The Ice-Out Bounty: Spring Floods, Lost Barrels, and the River's Revenge
In the spring of 1864, the Suncook River's ice goes out a month early, rips open Dr. G. G. Wilkins's riverbank cellar, and carries eleven barrels of moonshine down through Epsom toward the Merrimack. Deacons, a temperance widow and a greedy deputy all pull them out of the water, so Wilkins puts up a bounty in counterstamped coin to get back one deadly red-X barrel of heads before anyone drinks it. You'll also hear Civil War era New Hampshire history, copper still talk from coppersmith Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister, and plain distilling advice from Pittsfield.
In this episode
- What ice-out and spring freshets were on 1860s New England rivers, and why moonshiners hid barrels in riverbank cellars
- Why spirit barrels float and who owned flood-salvaged whiskey under Civil War excise tax law and common law
- Why heads and foreshots are dangerous: methanol and the poisoned red-X barrel
- Deacon Tuttle, Widow Hatch and Deputy Pease fight over flooded moonshine barrels on the Suncook River
- Coppersmith Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister tells three new flood stories about copper stills
- A step-by-step spring rye-and-malt whiskey run on a copper pot still
- Thump keg tips: using hickory ashes and red oak shavings for flavor
- Myth busted: does rocking whiskey barrels on a river make them age faster?
Dr. G. G. Wilkins tells of the spring the Suncook ice went out a month early. It tore open his riverbank cellar and carried eleven barrels down through Epsom toward the Merrimack. Deacons, a temperance widow and a greedy deputy all fished them out, and Wilkins paid a bounty in counterstamped coin to get one deadly red-X barrel of heads back before anyone drank it. Master coppersmith Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister tells three new flood stories, the two men walk through a spring rye-and-malt run, and Wilkins answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, NC, about hickory ashes and red oak shavings in the thump keg, then knocks down the myth that river-rocked whiskey ages faster.
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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, you hairy sack of grievances. You have been awake three weeks out of your winter den and you have done nothing but eat, grumble, and break wind like a Concord alderman after a pork supper. Lie down in the mud where God and the county intended you.
♦ Bear grunts, chain drags, a heavy body thumps down onto wet ground
Wilkins: There. Peace in the valley, more or less.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth, swelling and settling under the voice
Wilkins: Good evening, friends and sinners, and welcome to Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, coming to you from the log fortress of Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, in Pittsfield, New Hampshire. I am your host, pulling teeth, beating copper, and stamping coin since before most deputies learned to button their own trousers. Tonight we talk about the spring the river turned bandit: the ice-out, the flood, and eleven of my barrels that went sailing off to Epsom without asking leave. We'll have the finest coppersmith in Merrimack County at my elbow and a hard question from a North Carolina man. But first, a word from the fellow who keeps the lamp oil paid for.
♪ Brief bright banjo flourish
Announcer: A quick word, friends! The Flame-Flow Still, protected under United States Patent 10,561,960, is handcrafted from heavy-gauge pure copper for those who honor true American craft. See it at moonshinestill.com, that's moonshinestill.com!
♪ Theme fades out
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Wilkins: Segment the first, and a bit of history for you. If you never lived along a New England river, you don't know what ice-out means, so let me tell you. All winter the Suncook lies under ice thick enough to drive an ox team across. Then comes March. The sun gets higher, the rain turns warm, and the snow up in Barnstead and Gilmanton starts running downhill all at once. The water rises under the ice and lifts it. The ice goes rotten and gray, honeycombed through like a bad molar, and you can hear it groaning at night, booming like a cannon off in the woods.
♦ Distant deep crack and groan of river ice
Wilkins: The old folks call it the freshet. When the ice breaks it doesn't melt politely. It breaks into cakes the size of a barn floor, and those cakes pile up at every bend, every bridge pier, every mill dam, until the water backs up behind them like a congregation waiting on a late preacher. Then the jam lets go, and the whole river comes down at once. It takes bridges, mill gates, fences, outhouses with the occupant still inside, and anything a careless man left on the bank.
