Cull Coppers and Clipped Edges: Making Change When the Mint Ran Dry
In 1860s Pittsfield, New Hampshire, moonshiner, blacksmith, and copper still man Dr. G. G. Wilkins spills his coin box: worn Spanish silver, bogus bungtown coppers, and light Civil War cents that still passed for change when the Mint ran dry. He shows how Yankee storekeepers caught a counterfeit by its ring, its weight, and its clipped edge, and Wilkes County runner Junior Vance tells moonshine-running stories paid in jukebox nickels and bad half dollars. Then it's back to distilling, with hickory ashes, red oak shavings, and the thump keg.
In this episode
- How the 1857 end of Spanish silver as legal tender hit farm widows and storekeepers
- Old New England coin names: ninepence, fourpence, pistareen, levy, and fip
- Bungtown coppers, fake English halfpennies, and Civil War store card tokens
- Large cents, Flying Eagle, Indian Head, and the first 'In God We Trust' two-cent piece
- Catching a counterfeit coin by its ring, its weight, and a clipped or sweated edge
- Why the G. G. Wilkins Pittsfield N.H. counterstamp meant he'd honor that coin at his counter
- Moonshine runner Junior Vance on jukebox nickels and a counterfeit half dollar that went thud
- Thump keg Q&A: hickory ashes, red oak shavings, and why the blue-flame proof test fails
Dr. G. G. Wilkins looks at the worn Spanish bits, bogus English halfpennies, and light coppers that still made change in 1860s New England. He shows how storekeepers caught a bad coin by its ring, its heft, and the feel of its edge, and explains why his 'G. G. WILKINS / PITTSFIELD N.H.' counterstamp came to mean he would honor that coin at his own counter. Wilkes County runner Junior Vance tells new stories about a load paid for in forty pounds of jukebox nickels, a counterfeit half dollar that went thud, his granny sorting silver by its edges, and a nickel he scratched and got back six years later. In Segment 4, Wilkins answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller's question about hickory ashes and red oak shavings in the thump keg, and he takes apart the blue-flame test on 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 great flea-bitten carcass down. That's a tin peddler's mule on the turnpike, not a deputy. You already had your supper tonight, a woodchuck that took you forty minutes to finish and complained for thirty of them. I heard every squeal from the anvil, and I'll hear it in my sleep. Lie down.
♦ Bear huffs, chain drags across frozen dirt, a heavy body drops against the log wall
Wilkins: There. Four hundred pounds of grudge, napping against my wall.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth, swelling then settling under
Wilkins: Good evening, neighbors, scoundrels, and the one honest man in Merrimack County, whoever you are. Write me so I can stamp your forehead. This is Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, broadcasting from the log walls of Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, in Pittsfield, New Hampshire. I'm your host, your dentist, your blacksmith, and in two cases the reason your sheriff walks with a limp.
Wilkins: Tonight's subject is small change and the large lies that ride on it. I call it Cull Coppers and Clipped Edges: Making Change When the Mint Ran Dry. I'm holding a copper cent so worn it has passed through more hands than the banister of a Concord parlor house, and come out smoother for it. You can't read the date. You can't make out the lady's face. And Hezekiah down at the store took it for a full cent anyhow, because what else was he going to do? Tonight I'll tell you how a Yankee storekeeper decided whether a coin was honest, and why my little steel punch, struck right here on this anvil, came to mean more than the eagle on the reverse.
♦ Single light tap of hammer on anvil, ringing out
Wilkins: But first, a word from the people who keep the copper in this fort shining.
♪ Brief tinny calliope flourish
Announcer: A QUICK WORD, friends! Pure copper for the honest craftsman: the Flame-Flow Still, protected by United States Patent 10,561,960! Heavy-gauge electrolytic copper, handmade, and waiting for you right now at moonshinestill.com. That's moonshinestill.com!
♪ Theme returns, fades
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Wilkins: Segment the first. History.
Wilkins: Let me empty my coin box on the counter for you. Not my cash drawer, the revenue men read that. My curiosity box. Hear that?
