The Conscription Riot Rumors: Pittsfield Waits for the Draft Wheel
In the summer of 1863 the Union draft wheel came to Pittsfield, New Hampshire, bringing riot rumors, $300 commutation arithmetic, and a run of men begging the town dentist to pull their front teeth. Alchemist G. G. Wilkins tells this Civil War moonshine history from beside a dripping copper still, with Barnaby the bear running off a substitute broker and a keg of rye getting the town bounty meeting to finally vote. Then Wilkes County moonshine runner Junior Vance shares family stories of hiding from Confederate conscript officers, and Wilkins goes over thump keg distilling and why a good bead does not mean your liquor is safe.
In this episode
- How the 1863 Enrollment Act and the Union draft wheel worked in New Hampshire
- The $300 commutation fee, substitutes, and 'a rich man's war, a poor man's fight'
- New York City draft riots of 1863 and the rumors that ran up Route 28
- Civil War draft dodging by pulling front teeth, and why the cartridge-tearing rule mattered
- Barnaby the bear versus a Concord substitute broker, and a keg of rye at the bounty meeting
- Wilkes County moonshine runner Junior Vance on hiding from Confederate conscript officers in the Brushy Mountains
- Thump keg tips: red oak shavings and hickory ashes in copper still distilling
- Moonshine safety myth busted: why a good bead does not mean safe liquor
Dr. G. G. Wilkins remembers the summer of 1863, when the Enrollment Act brought the draft to Pittsfield along with wild riot rumors, $300 commutation arithmetic, and a crowd of men who suddenly wanted their front teeth pulled. He also tells how Barnaby the bear dealt with a Concord substitute broker and how a keg of rye loosened tongues at the town's bounty meeting. Wilkes County runner Junior Vance tells new stories about his great-great-granddaddy hiding from Confederate conscript officers in the Brushy Mountains, his own deafness at the induction physical, and a friend who ate soap to fake a fever. In the last segment Wilkins answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller's question about red oak shavings and hickory ashes in the thump keg, then knocks down the 'good bead means safe liquor' myth on his 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. BARNABY. Put your great hairy backside down on that stump and keep it there. That is not a revenue man. That is the Widow Hutchins' goat, and she has buried two husbands this year without you making a muff of her livestock. Down, I said. There. He is chewing his own chain now, which is the closest that bear comes to a rosary.
♦ Chain rattles, one last sulky bear huff
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth, swelling then settling under the voice
Wilkins: Good evening, neighbors, sinners, and the occasional deputy listening at the knothole. This is Radio Moonshine, and I am Alchemist G. G. Wilkins: dentist, blacksmith, inventor, and the most frequently accused honest man in Merrimack County. We are broadcasting from the log walls of Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28 to you travelers, in Pittsfield, New Hampshire. The jar is dripping, the bear is sulking, and the anvil is warm.
Wilkins: Tonight we go back two summers to 1863, when Washington decided it wanted our young men as badly as it wanted our whiskey money. We will talk about the draft wheel, the riot rumors that ran up this turnpike faster than a scalded cat, the three-hundred-dollar arithmetic, and the strange plague of toothaches that hit Pittsfield the week the enrolling officer came to town. First, a quick word.
♪ Banjo flourish
Announcer: A quick word, friends! Learn the copper arts from the man himself in the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Master Distilling Course: history, heat, cuts, and craft, taught plain and true. Get the particulars at moonshinestill.com. That's moonshinestill.com!
♪ Fiddle sting
♪ Slow fiddle air, mournful, under
Wilkins: SEGMENT ONE. The Wheel Comes to Merrimack County.
Wilkins: On the third day of March, 1863, Congress passed the Enrollment Act. It was the first time this Union ever drafted men by federal law. Every male citizen from twenty to forty-five was to have his name written in the book, and so was every foreigner who had declared he meant to become a citizen. I remember Asa Blodgett reading it out at the store in the village, slow, moving his finger under the words like he was following a deer track.
