The Provost Marshal's Visit: Concord Officials Come Asking Questions
In the summer of 1864, a provost marshal's clerk and a federal revenue inspector rode out from Concord to hunt down draft dodgers and hidden moonshine stills across Merrimack County, New Hampshire. Alchemist G. G. Wilkins tells how he hid his copper still under a quilt and a Bible, covered the mash smell with clove oil, and pulled a revenue man's rotten molar at just the right moment. Then Barnaby the pet bear wrecked the whole act. It's Civil War distilling history, Enrollment Act facts and real moonshining know-how, told by the fire.
In this episode
- How the 1863 Enrollment Act, provost marshals and draft boards worked in Civil War New Hampshire
- Substitutes, $300 commutation fees and the 'rich man's war, poor man's fight' complaint
- Why Union army surgeons turned away recruits who lacked enough front teeth
- Internal revenue districts, distiller licenses, stamp taxes and the 1864 whiskey tax jump
- Hiding a copper still and covering mash smell from federal revenue inspectors
- Coppersmith Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister's family stories about hiding still parts from revenuers
- Listener question: hickory ashes and red oak in the thump keg
- Testing the old moonshine myth that 'lead burns red' in the flame test
Dr. G. G. Wilkins describes the nervous summer week of 1864 when a provost marshal's clerk and a federal revenue inspector rode out from Concord to check enrollment lists, tax stamps and suspicious cellars across Merrimack County. He explains how the Enrollment Act and the internal revenue districts actually worked, then tells how he faked his innocence, pulled an inspector's rotten molar at a very convenient moment, and lost the whole act when Barnaby the bear turned up at exactly the wrong time. Master coppersmith Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister brings new family stories about hiding still parts from federal men, and Wilkins answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, NC about hickory ashes and red oak in the thump keg before taking apart the old 'lead burns red' flame test.
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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! Shut that great hairy trap and lie down. You ate a whole goose this morning, feathers and all, and I'll be picking quills out of your leavings till Thanksgiving like a man harvesting the world's worst pillow. Down, I say. Down, you four-hundred-pound sack of bad decisions.
♦ Low bear grunt, chain dragging across planks, then settling
Wilkins: There. He's sulking, and a sulking bear is the best kind.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth, rising and then dipping beneath the voice
Wilkins: Good evening, friends, neighbors, sinners and the occasional reformed Baptist. You're listening to Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, broadcasting from the log fortress of Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, in Pittsfield, Merrimack County, New Hampshire. I'm your host, Doctor George G. Wilkins: dentist, blacksmith, inventor, stamper of coins, and, as the Merrimack County bench will tell you, an occasional defendant. Tonight's tale is about the week the government came calling. I don't mean the sheriff. I know the sheriff. I've pulled two of his teeth and sold him the cure for both. I mean Washington, by way of Concord: a provost marshal's clerk and a federal revenue inspector, riding up the turnpike with ledgers under their arms and suspicion in their noses. Stay with me, because before this hour is out you'll hear about enrollment lists, tax stamps, an abscessed molar the size of a hen's egg, and the worst timing ever shown by a bear in the history of the Republic.
♪ Theme flourishes and fades
Announcer: A quick word, friends! Is your still sealed with flour paste and prayer? Throw out the paste and keep the prayers for church! Heavy-Duty Sanitary Tri-Clamp Ferrules and Gaskets from Moonshine Stills lock tight and stay tight. Visit moonshinestill.com today!
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
♪ Brief fiddle sting
Wilkins: Segment the first. Before I tell you how I fooled two federal men in my own parlor, you ought to know who those federal men were and who sent them, because it was not the same office. In this war, Washington reached into Merrimack County with two separate hands. One hand wanted your body and the other wanted your money.