Wilkins: Now consider the Suncook. It runs out of the Suncook Lakes in Barnstead, comes down through Pittsfield past our mills, on through Epsom, through Allenstown, and joins the great Merrimack at Suncook village. So whatever the Suncook steals from Pittsfield, it delivers downstream, to the mill towns, the eel weirs, and the river drivers with their pike poles.
Wilkins: And a runner in these parts loved the river. Under winter ice a man could sink a barrel off a ledge with a line on it, and no revenue man would think to cut ice looking for it. Or he'd dig a cellar into the riverbank, shore it with timber, cover it with sod, and keep his stock cool all summer. A fine arrangement until the river decides it wants a drink.
Wilkins: Here's the cruel trick of it, friends. A tight barrel of spirit floats. Wood floats, and spirit is lighter than water, so a barrel washed out of its cellar doesn't sink to the bottom and keep its secret. It rides high and bobs along like a fat Methodist at a baptism, until it fetches up in an eddy or against a dam where any farmer with a hay hook can haul it in.
Wilkins: Then comes the law. Under Mr. Lincoln's war excise, spirit on which the tax has not been paid can be seized and forfeited to the government. And under the old common law of England and these states, goods carried off by a flood don't become the property of whoever fishes them out. They still belong to the owner. So picture the knot. The barrel belongs to the man who made it. But if he steps forward to claim it, he's confessing to the deputy. And the finder can't rightly claim it either, though he has it in his barn. So you have a barrel nobody can own and everybody wants, sitting in the middle of a town like a widow with a fortune and no suitors brave enough to speak.
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
♪ Low, rolling fiddle sting
Wilkins: Segment the second. Legends, outlaws, and runners, and tonight the outlaw is the Suncook River itself, with me as its first victim. This was the spring of 'sixty-four. The winter had been a hard one, deep snow, and I had laid down eleven barrels in a cellar dug into the bank below the mill dam. Timber shoring, a plank door, sod over the top. Nine barrels of good double-run rye, sweet as a parson's daughter's lie. One barrel of tails I meant to run again. And one barrel, painted with a big red X on both heads, holding the heads and foreshots from a whole winter of running. I kept that for lamp fuel and for cleaning my dental instruments, and it was not fit for any human throat, not then, not ever.
Wilkins: Then in the last week of February we got three days of warm rain out of the south, rain like the Lord was rinsing out a spittoon. The fourth night, about two in the morning, I woke up to a sound I will never forget.
♦ Enormous grinding roar of breaking ice and rushing water, timber splintering
Wilkins: The ice went out with a roar like the whole Merrimack County bar association clearing its throat at once, and about as much good came of it. By lantern light I ran down to the bank in my nightshirt, which is a sight that has frightened deer, and found my cellar gone. Not broken. Gone. The sod, the planks, the shoring timbers, all of it scoured down to wet ledge. And eleven barrels on their way to the Atlantic Ocean.
♦ Barnaby huffs and grumbles outside
Wilkins: Yes, Barnaby, you remember. You slept through it, you useless hearth rug.
Wilkins: By morning the barrels were spread the length of the Suncook like peas spilled down a church aisle. And the villages woke up to what they took for a miracle. In Epsom, Deacon Hezekiah Tuttle waded in up to his watch chain and hooked one out with a hay hook, then announced before witnesses that the Lord had sent communion wine to his congregation. That would have made it the first communion in Epsom history that needed a second collection plate for the sick bucket.
Wilkins: Below him, the Widow Prudence Hatch, a temperance woman with a jaw like an anvil horn, got hold of another and took an axe to its heads right there on the bank, crying, 'Rum is ruin! Rum is ruin!' Meanwhile her hired man stood ten feet downhill catching the ruin in a milk pail, and he looked like a man who'd found religion at last.
Wilkins: And then there was Deputy Orrin Pease of the county. Orrin was a man so lazy he once married a woman because she lived next door. He went down the river road in a wagon and collected three barrels as evidence, he said. He did not take them to the county. He took them home to his barn, for safekeeping.
