Annealing the Cent: Why Copper Goes Soft and What a Counterstamper Does About It
Why does copper go soft in the fire, and why does a cold large cent chip a steel punch? In this 1860s moonshine history episode, Dr. G. G. Wilkins talks work-hardening, annealing and quenching copper at his Pittsfield, New Hampshire forge, and explains how the same rules apply to copper still sheet, rivets and coin blanks. He also tells the tall tale of Barnaby the pet bear, a spilled quench bucket and a deputy branded with a red-hot counterstamped cent, and a retired revenue man shares Civil War era stories about stills.
In this episode
- Copper work-hardening explained: why hammered copper still sheet gets stiff and cracks
- How to anneal copper at a dull red heat, and why quenching doesn't harden copper the way it hardens steel
- Counterstamping large cents: why heated coins take crisp, deep letters and cold coins chip the punch
- Coin and copper history: Boulton's Soho Mint planchets, Paul Revere's copper rolling mill, the Flying Eagle cent and the 1864 bronze cent
- Barnaby the bear tall tale: the spilled annealing bucket and a deputy branded with a hot cent
- Revenue man stories: a whistling cracked pot in the fog, a rivet baked into church-supper bread, and a knuckle-rap test on a copper kettle
- Listener question: hickory ashes and red oak shavings in a moonshine thump keg
Dr. G. G. Wilkins gives a workshop talk at his forge on work-hardening, annealing and quenching copper. He explains why a large cent heated in the coals takes a crisp counterstamp while a stiff, unheated one fights back and a frozen punch chips, and he applies the same rules to still sheet, rivets and coin blanks. He also tells the tall tale of the January morning Barnaby knocked over the annealing bucket and branded a deputy's backside with a hot cent. Retired revenue man Captain Donald Vance tells three new stories: a cracked pot whose whistle led him through the fog, a minister's tooth broken on a rivet baked into a church-supper loaf, and a knuckle-rap test that caught a farmer lying about his grandmother's kettle. Wilkins also answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, on hickory ashes and red oak shavings in the thump keg.
▶ Listen in the Radio Moonshine app
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 four hundred pounds of lard and fleas down before you pull that window frame clean out of the logs. You've had two pecks of mash, a ham shank, and most of a deputy's mitten this morning. That's breakfast. Now lie down.
♦ Bear huffs, chain drags across frozen ground, a heavy body thumps down
Wilkins: Good bear. Stupid bear, but a good one.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth, swelling then settling under
Wilkins: Good evening, friends, neighbors, sinners, and any revenue men listening at the keyhole. This is Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, broadcasting from the log fortress of Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, in Pittsfield, Merrimack County, New Hampshire. I'm Dr. George G. Wilkins: tooth-puller, blacksmith, inventor, counterstamper of coins, and twice the guest of the Merrimack County sheriff, who keeps a lovely jail but a poor cook.
Wilkins: Tonight we are at the forge. The coals are banked, the anvil is cold, and there is a bucket of quench water by my left boot that I'm watching like a hawk, for reasons you'll hear before the night is out. Our subject is annealing, the art of making tired copper soft again, and why a counterstamper who doesn't understand it goes through steel punches like a drunk goes through apologies.
♪ Theme fades to a single fiddle note
Announcer: A quick word, friends! Do you want to know what the Alchemist knows about copper, fire, and the honest cut? The Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Master Distilling Course is waiting for you. Learn more at moonshinestill.com. That's moonshinestill.com!
♪ Banjo flourish
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, bellows wheeze, coals catching with a soft roar
Wilkins: Segment the first. A little history of the copper in your pocket.
Wilkins: Pull a big old large cent out of your purse, if Mr. Lincoln's tax man hasn't got it already. Nearly the size of a half dollar, brown as a tobacco spit, and all copper. Uncle Sam struck those from 1793 clean through 1857. Here's a thing most folks don't know: the Philadelphia Mint couldn't get enough copper of its own in the early years, so it bought ready-cut blanks, planchets, from Matthew Boulton's Soho Mint over in Birmingham, England, and had them shipped across the ocean in casks like salt pork. Think on that. Plenty of a good Yankee penny was English copper pretending to be patriotic, which puts it in fine company with half the Concord legislature.