♦ Handful of mixed coins spilling across a wooden counter, a few rolling and spinning down
Wilkins: That's forty years of New England pocket trash. Here's a Spanish real, worn so thin you could read a newspaper through it, and for most of my life it was perfectly lawful money in these United States. Spanish and Mexican silver was legal tender in this country until February of 1857. Up here we never called it a real. We still counted the old way, six shillings to the dollar, so the real at twelve and a half cents was a 'ninepence,' and the half-real at six and a quarter was a 'fourpence.' Go to Philadelphia and the same coins turn into a 'levy' and a 'fip,' and the shopkeepers there look at you like you've got two heads when you ask for ninepence worth of molasses. I went down there once. Never again. They have no bears and they water their rum.
Wilkins: Then in 1857 Congress decided to clean house. They declared the foreign silver no longer lawful tender, and they told folks to bring it to the Mint and swap it for the new cents. But the Mint didn't take it at face. A Spanish quarter that had passed for twenty-five cents all your life, they took at twenty. The ninepence they took at ten. The fourpence at five. So whoever was holding the coins on the last day took the loss. Mostly that was farm widows and storekeepers. The bankers had seen it coming and passed theirs off the year before. Washington doesn't rob you with a pistol. It sends a circular.
Wilkins: Here's a pistareen, a Spanish two-real piece of poorer silver that went around at about twenty cents. I've had men swear to me a pistareen was worth a quarter, and I've pulled teeth from those same men and found more silver in their fillings.
♦ Coin flicked onto the counter, a short dull clink
Wilkins: And here, friends, is the most disreputable object in this fort, Barnaby included. A bungtown copper. It's meant to pass for an English halfpenny. King George on the front, Britannia on the back, and under that brown skin it's light, cheap, and crooked. Birmingham turned them out by the barrel, and so did some enterprising rascals on this side of the water. 'Bungtown' is what we called any copper not worth bending over for. A bungtown copper is like a Gilmanton suitor: looks fine by lamplight and weighs nothing in the morning.
Wilkins: Now our own cents. The old large cent, the big copper wheel, weighed one hundred sixty-eight grains, nearly eleven grams if you talk like a Frenchman. That was real copper, enough to patch a kettle. In 1857 they quit making it and gave us a little copper-nickel bird, the Flying Eagle. Two years later came the Indian Head. Then in '64, with the war eating every scrap of metal, they made the cent lighter still, out of bronze, and they brought out a two-cent piece. It was the first coin in American history to say 'In God We Trust.' They wrote that on the two-cent piece because two cents was about all the trust anybody had left.
Wilkins: Before that, when the government couldn't make change, everybody else did. Grocers, saloon keepers, undertakers. Each one struck his own cent-sized token with his name and his trade on it, and they went around by the millions. Congress put a stop to it in 1864 and outlawed private one- and two-cent pieces. Mind you, my counterstamp never claimed to be money. It was a signature. More on that after I've had a sip of water. Water, I said. Stop laughing, Barnaby.
♦ Bear grunts outside, chain clinks once
Wilkins: So you're a storekeeper in Pittsfield. A mill girl from the Suncook cotton mills puts a coin down for thread, and you've got about a second to decide whether it's honest. Three tests. Sound, weight, and edge.
Wilkins: Sound first. Every decent store on this turnpike kept a flat stone, or a marble slab, or a spot on the counter worn bare by years of this.
♦ Silver coin dropped on stone, a clear bright ring that lingers
Wilkins: That's silver, ringing like a church bell. Now listen.
♦ Second coin dropped on stone, a flat dead thud
Wilkins: That's lead with a silver wash. It goes down like a drunk falling off a porch, no music in it at all. Every scoundrel in the Suncook Valley owns a coin that won't ring, and most of them married one.
Wilkins: Weight second. An old storekeeper could heft a stack of ten coppers in his palm and tell you whether two of them were light, the way I can tell a rotten molar by the sound it makes against the forceps. A careful man kept a little brass balance under the counter. That got more important after 1853, when Congress made our silver coins lighter so the speculators would quit melting them down and shipping the metal overseas. The new ones had little arrows beside the date so you could tell them apart. Of course, half the town couldn't see an arrow without spectacles, so a storekeeper learned the new weight in his hand the way a farmer learns his own wife's step in the dark.