Wilkins: Now the question that set the whole valley quarreling: whose barrels were these? Every one of them had a brand burned into the head with a hot iron, and that brand was the shape of a molar tooth. Deputy Pease came up my turnpike with that brand drawn on a piece of shingle, waving it at me like Moses with the tablets. 'A molar, Wilkins! A tooth! And you are the tooth-puller!'
Wilkins: And I said, Orrin, accusing a man by a molar brand is like arresting a cow for wearing a hide. Every tooth-puller from Concord to Dover has molars on the brain. Go arrest the dentist in Rochester. Go arrest the Lord God, who put thirty-two of the things in every head in this county. And Orrin went off grumbling, because I had said nothing false, and nothing true either.
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Wilkins: But here's where the joke stopped being a joke, friends. That red X barrel was out there. Somewhere between Pittsfield and the Merrimack, a barrel full of heads and foreshots, full of the poison that blinds a man and stops his heart, was floating toward some farmer's barn. Every fool who'd tapped the other barrels would tap that one too, thinking it was more of the same.
Wilkins: So I did what no smart outlaw does. I saddled my mare and rode the river road from Pittsfield to Suncook village, and at every store, every tavern, every mill gate I hollered the same thing. A bounty! Two dollars in hard coin, no questions asked, to anyone who brings me the red X barrel with its bung untouched. And I told them plainly it was dental lamp oil and solvent and would kill a man who drank it. Some laughed. Some believed me. The Widow Hatch said it served the drinkers right, and I told her she'd change her tune if it was her hired man lying blind in her dooryard.
♦ Hoofbeats on muddy road, fading
Wilkins: Four days later, old Asa Bickford, an eel fisherman below Short Falls, came up the turnpike in his dory wagon with the red X barrel lashed in the back. He'd found it caught in his weir. He pulled the bung, took one sniff, and knew it was trouble. He told me it smelled like a cobbler's glue pot and a dead man's breath, so he hammered the bung back in tight with his boot heel and sat on it. I paid him every cent of the bounty, and I paid it in coppers stamped on my own anvil.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: So old Asa now carries my name in his pocket, G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., which is closer than the sheriff ever got. And I burned that barrel's contents in a ditch on the far side of my field, where it gave a blue lick of flame and a stink that made Barnaby cover his nose with both paws.
Wilkins: Now, the river's revenge. Deputy Orrin Pease, you'll remember, had three barrels in his barn. Two were good rye. The third, as Providence would have it, was my barrel of tails. Orrin, being greedy, opened that one first because it was the biggest. Tails, my friends, are the oily dregs at the end of a run, greasy as a wet hound and tasting like a harness soaked in lamp oil and old boots. Orrin drank three tin cups of it on a Saturday night to prove a point to his brother-in-law.
Wilkins: By Sunday the evidence had been entered into the record, the record being Mrs. Pease's front step. Out both ends, I'm told, and in no particular order. His wife said he made a noise like a moose calving in a rain barrel. He was green until Wednesday, and he missed church, which was the only part of the whole affair the deacon held against him. He never drank another drop of found whiskey, and I count that the most successful temperance lecture ever delivered in this county. The river delivered it, and I just supplied the text.
♦ Barnaby grunts loudly; chain clinks
Wilkins: And Barnaby had his part too. One of my barrels never left home. It spun into the eddy below the fort and beached itself in the alders not forty feet from Barnaby's chain. A bear fresh out of his den is hungry, cross, and bound up tight, and Barnaby smelled sweet rye and went at that barrel like a deacon at a ham supper. He bit through two staves like they were barley sugar and drank half of it lying on his back, holding the barrel over his face with all four paws, gurgling like a drain.
Wilkins: And that very afternoon, Deputy Pease, pale and shaky from his own troubles, came back up my lane to search the property. He walked right up to Barnaby's alders with his shingle in his hand. Now, every bear coming out of winter has to pass what the hunters call a plug, six months of hair and dried gut and God knows what, packed in tight as a cannon wad. Barnaby, loosened considerably by my rye, stood up on his hind legs, looked the deputy dead in the eye, and let fly. A cork as black as a stovepipe and as long as a Baptist's farewell, landing square on Orrin's boots with a sound like a wet mitten slapping a barn door. And then a good deal more came after it to fill in the details.