Wilkins: Later on, Paul Revere himself, the midnight-ride Revere, got into copper. He set up a rolling mill at Canton, Massachusetts, around 1801. That mill rolled the copper sheathing for the bottom of Old Ironsides and the sheet for the dome of the State House in Boston, and in time the Mint bought his copper too. A man who rode all night to warn of the British spent his old age rolling metal flat. I take comfort in that. There's hope for every fool who started out loud.
Wilkins: Now, why does a mint care about any of this? Here's the heart of tonight. Copper has a temper, same as a wife or a mule. Hammer it, bend it, roll it, or strike it in a coining press and it gets stiff. Springy. Ornery. The smiths call it work-hardening. Copper gets stiffer the more you work it, which is the exact opposite of every married man in Merrimack County.
♦ Light hammer taps on copper sheet, the ring growing sharper with each blow
Wilkins: Hear that? It starts with a dull 'tunk' and climbs up to a 'ting' like a church bell with a grudge. That bright ring is the metal telling you it's had enough. Keep beating it cold past that point and it will split on you like a rotten fence rail.
Wilkins: The cure is fire. Lay the copper in the coals until it shows a dull red. Judge it in a shadowed corner, not in sunlight, because daylight will lie to you about color. Let it reach that sullen red and the stiffness goes out of it, soft as a church-supper dumpling. That's annealing. There's a fellow in Sheffield, England, named Sorby, who has lately been polishing and etching bits of metal and studying them under a microscope, and he says metal has a grain inside it, the way a board does. Hammering crowds and tangles the grain like a Fourth of July crowd at the Pittsfield tavern door, and the fire lets it settle down fresh. I can't see that grain myself, but I've felt it in my forearms for thirty years.
Wilkins: Now here's where blacksmiths make fools of themselves. Steel and copper are different animals. Quench red-hot steel and it comes out glass-hard. Quench red-hot copper and it comes out every bit as soft as if you'd let it cool on the bench. The water doesn't harden copper one whisker. All it does is cool the metal quick and crack off the black fire scale. I have watched a Barnstead smith dunk a copper pot over and over trying to harden it like an axe bit, and when he was done it was softer than his head, which I hadn't thought possible.
Wilkins: So what does this mean for a counterstamper? When the Mint struck those cents, the press work-hardened the face. Then each cent spent forty years jingling against buttons and nails and other cents. Lay one of those old stiff coins on my anvil, set my steel punch, 'G. G. WILKINS / PITTSFIELD N.H.', and give it a lick, and the letters come up shallow and mean. Worse, on a January morning when the shop is cold enough to freeze the spit in your beard, I've had the punch itself chip at the corner. Folks always told me the copper was brittle in the frost. It isn't, and I'll prove it to you before the night's done. But I learned the cure years ago. I put a handful of cents in an iron ladle, set it in the coals until they glow dull red, tip them into the quench bucket, dry them, and stamp. The letters sink in deep and clean as a fresh grave. A cold cent fights the punch like a wisdom tooth fights the forceps. A warm one comes out of the deal like a milk tooth on a string tied to a slammed door.
Wilkins: And mind this about the new money. In '57 Congress quit the big cent and gave us that little Flying Eagle, copper with one part in eight of nickel. It's hard stuff. You could shoe a mule with it and the mule would complain about the price. This very year, 1864, they went to bronze. Every one of those alloys stamps differently, and a counterstamper who doesn't know his metals is just a man hitting money with a hammer, which the government already has covered.
♪ Short fiddle sting
♦ Wax crackle, chain clink outside, Barnaby snorts
Wilkins: Segment the second. Legends, outlaws, and the day my bear became a metallurgist.
Wilkins: Barnaby is snorting out there because he knows what's coming. This is the story of the morning he knocked over the annealing bucket.
Wilkins: It was January, a few winters back, and so cold the Suncook was groaning under its ice like an old man getting out of a chair. I had a fat batch of cents in the ladle, glowing red, and my quench bucket set by the window where I could reach it. Now, I'd been keeping molasses in that same bucket the week before, and a bear never forgets molasses. Barnaby stuck his great black head through the window, smelled sweetness, and gave that bucket a swipe that would have taken the door off a bank.