Wilkins: The first hand was the Provost Marshal General's Bureau. Congress passed the Enrollment Act on the third of March, 1863, when the volunteering had dried up like a spinster's garden. That law put a colonel named James B. Fry in charge of a whole new bureau, and Fry put a provost marshal in every congressional district in the loyal states. Our district reported to Concord. The provost marshal didn't sit alone, either. He sat on a Board of Enrollment with a commissioner and a surgeon. The three of them heard every excuse a man could invent for staying home, and the surgeon poked, prodded and peered into every drafted fellow who claimed a bad back, a bad heart or bad eyes.
Wilkins: Under that board came the enrolling officers. They went door to door, from Epsom to Barnstead, writing down the name, age, trade and color of every man of fighting age, roughly twenty to forty-five. You can imagine how popular they were. A provost marshal's clerk is a fellow who can't lift a musket but can lift your name off a church register and drop it on a battlefield. Elsewhere in the North, enrolling officers were shot at, stoned and chased off with dogs. In New Hampshire we were more polite. We just lied to them.
Wilkins: Now, a drafted man had two ways out, if he had money. He could hire a substitute, some poor devil from Manchester or a bounty man from Boston who would march in his place. Or, for a time, he could pay three hundred dollars commutation money and buy himself out of that draft. Three hundred dollars! That's more than a Suncook mill girl earned in a year. Folks called it a rich man's war and a poor man's fight, and they weren't wrong. Congress did away with most of that commutation business in July of 1864, which is precisely when my story happens, so you can guess how cheerful Merrimack County felt that summer.
Wilkins: And there's one more provost marshal fact, and it's my favorite, being a tooth man. The army surgeons would turn away a recruit who lacked enough sound front teeth. A soldier loads his musket from a paper cartridge, and he tears that paper open with his teeth. No teeth, no tearing. No tearing, no shooting. No shooting, no use to Mr. Lincoln. You may imagine how many men in Merrimack County came to my door that summer, suddenly very interested in my forceps.
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Wilkins: I sent them home with their teeth in. I'm a dentist, not a deserter's carpenter. A man's teeth are the only thing God gave him that the government can't tax, and I won't help him throw them away for fear. I'll pull a rotten tooth for any man, but I won't pull a good one to cheat the Union. There's a line, and I stand on the honest side of it, at least where teeth are concerned.
Wilkins: Now the second hand, the one in your pocket. That's the internal revenue. Under the revenue laws, the whole country was carved into collection districts, and each district had an assessor to figure what you owed and a collector to come and get it. Under the assessor worked assistant assessors, each with his own patch of country, and those were the fellows who rode up your lane with a pencil. They licensed everything. Every distiller had to register and take out a license. Every liquor dealer paid a license. And, mark this, friends, every dentist had to buy a federal license too. They taxed my whiskey, they taxed my tooth-pulling, and they taxed the very paper I wrote my receipts on.
Wilkins: That's the stamp tax. A bank check needed a little adhesive stamp. A deed needed a stamp. A contract, a receipt, a patent medicine bottle and a box of matches all needed stamps. Fail to stick one on and the paper might not hold up in court, and you might pay a fine besides. The only thing in this fortress that isn't taxed is Barnaby's flatulence, and give Congress time.
Wilkins: The whiskey tax itself climbed that year like a cat up a curtain. Twenty cents a gallon back in '62. Sixty cents come March of '64. A dollar and a half come July of '64, the very month of my story. Two dollars from New Year's of '65. So when I tell you a revenue inspector came riding up the Suncook Valley Turnpike in the summer of 1864, you understand he wasn't out for his health. He was out to see who'd been making liquor at sixty cents and meant to sell it at a dollar fifty without telling Washington the difference.
♦ Bear grunt outside window, chain rattle
Wilkins: Yes, Barnaby, I'm coming to your part. Be patient. You're the villain of this piece and you'll get your entrance.