Wilkins: Edge third. Run your thumb around it. If it's smooth where it ought to be reeded, or flat on one side like a half-moon, somebody's been at it with shears or a file. That's clipping. Every shaving goes in a little pile, and when the pile's big enough it gets melted, and the clipper is a richer man and the town is poorer, one ninepence at a time. There's a cousin of it called sweating. You shake a sack of good coins hard enough to knock the dust off them and sell the dust. The English were so plagued by clippers that they put milled edges on their money so you could see any shaving, and Sir Isaac Newton himself, warden of their Mint, spent his old age hunting clippers and seeing them hanged. He worked out how the moon goes round the earth, then went hunting coin shavers for sport. A sensible man after my own heart.
Wilkins: We had our own clipper in these parts. I'll call him Ezra Tibbetts, a Concord money-shaver who came up the turnpike in the fall of '61 and passed a sack of clipped Spanish silver in Pittsfield, Barnstead, and Epsom before anybody caught on. He made the mistake of trying a shaved ninepence on me. I rang it on my stone, it went dull, I put my thumb on the edge, and I could have used that edge to shave with. I told Ezra I didn't accept short weight. Ezra laughed, and Ezra walked out the side door. The side door is where Barnaby's chain reaches.
♦ Bear grunt, low and long
Wilkins: I'll tell it straight. Barnaby didn't kill him. Barnaby has his principles. Barnaby clipped him the way Ezra clipped coins: took a sliver off the edge and hoped nobody would notice. Only the sliver was Ezra's left ear. I heard a sound like a boot pulling out of spring mud. Then a little wet crunch, like a man biting a pickled walnut. And Ezra Tibbetts was standing in my dooryard holding the side of his head with blood running down between his fingers into his collar, screaming a note I've only heard from a pig at slaughter and one Loudon soprano. Barnaby swallowed. He didn't even chew. I keep a fair price list at Fort Wilkins, and I charged Ezra nothing for the bandage, because I figured the bear had already collected. Ezra wore his hat tipped to the left the rest of his life. Folks in Concord called him 'Short Weight.'
♪ Brief fiddle sting, comic
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Wilkins: Segment the second. Legends, outlaws, and runners. Let me tell you why my punch matters.
♦ Coal stirred in a forge, bellows wheezing twice
Wilkins: By the war years Pittsfield had quit trusting its own pocket change. Half the coppers were bungtown trash, half the silver was clipped, and the paper wasn't worth wiping with. A man walked into a store and argued over every coin like a horse trader over teeth. So I started stamping. I took a bar of tool steel, cut the letters backwards into the end of it, hardened it in the forge, and tempered it down to a good straw color so it wouldn't shatter. I'd lay a coin on the anvil, set the punch, and give it one blow.
♦ Steel punch struck once by hammer on a copper coin atop an anvil, a sharp CLANK
Wilkins: G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. Now here's what that mark meant in this valley. It meant Wilkins had that coin in his hand. Wilkins rang it, weighed it, and thumbed the edge, and Wilkins would take it back at his own counter at the face he passed it out for. It wasn't a coin of my own making. It was my word, struck into somebody else's metal. A man in Chichester who'd never laid eyes on me would take a stamped cent from a stranger, because he knew a Pittsfield dentist with a bear stood behind it, and he knew the bear stood a good deal closer.
Wilkins: Copper takes the mark like butter. Silver fights you. It's harder, so you hit it harder, and if your hand wobbles you get a double strike. A double strike on silver looks like a drunk man's signature, and I should know, I've signed both. Strike once and strike hard. There's advice for coinage and for courting, and I won't say which I learned it from first.
Wilkins: I stamped them by the hundreds. My punch has gone into more hands in Merrimack County than the parson's, and it has never once asked for a collection. The sheriff confiscated one of my stamped cents as evidence during one of our little disagreements, and as far as I know it's still in the county strongbox. That makes it the only honest coin the county has ever held.