♦ Wooden bucket slams over, water gushes, then a violent hiss and crack of steam off hot coals
Wilkins: The quench water went straight across the hearth. The coals blew up a cloud of steam and ash so thick I couldn't see my own nose, and I've got a considerable nose. In the confusion I fumbled the ladle, and a dozen red-hot cents, a few already stamped from the batch before, went skittering out the open window into the snow, hissing like a nest of copper snakes.
Wilkins: Now, crouched under that window was one Deputy Asa Pettingill, lately of the county's employ, who had crept up to peek at my still-house and catch me at something. He was squatting in the snow with his coattails hiked up for a better look through the chinks. One of those cents, fresh out of the coals and stamped plain as day, dropped down the back of his trousers and settled exactly where a man sits.
♦ A man's shriek rising an octave, boots stamping and slipping on ice
Wilkins: The noise he made I can only describe as a bagpipe being sat on by a Baptist choir. He jumped up and danced. He slapped at himself. He spun in a circle. And Barnaby, who had never seen a deputy dance before, decided this was an invitation. That bear reared up on his chain and took a swipe at the dance floor. One claw caught the seat of those county trousers and opened it like a letter, wool, drawers, and a strip of the deputy's own hide about the length of a carrot. The sound was like tearing a feed sack wet. Barnaby stood there with that rag of britches hanging off his claw, sniffing it, deeply disappointed it wasn't molasses.
Wilkins: Pettingill ran for the turnpike with his hindquarter steaming in the frost like a fresh cow pie, and the cold air hit the burn and he hollered all the way to the Barnstead line. I'm told the doctor in Concord spent an hour picking wool and bear hair out of him with tweezers. But the cent had done its work. That deputy carries my mark on his hindquarter to this day, 'G. G. WILKINS / PITTSFIELD N.H.', backwards, the way a seal prints. It's the only honest signature ever to appear on county property. He's the only man in New Hampshire who has to borrow his wife's looking glass to read his own brand, and she says it's the most interesting thing back there in twenty years.
Wilkins: I never sent the county a bill for the cent. Barnaby treats an annealing bucket the way a Concord congressman treats a ballot box: knocks it over, licks what spills, and blames the weather. Ever since, my quench bucket sits on the far side of the forge, and Barnaby gets his molasses in his own dish like a Christian.
♦ Bear grunt, satisfied
Wilkins: Now I've got company in the shop tonight. He spent a good long career on the other side of the law from me, and he's here anyhow, which shows either great courage or a weak memory. Formerly of the federal revenue service, out of Manchester, please welcome Captain Donald Vance. Sit down, Captain, and mind the bucket.
Captain: Thank you, Doctor. I'll mind the bucket, the bear, and my pockets, in that order. I've heard about the stamped deputy. I never thought I'd feel sorry for a Merrimack man in that line of work, but I have to say, I feel for him.
Wilkins: Nobody's ever felt for him the way that cent did, Captain. Now, tonight we're talking about copper going stiff and going soft. You spent years crawling through the hills hunting copper. Did you ever catch a man on account of his metal's temper?
Captain: More than once. The best of them was up near Bethlehem, in a fog so thick you could lean a shovel against it. I was walking a logging road and I heard whistling. Not a man whistling. A high, thin note, rising and falling. I thought at first it was a loon that had lost its way. But it held its pitch too steady, and every so often it slid up like a teakettle with ambitions.
Wilkins: A cracked seam.
Captain: A cracked seam, exactly. I followed that note better than a mile through the fog, and I found a young fellow, couldn't have been twenty, sitting on a stump next to the sorriest copper pot I ever saw. He'd hammered the whole thing up cold out of sheet. Never put it in a fire once. The metal got so hard and springy that it split along a rivet line in a crack fine as a hair, and the steam came screaming out of it. That pot whistled 'Yankee Doodle' better than the Bethlehem cornet band, and it kept time better too.
Wilkins: A pot hammered cold and never annealed is like a deacon who never takes a drink: stiff, brittle, and bound to crack loud in front of company. What did you do with the boy?
Captain: I seized the pot, not the boy's future, though I was tempted to seize his hammer for his own good. A cracked pot near a fire, spitting hot vapor, is a house fire looking for a house. I told him there was an old coppersmith over in Littleton who'd teach him to anneal between courses, and if I ever heard that whistle in those hills again, I'd come back with a warrant and a tuning fork.
Wilkins: Ha! A tuning fork. I like you better than I planned to, Captain. Tell me another.
