grunt and final drip into jar
♪ Theme rises and fades into wax cylinder crackle