♪ Banjo transition, a brisk walking tune
Wilkins: Segment the second: legends, outlaws, and one sorry dentist. It was the second week of July, 1864, hot as the hinges of hell, and the Suncook River was so low a man could walk across it without wetting his opinions. Word came up the turnpike from Chichester: two men from Concord. One was a clerk of the provost marshal's office. I'll call him Mr. Ebenezer Tuttle, which is near enough to his name and a good deal kinder than what I called him that week. He was a thin, buttoned-up fellow with ink-stained cuffs and a leather satchel holding the enrollment lists for every town in the county. The other was an inspector of internal revenue, a Mr. Horace Pettengill, also near enough. He was a round man with a round hat and a little notebook, and he licked his pencil so often his tongue was blacker than a Concord banker's heart.
Wilkins: Tuttle wanted to know who in Pittsfield had been left off the rolls. Pettengill wanted to know who in Pittsfield had a cellar that smelled like Christmas. Between them they'd been through Loudon, Epsom and Northwood, and they'd turned up a dozen men hiding in haylofts and three stills hidden under hog pens. I got two days' warning. Two days, friends, to make Fort Wilkins look as innocent as a Shaker meeting.
Wilkins: Here's how a man stages innocence. First, the smell. A fermenting mash smells like a brewery fell into a bakery, and you can't hide it under a blanket. But I'm a dentist, and a dentist keeps oil of cloves for toothache. So I took every drop of clove oil I owned and the two bottles I borrowed from the Pittsfield druggist, and I painted it on the doorframes, the windowsills and the hot stovepipe. By morning the whole fortress smelled like a Christmas ham laid out at a funeral. Second, the copper. My still was taken down, the pot was turned upside down and draped with a quilt, and my late aunt's Bible was set on top of it. The swan neck went in the woodpile and the worm went in the root cellar under the potatoes. Third, the jars. Every jar of honest Wilkins spirit went down the well in a bucket on a rope. Fourth and last, the bear. Barnaby I chained by the woodpile with a ham bone, for I judged a quiet bear was a respectable bear.
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, distant horse hooves on hard-packed dirt
Wilkins: They came up the lane at ten in the morning on a pair of livery horses. Tuttle got down first, opened his satchel and laid his list on my anvil. 'Doctor Wilkins,' he says, 'what is your age?' I told him forty-six. Now, I've been forty-six since about 1858. It's a fine age, and I mean to keep it. He wrote it down and frowned, then looked at me and frowned some more. Then he had the gall to say, 'You look younger, sir.' I told him clean living and pulling teeth will do that for a man. I'd have been flattered if I hadn't known exactly what he was hinting at.
Wilkins: Then Pettengill gets down, puffing like a bellows with a hole in it, and he sniffs. He sniffs the door, the window, the stovepipe. 'Cloves,' he says. 'Dental practice,' I say. 'You've an awful lot of dental practice,' he says. And that's when I saw it. When he talked, he held his jaw. His left cheek was swelled up like he'd stuffed a crab apple in there for safekeeping, and when he put his tongue to it he winced the way a man winces when he sits on a hornet. That inspector had a rotten molar, friends, and it had been riding with him all the way from Concord, kicking him every mile.
Wilkins: 'Mr. Pettengill,' I says, all warm and Christian, 'you look to be in some distress. Let me have a peek.' He was a proud man, but a toothache makes a beggar of a king. He sat in my chair. I opened that man's mouth and the smell hit me like a dead woodchuck in a church organ. I've been in privies with better breath. The lower left molar was black as a stovepipe, cracked down the middle, with a gum boil at the root full of yellow, the size of a robin's egg and fixing to burst. 'Mr. Pettengill,' says I, 'that tooth has to come out, and it has to come out today, or you'll be riding back to Concord in a pine box with your face swelled up like a bladder at a pig killing.'
Wilkins: And here's the beauty of it. A man with forceps in his mouth asks no questions. That's the finest interrogation defense ever invented, and the law schools in Boston ought to teach it. I took my time. Oh, I took my time. I lanced the boil first, and it went off like a corked bottle of spoiled cider, right down the front of his waistcoat. He made a noise like a heifer stuck in a fence. Then I got the forceps down on that crown, rocked it out, rocked it in, and felt the roots let go one at a time. That molar came out with a crack like a frozen pond giving way. There was a root on it like a parsnip, curved like a fishhook, and he thanked me for it with his whole bladder. I'll say no more about the chair. I burned the cushion.