Captain: Well, Doctor, this one comes around to you. Over in Ossipee there was a coppersmith's widow who kept her late husband's trade going on the quiet. She had no forge, so she annealed her rivets in the bread oven. She'd lay a tin of copper rivets on the back of the oven floor between bakings, let them come up to heat, then pull them and quench them in the dishwater.
Wilkins: Economical woman.
Captain: Very. Too economical. One Saturday she baked six loaves for the Congregational church supper, and one rivet had rolled off the tin and gone into the dough. Pastor stood up, said grace, took the first slice, and bit down. I was at the far end of the table and I heard the crack. It sounded like a pine knot popping in a stove. He split a back molar clean in two.
Wilkins: Wait now. Big fellow, gray whiskers, wore a muffler in July?
Captain: That's him. I sent him to Pittsfield. I told him there was a dentist on Route 28 with a fast hand and a bear out front, and not to look the bear in the eye.
Wilkins: I remember that molar! It came out in three pieces, and he called on the Lord at each one, and the Lord didn't answer, so he called on me in some language I won't repeat on a Sabbath-adjacent evening. I pulled that minister's molar for fifty cents and a blessing, and I am still waiting on the blessing. So the rivet was your doing.
Captain: The rivet was the widow's doing. I only did the referral. And I didn't arrest her. I told her to anneal in a proper fire away from the food, because copper scale and dishwater have no business in anybody's bread. She sent me a pie every Christmas after that, and I checked every bite of every one for hardware.
Wilkins: Wise man. Now, you said the temper of the metal caught a liar once?
Captain: Down in Plymouth. A farmer had a good-sized copper kettle in his sugarhouse with a suspicious bit of fittings on top. I asked him about it, and he put his hand on his heart and said, 'Captain, that's my grandmother's sap kettle, made in 1790, and it hasn't been touched since.' Now, old copper that's been knocked about and scrubbed for seventy years gets a hard skin on it. Rap it with your knuckle and it rings. Copper that's just come out of the fire, freshly worked and annealed, is soft, and it gives you a dead, dull thud.
♦ Knuckle rap on soft copper, a dull flat thud
Captain: So I rapped it. Thud. Rapped it again. Thud. Like knocking on a pumpkin. I looked at him. He looked at the kettle. The kettle said 'thud', the farmer said 'grandmother', and I said 'then grandmother is under arrest'. He folded right there and admitted he'd had it reworked and the top fitted the week before.
Wilkins: A revenue man's knuckle is the only part of him that ever did an honest day's work, Captain, and I say that with real affection.
Captain: I'll take it, Doctor. I'll even admit that when I came across an old-timer whose copper was clean, well riveted, and properly annealed, I respected the work, whatever I had to write in my book. It was the cracked seams, the scrap metal, and the hot vapor next to an open fire that worried me. Those were the outfits that hurt people.
Wilkins: And on that point you and I agree, which ought to worry us both. Captain Donald Vance, everybody. Stay put, Captain. There's cider in the jug that's only cider, so far as you know.
Captain: So far as I know, Doctor, is a phrase I've written in a good many reports.
♪ Banjo and fiddle bridge, bright and quick
♦ Wax crackle, a tin bell rung by hand
Announcer: Step right up, friends, step right up! Are you tired of guessing? Tired of burnt pots, sour wash, and a jar you wouldn't give a dog? Do you lie awake wondering why your copper cracks, why your runs stink like a boiled boot, and where the honest cut really falls? Then hear this! The Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Master Distilling Course, a full eight-week historical and technical distilling academy from Fort Wilkins Academy! You'll master the thermodynamics of vapor, the true art of the cuts, foreshots, heads, hearts, and tails, and the deep history of American spirits, taught directly by master distillers, coppersmiths, and historians! More than thirty hours of detailed lessons, blueprints for heavy-gauge pure electrolytic copper, and live question-and-answer sessions where you put your questions to the experts yourself! All this for just one hundred ninety-nine dollars! See the copper with your own eyes at the showroom at Fort Wilkins, on Route 28 in Pittsfield, New Hampshire. Enroll today at fortwilkins.com/course, with the copper and course particulars at moonshinestill.com/course! Once more, friends: fortwilkins.com/course, and moonshinestill.com/course! Reserve your seat before the Alchemist's bear eats the enrollment book! For historical and educational purposes, and always within the law!