Wilkins: Orrin dropped his shingle and walked backwards all the way to the turnpike, never taking his eyes off that bear. He came to search my property and left with my bear's whole winter on his boots, which is more than the county ever got out of me.
Wilkins: Of my eleven barrels, I got back the red X and Barnaby's leftovers. The deacon kept his communion, the widow's hired man kept his pail, and five barrels were never seen again. I like to think they rode the Merrimack all the way past Amoskeag Falls, and somewhere down there is a pickerel that drank my double-run rye and has been calling himself a Whig ever since.
♪ Banjo vamp under
Wilkins: Now, I am not the only man in this valley who lost copper and cargo to that freshet. Sitting across my workbench tonight is the finest metalsmith in Merrimack County, a man who's forgotten more about joining copper than most smiths will ever learn. Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister. Silas, welcome to the fort.
Silas: Thank you, Doctor. Your bear smells like a tannery fire tonight.
Wilkins: He's in his spring humors. Silas, the ice-out of 'sixty-four. You were working the river that year, I know it. What did the freshet cost you?
Silas: More than it cost you, likely, though less of it was drinkable. That winter I'd been making a little thing for some of the gentlemen upriver. A hollow copper ball, about the size of a big turnip, two hammered halves joined with silver solder so it'd hold tight and never poison a soul. You'd tie one on a line to a barrel you'd sunk under the ice. Come spring, you cut a hole, you see the ball bobbing under the ice, you've found your barrel. A tell-tale float, we called it.
Wilkins: A clever piece of dishonesty. I approve.
Silas: Well, two weeks after the ice went out, I was down at Hooksett for an order of sheet, and an eel man waved me over to his weir. There, bobbing in the stakes, was one of my floats. I knew it by my seam, a seam I lay a certain way, like a man knows his own handwriting. The line on it was sheared off clean as a razor would do it, not frayed a hair. The ice cake had come down on it like a guillotine. Somewhere upriver, a barrel had gone one way and my float had gone the other, and I expect the owner's still standing on the bank looking down a hole in the ice.
Wilkins: The float came out of it fine, I suppose? Copper and silver solder.
Silas: Not a dent. I took it home. It sits on my mantel, and my wife keeps hairpins in it, and she doesn't know half its history.
Wilkins: Silas, you're a careful man with a joint. Tell them about the deacon's kettle.
Silas: Ah. Well, that same spring, about a month after the flood, Deacon Tuttle of Epsom came to my shop with a copper vessel in a grain sack. The river had folded it up like a crushed hat. An ice cake had pinned it against the dam at Short Falls and simply sat on it. He wanted it mended, and he wanted it understood that it was a maple-sugar kettle.
Wilkins: Of course it was.
Silas: Now, I've built sugar kettles. They're wide and open, and they don't have a lid. This had a domed top, Doctor, and right in the crown of the dome there was a round hole about two inches across, with a lip of old solder all around it where a swan neck had been fitted, and broken off when the ice took it. I turned it over in my hands and said, Deacon, this is the first sugar kettle I ever saw that needed a chimney.
Wilkins: Ha! And what did the righteous man say to that?
Silas: He said the sap in Epsom was uncommonly vigorous. I said I'd charge him uncommonly vigorous rates, and he paid them without another word.
Wilkins: The first deacon I ever saw who needed a lawyer. Now, Silas, I have heard a rumor, and I want it on the record, that you rode the Suncook on an ice cake.
Silas: I'm not proud of it.
Wilkins: You're not ashamed of it either, or you'd not be smirking.
Silas: It was the day after the ice went out. I'd left a new worm, a fine copper condensing coil, a full winter's work, on a bench by the water below Epsom, ready to deliver. The water came up in the night and the coil floated off on a cake of ice like a Christmas wreath on a platter. I saw it going by from the road and lost my senses. I ran down the bank, jumped out onto the nearest cake, and stepped from one to the next until I was on the big one with my coil.
Wilkins: And then?
