The Great Pittsfield Mash Flood of 1866
Dr. G. G. Wilkins tells how a rusted hoop on his biggest fermenting vat burst in April of 1866. Six hundred gallons of sour mash ran down Pittsfield's Main Street, a Concord tax assessor slid into Barnaby's reach, and the town drunk, Ezekiel Pound, declared it a miracle and tried to found a church on the spot. Appalachian herbalist Clara Higgins tells new tales of a burst persimmon-beer hogshead, drunken ducks, 'apple palsy' and green-persimmon disasters, and gives Ezekiel's condition its proper mountain name. Wilkins answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller's voicemail about hickory ashes and red oak shavings in the thump keg with the potash trade and white-oak cooperage, then takes apart the blue-flame lead test at his anvil.
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Full episode transcript
♦ Audible wax cylinder surface crackle, slow drip of clear distillate into a glass jar
♦ Barnaby the black bear grunting and chain clinking outside log cabin window
Wilkins: Barnaby. Barnaby! Settle that carcass down. He smells a sour mash on the April wind and thinks it is 1866 all over again. It is not, you great black sack of appetite. Lie down.
♦ A deep, wet bear groan, chain dragging across frozen mud
Wilkins: Look at him, licking the window glass. A bear forgets his own mother, but he never forgets a free drink.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth, swells and fades under
Wilkins: Good evening, neighbors, sinners, and you three gentlemen from the Merrimack County sheriff's office who listen faithfully every week, the way a tick listens to a dog. This is Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, coming to you from the log fortress of Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, in Pittsfield, New Hampshire. I am your host, dentist, blacksmith, inventor and twice-arrested citizen, Dr. George G. Wilkins. Tonight's tale is one Pittsfield still tells in a whisper, with its nose held: the Great Pittsfield Mash Flood of 1866. Six hundred gallons of sour mash, one rotten hoop, one bear, one tax man, and one town drunk who swears to this day he saw the hand of God. But first, a quick word.
Announcer: A quick word, friends! Is your still sealed with flour paste and prayer? Lose the paste and keep the prayer! Heavy-Duty Sanitary Tri-Clamp Ferrules and Gaskets from Moonshine Stills lock your joints tight and true. Visit moonshinestill.com, that is moonshinestill.com!
♪ Short banjo sting
♪ Fiddle drone, slow and ominous
Wilkins: Segment the first. History. Before I tell you what happened on my Main Street, let me tell you what happened in London, because the English got there first, as they like to tell us. On the seventeenth of October, 1814, a big porter vat at Meux's Horse Shoe Brewery, near Tottenham Court Road, popped its iron hoops. Out came a wave of beer so heavy it knocked down a brick wall and flooded the cellars of the poor folk living behind it. Eight souls died, drowned or crushed. When I first read of it in an old London paper I laughed, and then I stopped laughing, because a vat is only a barrel that has grown proud.
♦ Wax crackle, a log shifting in the stove
Wilkins: Here is how a fermenting vat is built. You raise staves of wood side by side like the ribs of a cow, and you drive hoops down over them to squeeze them tight. The wood swells when it is wet and seals itself. Let a vat stand empty and dry and it shrinks and weeps. Let an iron hoop rust and nobody see it, and the whole weight of the mash leans on the hoops that are left. A gallon of mash weighs a little over eight pounds. Six hundred gallons is two and a half tons of sour porridge pushing at a few strips of rusty iron, and that iron is pushing back with only my good intentions.
Wilkins: Now, my big vat. I had her from a cooper in Epsom, white pine staves, three iron hoops. That winter I borrowed the middle hoop. Borrowed is a word a Yankee uses when he means took. I needed horseshoe stock for Deacon Batchelder's mare, the iron dealer in Concord wanted cash money, and the hoop was right there looking idle. I put two hickory withes around the vat in its place and told myself they would hold till spring. That makes me the first man in Merrimack County to shoe a horse with his own flood.
Wilkins: The mash was sour mash, done properly. I learned it from the writings and the reputation of Dr. James Crow of Kentucky, a Scotchman and a physician like myself, God rest him. He died in 1856. Crow did not invent souring, but he measured it and ran it like a scientist. When a run is finished you keep back some of the spent stillage, the backset, sour as a widow's tongue, and stir it into the next batch. It keeps the mash consistent, it keeps out the wild bacteria, and it makes every batch taste like a cousin of the last one. I had been keeping my vat going on backset since the fall, which is why the stink of it could knock a crow off a fence a quarter mile off.