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, Wilkins chuckling
Wilkins: He lay back white as a boiled turnip, spitting into a basin, and asked for nothing more than a cool cloth and a quiet porch. Meanwhile Tuttle looked through my Bible on top of my quilted pot and remarked that I must be a very devout man to keep scripture on a cooking kettle. I told him the Lord's word goes best where the heat is. He wrote that down, God help him. By two in the afternoon, gentlemen, I had them both on the porch drinking spring water, the inspector's jaw packed with lint, the clerk's list half-forgotten, and they were saying their goodbyes. I had won. I had beaten Washington with cloves, a Bible and a parsnip-rooted molar.
♦ Bear grunt, low and ominous
Wilkins: And then. And then, friends. Barnaby.
Wilkins: I had chained that bear by the woodpile. I had not reckoned that a bear with a ham bone and nothing else to do will dig. And he dug. He dug under the woodpile, under the sill, and clean through the back wall of my root cellar, where he found three things: the potatoes, which he scorned; my copper worm, which got tangled round his neck; and the half-barrel of sour mash I'd left down there to finish fermenting, which he did not scorn at all. He drank it. He ate it. He waded in it. A four-hundred-pound bear with twenty gallons of fermenting corn mash in his belly, on the hottest day of July.
Wilkins: So just as Tuttle stepped off my porch with his satchel under his arm, round the corner of the woodpile came Barnaby, swaying like a Concord legislator after a temperance supper, with my copper worm hung round his neck like a Methodist bishop's collar, and he was preaching the same sermon from both ends. He looked at Tuttle. Tuttle looked at him. Barnaby opened his mouth, and I knew what was coming because I've cleaned up after it. He threw up a bushel of sour mash, hot, frothing and smelling like the floor of a Portsmouth brewery, all over that clerk's boots. Tuttle wore it home to Concord like a medal of the Grand Army of the Republic.
Wilkins: But Barnaby wasn't finished. A bear that's been sick wants comfort, and the nearest comfortable thing was a leather satchel that smelled of ink and sweat. He went for it. Tuttle held on, being a loyal servant of the government, and Barnaby got a claw in the back of the man's trousers instead. They tore down the back with a sound like a mainsail splitting off Cape Ann, from the belt clean to the bend of the knee, and Merrimack County saw a moon rise at two in the afternoon. Pale as lard, it was, with one long red scratch across the left side where Barnaby's claw kissed him goodbye. Tuttle let go of the satchel to cover his dignity, and Barnaby sat down in the dooryard with it and ate the Pittsfield pages of the enrollment list, three sheets, slow and serious, like a deacon reading the minutes.
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, Wilkins laughing hard
Wilkins: Now you'd think that was the end of me. Copper worm round the bear's neck, mash on the clerk's boots, government paper in the bear's belly. But Mr. Pettengill was on my porch with his face full of lint and his mind full of gratitude, and that is a powerful combination. He opened his little notebook and licked his black pencil, slowly, because his jaw hurt, and he wrote. I read it over his shoulder. It said: 'Proprietor keeps a bear. Bear observed to be fermenting internally. Copper object about the bear's neck, believed to be a collar. No further inquiry advised.' That's the truest sentence the Treasury Department ever paid a man to write.
Wilkins: I sewed up Tuttle's trousers with dental silk, and I dabbed his scratched hindquarter with a cloth soaked in strong spirit while he bit a leather strap and called me names his mother never taught him. I pulled that man's tooth for free, I charged him nothing for the bear, and that's more mercy than the Treasury ever showed a Pittsfield man. They rode back down the turnpike at a fast walk, the one standing in his stirrups and the other spitting pink every quarter mile. Pittsfield had a mighty short enrollment that month. I never heard another word about it. I did buy my dental license, mind you, the following week, with a stamp on the receipt. A man ought to pay for the things he's actually caught at.
