Verdigris and Vinegar: Copper Corrosion, Poisoned Whiskey, and the Still-Keeper's Duty
How did a jug of 1860s moonshine turn into slow green poison? Alchemist G. G. Wilkins digs into the history of verdigris, copper corrosion and poisoned whiskey, from French wine cellars and pickles laced with copper in London to the sour-mash shortcuts that put copper into New Hampshire distilling during the Civil War. Coppersmith Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister brings tavern stories, a sick goat and a steel-needle test for bad liquor, and Barnaby the bear deals with a copper thief in his own way.
In this episode
- Verdigris history: French vert de Grèce made on purpose for painters, dyers and apothecaries
- Frederick Accum's 'There is death in the pot' and Dr. Hassall's Lancet findings on copper in London pickles
- How sour mash, leftover backset and a green-crusted worm put copper into moonshine
- Copper colic symptoms and 19th-century treatment with egg whites and milk
- Civil War whiskey tax, cheap stills and poisoned liquor in Merrimack County, New Hampshire
- Silas McAllister's steel-needle test for copper in whiskey, plus Gilmanton's green 'Saint Patrick's Brandy'
- Vinegar, sand and ash-lye cleaning: an argument over how to look after a copper still
- Listener Q&A: hickory ashes and red oak in a thump keg, and the copper-cent-in-the-jug myth
Dr. G. G. Wilkins covers the history of verdigris, from the French cellars that made it on purpose for painters and druggists to the London chemists who found copper in grocers' pickles, and explains how sour mash and lazy cleaning put copper into a man's whiskey. Master coppersmith Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister tells new stories: a Gilmanton tavern keeper's green 'Saint Patrick's Brandy', an apprentice's verdigris paint and a sick goat, and a steel-needle test he used on a peddler's jug at the Epsom fair. Then the two men argue over Wilkins's vinegar, sand and ash-lye cleaning ritual. In the last segment Wilkins answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, NC about hickory ashes and red oak shavings in a thump keg, and puts down the old notion that a copper cent dropped in the jug sweetens the whiskey.
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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 down, you moth-eaten hogshead of bad intentions. That's vinegar you smell, not pickles, and none of it is for you. I scoured the worm this morning, and ever since he's had his nose at that window like a deacon at a widow's keyhole. Lie down, or I'll trade your hide to a Concord attorney for a hearth rug. Then you'll spend eternity being walked on by a lower animal than yourself.
♦ Barnaby huffs; chain drags across frozen dirt; a heavy body thumps down against the log wall
Wilkins: Thank you. He's sulking now. He sulks like a bride's mother.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth, swells, then settles under
Wilkins: Good evening, and welcome to Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, coming to you from the log fortress of Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, in Pittsfield, Merrimack County, New Hampshire. I am your host, Dr. George G. Wilkins. I'm a dentist, a blacksmith, an inventor and a stamper of coins, and the only man in Pittsfield whose hands smell of vinegar, lye and other men's molars all at once. Tonight's sermon is green. We call it Verdigris and Vinegar: Copper Corrosion, Poisoned Whiskey, and the Still-Keeper's Duty. We'll talk about why copper goes green as a frog's belly, how a lazy man can hand his neighbors a jug of slow poison and call it Christmas cheer, and how I keep my own worm bright enough to shave in. Pull your chair close. And mind: everything said on this program is for history and education only. Distilling spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of these United States, and the revenue man has ears in every stovepipe.
♪ Theme fades out
♦ Wax crackle; a brass hand-bell rung twice
Announcer: A QUICK WORD, friends! Is your copper honest? The Flame-Flow Still, protected under U.S. Patent 10,561,960, is hammered from heavy-gauge pure electrolytic copper that scrubs up bright as a new cent! See it for yourself at moonshinestill.com!
♪ Short fiddle sting
Wilkins: SEGMENT THE FIRST: history. Copper, friends, is the most honest metal God put in the ground and the easiest to corrupt, which makes it very like a county commissioner. Leave it in wet air long enough and it grows a coat. You've seen it on an old weathercock, on the copper sheathing they haul off a ship's bottom down at the Portsmouth yard, and on a cent that spent ten years in a dead man's pocket. That slow green is mostly weather, air and damp and time. It's ugly, but it's slow. The real devil comes when you add ACID. Then copper doesn't grow a coat, it grows a crust, and the crust dissolves into whatever liquid is standing on it. That crust is verdigris.