♪ Banjo flourish and fiddle trill
♦ Wax crackle, bellows pumping, coals brightening
Wilkins: Segment the third. Copper and the craft. Same fire, same temper, three different jobs.
Wilkins: The rule for still sheet, rivets, and coin blanks is the same rule. Work the copper and it stiffens. Heat it to dull red and it softens. Quench it or let it cool, whichever you please, since copper doesn't care. Then clean off the scale. Learn that once and you'll never forget it, the way you never forget your first wife's mother.
Wilkins: Still sheet first. When a coppersmith raises a pot, he takes a flat sheet and beats it over a stake, course after course, round and round, coaxing it up into a belly. Every course stiffens the metal. When it starts ringing sharp and springing back at the hammer, he stops, lays it in the fire, brings it to a dull red, cools it, and goes at it again. Skip that step and you get the Captain's whistling pot from Bethlehem. Do it right and the walls come up even, with no hidden cracks waiting to open on you when the fire's lit.
Wilkins: Rivets next. A copper rivet has to be soft so it heads over when you peen it, filling the hole and swelling tight against the seam. Use a hard rivet and the head splits like a hickory nut. So we anneal rivets by the tinful, and we do it in a forge, not a bread oven, God bless that Ossipee widow and her minister's molar.
Wilkins: Coin blanks last, which brings us back to the Mint. They annealed their planchets before striking so the copper would flow into every corner of the die, Liberty's hair, the wreath, the date. My trick with old cents is the same trick the Mint used. Warm them in the coals, cool them, and the punch goes home.
Wilkins: And cleaning. Annealed copper comes out dressed in a black scale. The quench knocks most of it off. The rest you pickle away in a crock of oil of vitriol well cut with water, or a strong vinegar if you're poor or timid. Hear me now: when you mix vitriol, you pour the acid into the water, slow, and never the water into the acid, or it boils up and spits in your face, and I have no interest in pulling a man's teeth after he's burned his lips off. Rinse it well afterward.
Wilkins: Why do I fuss over bright copper in a still? Because the bright face of the copper is what grabs the sulfur stink out of the vapor, that rotten egg and cabbage-cart smell of a careless run. Black scale and green crust dull that face. A still left dirty is a still doing half its job. Keep it bright.
Wilkins: Now a word on the run itself, for history's sake. A mash is made, fermented into a weak wash, and run through the pot. Heat it gentle. The first spirit to come off is the foreshots, and right behind them the heads. That's where the poison spirit, the wood alcohol, mostly comes off, because it boils at about a hundred forty-eight degrees by the thermometer, well below good spirit at a hundred seventy-three. But mark this: it doesn't all come off in one tidy spoonful. Some trails along into the heads, so a careful man throws away a generous measure of the early runnings, and nobody drinks them, rubs them on a gum, or sells them to a fool. Throw them out. Then come the hearts, which are the good part. Then the tails turn oily and flat, and those get set aside.
Wilkins: And fire. Alcohol vapor is heavier than air. It doesn't rise politely and leave by the chimney. It sinks and pools along the floor like cold molasses and creeps over to your firebox or your lantern, and then the whole shed goes up with a sound like a cannon. Keep your receiving jar well away from any open flame, keep your joints tight, and keep a bucket of water handy, and keep it out of reach of the bear.
Wilkins: And as the Captain would remind me if I didn't, making spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of these United States, and everything on this program is for history and education. Barnaby says the same. He means it less.
♪ Short fiddle sting
♦ Wax crackle, then the hiss and click of a talking-cylinder machine starting
Wilkins: Segment the fourth. Myths, slang, and the mail. We've got a voice on the talking-cylinder line all the way from the Carolina hills. Let's give it a turn of the crank.
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?
♦ Cylinder clicks off
Wilkins: That's Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina. Rabbit, Wilkesboro and Wilkins are near cousins by name, and I suspect by bad habits. Your uncle has company in this. Half the old men in America swear by something in the doubler. But let me tell you what hickory ash really is.