Silas: And then I was standing on a block of ice the size of a parlor floor in the middle of the Suncook in flood, holding a copper coil, with no way back. I rode it near half a mile. Grinding and tilting and spinning slow. Farmers ran along the bank shouting advice I couldn't hear. At the next bend the cake hit the bank, went up on its edge, and pitched me straight into the river. The coil went in with me and wrapped round my leg like a snake.
Wilkins: Good God, man.
Silas: That water was so cold it stopped my breath. I'd have gone under for good, but a river driver who'd been watching from the bank reached out with his pike pole and hooked me by the seat of my britches. He hauled me ashore like a sturgeon, coil and all.
Wilkins: The only time a man in this valley got pulled out of trouble by his own backside.
Silas: I'll say it plain to anyone listening, Doctor. Spring ice will kill you. It's rotten, it turns over without warning, and that water will freeze your limbs in a minute. No coil, no barrel, no amount of copper is worth stepping out on a river at ice-out. I was lucky, and I was a fool, and only one of those was my doing.
Wilkins: Well said, and Silas rode that ice cake like a Concord senator rides a bill: no steering, no idea where it was going, and loud the whole way down. Stay at my bench, Silas, because after this word from our sponsor I want your hands in the copper talk.
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
♪ Brassy, rollicking medicine-show fanfare with banjo and tambourine
Announcer: Ladies and gentlemen! Friends of honest metal! Has your old kettle been folded flat by the river? Has some tinker sold you a pot of salvaged scrap that tastes like a nail keg? Step right up, for here is the cure! If you appreciate authentic American craftsmanship, look no further than Moonshine Stills, proud home of the Flame-Flow Still, protected under United States Patent 10,561,960! Engineered from heavy-gauge, high-purity electrolytic copper, the very metal of champions, with precision CNC-machined brass unions that seal tight and true, the Flame-Flow is designed to maximize convective circulation and deliver unmatched purity for essential oils, herbal tinctures, and traditional distillation demonstrations! No flimsy seams! No dull, cheap metal! Just a gleaming, handcrafted flagship that would make a Boston coppersmith weep into his apron, all for eight hundred ninety-nine dollars! So don't delay! Visit moonshinestill.com, that's moonshinestill.com, and go straight to moonshinestill.com/products/flame-flow-copper-still to order your setup direct! Or step into the showroom at Fort Wilkins on Route 28 in Pittsfield, New Hampshire, and lay your own hands on it. Once more, friends: moonshinestill.com/products/flame-flow-copper-still. The Flame-Flow Still, built to last longer than any river flood!
♪ Fanfare ends on a cymbal crash
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
♪ Slow, warm fiddle under
Wilkins: Segment the third, copper and the craft. First, as always, a straight word, plain as a fence post. Making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of the United States. What follows is history and education. Treat it as such, and keep your neighbors alive.
Wilkins: Now, Silas, spring is when an old-time runner started his rye, with fresh water running and the cold still in the ground. Walk them through it.
Silas: Start with the grain, Doctor. Rye alone won't ferment worth a damn, because its sweetness is locked up as starch, and yeast can't eat starch. You need malt, barley that's been sprouted and dried. The malt carries the enzymes that turn starch into sugar. The old rule was a bushel of rye ground coarse to about a peck or so of barley malt, and plenty of clean water.
Wilkins: And here's where most men ruin it. They boil the hell out of the whole business.
Silas: That's so. You cook the rye in hot water to break it open, then you let it cool down before you stir in the malt. The malt does its work hot, but not boiling. About as hot as you'd want your bath if you were a lobster thinking it over, near a hundred and fifty degrees. Hold it there a good while and stir, and the mash goes thin and sweet. Pour the malt into boiling water and you kill the enzymes stone dead, and you've made a very expensive porridge.
Wilkins: Then you cool it to blood-warm, pitch your yeast, and let it work several days. Keep it warm, but not hot. Yeast is like a Pittsfield mill hand: overheat him or starve him and he gets sour and stinks of brimstone. That stink, the rotten egg, is sulfur, and a good part of it comes from yeast that suffered. Keep it in a place with good air, because the working mash gives off gas that'll take a man down in a closed pit.