Wilkins: The word is French: vert de Grèce, green of Greece. Don't ask me why the French blamed it on the Greeks. The French blame everything on somebody. Down in the wine country around Montpellier they made verdigris ON PURPOSE for two hundred years. They took the skins and stems left over from pressing, the marc, let it sour, and stacked it in clay crocks in the cellar with thin copper plates between the layers. A few weeks later they scraped off a crust green as a mallard's neck and sold it by the pound to painters, dyers and apothecaries. Your sour mash will do the same thing to your pot if you leave it there overnight. The only difference is the French had the decency to charge for it, and your neighbor with the filthy pot gives it away free in a jug.
Wilkins: The doctors knew all about it. Old surgeons put verdigris in a salve to eat away proud flesh and corns, and they knew perfectly well what it would do inside you. Back in 1820 a German chemist living in London, Frederick Accum, published a book on how grocers and confectioners were poisoning the public, and on the title page he printed the words of Scripture: There is death in the pot. He meant pickles. London grocers were greening their cucumbers in copper so they'd look fresh off the vine, and Accum caught them at it. Thirty-odd years later a Dr. Hassall went through the London shops with a microscope and his chemicals, published in The Lancet, and found copper in pickles and bottled fruit up and down the city. The great Orfila in Paris, the poison doctor, told the world that if a man has swallowed copper salts you pour white of egg into him. Our country doctors still do: egg whites, milk, and send a boy running for the doctor. In my experience you also send for the man's prayers.
Wilkins: I've seen copper colic. The patient tastes brass, like he's been sucking a doorknob. Then his belly burns, then it gripes like a sack of cats, and then he heaves, and what comes up is green-blue, the color of the ditch behind a dye works. Then he purges from the other end with equal enthusiasm. Verdigris whiskey goes down green and comes up greener, and by the third trip it has earned a Christian name. A small dose leaves you wishing you were dead. A big dose takes care of the wishing for you.
Wilkins: We're no better here in New England. Half the receipt books in Merrimack County told a woman to scald her cucumbers in a brass kettle to green them up, and the other half warned her it would kill her husband. I'm told some women read both and chose accordingly.
♦ Barnaby grunts outside, low and approving
Wilkins: Barnaby agrees. He's been married. Now, how does copper get into WHISKEY? Three ways, and every one of them is sloth. First, sour mash. A mash or a wash that sits too long in summer goes vinegary. You'll see the fruit flies at it and the mother of vinegar growing on top like a drowned man's skin. Run that sour stuff in a copper pot and you're feeding acid to metal. Second, the leavings. A man finishes his run, he's tired, he's had a few honest samples, and he leaves the spent mash and backset sitting hot in the pot overnight. By morning the acid has been chewing copper for eight hours, and he never rinses it out. Third and worst, the worm. The condensed spirit trickles down a worm crusted green inside, picks up the copper, and drips out of the spout with a cast of blue on it like skimmed milk. And then there's the plain fool who STORES his cider or his brandy in a copper kettle because, he says, it was born there. When Mr. Lincoln's levy made honest liquor dear, these cheap jakes bred like rabbits in a hayloft, and the doctors in Concord got more copper colic than they'd seen in a generation.
Wilkins: So here is the still-keeper's duty, plain as I can put it. Copper is the only part of this craft that will do you a kindness if you treat it right and poison your customers if you don't. I've been arrested twice for selling spirits, and I'll sleep fine if I'm arrested a third time. But if I ever green-poisoned a neighbor, I'd hang myself from my own anvil horn and save the county the rope.
♪ Banjo bridge, jaunty and a touch sinister
Wilkins: SEGMENT THE SECOND: legends and outlaws. And tonight's outlaw is a green one. Out on the Barnstead road there lived a fellow, I'll call him Abner because his mother's still alive and she's got a skillet arm, who ran his mash in an old copper wash boiler. He hadn't scrubbed it since Fort Sumter. He sold the stuff as Abner's Emerald, and he was proud of the color. A teamster from Concord drank a pint of it at the Pittsfield fair and threw up a stream so green on the cattle judge that the judge awarded it a ribbon for best vegetable.