♪ Fiddle reel bursts in, then settles
Wilkins: Now, I have a guest at the fire tonight, a man who knows copper the way I know a bad tooth: by the sound it makes when you hit it. He hammers pots, swan necks and every other thing in the Fort Wilkins foundry, and he has hands like two smoked hams. Please welcome Silas McAllister, called Hacksaw. Silas, sit down before Barnaby smells you.
Silas: Evening, Doctor. Evening to everyone listening. I'll sit, and I'll keep my boots on the far side of that window, if it's all the same.
Wilkins: Hacksaw, you've hammered so much copper your knuckles ring when you knock on a door, and the Pittsfield widows all think you're the dinner bell.
Silas: Well, some of them come running, and some of them come with a broom. I've learned to tell which by the gait.
Wilkins: Tonight is about federal men coming to call. Your family has been working copper in this valley long enough to have hidden a good deal of it. Did any of yours ever get a visit from the provost marshal's people?
Silas: They did, Doctor. My grandmother's place was in Loudon, up off the Concord road. In the summer of '63, the first enrollment, an officer came up the lane with his book. Now, my great-grandfather was living with them then. He was eighty-some years old and deaf as an anvil, and he couldn't have been drafted for anything but a tombstone. But my grandfather was right in the fighting years, and he was also the one who ran the still in the back shed. And the still was out, mid-cleaning, with the swan neck sitting on the kitchen table where she'd been scrubbing it.
Wilkins: The swan neck, on the kitchen table, with a government man at the door.
Silas: On the table. So my grandmother picks it up, wipes it with her apron, and hands it to the old man with the narrow end toward his ear. 'Here's your trumpet, Father,' she says. Loud. And he puts the narrow end of the swan neck in his ear like he's done it his whole life. Then the officer comes in and starts asking questions. 'How many men in this household?' And the old man yells, 'WHAT?' into the copper. 'Men, sir, of age!' 'WHAT?' And with the bend in that neck, his own voice came booming back at him and he couldn't hear a blessed thing but himself. He got louder and louder. Grandmother said he hollered 'WHAT' fourteen times. The officer wrote down what he could get from her, which wasn't much, said the household was 'infirm,' and left.
Wilkins: Ha! A deaf man and a swan neck. That's better than anything I've done with a Bible.
Silas: And the thing of it was, Doctor, it made a fine ear trumpet. The old man wanted to keep it. My grandfather had to make him a proper one out of sheet brass before he'd give the neck back for the next run.
Wilkins: Now that's craft serving the family. What about the revenue side? Did any McAllister ever cross paths with the gaugers?
Silas: My great-uncle Abner did, in Epsom, a year or so after the tax came on. A revenue gauger turned up at his shop. Not to search, mind you. He needed a repair. Those gaugers carried a brass hydrometer in a little case, a float with a long stem marked for proof, and you dropped it in the spirit to read the strength. This fellow had stepped on his and bent the stem. Nobody in Concord would fix it for less than a week, and he had a route to ride.
Wilkins: So the tax man walks into a coppersmith's shop to have his tax-measuring instrument fixed. I'd have charged him three dollars and a confession.
Silas: Abner thought about doing worse than that, I'll tell you. But he was proud of his work, and a bent stem is a bent stem. He straightened it, trued it and checked it against water. While he was at it he noticed the man's pocket flask on the bench, a little pewter-lidded thing with a seam down the side, and the seam was dull grey. Lead solder. Abner picked it up and told him, 'Mister, you're riding round the county measuring other men's whiskey, and you're drinking yours out of poison.' He took the seam apart, cleaned it to bright metal and ran it again in silver. He told the gauger that lead would kill him slower than the Rebels but just as surely.
Wilkins: And did the gauger pay?
Silas: He paid for the hydrometer and not the flask. Abner said that was fair, because he'd done the flask for himself. He couldn't stand the thought of the metal doing a man harm.
