The Bear in the Assessor's Parlor: Property Valuation Day in Merrimack County
In 1860s Pittsfield, New Hampshire, the town assessor comes to Fort Wilkins on inventory day. Alchemist G. G. Wilkins passes off his copper moonshine still as a 'dental scalding kettle,' and then Barnaby the pet bear breaks into the parlor, sends the assessor out through a closed window and eats the tax book. Blue Ridge herbalist Clara Higgins adds Civil War era Virginia stories about hiding stills from the revenue man, real 1860s slang for liquor, and old distilling folklore.
In this episode
- How New Hampshire selectmen took the town inventory and assessed property on April 1 during the Civil War
- How Lincoln's Revenue Act of 1862 set up federal assessors and collectors who came after copper stills and distillers
- How Dr. Wilkins disguised his copper pot still, cap, arm and worm as a 'dental scalding kettle'
- Barnaby the black bear, a salt herring, a closed window and the eaten tax book behind a very low valuation
- Clara Higgins on hiding Blue Ridge Virginia stills from the commissioner of the revenue, plus a hog counted three times
- Applejack hidden behind a vinegar barrel, and real Civil War slang for whiskey and liquor
- Listener question: hickory ashes and red oak shavings in a thump keg, for Rabbit Miller of Wilkesboro, NC
- Testing the blue-flame proof myth for moonshine at the anvil and showing why it fails
Dr. G. G. Wilkins tells how the selectmen's assessor came to Fort Wilkins on inventory day, how the doctor passed off his copper still as a dental scalding kettle, and how Barnaby got into the parlor, sent the assessor out through a closed window and ate the tax book, which led to a very low valuation. Blue Ridge herbalist Clara Higgins shares new Virginia stories of hiding stills from the commissioner of the revenue, a three-times-counted hog, applejack hidden behind a vinegar barrel, and real Civil War slang for liquor. Wilkins also answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, NC, on hickory ashes and red oak shavings in the thump keg, and debunks the blue-flame test at the anvil.
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Full episode transcript
♦ Audible wax cylinder surface crackle, slow drip of clear distillate into a glass jar
♦ Barnaby the black bear grunting and chain clinking outside log cabin window
Wilkins: Barnaby. Barnaby! Settle your carcass. You have been fed, watered, and scratched behind the ears, which is more than my late father-in-law could say on his best Sunday.
♦ Bear huffs, chain drags heavy across frozen dirt
Wilkins: Lie down, you four-hundred-pound bag of grievances, before I sell you to the circus by the pound. Lie DOWN. There. Good boy. Breathe toward the turnpike, not toward my window. You have breath like a tannery privy in August.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth
Wilkins: Good evening, neighbors, rascals, widows, and any revenue man pressing his ear to the wire. 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 am your host: dentist, blacksmith, inventor, counterstamper of coin, and twice a guest of the Merrimack County sheriff, and I enjoyed the board both times.
Wilkins: Tonight's tale is a favorite of mine, and I've polished it brighter than my best forceps. I call it 'The Bear in the Assessor's Parlor: Property Valuation Day in Merrimack County.' It has a selectman's man, a copper kettle with a story to tell, a closed window opened the hard way, and a valuation so gentle you'd think the town loved me. The town does not love me. The town is afraid of my bear.
Wilkins: Later I'll be joined by a sharp-tongued lady herbalist from the Blue Ridge of Virginia. We'll take a call-in cylinder from a fellow in North Carolina with a question about ashes, and I'll put the old blue-flame test on my anvil and strike it dead.
Wilkins: But first, a word from the folks who keep the lamp lit on this program.
♪ Quick fiddle sting
Announcer: A QUICK WORD, friends! Copper craftsmanship has come to the Suncook Valley: the Flame-Flow Still, protected under United States Patent 10,561,960, built of heavy-gauge pure electrolytic copper. See it at moonshinestill.com, or in person at the Fort Wilkins Showroom on Route 28 in Pittsfield. Moonshinestill.com!