Wilkins: Now Abner wanted copper for a new boiler but didn't want to pay for it, so one night last October he came creeping up the turnpike to help himself to my scrap pile, the one behind the still-house. The one Barnaby sleeps beside. Friends, I heard it from my bed. First a clink, which was Abner. Then a chain paying out, link after link, like a ship dropping anchor, which was Barnaby. Then a sound like a wet sail tearing in a gale, which was the seat of Abner's homespun. Then a scream that started as a man's and finished as a teakettle's. I came out with the lantern and saw Barnaby with Abner by the hindquarters and his head shaking side to side, the way a terrier does a rat, except the rat was a hundred and sixty pounds and calling on every saint in the almanac. One claw had laid open the back of his calf like the casing on a sausage, and the meat was showing pink and white in the lantern light. The smell was blood, bear breath and fear, and fear smells exactly like Abner's Emerald coming back out.
Wilkins: I talked Barnaby off with a ham bone and the voice I save for county commissioners. I sat Abner on my anvil block, rinsed that calf with clean spirit while he howled loud enough to wake Barnstead, and stitched him with silk and a curved needle, eleven stitches. Then I charged him a dollar. He ran home down Route 28 with his backside bare, showing his full moon to the real one, and the real one was embarrassed. Barnaby kept the breeches, and in the pocket were three green copper cents. I scoured them in vinegar, put them on the anvil, and stamped every one.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin, ringing off the anvil
Wilkins: G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. Those three cents are the only clean thing Abner ever produced. Barnaby still wears the smell of those breeches proudly, like a colonel wears his medals.
♦ Heavy door creaks; boots on a plank floor; a leather apron set down on a bench
Wilkins: And here's a man who has looked at more green copper than a Montpellier cellar rat. He's the master coppersmith of our own foundry here at Fort Wilkins, a man who will lecture you on a rivet seam until your ears weep. Pittsfield, say good evening to Silas Hacksaw McAllister. Sit down, Silas. Mind the spittoon. That's the clean one.
Silas: Evening, Doc. Evening, folks. I'll stand, if it's all the same to you. That chair of yours has a nail coming up through it, and it's been raised higher than the whiskey tax.
Wilkins: Stand, then, like a Puritan at a dance. Silas, what's the worst green pot you ever lifted the lid on?
Silas: That would be Hosea Pike's, Doc. He kept a tavern over at Gilmanton Iron Works. Two winters back he sent for me to mend a leak in his copper kettle. Now Hosea made a decent cider brandy in the fall, but he'd got it into his head that the kettle he boiled it in was the brandy's kin. So he poured the whole run back into that kettle, set the lid on, and kept it there till spring. Said it would keep the spirit in the family.
Wilkins: Like burying a man in his mother's apron.
Silas: That's about the size of it. By March his customers were saying the brandy tasted like a brass doorknob. I came over, lifted that lid, and the inside of the kettle was crusted blue and green, thick as pond scum in August. The brandy had a blue cast to it, faint, like skimmed milk with a cloud in it. There wasn't any leak. I told him straight: Hosea, pour every drop of it into the ground, scour this kettle, and never keep spirit in copper again. Copper is for making it, not keeping it.
Wilkins: And did he listen?
Silas: He did not. The spring militia muster was the next week, and he carted that brandy down to the field and sold it from his wagon as Saint Patrick's Brandy, green for the occasion.
Wilkins: Oh, Lord.
Silas: By drill time half the company was sick in the ranks. The captain called present arms and twelve men presented their breakfasts. One sergeant went down on his knees right in the line and heaved so hard I thought his boots would come up after the rest. Nobody died, thank Providence, but that sergeant swore he spat green till May. Hosea poured out the last of it that night and bought himself a stoneware crock. Now every time I see him he asks if I've got any copper on me, and I tell him only the honest kind.
Wilkins: A man who sells verdigris to the militia is a man who's never been shot at by the militia, and he's lucky they could not hold their muskets steady that afternoon. What else, Silas? You've had an apprentice or two.
Silas: I had a boy named Rufus, good hands, bad judgment, which is the usual mix at that age. He wanted the shop sign painted green, and green paint cost dear. He'd heard how the French make verdigris. So he took a crock, packed it with apple pomace soaked in vinegar, buried strips of my good copper offcuts in it, and set it behind the stove. Three weeks later he scraped off a crust as green as you please, ground it in linseed oil and painted the sign. I'll say this much, it was a handsome green.
Wilkins: I can hear the goat coming.