Wilkins: They split us into two classes, the way a butcher splits a hog. Class One was every man from twenty to thirty-five, plus the unmarried men up to forty-five. Class Two was married men past thirty-five, and they would be called only once Class One was used up. You never saw so many Pittsfield bachelors of thirty-eight suddenly courting. Widow Hutchins got four proposals in one week, and one of them came from a man who had already called her goat ugly to her face.
Wilkins: Then came the clause every man learned by heart faster than the Lord's Prayer. A drafted man could pay three hundred dollars commutation and go home, or he could hire a substitute to go in his place. Three hundred dollars. A laboring man at the mills down on the Suncook might see that much in a year if he never got sick and never drank, and I can tell you the second condition did not apply to anyone I sold to. So the cry went up from Concord to the coast: a rich man's war and a poor man's fight.
Wilkins: Three hundred dollars to stay home. I know men in Pittsfield who would pay three hundred dollars to get away from home, and they volunteered first.
Wilkins: The government sent provost marshals into every district, under a man named Fry down in Washington. Enrolling officers went door to door with ink pots and ledgers. One came up my lane in June, a thin young fellow with a cough, and Barnaby stood up on his hind legs at the end of his chain. Eight feet of black fur and a breath like a tannery privy. The boy wrote my name down from forty yards off, plus the bear's. I believe Barnaby is still enrolled in Class One, unmarried, and I hope they draw him.
♦ Distant bear grunt, as if offended
Wilkins: Then came July. Word reached us by the Concord stage that the draft drawing in New York City had turned into a riot. Four days of it, from the thirteenth to the sixteenth. Mobs burned draft offices, and I will not soften this part: they hunted Black men and women through the streets and murdered them, and they set fire to the Colored Orphan Asylum with children inside it. Those were cowards and butchers. Every one of those orphans was worth a hundred of the scum who lit the match. The government had to bring soldiers straight back from Gettysburg to stop it. Boston had its own scrap in the North End the next day.
Wilkins: And that is where the rumors started, because a rumor travels up Route 28 the way vapor goes up a still head: hot, fast, and full of things you should throw away. Monday it was a riot in Boston. Tuesday it was ten thousand rioters marching north to burn every provost office in New Hampshire. Wednesday Hiram Tuttle swore they had reached Epsom and were roasting a selectman on a spit. Thursday I went out at dawn with my shotgun and watched what came up the turnpike. One tin peddler, two cows, and a drunk Methodist singing 'John Brown's Body' in the wrong key. That was the whole army of insurrection.
Wilkins: But the real wheel was coming. The names for our district would be drawn at the provost marshal's office, out of a turning box, by a man in a blindfold. The provost's wheel spun fairer than any card table in Concord, and that is a terrible thing to say about the cards.
Wilkins: Now here is where my trade came in. The examining surgeons had a list of reasons to send a man home, and one of them was teeth. A soldier tore his paper cartridge open with his teeth before he poured the powder. No opposing front teeth, no cartridge. No cartridge, no soldier.
Wilkins: Well, neighbors. Men who had not opened their mouths to me in ten years except to call me a cheat were suddenly opening wide enough to drive a hay wagon in. They came at night. They came with cash, with hams, with a quilt. One fellow brought his wife's good silver spoons, which I sent back, because a man who will trade his wife's spoons for his own hide has teeth I would not want on my anvil anyway.
Wilkins: I told every one of them the same thing. I am a tooth-puller, gentlemen, not a tooth-thief, and I will not rob a sound jaw to cheat Father Abraham. A rotten tooth, yes, I will take it out, and I will charge you double for the inconvenience of your breath. A healthy incisor stays put.
Wilkins: Then there was Ephraim. I will not give his family name, because his grandchildren may still have to live with it. Ephraim did not trust me to be crooked, so he went out to his barn with a jug and a pair of hoof nippers and pulled his own two front teeth. He came up my lane at midnight holding a dish rag to his face, and that rag was so soaked you could have wrung a pint out of it. When he grinned to show me his work, a string of red drool swung off his chin and stuck to my door latch. One tooth came out clean. The other broke at the gum line, and the root was still in there like a fence post after the fire. I had to dig it out by lantern light while he bellowed hymns, cussed, and bit through a leather strap. He passed out twice. I poured a little spirit on the wound and a lot more into myself, because I am a professional.