♪ Sting resolves
Wilkins: My standing caution, which the magistrate made me memorize like a catechism: making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is illegal under United States law, and everything on this program is for historical and educational purposes only. Those who take it for a how-to deserve what the bear gives them.
♦ Wax cylinder crackle swells
♪ Banjo transition, a slow walking tune
Wilkins: SEGMENT ONE. Valuation Day, or the Annual Plundering, Done Politely.
Wilkins: Let me tell you how a New Hampshire town picks your pocket, because it isn't with a knife. It's with a pencil, a ledger, and a man named something like Thaddeus.
Wilkins: In our towns the selectmen serve as the assessors. Every spring they take the inventory, which some old-timers call the invoice, of every taxable soul and every taxable stick in town as it stood on the first day of April. April first. Fools' Day. I have always thought that was the most honest date the State ever chose.
Wilkins: First they count your polls, meaning you yourself, if you're a man of taxable age, breathing and upright. Being alive is taxed in New Hampshire, friends. Dying is the only exemption, and the paperwork is murder.
Wilkins: Then comes your estate. Horses. Oxen. Cows. Sheep. Hogs. Your carriage, if you're vain enough to own one. Your mill, if you're fool enough to build one on the Suncook. Your stock in trade. Your money at interest. And if they suspect you're holding back, they can call on you to swear to the whole list, so you can damn your soul and empty your purse in one sitting.
♦ Wilkins sets down a tin cup on a plank table
Wilkins: A town assessor is a tooth-puller for your purse. He never takes the rotten one, only the gold one. And unlike me, he doesn't even give you a slug of something to bite down on first.
Wilkins: Now these are war years, and the war brought us a second set of valuers. Mr. Lincoln's Revenue Act of 1862 cut the country into collection districts, each with a federal assessor and a pack of assistant assessors, plus a collector at the tail end to swallow what they flushed out. So a man in Merrimack County with a copper pot can, in one season, have the town's valuer at his front door and the government's valuer at his back door, both licking their pencils.
Wilkins: The fellow who came to Fort Wilkins licked his so often that by noon his tongue was more lead than meat, and so was his judgment.
Wilkins: The town list wants to know about 'taxable implements,' the tools a man earns his bread by, and here a fellow like me has a problem. I own an anvil, which is honest. A forge, which is honest. A dentist's chair, a turnkey, three pairs of forceps, and a bone saw I bought off a regimental surgeon in Concord who swore he never used it on anyone who didn't deserve it. All honest. And in the back room I have a large copper vessel with a cap, a long arm, and a coiled worm sitting in a tub of cold creek water.
Wilkins: Now, that last item is not honest. Not in the eyes of the State, anyhow. Copper is as honest as the sunrise.
Wilkins: So I had a story ready. I was going to tell the town that my copper kettle was a dental scalding kettle, a contraption for boiling forceps clean between patients.
Wilkins: And here's the joke, friends, and it's on me. In this year of grace, NOBODY boils his instruments. Not dentists, not surgeons, not the hog-butcher. A dentist wipes his forceps on his apron, the apron on his trousers, and the trousers on the next patient's chair, and that's the whole sacred rite. I had to make up a reason to boil steel that the assessor had never heard of in his life. I told him the steam drove the 'tooth-devils' out of the iron. He wrote it down. God help the man, he wrote it down.
♦ Barnaby grunts outside; chain rattles once
Wilkins: Hush, you. I'm getting to your part.
♪ Banjo transition
Wilkins: SEGMENT TWO. Legends and Outlaws: The Bear in the Assessor's Parlor.
♦ Wind rattling a log-cabin shutter
Wilkins: It was mud season. I'll call the man Thaddeus Grout, which is near enough to his real name that he'll know it's him and far enough that his widow-to-be can't sue. Grout was the selectmen's legman: a long skinny fellow with a neck like a heron and an Adam's apple that rode up and down when he swallowed, like a well bucket on a short rope.