Silas: The neighbor's goat came over the fence, as goats will, and took a liking to that fresh paint. Licked half the S off McALLISTER. By nightfall she was down on her side, bloated, groaning, foaming green at the mouth and leaking green behind. The neighbor came over with his hat in one hand and a shotgun in the other, and I wasn't sure which he meant to use first. We dosed her with milk and raw eggs, and she came round in two days. Then I sat Rufus down with that crock in front of him and said, son, that's sour fruit and copper and time, and it gave you poison enough to fell a goat. Leave sour mash in a copper pot overnight and you've made the same crock. The pot doesn't know the difference, and neither does the man who drinks from it.
Wilkins: The goat recovered, the sign did not, and Rufus's career as a portrait painter ended that afternoon. Now Silas, you told me once that green copper TALKS to you.
Silas: It does, if you know how to listen. I built a pot two years ago, a good one, lapped and riveted, and the man who bought it brought it back after a week. He was clean, careful, scoured it every run, and still along one rivet seam, only that one, a line of green had come up, like the first whiskers on a schoolboy's lip. Green only grows where copper stays wet. A seam that keeps green is a seam that keeps damp, and a seam that keeps damp is weeping. I held a candle behind it in the dark and sure enough there was a pinhole you couldn't have threaded with a hair. I cut that seam out and riveted it fresh. So I read the green the way a doctor reads a tongue. It tells you where the sickness is.
Wilkins: As a dentist, I'll say a tongue has told me more lies than any copper ever did. And the needle, Silas, tell them about your father and the needle.
Silas: That was at the Epsom fair when I was a boy. There was a peddler selling jugs out of a wagon, and the stuff had a faint tint my father didn't like. So my father, who was a careful man, borrowed a steel knitting needle off my mother, rubbed it bright on his sleeve, poured a little of the peddler's liquor in a cup with a splash of vinegar, and stood the needle in it. When he pulled it out, the tip had a coat on it red as a new cent. That's copper plating itself onto the steel. My father held it up for the crowd, and that peddler left the fair faster than he came.
Wilkins: The chemists use that very trick, bright iron in a soured liquid. But you tell them the other half of it, Silas.
Silas: I will. If the needle comes out bright, that doesn't prove a thing is safe. It only proves it's damned if the needle comes out copper. The test that counts is a clean pot and an honest man, and you can't dip a needle in a man.
Wilkins: Would that you could. I'd have stuck one in the Merrimack sheriff years ago.
♪ Banjo flourish into a brass bell
♦ Wax cylinder crackle; hand-bell rung three times
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♦ Bell rings once; crackle
♪ Fiddle reel, slowing into a low drone
Wilkins: SEGMENT THE THIRD: copper and the craft. Let's put on the leather apron. First, the colors. Copper goes three colors on you, and you ought to know what each one means. Dull brown is plain tarnish from air. It's harmless and lazy. Black, inside the pot and the cap and the upper worm, is mostly copper that has been doing its job. The sulfur stink in the vapor, rotten egg and burnt boot, grabs onto the copper and stays behind as a dark film instead of riding into your jar. That's copper earning its wages. But even honest work leaves dirt, and you scrub it off, so it never flakes into your spirit. Green and blue are the warning. Green or blue means acid has been at the metal and the copper is dissolving. Green goes in your pot, then in your jug, then in your neighbor.
Silas: And keep in mind, Doc, green on the OUTSIDE of a pot is weather. Green on the INSIDE is negligence.
Wilkins: Well put. Now, my ritual. Some men are ashamed of their worm. I polish mine in public, and the ladies of Pittsfield have stopped complaining and started taking notes. Here's how it goes at Fort Wilkins, step by step.
Wilkins: Step one. When the run is done, let the fire die out completely, and never leave a lit still unattended while you wait. The vapor will burn, and a leaking joint near an open flame has turned many a still-house into a funeral pyre. Once it's cool enough to handle, drain the pot. Spent mash and backset come out THAT DAY. They never sit in copper overnight. Feed the spent grain to the hogs cooled, never hot, and pour the backset into a crock or a wooden tub, never back into the copper.
Wilkins: Step two. Flush with hot water and scrape the scorched mash off the bottom with a wooden paddle. Never use iron. An iron scraper gouges copper, and every gouge is a pocket for grime and green to settle in.