Wilkins: And here is the tragedy. The surgeon passed him anyway. Ephraim still had molars like a mill horse and two good eye teeth, and the doctor judged that would do for a cartridge. So the Union got a soldier who could tear a cartridge but couldn't whistle for his dog. I am told he served handsomely in Virginia and spat further than any man in the regiment through that gap.
♪ Banjo transition, jaunty
Wilkins: Now, the enrollment meeting. Pittsfield, like a good many New England towns, decided that if the government was going to take its men, the town would rather buy volunteers with bounty money, and maybe pay the commutation for any poor devil whose name came out of the wheel. That had to be voted at a meeting. A meeting of Yankees about money is a fistfight with minutes.
Wilkins: The first hour was misery. Old Deacon Sargent stood up and said the town treasury was a sacred trust, and Asa Blodgett stood up and said the deacon's son was twenty-three and unmarried, and the deacon sat down very hard. Nobody would vote. Everybody had arithmetic and nobody had nerve.
Wilkins: So I went out to my wagon and rolled in a keg of rye. I want to be clear for the historical record that it was a gift to the cause of civic deliberation. I set a tin dipper on top and said nothing at all. A Yankee will not take a free thing if you offer it, but he will take it if you leave it lying there.
Wilkins: By the first dipper they were talking. By the second, the deacon was moving that the town pay every drafted man's commutation. By the fourth he was moving to commute the whole Ten Commandments. Hiram Tuttle confessed he had been the one spreading the roasted-selectman rumor, and the selectman in question forgave him and then threw him in the horse trough. By the fifth dipper the bounty passed, the moderator wept, and two men who had been suing each other over a line fence since 1849 went home singing with their arms around each other. One of them fell in the ditch by the Congregational church and the other went in after him out of loyalty.
Wilkins: I am not saying rye whiskey saved the Union. I am saying it saved one evening of Pittsfield from its own stubbornness, and that is harder.
♪ Fiddle sting, then fade
♪ Driving mountain fiddle reel, under
Wilkins: SEGMENT TWO. Brokers, Bears, and the Men Who Ran.
Wilkins: Wherever there's a three-hundred-dollar loophole, a weasel shows up to rent it out. In 1863 they called them substitute brokers. They found some poor fellow, or a drunk, or a foreigner fresh off the boat, signed him up to go in a rich man's place, and kept half the money for themselves.
Wilkins: One of them came up from Concord to Fort Wilkins in August. I shall call him Mr. Crimmins, which is near enough. Silk hat, carpetbag, a hairpiece the color of a wet fox, and a smell of bay rum and bad intentions. He'd heard I had cash, and he figured a dentist with a still would want a substitute in case his name came up. He said he had a strong young Irishman in Manchester, ready to go, three hundred and eighty dollars, and a bargain.
Wilkins: I told him I was forty-six and past the age, which was not strictly true, and that I'd sooner send Barnaby than buy a man like a mule. He did not care for the comparison. He backed up, still selling, waving his papers, and he backed right up to the window where Barnaby's chain runs.
♦ Chain snapping taut, a deep wet bear huff
Wilkins: Barnaby does not attack a man. He investigates a man. He put his nose in the small of Mr. Crimmins' back and drew a breath like a blacksmith's bellows. Crimmins went stiff as a frozen shirt. Then Barnaby smelled the salt pork in the carpetbag, and that was the end of the negotiation. He took the bag in his jaws and shook it the way a terrier shakes a rat. Brass clasp tore loose. Pork, a clean shirt, a bottle of hair oil and two dozen blank substitute contracts went across the dooryard like a paper snowstorm.
Wilkins: Then he ate them. All of it. I watched that bear chew through a pound of salt pork, a bottle of hair oil with the cork still in it, and every blank enlistment paper Mr. Crimmins owned. You could hear the glass crunch. Crimmins made a noise like a gelding's last opinion, ran for his buggy, and his hat came off, and his hairpiece came off with it. Barnaby ate that too. Took it in one gulp like an oyster.