Wilkins: He came up the turnpike in the slop, his boots sucking in the April mud with a sound I won't describe in mixed company, except to say every step sounded like a hog pulling his face out of the trough. He had his inventory book under one arm, bound in calf with a brass clasp. In his coat pocket he had his dinner: a paper of salt herring and a wedge of sharp cheese. You'll want to remember that herring.
Wilkins: He sat in my parlor, which is the room where I pull teeth, so the floorboards have a certain character. He opened the book and wet the pencil. Horses: one mare, spavined, mean. Cows: one, dry. Hogs: none, because Barnaby ate the last one, which I did not say aloud. Carriage: none. Money at interest: I laughed so long he wrote it down as 'none, emphatically.'
Wilkins: Then he wanted to see the taxable implements. I showed him the anvil and the forge. He priced my forceps at forty cents a pair, which offended me deeply. Then he sniffed. A man can hide a copper pot. He can't hide what it breathes. My still-house smells like a warm loaf and a church picnic and sin all at once.
Wilkins: He pushed open the back-room door, and there she sat, gleaming, cap on, arm out, worm coiled in the tub like a sleeping snake.
Wilkins: 'What,' says Grout, 'is that?'
Wilkins: 'That,' says I, 'is a dental scalding kettle. For driving the tooth-devils out of the forceps.'
Wilkins: 'And the coil in the tub?'
Wilkins: 'For cooling the screams of my patients before they reach the neighbors. The Tiltons up the road complained.'
Wilkins: He looked at me. I looked at him. A single clear drop fell from the end of that worm into the jar, plink, like a bell at the start of a funeral.
♦ Single drip into a glass jar
Wilkins: Grout put out a finger, caught the next drop, and touched it to his tongue. His Adam's apple went up the rope and stayed there. His eyes went wet. He opened his mouth to make an official finding.
Wilkins: And that is when the floor began to shake.
♦ Deep bear grunt, a wrenching of iron from wet timber, a heavy THUD
Wilkins: Now, friends, mud season rots a sill the way sugar rots a molar. Barnaby's chain was staked to an iron staple driven into the old sill log under the still-house window, and that log had been drinking April all month. Barnaby smelled salt herring. Barnaby loves salt herring more than he loves me, and I've accepted that. He leaned once, the staple came out of the wood like a loose tooth out of a drunkard's gum, and four hundred pounds of black bear came around the house dragging eleven feet of chain and half the sill.
Wilkins: He came in through the parlor door. He didn't open it. He IS the door now; I rehung the hinges on him in spirit.
Wilkins: You haven't lived until you've seen a bear in a parlor. The floorboards groan like an old man getting out of a pew. The room fills with the stink of wet fur, river mud, and whatever Barnaby rolled in that week, which that week was a dead woodchuck. A string of drool hung off his lip, clear and thick as horse liniment, swinging back and forth. Grout turned around slowly, the way a man does when he hopes he imagined something.
Wilkins: He had not imagined it.
Wilkins: Barnaby put his nose straight into Grout's coat pocket. Herring, paper, cheese, and the whole right coat-tail went into that mouth in one bite. There was a ripping sound like a sail splitting in a gale, and the bear came away with the coat-tail, the pocket, and a long strip of Mr. Grout's woolen drawers.
♦ Cloth ripping, a high wordless yelp
Wilkins: There stood the assessor of the town of Pittsfield with his backside out in the April draft, as white and startled as a boiled parsnip that has just been told the price of parsnips. It had a mole on it shaped like the State of Delaware. I've never been able to look at a map the same way.
Wilkins: Grout made a noise I've only heard once before, from a deputy whose wisdom tooth I pulled without asking his opinion first. Then he went for the window. The window was shut, glass and all, latched against the spring wind.
Wilkins: He did not open it.
♦ Glass and wooden muntins shattering, a body landing with a wet slap
Wilkins: The assessor went through that window like a sermon goes through a deacon, fast, painful, and without touching anything useful on the way. He took the sash, two panes, and my wife's geranium, landed headfirst in the dung heap outside the mare's stall, and stood up wearing it. The mare looked at him like she'd been insulted personally.