Wilkins: That's the McAllister religion right there. Now, you told me once you can tell a lead seam from across a room by ear. I don't believe it, so prove it to my listeners.
Silas: Not from across the room, Doctor. From arm's length. Copper that's been planished right, with every hammer blow laid tight and the seams joined in silver or proper rivets, will ring when you rap it with a knuckle. It hums, like a church bell far off. Lead in a seam deadens it. You get a thud, like knocking on a wet log. Last fall there was an estate sale in Concord, an old tavern-keeper's goods, and they had six copper pots on a table, all polished up like mirrors to fetch a price. I went down the row rapping each one. Four sang and two thudded. I turned the two over, scraped the seam with my thumbnail, and sure enough there was soft grey metal underneath the shine. Lead, every inch.
Wilkins: A lead seam thuds like a deacon's sermon. A silver seam sings like the deacon's daughter, and I'll say no more on a family program.
Silas: I bought the four that sang and told the auctioneer the other two ought to go for flowerpots and nothing that holds drink. He didn't thank me. The man bidding against me did, after I explained.
Wilkins: Give me one more, Hacksaw. A hiding story, from this summer of inspectors.
Silas: There was a fellow in Northwood, whose name I won't give because his grandsons are big. When word came the inspector was riding through, he unbolted the still cap, the copper dome off the top of the pot, and turned it upside down on a fence post by the road. Filled it with rainwater and set a little stone in it, and it looked like any farmwife's birdbath. A pretty one, too. The inspector came by, saw nothing in the shed, admired the birdbath and let his horse drink from it while they talked.
Wilkins: Oh, no.
Silas: That cap hadn't been rinsed, Doctor. The inside was wet with the last of the run. The horse drank the lot, and partway down the road toward Deerfield the animal started walking sideways. The inspector had to lead it the last mile. He told the livery stable the July heat had got to it.
Wilkins: That horse drank from the birdbath and came home walking like a Concord legislator after a temperance supper. Silas McAllister, ladies and gentlemen, the only man in Merrimack County who can hear a lie in a pot. Stay by the fire, Hacksaw. I'll want you for the copper talk.
Silas: I'm not going anywhere, Doctor. That bear is between me and my horse.
♦ Bear grunt, chain clink
♪ Bright banjo vamp, then a brassy patent-medicine fanfare
Announcer: Step right up, friends, step right up! Have you ever stood beside your still in the dead of night, smelled that sweet, dangerous vapor and wondered where it was getting out? A loose joint wastes your spirit, and worse, sends flammable vapor drifting toward your fire! Flour paste cracks, rye dough crumbles, and a slipping hose clamp lets go just when you've turned your back!
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Announcer: And the price, friends? Just thirty-four dollars and ninety-five cents! See them for yourself at the Moonshine Stills showroom at Fort Wilkins, on Route 28 in Pittsfield, New Hampshire. Mind the bear! Or order this very night at moonshinestill.com/products/tri-clamp-fittings. Once more, that's moonshinestill.com/products/tri-clamp-fittings. Shop Hardware at moonshinestill.com. Throw out the paste and seal it right!
♪ Fanfare resolves on a banjo strum
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Wilkins: Segment the third: copper and the craft. This is the alchemy, friends, where base matter becomes something finer, or becomes poison if you're a fool about it. All of this is for history and education, and the federal law says a man needs a permit to make spirits for drinking. I paid for my dental license, and you may draw your own lessons. Now, Hacksaw, sit close. I'll talk the mash and you correct me on the metal.
Silas: I'll correct you whether you ask or not, Doctor.