Wilkins: Step three: ash lye. Behind the still-house I keep an ash hopper, a wooden trough full of hardwood ashes from my own forge and hearth, and I pour rainwater through it and catch the brown liquor that drips out the bottom. That's lye. I test it the way my grandmother did for soap: drop in a fresh egg. If the egg floats with a piece about the size of a shilling showing, it's strong enough. A warm lye wash cuts the grease, the burnt grain, and the oily film the tails leave behind. Now listen hard. Lye burns. It'll take the skin off your hands and the sight out of your eyes. I wear greased leather gloves and my spectacles, and I keep Barnaby and children well back, although it's Barnaby I worry about less. Then rinse, and rinse again, until the water no longer feels slick between your fingers.
Wilkins: Step four is vinegar and salt, for the green and the black. I make a paste of cider vinegar and a fistful of salt and work it over the inside of the pot and cap with a twist of cornhusk and a rag. For a stubborn spot I sprinkle a little fine sand from the Suncook riverbank...
Silas: Easy with that sand, Doc.
Wilkins: Here it comes.
Silas: I mean it. Every scratch is a place for grime to sit and for damp to linger, and I've seen pots scoured so hard for twenty years you could read a newspaper through the bottom. Use the finest sand you've got, use a light hand, and only on a stubborn spot. Let the vinegar do the work. That's what you've got it for.
Wilkins: The man builds them, so I take his scolding. The Suncook sand scours my pot, the vinegar scours the sand, and my wife's tongue scours me, and only one of the three ever leaves me shining. Now Step five, and it's the one fools skip. RINSE OUT EVERY DROP OF THAT VINEGAR. Remember Montpellier. Vinegar is acid. Wipe a pot with it and rinse it, and the vinegar is your physician. Leave it standing in the pot, and the cure turns into the complaint the minute you sit down to supper. I rinse three times with spring water, and the last rinse should come out tasting of nothing at all.
Wilkins: Step six: the worm. You can't put your arm down a coiled worm, so I clean it the way a soldier cleans a musket barrel. I tie a clean rag to a long cord with a lead-free weight on the end, drop it through, and pull it back and forth through the straight runs. Then I pour warm vinegar through the coil, then spring water, then more spring water, and I catch what comes out the bottom in a white bowl. If the rinse runs blue or green, I'm not done. I keep at it until the water comes out clear as a baby's conscience. Then I hold a candle to the mouth of the worm and look in, and when that copper winks back at me rosy and bright, I know my still is honest. A bright worm is the mark of a still-keeper who does his duty. A dull worm is like a sheriff's conscience: nobody looks inside it because everybody already knows.
Wilkins: Step seven, the christening. After a scouring, before any real run, I fill the pot with water or a little weak wash, bring it up slow, run it through, and throw out everything that comes over. That carries away whatever lye, vinegar, sand or loose grime I missed.
Wilkins: Then come the cuts, which are the other half of honesty. Your first drips, the foreshots, and the heads behind them are sharp and solvent-smelling and full of the light poisons, methanol chief among them. Those get THROWN OUT. They don't get tasted, they don't get used as a mouth rinse for a patient, and they don't get sold to Abner. The hearts come next, sweet and clean, and those you keep. Then the tails come on oily and wet-dog smelling, and you set them aside for another run. And mind this: if your hearts come out with a blue or green tint, your still is dirty. Don't drink it and don't sell it. Shut down, cool down, and clean again.
Silas: One more thing from the smith's side, Doc. Every bit of that cleaning is wasted if the metal is bad to start with. A pot patched with lead solder or riveted together from salvaged junk will poison a man however bright you scrub it. Use good pure copper, and join it with rivets, silver solder or proper unions. The bright copper only counts if the metal under it is honest.
Wilkins: Amen, Silas. And again, friends, this is history and education. A man who distills spirits to drink without a federal permit will be breaking the laws of the United States.
♪ Fiddle drone resolves; banjo picks up a bouncing tune
Wilkins: SEGMENT THE FOURTH: myths, slang, and the mailbag. We've got a voice on the call-in tape, all the way from North Carolina. Let's hear it.
♦ Wax cylinder machine whirs; needle drops; heavy 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?
♦ Needle lifts; whir winds down
Wilkins: That's Cletus Rabbit Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, down on the Yadkin River in Wilkes County, a town with the sense to name itself almost after me. Rabbit, thank you for writing, and give your uncle my regards. He's not as wrong as he is right, but he's not as right as he thinks. Let me split the log for you.