Wilkins: Meanwhile, back in the parlor, Barnaby had finished the herring and wanted dessert. The inventory book had dropped to the floor. Calfskin binding, glue made from boiled hooves, and pages soaked in iron-gall ink. To a bear that's a pie. He held it down with one paw and ate the whole valuation of the town of Pittsfield, clasp and all, every horse, ox, sheep, and widow's cow in it.
Wilkins: Iron-gall ink does not agree with a bear. Ten minutes later, with Grout bleeding in the dung heap and me standing there with my mouth open, Barnaby heaved three times, each one a deep rolling bellows-sound that rattled the forceps on their hooks, and brought the whole lot up on my wife's braided hearth rug. A pint and a half of purple-black bile with the town's livestock floating in it like dumplings in a sick man's stew. I could read 'Berry, oxen, two' on a scrap as plain as Scripture.
♦ Barnaby grunts, contented, outside the window
Wilkins: Yes, you were very proud of yourself.
Wilkins: Then I did what a dentist does. I went out with my forceps and a lantern and pulled glass out of Thaddeus Grout. Eleven slivers from his scalp, two from his ear, and one from the parsnip, which he made me promise never to describe, and I've kept that promise in every way except this broadcast. He hollered worse than for any molar. I gave him a pull from the scalding kettle for his nerves. He didn't ask what the tooth-devils had done to it.
Wilkins: Now here's the strange part. The book was gone. Eaten, brought up, and mopped. Grout had to rebuild the whole Fort Wilkins entry from memory, and his memory had been through a window. When the list came out that summer, it read, and I have a copy pinned over my forge:
Wilkins: 'Kettle, dental, dented: one dollar fifty. Implements, smithing: middling. One dog, black, large, unfriendly. Value: none, and God help the buyer.'
Wilkins: Barnaby was entered as a DOG. And ever after, Grout assessed Fort Wilkins from the turnpike with a spyglass, like a sea captain afraid of whales. I've been taxed by the town, taxed by Washington, and taxed by my wife, and only the bear ever got me a reduction.
♪ Banjo flourish, then a mountain fiddle line enters
Wilkins: Now I have a guest who has come a long way by rail, stage, and bad temper. She's an herbalist of the Blue Ridge in Virginia and a collector of mountain talk, and she knows more names for liquor than I know for the sheriff, and I know a great many for him. Please welcome Miss Clara Higgins.
Clara: Well, thank you, Doctor. I've got to say, I came up that turnpike expecting a fort and found a woodshed with opinions.
Wilkins: The opinions are load-bearing, madam.
Clara: And your bear looked at me through the window like I was a ham with a bonnet on.
Wilkins: That's a compliment from Barnaby. He looks at the sheriff like a turnip.
Clara: I'll take it. Now, Doctor, I was laughing so hard at your Mr. Grout I near swallowed my snuff. But you Yankees have it easy. Down home we don't get a selectman with a pencil. In Virginia the county sends round the commissioner of the revenue, and Lord, the commissioner thinks he's next door to the Almighty.
Wilkins: Up here we call that a deputy with a horse.
Clara: My great-great-granddaddy Ezra Higgins kept a little copper pot up a holler past the spring, and every listing season he'd hide the parts. One year the commissioner came early, and Ezra was caught with the cap of the still in his hands. Bright copper, shaped like a big round hat. So he ran out to the corn patch and set it on the scarecrow's head.
Wilkins: Oh, no.
Clara: Oh, yes. That commissioner came riding past, saw an old fellow standing in the corn in a shining copper hat, and tipped his own hat to it, polite as you please. Hollered good morning. Scarecrow didn't answer. Ezra comes out and says, 'That's my uncle. Deaf as a stump. Don't own a thing in this world but his hat.' And the commissioner wrote down, and my mama's still got the copy: 'Uncle, one, no property.'