Wilkins: Now a story I've never told on this program. One spring Barnaby got into my coin box. Not this one, an earlier and fatter one. He cracked it open like a hornet's nest and swallowed better than a dollar in stamped coppers before I could get a pitchfork between him and the rest. Thirty-odd cents, gone into a bear. The county will tell you I'm a man of low character, and I'll prove them right. For three days I followed that animal around with a shovel and a sieve, and I panned his droppings in the Suncook like a California forty-niner. I got every cent back but two. And here's the alchemy, neighbors: every copper came out brighter than it went in. A bear's gut is the finest pickle in New England. I gave those coins out as change for a month, and nobody complained. It's amazing what folks will put in their mouths when it's shiny.
♦ Bear grunts, offended
Wilkins: Oh, don't sulk. It was a compliment to your digestion.
Wilkins: Now I've got a guest tonight who has handled more cash in a hurry than any banker in Concord. He's a road man from the Brushy Mountains of Wilkes County, North Carolina, and he's come a long way to sit by my stove. Junior Vance, welcome to Fort Wilkins.
Junior: Well, thank ye, Doc. I'll tell you, that bear of yours looked at me comin' up the path like I was a ham with legs.
Wilkins: You're a lean man, Junior. He'd want gravy with you. Tonight we're talking about money that won't hold still, worn coppers, light silver, coins nobody trusts. Did a man in your line ever get paid in something he didn't like the feel of?
Junior: Doc, I got paid in forty pounds of it once. There was a feller in Charlotte ran jukeboxes and pinball machines in every beer joint from there to Gastonia, and he took a load off me one night and didn't have a dollar in paper on him. He goes in the back and hauls out these canvas sacks, the kind the bank uses, and they're nickels. Nothin' but nickels. Must've been forty pounds. I says, mister, what am I supposed to do with all that? He says, count it on the way home.
Wilkins: Forty pounds of nickels. Did it ride well?
Junior: No sir, it did not. I'd took the load out, see, so the back end was light, and I throwed them sacks in the trunk, and that coupe got to wallowin' in the curves like a sow in a mudhole. I come up the mountain with nickels slidin' from one side to the other, chink-chink-chink, all the way to Wilkes. Sounded like a slot machine was chasin' me. I was paid in full, I'll give him that. And by the time I got home my arms was too wore out to count it.
Wilkins: I've been paid in a goose, half a pig, and one honest apology, and the apology was the hardest to spend. Now Junior, my storekeepers ring a coin on stone to hear if it's honest. Anybody down your way ever try to slip you a bad one?
Junior: One time. Feller behind a fillin' station in Statesville, after dark, and he's short. He says, I got a silver half dollar to make up the rest. And he drops it on the concrete step. And Doc, it didn't ring. It went thud. Like droppin' a biscuit.
♦ Coin dropped on stone, a dull thud
Wilkins: Just like that one?
Junior: Just exactly like that one. My granddaddy taught me any silver worth havin' sings when it hits the floor. I picked it up and it felt greasy, and I put my thumbnail in it and it marked like soap. Lead. Some ole boy had poured it in a mold and painted it. I says, mister, this half dollar has passed on, and you're about to follow it. He found him a real one in his other pocket mighty quick.
Wilkins: A man with a lead coin always has a silver one hidden somewhere. Same with a deputy. He's got one honest reason for being in your dooryard and nine he keeps in his boot. Tell me about the edges, Junior. Tonight's a night for edges.
Junior: Well now, that's my granny. In '65 the government quit puttin' silver in the dimes and quarters. They started stampin' 'em out of copper in the middle with nickel on the outside, like a sandwich. And my granny was of the opinion that the government had just robbed every widow in Wilkes County.
Wilkins: She was correct. The same thing happened to the Spanish ninepence. Washington always robs the widows first. They don't have time to write their congressman.
Junior: Yes sir. So every Saturday Granny'd set on that porch with a buttermilk can on one side and a coffee can on the other, and she'd pick up every coin that come into the house and turn it sideways. If the edge showed a little red stripe, the copper peekin' through, that went in the coffee can for spendin'. If it was solid silver all the way around, that went in the buttermilk can, and nobody touched the buttermilk can. My cousin Dewey took a quarter out of it one time to buy a Co-Cola, and she whipped him with a fly swatter till he could spell 'ninety percent silver' backwards.