Wilkins: Only the hairpiece gave him a bellyache. Two days later it came out the other end of the bear, all in one piece and somehow still curled, and I nailed it to the barn door as a warning to all brokers. The swallows nested in it the next spring. That's more use than Crimmins ever made of it.
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, fiddle drops out
Wilkins: Now. Not every man who ducked a draft was a coward, and not every man who went was a hero. In the hill country there were plenty of men who ran from both sides' conscription officers and took to the woods. My guest tonight knows something about those hills. He comes from Wilkes County in North Carolina, from the Brushy Mountains, and he talks about years that haven't happened yet and machines I don't understand. I have given up asking him how. He pays in hard money and he drinks like a Christian. Junior Vance, welcome to Fort Wilkins.
Junior: Doc, thank you. Your bear just looked at me like I was a sack of sorghum with legs, and I believe I'll sit on this side of the stove.
Wilkins: Smart man. Junior, tonight is about the draft. Your Carolina folks had a draft too, did they not? The Confederate one.
Junior: Yes sir, they did, and the Brushies were full of men who didn't want any part of it. Wilkes County wasn't exactly sold on that war. Plenty of folks there didn't care to die for some planter's cotton. My great-great-granddaddy Absalom Vance was one of 'em. When the conscript officers came riding, Absalom went up the mountain to a rock house. That's an overhang in the cliff, Doc, dry as a church pew, and big enough to stand a mule in.
Wilkins: And did Absalom sit up there reading his Bible?
Junior: No sir. He hauled a little copper pot up there piece by piece on his back and made liquor the whole war. Said if he was gonna be an outlaw he might as well be a useful one. The Home Guard rode those roads looking for deserters, and they were mean as copperheads. They'd hang a man, or burn his barn, or worse.
Wilkins: How did he know when they were coming?
Junior: His wife, my great-great-grandmama Lettie. She had a red flannel petticoat, and when the Home Guard came up the valley road, she hung it on the clothesline. Absalom could see that line from the rock house with a spyglass he'd swapped a gallon for. Red petticoat, he put the fire out and laid low. White sheets, come on home for supper.
Wilkins: A woman who signals her husband with her underthings. Junior, that is the most romantic piece of military intelligence I've ever heard.
Junior: Well, it worked fine till the thunderstorm. Home Guard was coming, so Lettie hung the petticoat out, but it was pouring, and that flannel soaked through and went dark red and sagged on the line. Absalom looked through his spyglass and decided it was a ham hanging up to cure. He hadn't had ham in a month. He came straight down that mountain in the rain to get a slice.
Wilkins: Oh, Lord.
Junior: He walked in the back door just as two Home Guard boys came in the front. Lettie didn't even blink. She threw a quilt over him and told 'em he was her sick mama with the smallpox. Them boys left so fast one of 'em left his hat. Absalom kept that hat forty years and wore it to church.
Wilkins: The smallpox. Your grandmama was a genius, Junior. Barnaby uses the same tactic with deputies, except he does not need the quilt.
♦ Bear grunt, approving
Wilkins: Now, you have told me before that in your own time, wherever and whenever that is, they still draft young men.
Junior: Yes sir, they surely do. Mine came in sixty-six. I got the letter the same week I put new glasspacks on the Ford, which, Doc, means I took the muffler off so she'd roar. I drove every night with that exhaust bellowing under my seat like a sick bull. Years of it.
Wilkins: And it damaged your hearing.
Junior: Doc, I couldn't hear a dinner bell if you rang it inside my hat. So they put me in a line at the induction station in Charlotte with a hundred other boys in their drawers. Cold as a well bucket. The doctor stood behind me and whispered numbers, and I was supposed to say 'em back. I didn't hear one word. I just figured the odds and said 'thirty-two.' He whispered again. 'Thirty-two.' Again. 'Thirty-two.'
Wilkins: And?
Junior: He came around in front of me and hollered, 'Son, can you hear me at ALL?' And I said, 'Thirty-two.' He sent me home on account of my ears. My mama cried for joy, and my daddy said that was the first time a Ford ever did anything useful for the Vance family.
Wilkins: A man who answers 'thirty-two' to every question would make a fine selectman in Merrimack County. We've got three of 'em already.