Silas: Then you strain off the wash, a thin, beery stuff, and that's what goes into the pot. Never fill the pot more than about three-quarters, or it'll foam up into the neck and puke wash into your condenser.
Wilkins: Now, copper. Silas, you've hammered more pots than I've pulled teeth. Where does the copper do its real work?
Silas: In the vapor, Doctor. Folks think it's the pot that does it, the copper touching the boiling wash. It helps some. But the real cleaning happens up in the helmet and the swan neck and the arm, where the hot vapor rubs against the bright metal. That's where the sulfur gets caught. So when I build, I give the vapor plenty of copper to touch on its way out. A short neck made of cheap metal is a waste of good copper below it.
Wilkins: And the worm. This time of year, Silas, a man's got the best condenser water God ever made.
Silas: Snowmelt. Ice water. The colder the tub, the quicker and cleaner the vapor turns back to liquid in the coil. But the tub warms as you run. By the middle of the run, put your hand in it, and if it's warm, change it or run fresh water in. Warm water in the tub means vapor going out the end of your coil, and loose vapor near a fire is how still-houses burn down.
Wilkins: Which brings us to the fire. Low and steady. Never walk away from a still with a fire under it, not to piss, not to court a widow, not to chase a bear. Alcohol vapor catches like dry birch bark. Keep every joint tight, run it in a place with good air moving, and keep a bucket of water and a wet sack at your elbow.
Wilkins: Now the cuts, and I'll do this the way I learned it. Don't catch your run in one big crock. Set out a long row of small jars and number them. The first trickle that comes out, the foreshots, smells sharp as a cobbler's glue pot. That goes in the discard, every drop. Then the heads, still sharp, solvent-smelling, and they burn your nose. Those carry the methanol and the poison, and they go aside to be destroyed or used as fuel and solvent, clearly marked. Mark them better than I did, so no flood and no fool ever carries them off.
Silas: A red X wasn't enough, I take it.
Wilkins: A red X was enough for the eel man, and he was the only one who mattered, thank God. Then come the hearts, sweet and clean, and they're the spirit you're working for. Then the tails, oily and heavy, smelling like wet dog and harness. Those go aside to be run again. The numbered jars let you smell each one by itself and decide where the hearts begin and end, instead of trusting one big crock that's mixed the good with the bad.
Silas: And for the love of God, Doctor, tell them about the joints.
Wilkins: Silas will tell you himself.
Silas: Silver solder or a proper mechanical union. Never soft lead solder, never scrap metal of unknown history. Lead leaches into hot spirit, and it poisons a man slowly and surely. I've thrown more salvaged junk out of my shop than I care to remember.
Wilkins: Silas, you're a credit to your trade. Stay put for the mail.
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
♪ Jaunty mouth-harp riff
Wilkins: Segment the fourth: myths, slang, and the listener's mailbag. Tonight we've got a recorded message from far away, all the way down in the Carolina hills. Spin it up for me.
♦ Scratchy, distant recording crackle; faint creak of a porch chair
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, North Carolina, sitting on the Yadkin River in some of the finest moonshining country on God's earth. Rabbit, I salute you and your uncle both, and I'm about to make a liar of one of you.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Start with the hickory ash. Every New Englander's great-granddaddy knew ash, because this whole state used to burn forests down for it. In the old days, a settler would fell a hardwood lot, burn it, soak the ash in water, and boil down the lye to make potash and pearlash, the first cash crop half these hill farms ever had. Ash in water makes lye, Rabbit. Lye! The stuff you make soap with and strip a hog's bristles with. Tossing a fistful of it into your keg makes the charge harsh and alkaline, and it does exactly nothing to the methanol. The methanol in your heads boils off early in the run, ash or no ash, and the only way to be rid of it is to catch those first jars and throw them out.