Wilkins: A woman after my own heart. She looked at the edge first. The face can lie, but the edge confesses. I've seen men with handsome faces and their edges clipped down to the gristle.
Junior: Now here's one that'll tickle you, Doc, seein' as you put your mark on money. There was a deputy, I won't say which county, and every so often he'd pull me over on a backroad, look in the window, and say, 'Toll, Junior.' And I'd hand him somethin' to go on about his business. One night all I had was a buffalo nickel, and he took it. But before I handed it over I scratched a 'J' in the buffalo's backside with a horseshoe nail. Just meanness.
Wilkins: Counterstamping the law. You were born for my profession.
Junior: Well, six years later I'm settin' in a diner in Wilkesboro, I pay for a cup of coffee and a slice of chess pie, and the waitress gives me my change. And there's that buffalo with a 'J' on his hindquarters, lookin' up at me out of my own hand. Went all the way round the county and come home.
Wilkins: A sheriff's nickel and a sheriff's promise both come back around eventually, worn smooth and worth exactly five cents. Junior, did any of the old men in your hills trust paper at all?
Junior: Not the real old ones. There was a feller back up in the Brushies, his beard hung down to his belt buckle, made the best corn I ever smelt. He wouldn't take a dollar bill from the Lord Almighty. He said paper money was 'promises on a rag.' You paid him in silver, and he'd take every coin and bite it, and then he'd ring it on his anvil right there in the barn. Ting. Then he'd nod. If you give him a coin that didn't ring, he'd hand it back without a word and just look at you. I'd rather be cussed out by a preacher than looked at by that old man.
Wilkins: He was the last honest assayer in the South, and he worked for corn. Junior Vance, you've been a credit to Wilkes County and a danger to its deputies. Stay by the stove. Barnaby, quit sniffing at the gap under the door. He's company.
Junior: That bear's been sniffin' me since I sat down, Doc.
Wilkins: He likes you. When he doesn't like you, he doesn't sniff.
♦ Bear huffs heavily against the door gap, chain rattles
♪ Banjo bridge, brisk, fading out
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
♪ Bright calliope and brass-band fanfare, patent-medicine-wagon style
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♪ Fanfare button, cymbal crash
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Wilkins: Segment the third. Copper and the craft. And before Junior tells his granny I'm a corrupter of youth, the fine print: making spirits to drink without a federal permit is against United States law, and everything on this program is history and education. Now pull your stools close.
♦ Copper pot lid lifted, a soft metallic hum
Wilkins: I'll walk you through a run the way an old Pittsfield hand would have done it. You start with the mash. Take cracked corn and cook it in water until it's thick as porridge and smells like a johnnycake. Let it cool to where you can just hold your finger in it, about a hundred and fifty degrees, then stir in your malted barley. The malt carries a ferment, what the chemists call enzymes, that turns the corn starch into sugar. The mash goes from a paste to something thin and sweet, like magic, or Methodism on revival night. Let it cool further, to about eighty degrees, about as warm as a summer pond. Pitch your yeast and cover it loose. In a few days to a week the bubbling stops and you've got wash, a sour beer of six to eight percent. That's what goes in the still.
Wilkins: Now cuts. There are four of them, and this is where men get poisoned or get rich. A still doesn't make alcohol. It sorts it. The lightest stuff boils off first. Acetaldehyde boils about seventy degrees, acetone around a hundred thirty-three, methanol a hair under a hundred fifty, good ethyl alcohol about a hundred seventy-three, and water at two hundred twelve. So the first liquid out of the worm is the lightest and the meanest. Those are your foreshots. Throw them out. Not in the jar, not on a toothache, not to the deputy. Out. On a small pot of wash an old hand would toss a good teacupful, and he'd toss more if he had any doubt, because nobody ever went blind from throwing too much away.