Junior: Now my buddy Peanut Crump, he didn't have bad ears. Peanut was healthy as a mule. Somebody told him if you eat soap the night before, you'll run a fever and they'll reject you. So Peanut ate half a bar of his granny's lye soap. Homemade. Strong enough to take the paint off a church.
Wilkins: Junior, as a medical man, I must tell you that is a profoundly stupid idea.
Junior: Doc, Peanut knows that better'n anybody alive. He didn't get a fever. He got the trots so bad he spent the bus ride to Charlotte with his head out one window and his conscience out the other. Then he passed the physical clean, and the sergeant calls roll, and Peanut goes, 'Here,' and a soap bubble come out of his mouth. Big as a plum. Floated right up past the sergeant's nose and popped on his hat.
Wilkins: [laughing] No!
Junior: Swear on my mama. The sergeant looked at him a long time and said, 'Crump, you are the cleanest man in this Army, inside and out.' Peanut served his whole hitch and come home and never ate soap again. Folks still call him Bubbles.
Wilkins: Junior, that is a tale I will tell for the rest of my days. Absalom on his mountain, you with your thunder-wagon ears, and Bubbles Crump blowing soap at the Army. It shows you a man will do anything to get out of a war except the honest thing, which is to stand in the town meeting and say 'I don't want to go.' Plenty did, both sides, and some of 'em went anyway.
Junior: That's the truth, Doc. And I'd thank you for one dipper of that rye before your bear decides I'm the next course.
Wilkins: One dipper, then. For historical and educational purposes.
♦ Dipper clinks on tin cup, a long satisfied pour
♪ Brassy patent-medicine-show fanfare, cornet and drum
Announcer: SEGMENT FOUR AD BREAK. Step right up, friends! Step RIGHT up! Are you tired of guessing? Tired of staring into a bubbling pot, wondering whether you're making whiskey or making a widow? Then lend me your ears, all thirty-two of them!
Announcer: Here is the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Master Distilling Course from Fort Wilkins Academy, a full eight-week distilling academy covering both history and hard technique! Master the thermodynamics of vapor! Learn the honest art of the cuts: foreshots, heads, hearts, and tails! Learn the deep and rowdy history of American spirits, from New England cider brandy to the Revenue men's ledgers!
Announcer: You'll learn directly from master distillers, coppersmiths, and historians, with over thirty hours of detailed modules, true blueprints, and live question-and-answer sessions where you may put your puzzlers straight to the masters! You'll see how heavy-gauge pure electrolytic copper is worked, why it matters, and why cheap metal has no place near your spirit! And you can see the copper with your own eyes in our showroom at Fort Wilkins on Route 28 in Pittsfield, New Hampshire. Bear on the premises, chained and judgmental!
Announcer: All of it for one hundred ninety-nine dollars, cheaper than a substitute and a great deal more useful! Enroll today at fortwilkins.com/course. Once more for the folks in the back: fortwilkins.com/course! You'll find it at moonshinestill.com/course too. Reserve your seat before the wheel spins without you!
♪ Fanfare button, cymbal crash
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, the steady drip into the jar returns
♪ Low banjo picking, contemplative
Wilkins: SEGMENT THREE. Copper and the Craft: How You Make a Rye That Can Move a Town Meeting.
Wilkins: Before we get to my kettle, I have to say the plain law for every listener in every year. Making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of these United States. Everything on this program is for historical and educational purposes only. Now, Junior wanted to know what was in that keg I rolled into the enrollment meeting, so I'll tell you how a Suncook Valley rye was built in my day, step by step.
Wilkins: First, the grain. Rye is a contrary grain, spicy and proud, and it makes a mash so sticky it will glue your paddle to the tub. A rye mash sticks to the paddle the way a Concord lawyer sticks to an estate: you can't pry him loose till the meat is gone. So we never run rye alone. My bill was roughly seven parts rye, a part and a half cracked corn, and a part and a half malted barley. The corn gives body. The malt is the important part, because the enzymes in sprouted barley turn the starch in the other grains into sugar the yeast can eat.