♦ Barnaby grunts outside, chain clinks
Wilkins: Yes, Barnaby, the crows too. He remembers the crows.
Wilkins: The date was the eleventh of April, 1866, mud season, the worst time of year in New Hampshire, when the frost comes out of the ground and the roads turn to chocolate pudding. The war was a year gone. The two-dollar whiskey tax was still a stone around every honest neck. The cotton mill down on the Suncook was running its shifts, and the girls walked up Main Street at noon holding their skirts out of the mud. Then, a little after eleven in the morning, I heard a sound from the vat shed like a pistol fired inside a church organ.
♦ Sharp wooden crack, a groan of splitting staves, then a heavy rushing slosh
Wilkins: One hickory withe let go, then the other. The staves sprang open like the petals of a big ugly flower, and six hundred gallons of fermenting corn and rye, sour as sin and warm as a dog's belly, came out of that shed on its knees and went downhill. Fort Wilkins sits above the road, and the road runs down to Main Street, and Main Street runs down to the river. You never saw water so eager to get somewhere.
♪ Banjo transition, quick and jangling
Wilkins: Segment the second. Legends, outlaws, and the fool I married to this story. Our town drunk in 1866 was a man I will call Ezekiel Pound, a name close enough to his own that his grandchildren know who I mean and far enough off that they cannot sue me. Ezekiel has been drunk so long the Pittsfield fence posts call him by his first name. That morning he was asleep in the gutter outside the harness shop, his hat over his face, dreaming of whatever such men dream of, usually a bigger jug.
Wilkins: The mash came down that gutter like the Red Sea going back where it belonged. It lifted Ezekiel clean off the ground, turned him over twice, and set him down in front of the Congregational meeting house with his mouth open and full of mash. He came up spluttering, a gob of soaked corn on each eyebrow, sat up in the river of it, took a long breath, and shouted for the whole town to hear: Our Lord turned water into wine at Cana, and He has turned Main Street into breakfast at Pittsfield! Then he drank. Down on all fours, like a cow at a trough, slurping and singing between slurps. When Elder Tilton came out to scold him, Ezekiel told him he was founding the First Church of the Holy Runoff, and the Elder could join or get out of the baptismal font. That church had one pew, one preacher and one sacrament, and it was all lying face down in the gutter.
♦ Wax crackle, distant church bell ringing faintly
Wilkins: The mill girls screamed and hiked their skirts. A deacon's wife lifted hers to cross the street and showed more ankle than Pittsfield had seen since the Revolution, and three Baptists converted on the spot. Hogs broke loose from Hiram Sanborn's pen and went into the flood snout first. The trout and the suckers in the Suncook got so drunk that afternoon that the boys waded in and caught them barehanded, and two of the fish asked for credit.
Wilkins: Now for the worst of it, and I promised you the worst. That very morning a gentleman from Concord had come up the turnpike in a hired buggy. An assistant assessor of the internal revenue, a thin man with a ledger, a pencil behind his ear, and the moral posture of a buzzard on a fence. I will call him Mr. Crump. He had come to measure my liquor. He climbed down from his buggy at the foot of my lane just as the mash came round the shed, and two and a half tons of it took his legs out from under him like a scythe through timothy. He went down on his back, slid uphill, which should not be possible, but he hit an eddy, and fetched up, so help me, against the log wall exactly at the end of Barnaby's chain.
♦ Bear snuffling, chain going taut with a metallic snap
Wilkins: Barnaby had been lapping at the mash that pooled by his post since it came out of the shed, and a bear full of sour mash is a philosopher for about four minutes and a devil after that. Barnaby looked at Mr. Crump, coated head to boots in warm mash, smelling like the finest breakfast in New England. First he licked him. A long, slow lick from the chin to the hairline, a bear's tongue is rough as a rasp file, and it took off the assessor's eyebrows and a fair piece of his dignity. Crump made a sound like a teakettle with a secret. Then he rolled over to crawl away, which is the wrong thing to do, because it presented to Barnaby the part of a revenue man that has done the least work and carries the most mash.