Wilkins: The hickory ashes first. Hickory ash makes about the strongest lye there is. Your Southern grandmothers knew that. They made their soap with it, and they soaked their corn in it to make hominy. So when an old-timer had a bucket of hickory ash sitting by the keg, I'd wager most of what it did was SCOUR THE KEG between runs, and that's an honest use. Now, is there any truth to throwing it in while the still is running? A grain of it. Ash lye is an alkali, and an alkali in the pot can hold back some of the sour, vinegary acids that would otherwise ride over with the vapor, so a soured run might come out a little less sharp. But Rabbit, the bad heads are not sourness. The dangerous light stuff boils off first, before the hearts, and no handful of ashes in a doubler will catch it. The only thing that saves a man from bad heads is a jar set aside and poured out on the ground. Your uncle's ashes may sweeten the sour, but they'll never stop the poison.
Wilkins: Now the red oak shavings. Red oak is so open in the grain that you can put a short stave to your lips, puff your pipe, and blow smoke clean out the far end. That's why no cooper worth his drawknife makes a whiskey barrel of it. White oak holds liquor. A red oak barrel holds whiskey the way a deputy holds a secret: briefly, and leaking at every seam. Throw red oak shavings into a hot keg and you'll get color and a bitter bite of tannin. Your spirit will come out looking like it's been asleep in a barrel for five years when it was born on Tuesday. That's a peddler's trick, Rabbit, to make young liquor look old. It doesn't clean anything. So yes, your uncle was making swamp medicine, but it was well-meaning swamp medicine with one honest use hidden in it. Tell him to use the ashes on the keg and throw the shavings in the stove. Cletus Rabbit Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, you're a gentleman and a scholar, and there's a stamped cent here with your name on it.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: And since that cent is in my hand, here's tonight's myth. It's an old one, I hear it at every fair from Epsom to Epping. Drop a copper cent in your jug, they say, and it'll sweeten the whiskey, age it, and draw out the poison. Pure horse apples, friends. Whiskey is a little acid on its own, and acid eats copper slow and patient. Leave a cent soaking in your jug for a month and all you've done is make a small batch of Hosea Pike's Saint Patrick's Brandy. The cent doesn't draw anything out. It only puts copper in. Lady Liberty on that cent has kept her head through a war and a tax. Don't make her lose it in your jug.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin, a second strike
Wilkins: Here's a second myth while the anvil's hot. A little green in the whiskey, some old-timers say, gives it bite, and they call it the copper kick. Friends, that kick is your stomach trying to escape through your mouth. Good whiskey bites because it was distilled right. Green whiskey bites because it's poisoning you. A cent goes in your pocket, the green comes off your pot, and the only copper that ought to touch your spirit is a bright still doing honest work.
Silas: And if you want copper in your pocket, Doc, you could start by paying your smith.
Wilkins: Silas, I will pay you in stamped cents, and you will thank me when they're in a museum.
♦ Barnaby grunts twice outside; chain rattles
Wilkins: Barnaby says he's owed back wages too. He'll take his in ham.
♪ Theme returns softly, parlor banjo and mountain fiddle with antique warmth
♦ Hand-bell rung once
Announcer: ONE MORE WORD, friends! Bright copper and honest cuts! The Flame-Flow Still, U.S. Patent 10,561,960, heavy-gauge pure electrolytic copper, is waiting for you at moonshinestill.com, or at the Fort Wilkins Showroom on Route 28 in Pittsfield!
Wilkins: My thanks to Silas Hacksaw McAllister, who hammers the copper we've been talking about all night and who told me in front of all of Merrimack County that I scour too hard. He may be right. Don't tell my wife.
Silas: Thank you, Doc. Goodnight, folks. Keep your pots dry and your seams tight.
Wilkins: And if you want to learn the craft right, from the ash hopper to the worm to the jar you throw away, ask after the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. That's my own teaching, given here at the fort and sent out to them that can't make the trip. It covers how to clean a pot, how to read your copper, how to make an honest cut, how to keep your fire from making a widow of your wife, and how to keep your history lawful. It's the same knowledge I'd put in my own son's hands if I trusted him with a match. Inquire at Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, Pittsfield, New Hampshire.
Wilkins: Once more, friends: everything on this program is history and education. Making spirits to drink without a federal permit is against the law of the United States. And whatever you make, a pot that turns green has to be scrubbed bright again before it's used. That's your duty to whoever drinks from it.
Wilkins: Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.
♦ Bear grunt and final drip into jar
♪ Theme swells and fades beneath wax cylinder crackle
♦ Cylinder needle runs off into silence