Wilkins: Step one. Heat your water near a boil and stir in the cracked corn, because corn is the hardest and needs the most cooking. Keep stirring, or it scorches on the bottom and the whole batch tastes like a burned barn.
Wilkins: Step two. Let it come down until it's about as hot as you can stand to hold your finger in for half a breath. A man with a thermometer will call that a hundred and fifty degrees, give or take. Stir in the rye now, and stir like the devil is under the tub, because rye clumps into dough balls that hide dry flour in the middle.
Wilkins: Step three. Let it cool a few degrees more, to around a hundred and forty-eight, and stir in the malted barley. Then cover it and let it rest an hour or two. That's when the malt is turning starch to sugar. Dip a finger, and the mash will have gone from pasty to sweet. That's the alchemy, neighbors. You didn't add a grain of sugar, and the sugar came anyway.
Wilkins: Step four. Cool it all the way down until it feels like blood-warm milk, about eighty degrees, before you pitch your yeast. Pitch it hot and you've boiled your workers alive. Pitch it cold and they'll sit around like selectmen. Then let it ferment four days to a week, covered with a cloth against flies, in a room with good air. Fermenting mash breathes out a heavy gas that pools low and smothers.
Wilkins: Step five, the still. My pot is copper, hammered heavy, and there's a reason for that beyond looks. Rye mash gives off sulfur stinks in the vapor, the rotten-egg kind. Bright copper grabs those sulfur compounds and holds them on its own skin as a dark crust, so they don't ride into your jar. That's why I scrub my pot after every run. Dull copper is lazy copper. And no lead solder, ever, on any joint. Lead will poison your drinkers slowly and your reputation quickly.
Wilkins: Step six, and pay attention, because this one decides whether a man walks home or gets carried. The fire. Keep it LOW. A slow fire lets the spirit come off in order, lightest first. A hard fire pushes everything over at once and smears your cuts together, and then you can't tell poison from profit. And keep open flame away from any leak. Spirit vapor catches fire faster than a rumor on Route 28, and I have seen a still-house go up like a hay barn in August.
Wilkins: Step seven, the cuts. The first spirit off the worm is the foreshots. It smells like a varnish shop and a hospital had a child. Throw it out. Don't drink it, don't sell it, don't rub it on your gums, and don't give it to your mother-in-law however tempting. That's where the wicked light spirits run, the kind that blind and kill. Then come the heads, still sharp and solventy, and those go out too, or into a separate jar that never meets a mouth. Then the hearts, sweet, clean, spicy with rye, and that is your whiskey. Last come the tails, oily and wet-dog smelling, and you set those aside to run again another day.
Wilkins: You learn to cut with your nose and your patience, a little jar at a time, never one big bucket. Small jars let you see where one thing ends and the next begins. A big bucket hides your mistakes, the same way a big town meeting hides a coward.
Wilkins: That's the rye that passed the bounty in Pittsfield. It was clean, honest, and cut by a man who had pulled enough teeth to know what pain is for.
♪ Banjo turnaround
♦ Telegraph-style clicking, then a scratchy recorded tape hiss
Wilkins: SEGMENT FOUR. Myths, Slang, and the Listener Line. We have a voice on the recording cylinder tonight, all the way from Wilkesboro, North Carolina, Junior's country. Let's hear it.
♦ Recorded voicemail crackle, faint hum
Cletus: 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?
♦ Recording clicks off
Wilkins: Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro! Rabbit, there's a name a man earns, and I won't ask how. Junior, you know these Millers?
Junior: Doc, there's a Miller under every rock in Wilkes County, and half of 'em can outrun a deputy.
Wilkins: Then let's take your uncle's two remedies one at a time, Rabbit, and we'll start with the red oak.
Wilkins: Any cooper in New Hampshire will tell you that whiskey barrels are made of white oak and never red. Why? Cut a white oak stave and look at the end grain. The little pores are plugged up by a natural growth in the wood, so the barrel holds. Red oak's pores are open tubes. You can put one end of a red oak stick in a glass of water, blow on the other end, and make bubbles. A red oak barrel leaks like a deacon's promise.