Wilkins: A revenue commissioner who tips his hat to a scarecrow has finally met a man who agrees with him about everything.
Clara: [laughing] It's the most intelligent conversation he had all season.
Wilkins: What about livestock? That's where they get you up here. They count your hogs like they're counting the apostles.
Clara: Well, now, my grandmother Jessamine had one hog. Spotted, mean, and fast as a preacher leaving a funeral without pay. Commissioner comes to count her stock, and the hog busts out of the pen, shoots past him through the front gate, round the smokehouse, past him through the side gate, round the springhouse, and past him through the garden gate. Same hog, three times, wild-eyed and squealing.
Wilkins: And the fool counted three.
Clara: Wrote down three hogs, proud as a rooster. And Granny Jessamine planted her feet and said, 'Sir, I'll pay on three hogs gladly, the minute you show me the other two. Go on and fetch them. I've wanted to meet them.' He hunted the place for a half hour. Looked under the porch. Looked in the privy, and he didn't come out of there pleased. Finally he got so mortified he struck all three off the list, and Granny paid on no hogs at all that year.
Wilkins: Madam, that's tax law of a higher order than anything ever argued in Concord.
Clara: It's arithmetic, Doctor. A mountain woman can count to one better than a commissioner can count to three.
Wilkins: Now I know your people make applejack and persimmon spirits. How do you hide a barrel? A barrel is a big honest-looking thing.
Clara: You hide it behind a barrel that's even more honest. My granddaddy's daddy kept a row of barrels in the cellar, every one marked 'Cider Vinegar.' Now the front barrel, closest to the stair, was real vinegar, two years old, sharp enough to take the varnish off a coffin, with the mother floating in it like a drowned jellyfish.
Wilkins: I can see where this goes, and I'm delighted.
Clara: Commissioner comes down the cellar steps, says, 'Vinegar, is it?' and wants a taste. Granddaddy draws him a dipper from the front barrel, big and generous. The commissioner throws it back like a man who's been on the road all day expecting something better. His whole face turned inside out, Doctor. His eyes crossed, his ears went red, and that slimy mother slid down his chin. He coughed so hard he lost his hat into the barrel. Then he said, 'Vinegar. All of it. Vinegar,' and he went back up those stairs with his hat dripping and never tasted another barrel on that place as long as he lived.
Wilkins: The other barrels, I take it...
Clara: Were the finest apple brandy in three counties. Twelve barrels of 'vinegar.' We had the sweetest-smelling salad dressing in the Commonwealth.
Wilkins: Clara, you have a tongue like a well-honed forceps: it comes in sweet and goes out with something it wasn't invited to take.
Clara: Doctor, coming from a man whose bear eats tax books, I'll take that as a valentine.
Wilkins: Let's talk words, since you're the scholar. What were the boys calling it in the war? I've heard some names in the Concord barracks that would curl the hair on a sexton.
Clara: Oh, the soldiers were poets of bad liquor. Tanglefoot, because two swallows and your feet don't know each other. Oh-be-joyful, which sounds like a hymn and ends like a brawl. Bust-head, which needs no explaining to anyone who's woke up from it. Pop-skull. Rifle-knock. And down home, the mountain boys have taken to calling it blockade, and the makers blockaders, since everybody's been dodging somebody's line for four years.
Wilkins: Blockade. I like that. Up here we just call it 'Wilkins's,' and the sheriff calls it evidence.
Clara: I got one more. Floyd County cousin of mine, Lafe, got so sore at the commissioner that he named his mule Commissioner.
Wilkins: Oh, that's cruel to the mule.
Clara: The mule didn't love it either. But Lafe would stand in the road on court day, right where the real commissioner could hear, and holler, 'Commissioner, you lazy, swaybacked, slack-jawed, fly-blown son of a jackass, get your hind end in this wagon!' And not a lawman in the county could say one word, 'cause he was only addressing his livestock.
Wilkins: Every word of that was true of both of them, I'd wager.