Wilkins: The Wilkins rye-and-corn mash, as made at the old Fort, goes like this. Step one: grind your grain coarse. Take two parts cracked corn, one part rye and a good share of malted barley, about a fifth of the whole, because the malt carries the ferments that turn starch to sugar. Step two: heat your water, cook the corn soft first, then let it cool till you can just bear to hold a finger in it for a count of five, which is about a hundred and fifty degrees, more or less. Stir in the rye and the malt and keep it there an hour, stirring like a widow at a church supper. Taste it. It'll go from floury to sweet as the starch converts. Step three: cool the mash right down to blood warm or a little under, about eighty degrees, before you pitch your yeast. Step four: let it work in a covered tub in a room with air moving through it, four days to a week, till the bubbling stops and it tastes sour and dry. Now there's a point I've not made on this program before. Keep that ferment happy. If the tub gets too hot, or the yeast is starved, the yeast sulks and gives off extra rotten-egg stink, the hydrogen sulfide. A sick ferment hands your copper twice the work.
Silas: And that's where the copper comes in, Doctor. Folks think the whole pot cleans the spirit. It doesn't, not equally. The copper that does the most good is the copper the vapor touches: the head, the swan neck, the top of the column. If you've a steel kettle with a copper cap and neck, you've got most of the benefit. If you've a copper kettle with a steel or iron top, you've wasted your money where it counts least. The sulfur is in the vapor, so you put your copper in the vapor's road.
Wilkins: And I'll have him make all my vapor roads from now on. Step five: the run. Most old hands strip first. They run the whole wash through quick to pull out the low wines, then run those low wines a second time, slow, for the spirit. On that second run, Silas, how do you want the fire?
Silas: Low, Doctor. Low and steady. Hurry a pot and it'll puke, I mean boil over into the neck and spoil the run. Worse, a hard fire makes your joints work and leak, and the vapor coming out of a leaky joint will catch from an open flame. I've seen a Barnstead shed go up with the man's whole season in it.
Wilkins: Which brings me to the cuts, and you'll hear me say this every week until I'm dead and after. The first liquid that runs out is the foreshots, the very lightest stuff. Methanol boils at about a hundred and forty-eight degrees and your good spirit at about a hundred and seventy-three, so the lightest, meanest stuff comes over early. Throw out the foreshots. Don't drink them, don't rub them on a tooth, don't sell them to a Concord man. As a rule of thumb for a small pot, throw out a good gill and a bit for every five gallons of wash, and when in doubt throw out more. Then come the heads, still sharp, smelling of solvent and nail-polish pear. Set them aside. Then the hearts, sweet and clean, and they're the reason you came. Then the tails, oily, wet-dog and wet-cardboard. Catch those separate for a later run or throw them out.
Wilkins: And here's a fresh lesson for the brandy makers. A grain mash like mine makes comparatively little methanol. Fruit is another matter. Apple pomace, grape skins and pears are full of pectin, and pectin breaks down into methanol. So the cider-brandy man of New England has to be at least as careful with his foreshots and heads as any corn-whiskey man, and probably more. Don't let anyone tell you a fruit spirit is gentle because it smells of an orchard.
Silas: And keep it clean between runs, Doctor. I'll say only that once, since you've worn the subject out.
Wilkins: I have, I have. Last, the fire. Never leave a running still. Not for supper, not for a sweetheart, not for a bear. Keep the still-house aired, keep the flame away from the joints, and keep a pail of water and a wet sack by the door. Spirit fire burns pale and is hard to see in daylight, so a man can be standing in it before he knows it.
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Wilkins: Thank you, Hacksaw. You're welcome back any night that Barnaby's in a forgiving mood.
Silas: Then I'll see you in about four years, Doctor. Goodnight, all.
♪ Short fiddle bridge
Wilkins: Segment the fourth: myths, slang and the mailbag. We have a message tonight, and it comes all the way from the Carolina mountains. Roll the tape.
♦ Wax cylinder crackle shifting to a thinner, more distant crackle
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?
♦ Crackle returns to normal
Wilkins: Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina! Rabbit, I've heard this question before, and from your own throat, if my ears don't deceive me. Your uncle must be a stubborn man to send you twice. So tonight I'll answer it from a direction I haven't tried, which is the woodpile itself.