Wilkins: Throw red oak shavings into a hot thump keg, and the hot liquid and vapor will pull color and tannin out of them, bitter and woody. So your uncle got a darker, rougher spirit and maybe thought it looked aged. It did not clean anything. Red oak shavings in a thump keg is like perfume on a hog: the hog is unimproved and now the perfume is ruined too.
Wilkins: Now the hickory ashes. What's in wood ash, Rabbit? Potash. Every farm wife in Merrimack County leaches ash in a hopper to make lye for her soap kettle. Drop that alkali into a thump keg full of hot low wine and you'll get foaming and puking up the line, maybe a scorch on the bottom, and a dirty mess to scrub. Junior's friend Bubbles Crump could tell you what happens when you mix lye and liquid and a man's expectations.
Junior: He'd tell you, Doc, and then he'd burp.
Wilkins: The truth, Rabbit, is that your uncle's old-timers found that a run sometimes came out better on a day they used ashes, and they gave the ashes the credit. It was most likely a lower fire, or a better mash, or a sober distiller making better cuts. The only thing that takes the bad heads out of a run is the man at the worm. He throws out the foreshots and heads, cuts small jars, and keeps the fire low. Your uncle wasn't a liar, he was a man who liked a ritual. Tell him Wilkins says so, and that he can keep the hickory for smoking a ham.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: That's for you, Rabbit. One large cent, freshly struck with G. G. WILKINS on its face, and it's yours if you ever make it up Route 28. Now while the anvil's warm, let's knock down one more myth.
Wilkins: Every tavern-corner expert in the Suncook Valley will grab a jar, give it a hard shake, and squint at the bubbles. 'Look at that bead,' he says. 'Big beads, holds a long while, that's good liquor.' And he drinks it with all the confidence of a man who's never read a coroner's report.
Wilkins: Here's the truth. The bead tells you something about strength, more or less. A stronger spirit throws a different bubble than a weak one, and a practiced eye can guess the proof within a few degrees. It tells you NOTHING about whether the liquor is safe. Foreshots will bead. Heads will bead. A jar full of the wickedest varnish ever run off a careless worm will bead as pretty as a Sunday bonnet. The bubbles don't know who made the cuts and they don't care.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: A good bead on bad liquor is a handsome tombstone on a fool's grave. Trust the man and his cuts, not the bubbles.
Wilkins: And a little draft slang before we go. In '63 a man who paid his three hundred and went home was called a 'three-hundred-dollar man,' and it was no compliment. A man who took bounty money, ran off, and enlisted in the next town for more bounty was a 'bounty jumper.' And a fellow in Pittsfield who lost his teeth the week of the drawing, we called him 'Wilkins-proof,' because I would not pull them for him and he had to find a stupider man to do it.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin, ringing off
Junior: Doc, I'd like one of them coins myself.
Wilkins: You'll get one, Junior. When you can tell me what year it is where you come from and I believe you.
Junior: Thirty-two.
Wilkins: [laughing] Get out of my fort.
♪ Banjo and fiddle reprise, gentle
Announcer: Before we close, a quick word! The Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Master Distilling Course: eight weeks of cuts, copper, and history from the masters. Details and enrollment at moonshinestill.com. That's moonshinestill.com!
♪ Theme rises, warm and antique
Wilkins: SIGN-OFF. That's our evening, neighbors. In the end, the wheel turned and the names were drawn. Some Pittsfield boys paid, some sent a substitute, some went, and some didn't come back up the turnpike. I won't make jokes about those boys. I pulled their baby teeth, and I'd have given the whole still for any one of them.
Wilkins: If you want to understand this craft properly, the history and the honest technique together, then look into the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Master Distilling Course at fortwilkins.com/course. Thank you to Junior Vance of the Brushy Mountains, who is worth hearing even if he can't hear you. Thank you to Rabbit Miller of Wilkesboro, and give your uncle my regards and my condolences. And thank you to Barnaby, who has eaten one broker, one carpetbag, and one hairpiece in the service of the Republic.
Wilkins: Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.
♦ Bear grunt and final drip into jar
♪ Theme fades into wax cylinder crackle, then silence