Wilkins: Barnaby bit. I heard it from the doorway. It sounded like a wet bedsheet tearing on a clothesline in a gale, if the bedsheet had been to Dartmouth. Wool, linen, drawers and a flap of Concord meat about the size of a breakfast pancake came off together. Barnaby sat back and chewed it thoughtfully, the way a deacon chews a sermon, then spat out the pocket watch. Crump went down the lane on his elbows, howling, trailing mash and blood and the blue silk lining of his coat behind him, and he never did measure my liquor. He left with a measurement of his own: one pancake-sized piece of his hindquarters, taken by Barnaby. I stitched him up myself on my dentist's chair with silk thread and the strongest dose of my hearts that I could pour, and he signed a paper saying he slipped. That Concord man's honesty and his trousers had the same weakness. Neither one held up under pressure from below.
♦ Wax crackle, a jar set down on a wooden table
Wilkins: The sheriff came the next morning, bless him. You know he has arrested me twice. He stood in my lane in his good boots, sunk to the ankle in drying mash, and said, Wilkins, I am here to seize the evidence. I told him the evidence had left for Barnstead by the noon river. I have been arrested twice and I would gladly have made it three, but you cannot hang a man for a mash that has emigrated. As for the damages, I paid every shopkeeper on Main Street for his mud and his trouble in coppers stamped at my anvil, G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. Ezekiel Pound demanded his share too, and when I asked what for, he said for clergy services.
♪ Fiddle lifts, warm and lively
Wilkins: Now I have a guest here at the fort who has come all the way from the Blue Ridge of Virginia. That is two weeks by rail, stage and a mule that bit her, and I am told she bit it back. A herbalist, a gatherer of old words, and the only woman who has ever made Barnaby sit down by looking at him. Welcome to Fort Wilkins, Miss Clara Higgins.
Clara: Thank you kindly, Doctor. And I will say your bear sat down because he smelled the ginseng in my satchel, not on account of my eyes, though I thank you for the flattery.
Wilkins: Clara, you have heard me tell the flood. Have you mountain folk ever had a vat go out on you?
Clara: Lord, Doctor, more than once. My Uncle Asa, over in Floyd County, kept a persimmon beer hogshead down in his springhouse where the cold water runs through. Persimmon beer is a homely drink. You mash the ripe fruit with wheat bran and let it work. Well, one spring a hoop let go just like yours, and that whole hogshead went out the springhouse door and into the branch. The branch ran pink as a baby's cheek for a mile and a half.
Wilkins: Pink! And what drank it?
Clara: The Widow Akers's ducks. Must have been twenty of them downstream. By noon they were swimming in circles. One drake got up on the bank, staggered over to the churchyard where the preacher's wife had set her Sunday bonnet on a post to air, and he courted that bonnet, Doctor. Puffed his chest, bobbed his head, made the most shameless noises you ever heard out of a bird, for the best part of an hour.
Wilkins: A drake courting a Sunday bonnet showed more taste than half the bachelors in Floyd County.
Clara: Well, that's what the preacher's wife said! And the next Sunday the preacher took those drunk ducks for his sermon. He said, brethren, behold how the creature that drinks of the forbidden stream is made a fool of before the whole congregation. Then he passed the plate, and every man in that church who had walked down to drink from that branch the same afternoon put in double. Biggest collection of the year.
Wilkins: That is a man who knows his business. A dentist knows the only way to get rid of a rotten tooth is to pull it, not pray over it, but a preacher can pray over it and charge you for both. Clara, what would your people have called our Ezekiel Pound, lying in the gutter declaring miracles?
Clara: We'd say he was mash-struck, Doctor. That's a man so overcome by the smell of a spill that he gets religion and the hiccups at the same time. You see it at every barrel-bust from the Shenandoah to the Smokies. And spilled mash in the ground has its own name too. Down in Patrick County a mash barrel washed out on a hillside and the hogs found it. They rooted in that soaked ground for two days. One old sow got so drunk she fell asleep standing up, leaned against a rail fence like a drunk leans on a bar. So any patch of ground where mash has gone in, folks call it a hog-heaven patch.
Wilkins: Then Main Street, Pittsfield, was a hog-heaven patch from the meeting house to the bridge, and Hiram Sanborn's hogs would agree. What names do your folks have for the bad stuff, Clara? The liquor a man makes in a hurry?
Clara: Oh, there's a whole Bible of them. Bust-head. Tanglefoot, because it ties your feet in a bow knot. Forty-rod, because it kills you at forty rods. Who-hit-John, because you wake up asking. And my great-grandmother, Doctor, had her own word for what comes from cheating with applejack.
Wilkins: Applejack! Now we are in my country. Our colonial folk froze it out of hard cider all winter.