Clara: Mama says the mule was the better worker. Here's my favorite, though. Granny Jessamine, she of the hog, set out a jug on the porch every listing day. Labeled in her best hand: 'Oh-Be-Joyful, for the Commissioner's Rheumatism.'
Wilkins: A bribe in plain sight. Bold woman.
Clara: Wasn't a bribe. It was creek water with a sassafras root in it. Not one drop of spirit. But the commissioner took a swallow every year, smacked his lips, and swore it was the only thing that eased his elbow. Year after year. Granny said a man will feel any medicine he's sure he's stealing.
Wilkins: Any man cured of rheumatism by creek water deserved a sore elbow in the first place. Miss Clara Higgins, stay right where you are. We'll be back after a word from our sponsor.
Clara: I'm not going anywhere, Doctor. Your bear's between me and the door.
♪ Brassy parlor-band fanfare with a rattling tambourine
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Announcer: Ladies and GENTLEMEN! Step closer to the wagon! Has your old kettle been passing itself off as copper while it's nothing but tin and wishful thinking? Have you watched a lesser apparatus leak, tarnish, and ruin a batch of good herbs? Friends, those days are DONE.
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Announcer: Order yours TODAY at moonshinestill.com, that's moonshinestill.com/products/flame-flow-copper-still, or come see it gleaming with your own eyes at the Fort Wilkins Showroom on Route 28 in Pittsfield, New Hampshire. The bear is chained, the copper is polished, and the doctor is in!
Announcer: Once more, friends: moonshinestill.com/products/flame-flow-copper-still. The Flame-Flow Still. Patent 10,561,960. Copper you can trust!
♪ Fanfare closes with a cymbal crash
♪ Banjo picks back up, warm and slow
Wilkins: SEGMENT THREE. Copper and the Craft: What the Assessor Saw in My Back Room.
Wilkins: Miss Clara is still with us, sipping a cup of my strongest coffee, which I strain through a sock. A clean one.
Clara: He says clean, folks. I'm reserving my judgment.
Wilkins: Now, Grout saw my copper for about four seconds before the bear arrived, so I'll walk you through what he missed. This is the old way told for history's sake, and the law still says what the law says.
Wilkins: Step one is the wash. Before the still ever gets warm, you have a fermented mash, grain or fruit worked by yeast into a sour, beery liquid. That isn't my subject tonight, so we move on.
Wilkins: Step two: charging the pot. Here's the first place a greenhorn kills himself or his barn. You do NOT fill the pot to the brim like a Thanksgiving gravy boat. Leave room, about a quarter of the pot empty. A boiling wash foams up, especially a thick one, and if it has nowhere to rise, it pukes straight up into the cap and down the arm. Then you get scorched mash in your worm, a blocked line, and trouble.
Clara: My granddaddy called that 'the still throwing up its supper.' He said you could hear it gag.
Wilkins: You can, and it's a sound to fear. Which brings me to step three, the most important rule in the trade after making honest cuts. A still must breathe. The vapor path from the pot, through the cap, down the arm, and through the worm has to stay open to the air at the far end. If you plug it, with foam, scorched mash, a fool's cork, or a kinked worm, the pressure has nowhere to go. A boiling copper vessel with no outlet will blow its cap or split its seams and throw scalding wash over everyone in the room. I've seen the burns. I've treated them. Hot mash sticks to skin like tar, and when it comes off, the skin comes with it in a sheet, like peeling the paper off a wet wall.
Clara: Lord have mercy.
Wilkins: The Lord had very little to do with it. It was a man named Pike, who corked his worm to 'hold the steam in.' He held it in, all right, right up until it held him out the door.
Wilkins: Step four: fire. Keep it low and patient. And understand this about alcohol vapor: it's HEAVIER than the air. If a joint leaks, the vapor doesn't rise politely to the rafters. It creeps along the floor like a cat until it finds your firebox, and then it lights all at once, low and blue, and walks right back up the leak to you. Keep the open flame well away from your joints and from the end of the worm, and keep a wet sack and a pail of sand handy. Never walk away from a running still. Not for a pipe, not for a privy, not for a lady.