Wilkins: Soak wood ash in water and what drips out is lye. Potash. That's what your grandmother boiled with fat to make soap, and it will burn the skin off your knuckles and blind you if it splashes in your eye. Toss a handful in a hot thump keg and it may knock back a sour, vinegary note, the way lime sweetens a privy. But it does nothing to the poison spirit in the heads. The wood alcohol comes right on through like a tax collector through a closed gate. Rabbit, putting lye in your doubler is like washing your face with a hornet's nest: you'll be clean of something, but not what you aimed at.
Wilkins: Now red oak. Every cooper in New England will tell you red oak's no good for a whiskey barrel, because its pores run open from end to end. Put a short stave in your teeth and you can blow pipe smoke clean through it and out the far end. I've done it at the Pittsfield tavern to win a dram. Red oak leaks so bad you could smoke a pipe through a barrel stave, which is the only way a red oak barrel will ever hold anything of yours. The shavings add color and a bitter, puckery tannin to the spirit. And here's the danger, Rabbit: that bitterness hides the harsh heads. It covers up the warning. It doesn't remove it. A man drinks the disguise and thinks he drank the cure. The only cure for bad heads is the cut. You throw them out, every time, with a generous hand. So yes, Rabbit, the swamp medicine is real. It's just medicine for your uncle's pride.
Wilkins: Rabbit Miller, Wilkesboro, North Carolina, you've earned a shout from the Suncook Valley. Give your uncle my regards and take away his ash bucket.
♦ Wax crackle
Wilkins: Now, I promised a myth, and I'll break it on the anvil. The myth goes: copper turns brittle in the frost. I heard it for twenty years. Here, Captain, hand me that cent off the windowsill. It's been sitting there all night and it's colder than a widow's welcome.
Captain: Here you are, Doctor. It's like holding an icicle.
Wilkins: Now my punch has been warming by the forge. Watch.
♦ steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Clean letters. A little shallow, because it's a stiff old cent, but no cracks. Now the other way. Here's a punch I left out on the sill all night, frozen through.
♦ steel punch clangs on copper coin, with a sharp tick of chipping steel
Wilkins: Hear that tick? That's the punch chipping, not the coin. Here's the corner of my 'W' lying on the anvil like a lost tooth. Copper stays tough in the cold. It's hard steel that turns glassy and brittle in deep frost. That's why every blacksmith worth his apron warms his chisels and punches before he strikes in January. The old-timers saw something crack, blamed the copper, and never looked at the steel.
Captain: And the warm cent stamps better because it's been annealed, not because it's toasty?
Wilkins: Right as rain, Captain. When I say a 'warm' cent, I mean one that's been to dull red in the coals and cooled back down. Sitting it by the stove does nothing. It has to see the fire. Here's an annealed one.
♦ steel punch clangs on copper coin, a deep satisfying thunk
Wilkins: Deep as a grave and crisp as a new bill. Myth broken, punch saved.
Wilkins: And one more for the road: quench your copper to harden it like a knife.
♦ steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: False. Quench copper to harden it? You might as well dunk a sheriff in the Suncook to make him smart. The water only cools it and breaks off the scale. Copper comes out of the bucket just as soft as it went in, and, as Barnaby has shown us, the bucket is the dangerous part.
♦ Bear grunt outside the window
♪ Banjo flourish
Announcer: One more quick word, friends! Learn the craft the Alchemist's way, the copper, the fire, and the honest cut, with the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Master Distilling Course. Get all the particulars at moonshinestill.com. That's moonshinestill.com!
♪ Theme returns softly, banjo and fiddle with antique warmth
Wilkins: That's our night at the forge, friends. My thanks to Captain Donald Vance, the only revenue man ever welcome at Fort Wilkins, and only because he brought his own pie.
Captain: And I checked it for rivets, Doctor. Goodnight to your listeners.
Wilkins: And thanks to Rabbit Miller down in Wilkesboro, and to Deputy Pettingill's hindquarter, which still carries my mark and keeps my name before the public. If you want the full workshop, metal, fire, cuts and history, the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Master Distilling Course is eight weeks of it from Fort Wilkins Academy, one hundred ninety-nine dollars. Enroll at fortwilkins.com/course, or come see the copper on Route 28 in Pittsfield. Mind the bear.
Wilkins: Remember what the copper teaches. Work a thing too hard and it turns brittle. Give it a little fire and a rest and it comes back soft and willing. That goes for metal, for men, and for bears, though I'd skip the fire on the bear.
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 out under wax cylinder crackle