Wilkins: Now, here's the grain of truth, because your uncle wasn't pulling it entirely out of the swamp. Some of the old distillers would put a little lime, or sometimes a little ash, into a mash that had soured, to tame the acid so the yeast would work better. That's done in the fermenter, Rabbit, days before the still is lit. It's a fermentation trick. Somewhere down the generations, somebody's uncle moved it from the fermenter to the thump keg and gave it a new job it was never fit for. Putting lye in your keg to cure bad heads is like washing your feet to cure a toothache: you'll be clean in the wrong place and still hollering.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Now, red oak shavings. Silas, tell this man about red oak.
Silas: No cooper worth his drawknife will make a liquor barrel out of red oak, Rabbit. The wood is so open in the grain you can blow air through a stick of it end to end, like a pipe stem. A red oak barrel weeps like a widow at a wake. White oak is different. Its pores are plugged up with little natural growths inside the wood, so it holds liquor tight. That's why whiskey sits in white oak.
Wilkins: So red oak shavings in your thump keg will color your spirit, put some tannin and bitterness into it, maybe a taste like chewing a fence rail, and clean nothing at all. Rabbit, red oak in a thump keg is like a Merrimack deputy in a church pew: it leaks, it looks the part, and it does no cleaning whatever. The thump keg strengthens your spirit by running it through a second time on the way out, but it's not a sieve and it's not a priest. It cannot forgive a bad cut. Throw out your foreshots. Set aside your heads. Keep your hearts. That is the whole of the cure, and your uncle can keep his ashes for his garden.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Rabbit, here's a fresh stamped copper with my name on it, and I'll send it south with the next peddler. My regards to Wilkesboro and to your uncle, who's welcome to come north and argue with me if he'll bring a ham for the bear.
♪ Mouth-harp riff
Wilkins: Now, one more myth while the anvil's warm, and it rises naturally out of tonight's flood. Ever since my barrels went sailing, half of Epsom has been telling me that the ones they fished out tasted better, smoother, older, on account of the river rocking them. River-aged, they call it. The deacon swears to it.
Silas: The deacon swears to a great many things.
Wilkins: He does. Here's the truth. There's an old tale out of the western rivers that whiskey shipped downriver by flatboat aged on the way, rolling and baking in the sun for weeks, and there's a kernel in it. Heat and cold and motion do push the spirit into the wood and back out a little faster. But my barrels rode ice water in March for a few days. Cold spirit in a cold barrel doesn't age worth a fiddler's fart. And a barrel banged against dams and ice cakes starts its joints, and then the river seeps in. What the deacon tasted as smoothness was Suncook River water, a little mud, and the warm feeling of drinking something for free.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Rocking whiskey in a March flood doesn't age it. It only teaches the barrel to swim, and a swimming barrel takes on more river than refinement. Myth struck flat on the anvil.
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
♪ Theme returns softly, banjo and fiddle
Wilkins: Our time's running down like the last of the tub water. My thanks to Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister, coppersmith, ice-cake mariner, and the only man I know who's been pulled from a river by his britches and lived to boast of it.
Silas: Thank you, Doctor. Mind that bear.
Wilkins: The bear minds himself, and occasionally a deputy's boots. Now one last word from our sponsor.
Announcer: A quick word, friends! Built to outlast floods, deputies, and deacons alike, the Flame-Flow Still, U.S. Patent 10,561,960, in heavy-gauge pure electrolytic copper. Order today at moonshinestill.com!
Wilkins: And if you want to learn the craft the right way, with honest cuts, safe joints, and clean copper, without blinding your neighbor or burning down your barn, enroll in the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. I'll teach you the history, the metallurgy, the mash, and the cuts the way I learned them, with fewer floods and better jokes. Ask after it at the Fort Wilkins showroom on Route 28 in Pittsfield, or at moonshinestill.com. Learn it lawfully, mind you, and teach it to your children's children.
Wilkins: Remember, friends: the river gives and the river takes, and it never tells the sheriff which was which. Watch your ice this spring, mark your heads like your life depends on it, because somebody's does, and if you find a barrel in your eddy with a molar on it, I've never seen it before in my life.
Wilkins: Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.
♦ Bear grunt and final drip into jar
♪ Theme swells and fades into wax cylinder crackle
♦ Wax cylinder runs out with a soft hiss