Clara: That's just it. You set a barrel of hard cider out in the cold, the water freezes into ice, you throw out the ice, and what's left is strong. But nothing's been thrown away except water, you understand. All the bad stuff in that cider stays in the jack. Great-grandmother called the sickness that came after it apple palsy. Shaking hands, head like a split stump. She kept a tally on her kitchen door of every man in our valley that had the shakes from it, one notch apiece, and when the door filled up she started on the cupboard.
Wilkins: She would have needed a sawmill for Merrimack County. And persimmon brandy, Clara, the stuff your people are known for. Is there a trick to it?
Clara: Patience, and a frost. My cousin Lem couldn't wait. He picked his persimmons green in September and mashed them. A green persimmon will draw your mouth up like a purse string. Lem tasted his mash to see how it was coming and his lips puckered so tight he whistled through his nose for a week.
Wilkins: Which, I am told, improved his singing.
Clara: It did, Doctor, it did. But the mash hardly worked, and what he ran off it tasted like a tanned harness strap. He sold it as horse liniment, and the horses complained. You wait for the frost, you wait till the fruit is soft as pudding and sweet as Sunday, and then you mash.
Wilkins: Miss Clara Higgins, of the Blue Ridge. Thank you for coming north, and thank you for not biting Barnaby.
Clara: I make no promises for the trip home, Doctor.
♦ Bear grunt, chain clinks, Wilkins laughs
♪ Banjo flourish into a patent-medicine show organ vamp
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♪ Organ vamp resolves with a cymbal crash
♪ Low fiddle, steady and thoughtful
Wilkins: Segment the third. Copper and the craft. I have said it before and I will say it until they bury me in a copper coffin with a worm for a handle: making spirits without the government's permit is against the law of these United States, and what I tell you here is history and entertainment. Now. What went into that vat, and what should have come out of it?
Wilkins: The mash. You take your cracked corn and you cook it in water until it goes thick and swollen, because raw starch is locked tight and the yeast cannot touch it. You let it cool till you can hold your hand in it without cursing, a little below scalding. Then you stir in malted barley, or malted rye. Malted grain carries a ferment that the French chemists Payen and Persoz named diastase back in 1833. It works on the starch and turns it into sugar, the way my forceps turn a toothache into an empty socket. Then you cool it again, down to blood-warm or a touch under, and in goes your yeast and your backset from the last run, a quarter of the volume or thereabouts, and you leave it work.
Wilkins: Mind the temperature. Yeast that is overheated or starved works angry, and angry yeast breathes out rotten-egg gas, which will follow your spirit all the way to the jar if you let it. Three days, four, five, depending on your weather. When the cap of grain drops and the bubbling slows to a whisper, the wash is ready, a thin, sour beer of a few percent. Do not let that vat stand too long, and for God's sake keep all three hoops on it.
♦ Wax crackle, the creak of a copper lid lifted
Wilkins: The still. Strain your wash off the heavy grain so it does not scorch. Charge the pot no more than three-quarters full. Leave headspace, because a mash that foams up and boils over into your worm is called puking, and a puked run tastes like the bottom of a hog trough and has to be thrown out. Seal your joints. And here the old-timers used rye paste, which I have done, and which cracks when it dries and leaks when it does not. Mind this above everything: alcohol vapor is heavier than air. A leak at the joint does not rise up politely to the rafters. It creeps along the floor like a cat toward your firebox, and then your still-house is a bonfire and you are the guy on top of it. Never walk away from a lit still. Not for a woman, not for a sheriff, not for a bear.
Wilkins: The copper. Why copper and not iron? Because the bright copper in your helmet, your cap, your lyne arm, the parts the vapor touches on its way out, grabs the sulfur out of that vapor. The stink stays on the metal and does not go into your jar. A dull, crusted helmet is a lazy policeman. Keep it bright.
Wilkins: The cuts, and listen close, because this is the part that keeps men alive. Bring the fire up slow. The first runnings come off sharp and stinking, like a druggist's back room. Those are the foreshots, and they go on the ground or in the lamp, never in a mouth. Methanol, wood alcohol, the blinding stuff, boils at about 148 degrees by the Fahrenheit glass and good ethanol at about 173. Do not let anyone tell you that difference makes them come out neat and separate like eggs from a basket. They do not. They run together, which is why a careful man throws away the heads too, the solvent-smelling spirit after the foreshots, generously. And mind this for applejack and persimmon brandy: fruit carries pectin, and pectin gives you more methanol than corn ever will. Fruit brandy wants a heavier hand on the cuts, not a lighter one. Then come the hearts, sweet and clean, what you came for. And when the spirit turns oily and smells of wet dog and old cardboard, those are the tails. Set them aside.