Clara: Not even for a lady?
Wilkins: Especially not for a lady. That's how Pike's cousin lost his eyebrows.
Wilkins: Step five: the cuts. Here's where an honest distiller is made or a liar is unmasked. When the first drops come, they're the foreshots, and they go on the ground, or rather into a pail for the lamp, never down a throat. Then come the heads. Put your nose to them. They smell of solvent and fresh varnish on a pew, or sharp like a green apple bitten too early. That's ethyl compounds and acetaldehyde, harsh and headache-making, and they're set aside, never drunk. On a small pot the first several percent of your run goes into the waste pail, and a careful hand throws away a little more than he thinks he needs to.
Wilkins: Then the hearts. Sweet, clean, warm on the nose like bread. You keep those.
Wilkins: Then the tails come creeping in. They turn oily, cloudy on the tongue, and smell like wet cardboard, or like Barnaby after he's been in the river. Those are heavier fusel alcohols. Set them aside. A man who runs into the tails to stretch his jars is a man stretching his reputation, and it'll snap.
Clara: Down home they say, 'Short heads, short life; long tails, long face.'
Wilkins: That's a saying worth branding on a man's forearm. And step six: the copper does the quiet work. The sulfur stink a dirty wash throws up is pulled out by bright copper, and that's why I scrub my pot after every run. When Grout's finger caught that drop, he tasted hearts, clean and sweet, from bright copper. That's why his eyes went wet. It wasn't the bear. Well. Not only the bear.
Wilkins: As for Barnaby, he got hold of the worm once in the scuffle and licked the end of it like a boy with a molasses spoon. The next morning he slept till noon and woke up mean, so I'd say he learned something about heads that day.
♦ Distant bear groan
Wilkins: Miss Clara Higgins, you've been a joy and a menace, and I mean both as compliments.
Clara: Doctor, you're the only man I ever met who could make a valuation sound like a war story. Give my regards to Mr. Grout's backside.
Wilkins: It's still in Pittsfield. I'll pass it along.
♪ Fiddle reel, quick and bright
Wilkins: SEGMENT FOUR. Myths, Slang, and the Call-In Cylinder.
Wilkins: First, a myth I want to strike flat on the anvil. You've all seen it at the county fair. Some sage with tobacco in his beard pours a spoon of spirit, lights it, and declares: 'Blue flame, she's pure. Burns red, there's lead, and you'll be dead.' Then everyone nods like they've heard the Gospel.
Wilkins: Here is the truth. The poison that blinds and kills in a bad cut, the wood spirit that comes off in the foreshots, burns with a pale blue flame. So does good grain spirit. Blue and blue. The spoon can't tell them apart, and neither can the sage. A blue flame proves your spirit will burn, and that's all. It doesn't prove your cuts were honest, your copper clean, or your solder free of lead. The only proof of safety is what you threw away before the jar.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Struck. Lighting a spoon of spirit to prove it safe is like lighting a man's beard to prove he's a Christian: you learn nothing and the smell stays.
Wilkins: Now, the call-in cylinder. We've got a message that came all the way from the mountains of North Carolina. Let's hear it.
♦ Cylinder needle drops, heavy surface hiss, faint rooster in the background
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?
♦ Needle lifts, crackle fades
Wilkins: That's Cletus Miller, who goes by Rabbit, calling from Wilkesboro, North Carolina, down in the Yadkin country, where they've been running copper since before this republic had a name. Rabbit, I've heard this question before, and I'll keep hearing it, because ash is the oldest promise in the trade and the most broken. So let me answer you with things I've seen with my own eyes.
Wilkins: First, ashes. Rabbit, every farm in New Hampshire had ash before it had a church. Our grandfathers burned whole forests of hardwood clearing land, leached the ash in a hopper with water, and boiled that lye down to potash and pearl ash. They sold it by the barrel for soap and glass and shipped it off to England. Hardwood ash was money up here. So when a man says 'ash cleans things,' he's half right. Ash in water makes lye, and lye makes soap, and soap cleans a shirt.