Wilkins: Then the heads. They smell like varnish and the glue pot, and they'll give you a headache that feels like a mule is kicking you from inside your own skull. Heads smell like varnish because that's about what they're fit for, and I've known deputies who'd drink 'em and call it courage. Set them apart. Then the hearts come, sweet and clean, smelling of the grain. That's what the work was for. Last come the tails, oily and dull. Tails smell like a wet dog asleep in a damp cellar. Barnaby smells the same way, and I don't distill him either. Set the tails aside.
Wilkins: Mind this especially if you come from cider country like we do. Fruit mash, apple pomace and peach and pear, makes more methanol than corn does. There's a stuff in the skins and pulp called pectin, the same thing that sets your wife's jelly, and as the fruit ferments some of it breaks down into methanol. So when you run apple brandy you make your head cuts bigger and braver. An old Barnstead cider man who took stingy cuts on his apple jack went blind in one eye by sixty, and the only thing he could still see was his bill at the tavern.
Wilkins: Fire. Keep it low. Push a still too hot and the wash foams up and pukes through the arm and into the worm, and then you've got sour beer in your spirit and a mess like a drunk at a christening. Worse, a leaking joint puts vapor in the air, and alcohol vapor near an open flame will burn your still-house to the sills and you with it. Never walk away from a running still. Keep a bucket of water within arm's reach, and keep your pipe in your pocket.
♦ Fire crackling low beneath a pot, a gentle steady drip
Wilkins: And now the alchemy, the reason this whole fort is built around copper. Your mash makes sulfur compounds as it ferments, the stink of rotten eggs and cooked cabbage. When that vapor rises and touches bright copper, the copper grabs the sulfur and holds it, and the spirit runs on clean. The old-timers will tell you the pot does that work. They're mostly wrong. Most of it happens where the vapor touches the metal, up in the head, along the arm, and down the worm. That's why a man who builds his pot of copper and his condenser of something cheap has spent his money in the wrong place.
Wilkins: Here's what ties it to tonight's coins. Copper doing that work gets used up. Every run it gives a little of itself to the sulfur, and over the years the walls of a still wear thin, just as the face of a large cent wears smooth from thumbs and pockets. A still worn thin by sulfur is like an old large cent: it gave its best years to the work, and the only thanks it gets is a patch. So look your still over. Tap it. Listen to it the way you'd ring a coin. A thin spot sounds tinny, and a sound wall sounds solid.
Wilkins: Keep her clean. Vinegar and a handful of salt will brighten tarnished copper fast. Then rinse it, and I mean rinse it until the rinse water tastes of nothing, and run a load of plain water through her before any wash goes in. A man who handles his coppers too often wears them smooth, and there's a lesson in that for the young fellows of Pittsfield that I will not explain in front of the ladies.
♪ Short mountain fiddle bridge
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Wilkins: Segment the fourth. Myths, slang, and the mail. We've a voice from the South tonight, recorded on a wax cylinder that came all the way up the coast in a crate of turpentine. Brother Junior, this one's from your neck of the woods. Let's hear it.
♦ Cylinder machine cranking, needle drop, heavy hiss
Wilkins: This is Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina.
♦ Faint, crackling recorded voice, words lost under hiss: '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, hiss stops
Junior: Rabbit Miller. I know them Millers. Rabbit got his name 'cause he run from a revival tent so fast he left his shoes.
Wilkins: A man with good sense and quick feet. Rabbit, I'll take your uncle's two remedies one at a time, and I'll stamp the truth on each one like a coin.
Wilkins: Hickory ashes first. Wood ash is mostly potash. Every farm wife in New England has poured water through an ash hopper to leach out lye for soap, and in the early days New Hampshire shipped potash by the barrel down to Boston and over to England. It's a strong alkali. Throw it in your doubler and the liquid there gets alkaline. Maybe it tames a little sourness. But it can't do the one thing your uncle wants. The heads are a portion of the run. They come out of the worm in their own sweet time, and the only cure for them is a man with a clean jar who's willing to set them aside. Rabbit, your uncle's hickory ashes would make a fine bar of soap, and if he's drinking out of that thump keg, he could use one.