Wilkins: A tooth-puller learns early that half a pull is worse than none. Leave a root and the jaw festers. Leave the heads in your jar because you are greedy and somebody goes blind. Pull the whole tooth. Make the whole cut.
♪ Banjo transition, bright
Wilkins: Segment the fourth. Myths, slang, and the mail. Every week some poor soul in the hills sends a question to Fort Wilkins, and this week it came all the way from North Carolina. Roll the cylinder, Barnaby.
♦ Bear grunt, then the hiss and crackle of a second, older wax cylinder starting
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 hiss cuts off
Wilkins: Cletus Rabbit Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina. A fine name. A man called Rabbit should be careful around a bear, but you are a long way off. Let us take your uncle's two medicines one at a time, at the anvil.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: The hickory ashes first. New England knows wood ash better than any people on earth. Our grandfathers cleared this country by burning the forest and leaching the ash for potash and pearlash, and shipped it to England by the boatload for glass and soap. Hardwood ash is alkali, lye's own mother. Put it in a thump keg and it may sour some acids in the vapor and change the taste, maybe for better, maybe toward soap. But it does nothing at all to methanol. Wood alcohol walks right past potash. The heads that are bad in the jar were bad before the keg, and only the cut cures them. Your uncle is making soap and calling it Scripture.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Now the red oak shavings. Ask any cooper in Merrimack County. Red oak is open in the grain. Its pores run end to end like hollow straws, and you can blow pipe smoke through a stick of it. White oak has its pores plugged up by nature, which is why every tight barrel that holds whiskey or wine is white oak, and red oak only gets to hold flour and nails. Put red oak shavings in hot vapor and you will get a puckery, tannic taste and a muddy color, and you will not get one drop of safety. Rabbit, red oak in a thump keg is like a Concord congressman in a church: it leaks everywhere and leaves the place smelling worse. So your uncle is half right. Wood does change spirit. It just does not save anybody.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: And since we are knocking down idols, here is another myth from your country and mine. The blue flame. You pour a spoon of liquor, set a match to it, and look at the color. Lead burns red and makes you dead, they say, and blue means safe. Nonsense, Rabbit. Flame color cannot tell you there is lead in a jar, not reliably, and methanol, the stuff that blinds, burns with a pale blue flame as pretty as any honest spirit. A man can pass the spoon test and lose his eyes by morning. If flame color told you who was honest, every revenue man in New Hampshire would burn yellow, and the sheriff would never light at all. The only proof worth having is a still with no lead solder anywhere in it and a distiller who makes his cuts.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin, ringing long
Wilkins: There. One fresh copper, stamped G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., going into an envelope addressed to Mr. Cletus Rabbit Miller, Wilkesboro, North Carolina. Give it to your uncle and tell him it is worth more than his ashes. My anvil has stamped more coppers than the Philadelphia mint has stamped apologies. Thank you for listening, Rabbit, and keep your ears up.
♪ Banjo sting
Announcer: One more quick word! Your joints are where your trouble starts, so seal them properly with Heavy-Duty Sanitary Tri-Clamp Ferrules and Gaskets, only thirty-four ninety-five, at the Fort Wilkins showroom on Route 28 or at moonshinestill.com. That is moonshinestill.com!
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme returns softly
Wilkins: So ends the tale of the Great Pittsfield Mash Flood. The assessor lived, and I am told he sits sideways at church. Ezekiel Pound held services in that gutter till the mash dried, then went back to the harness shop, and to his dying day he tipped his hat to my vat shed like it was an altar. The vat I rebuilt with three new hoops and nothing borrowed. And Barnaby still licks the window every April.
Wilkins: If you want to learn the craft the way I learned it, with a trained eye and without flooding your neighbors, enroll in the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. Mashing, fermenting, copper care, the cuts, and the hard-won safety lessons of a man who has made every mistake once. Enquire at moonshinestill.com, and mind the law of the land while you study.
Wilkins: My thanks to Miss Clara Higgins of the Blue Ridge, to Rabbit Miller of Wilkesboro, and to every one of you out there turning the crank on this cylinder. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.
♦ Bear grunt and final drip into jar
♪ Theme rises, then fades into wax cylinder crackle