Wilkins: But a thump keg isn't a shirt. The lye stays down in the liquid in that keg. It does NOT ride up with the vapor, so it doesn't touch the spirit coming over, not one bit, good or bad. What it can do is foam.
Wilkins: There was an old fellow over in Barnstead, the next town, Hezekiah Babb, who heard the same story your uncle did. He dumped a full peck of hickory ash into his doubler on a hot run. That keg got caustic and slimy and started foaming like a mad dog's mouth, rose right up into the line, and choked it shut. And you all heard in Segment Three what a still does when its line is choked.
♦ A muffled BOOM, then a slow rain of debris
Wilkins: The cap of that thump keg went through his barn roof. Hot grey lye paste coated his walls, his cow, and Hezekiah. He came out of that barn grey from crown to boots, eyebrows singed off, looking like a biscuit dropped in the flour bin and then blamed for it. The lye burned the hair off the back of his hands, and the cow gave soapy milk for a week. True story, and the cow will swear to it.
Wilkins: So, Rabbit: ash is no cure for bad heads. If anything, a bit of ash or lime might sweeten a mash that's soured too far, because an alkali cuts acid. But that happens in the fermenter, not the keg, and it's a farmwife's trick, not a purifier.
Wilkins: Now, the red oak shavings. I tried that myself, years ago. Threw a hatful of red oak curls from my woodpile in the doubler. The keg turned the color of strong tea, rich and handsome. And out of the worm the spirit came clear as creek water, just as it always did. The color stayed home. Oak gives up its color and tannin to whatever it sits in, but those things don't climb with the vapor. If you want spirit that looks like it's been to finishing school, you rest it in oak after the run, for a long while. And use white oak, Rabbit, not red.
Wilkins: Red oak's grain is full of open pores, like a sponge. Make a barrel of it and the spirit weeps out through the staves. That's why coopers use white oak for whiskey; its pores are plugged up by nature. Red oak holds whiskey the way a county deputy holds a secret: it's out through every pore by Tuesday.
Wilkins: The only thing that cleans out bad heads, Rabbit, is the waste pail. Cut them, throw them out, and don't look back.
Wilkins: Rabbit, your uncle isn't a liar. He's a hopeful man with a shovel full of ashes, which in the mountains is close enough. Give him my respects, and tell him a doctor in New Hampshire said he's half right about soap. And for you, Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, I'm striking a fresh copper with the old punch.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: 'G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H.' It's yours. It goes out with tomorrow's mail, wrapped in a page of the Concord paper, which is the best use that paper's had all year.
♪ Fiddle reel winds down
Announcer: ONE MORE QUICK WORD, friends! Before you bank your fire tonight, see the Flame-Flow Still, United States Patent 10,561,960, built of heavy-gauge electrolytic copper. Visit moonshinestill.com, or call at the Fort Wilkins Showroom on Route 28 in Pittsfield. Moonshinestill.com!
♪ Parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme returns, soft and warm
Wilkins: That's our evening, friends. If tonight's tale tickled you, and you want to learn the alchemy of copper, the art of the honest cut, the reading of a run by nose and eye, and the true history of the craft from the hills of Virginia to the Suncook Valley, enroll in the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. You'll get history, metallurgy, safety, and the law, taught plain by a man who's been arrested twice and has learned from it at least once. And remember: making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is illegal under United States law, and everything on this program is for historical and educational purposes only.
Wilkins: My thanks to Miss Clara Higgins of the Blue Ridge, to Rabbit Miller of Wilkesboro, to Thaddeus Grout, wherever his backside may roam, and to Barnaby, the only creature in Merrimack County ever entered on the town books as a worthless dog and proud of it.
♦ Barnaby grunts, chain clinks
Wilkins: Yes, you. You're welcome.
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 beneath wax cylinder crackle