Wilkins: Now red oak shavings. Oak does do something to spirit. It gives it color, tannin, and a woody taste, the way a barrel does. But that's flavoring. It isn't cleaning. You can put a good coat on a crooked man and he's still crooked. And red oak has a funny little secret. Its pores run open from end to end like a bundle of straws, with nothing inside to plug them. White oak has plugs in its pores, so it holds liquid. Red oak doesn't. Hand a cooper a stave of red oak for a whiskey barrel and he'll laugh you out of the shop, because it weeps out the ends. Red oak in a barrel holds whiskey about as well as a Concord politician holds a secret. Raw shavings in a hot doubler give you a sawdust bitterness and a brown tint, and folks see the color, think it's been aged, and pay extra.
Junior: My uncle Dub did the same thing with a burnt peach seed. Said it 'sweetened the heads.' All it sweetened was his opinion of himself.
Wilkins: Every family has an Uncle Dub. Ours is in the county legislature. While we're at it, Rabbit, let me kill one more myth that kills men, and I'll stamp it on the anvil. The blue flame test. You pour a spoonful in a dish and set a match to it. If it burns blue, they say it's good liquor. If it burns some other color, it's poison.
♦ Match struck, a small soft whoosh of flame
Wilkins: The blue flame tells you exactly one thing: there's alcohol in it. That's all. Methanol, the stuff in your foreshots that blinds men, burns with a pale blue flame too. So a spoonful of poison can burn just as handsome as a spoonful of hearts. The blue flame vouches for your whiskey the way a horse thief vouches for his brother. A flame can't tell you a thing about the cuts. Only the man who made them knows, and only if he was honest.
♦ steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: There. One copper stamped BLUE FLAME IS NO PROOF. And this is the whole lesson of the evening, neighbors. A mark is only worth as much as the man who struck it. My stamp on a cent means something because I rang it, weighed it, thumbed the edge, and stand behind it. A clear jar means something only if somebody threw out the foreshots and heads. Ash won't vouch for it. Oak won't, and fire won't. Only an honest cut will.
♦ steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: And that one I'm stamping for you, Rabbit Miller of Wilkesboro. I'll send it south in the next crate of turpentine. Tell your uncle to save his hickory ash for soap and his red oak for the woodpile, and to cut his heads like his eyesight depends on it, because it does. You're a credit to the Brushy Mountains, son, and you've got better questions than half the Merrimack County bar.
Junior: I'll see that coin gets to him, Doc. If the deputy don't collect a toll on it first.
Wilkins: If he does, scratch a J on it. It'll come home.
♪ Fiddle and banjo reprise begins, soft
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Announcer: ANOTHER QUICK WORD, neighbors! The Flame-Flow Still, United States Patent 10,561,960, handcrafted from heavy-gauge pure electrolytic copper! Order yours today at moonshinestill.com, or visit the Fort Wilkins Showroom on Route 28! That's moonshinestill.com!
Wilkins: Junior Vance, thank you for crossing the miles to sit by my stove and talk about money.
Junior: Doc, it's been a pleasure. Tell that bear I'm leavin' by the front door.
Wilkins: He knows. He's already moved round to the front.
♦ Chain drags around the corner of the cabin, slow and deliberate
Wilkins: Friends, if tonight's talk of mash and cuts and copper caught your fancy, sign up for the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. It's my whole craft taught plain: the chemistry of the cuts, the care of copper, fire safety in the still-house, and the history of every mark and method in this valley. It's taught honestly and lawfully, for history and education. Inquire at the Fort Wilkins Showroom on Route 28 in Pittsfield, or at moonshinestill.com. I'll teach you to ring true, and I won't charge you an ear for it.
Wilkins: Before I bank the forge, ring your coins, thumb your edges, and don't trust a mark until you know the hand that struck it. That goes for coppers, whiskey, and every man who ever ran for sheriff. The revenue man keeps his conscience like a ninepence: worn smooth, half its weight gone, and still passed around like it's worth something.
♪ Theme swells, warm and crackling
Wilkins: Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.
♦ Bear grunt and final drip into jar
♦ Wax cylinder crackle fades to silence