Wilkins: Start with the hickory ash. Every farmwife in New England knows what hardwood ash is good for. You set it in a barrel with straw in the bottom, pour rainwater through, and what drips out is lye, strong enough to take the skin off your knuckles. Hardwood ash is mostly potash and lime, which makes it alkaline. Your grandmother made soap with it. She hulled her corn with it for hominy. So when your uncle's grandfather tossed ash in his keg, he wasn't crazy. He had a feeling that the ash scoured things, and it does scour things. In a hot keg it might dull a touch of sharpness or sourness. It might also leave a soapy, bitter taint and a crust in the bottom you'll be chipping out till Easter. What it won't do is touch the poison in the heads. That only goes out the way it always has, into the waste bucket at the start of the run. Your uncle's hickory ash would make fine soap, Rabbit, and from what I hear of Wilkesboro, somebody down there could use a bar.
Wilkins: Now the red oak, and here I'll tell you something your uncle doesn't know. Ask any cooper in Pittsfield why he won't make a whiskey barrel out of red oak and he'll tell you. Red oak leaks. The wood is open along its grain, full of little tubes running end to end, and a man can blow through a short stick of it and raise bubbles in a cup of water at the far end. White oak has natural plugs in those tubes, little stoppers called tyloses, which is why white oak holds liquid and red oak doesn't. So shavings of red oak in the keg might put a whiff of wood and tannin in the spirit, the way a fresh barrel does. That's flavoring, Rabbit, not cleaning. Cletus, red oak in a keg is like a Barnstead politician. It leaks from every pore and swears it's holding everything in.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: There's a Wilkins cent for you, Rabbit, stamped fresh: G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. Hold it up to the light and think of me. Now, since my punch is hot, let's knock down another myth. You've all heard the old saying: 'Lead burns red and makes you dead.' The idea is that you pour a spoonful of spirit, set it alight, and look at the flame. Blue is good, red or yellow means lead from a bad seam or a bad worm, and you'll be pushing up daisies by Sunday.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Bunkum, friends. That spoon will lie to you. A yellow or orange tinge in a burning spoon can come from salt, dirt, ash, the spoon itself or the soot on your thumb. It doesn't reliably tell you anything about lead. And the poison you should fear most, the methanol in the foreshots, burns with a pale blue flame you can hardly see in daylight, pretty much like good spirit. Bad liquor can pass that spoon test with a fine blue flame and still blind a man. A man who judges his whiskey by the color of a burning spoon is the same fool who judges a wife by the color of her bonnet. He'll find the trouble later, and he'll find it in private.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: So what protects you? Exactly what Hacksaw said: no lead in the seams, no soft solder, no scrap metal of unknown history, and honest cuts with the foreshots and heads thrown away. A spoon and a lucifer match are for lighting your pipe, not for judging spirit. Rabbit, thank you for writing up from Wilkesboro. Give your uncle my compliments and tell him to save his ashes for washing day.
♦ Bear grunt outside the window
Wilkins: Barnaby agrees. He has a professional interest in lye soap, since it's the only thing that gets mash out of his fur.
♪ Theme returns softly beneath
Announcer: Another quick word, friends! Before the fire burns low, make sure every joint on your still is locked tight. Heavy-Duty Sanitary Tri-Clamp Ferrules and Gaskets, pressure-tested and airtight, are only thirty-four ninety-five at moonshinestill.com!
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Wilkins: That's our hour, friends. If tonight's talk of mash, metal and cuts has given you an appetite for the honest science of it, enroll in the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. It covers the history, the chemistry, the copper, the cuts and the safety, taught the way I'd teach my own apprentice, without the bear. The government wants a permit for the doing, so learn the law along with the craft. That's how you stay out of the Concord jail, and out of Barnaby's supper dish.
Wilkins: My thanks to Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister, to Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, and to Mr. Tuttle and Mr. Pettengill, wherever they are tonight. I hope your trousers are whole, sir, and your jaw has healed. You were the finest guests Fort Wilkins ever had, and the only ones Barnaby ever ate the paperwork of.
Wilkins: Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.
♦ Bear grunt and final drip into jar
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme swells and fades into wax cylinder crackle