The Christmas Run of 1864: Snow, Sleigh Bells, and the Deputy Who Looked Away
In the deep snow of December 1864, moonshiner Dr. G. G. Wilkins drives a Christmas sleigh full of copper still whiskey across New Hampshire. He has muffled the sleigh bells in a widow's red flannel petticoat, and a deputy stares at the stars all night because Barnaby the pet bear has stolen his beaver hat. The episode covers Civil War whiskey tax history, old Yankee Christmas traditions, and real distilling know-how, plus holiday bootlegging stories from Wilkes County runner Junior Vance.
In this episode
- How the Civil War whiskey tax went from 20 cents to $2 a gallon and caused a Christmas rush for moonshine in 1864
- The Puritan ban on Christmas in New England, and how Thomas Nast's Santa Claus in Harper's Weekly helped bring the holiday back
- Running moonshine by sleigh in winter: snow rollers, packed roads, and why silent sleigh bells looked suspicious
- Belltown sleigh bells from East Hampton, Connecticut, and colonial flip made with a red-hot loggerhead
- Sherman's Christmas gift of Savannah and New Hampshire soldiers in the trenches at Petersburg
- Wilkes County bootlegger Junior Vance on whiskey wrapped as Christmas presents, cinder blocks for traction, and saving a deputy from an icy ditch
- Thump keg mailbag: what hickory ashes and red oak shavings do in a moonshine still
- Dr. Wilkins tests the old moonshine bead test myth for checking proof at his anvil
Dr. G. G. Wilkins opens the Fort Wilkins archives on the snowbound Christmas sleigh run of 1864. He drove it with the bells muffled in a widow's flannel petticoat and a hamper of 'winter bitters' aboard, and Deputy Lemuel Pettengill spent the night staring at the stars because Barnaby had stolen his beaver hat and would not give it back. Retired Wilkes County runner Junior Vance tells new holiday stories: whiskey wrapped as Christmas presents, a deputy he pulled out of an icy ditch, cinder blocks in his trunk for traction, and his mama's fruitcake rule. In the mailbag, Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro asks about hickory ashes and red oak shavings in the thump keg, and Wilkins also takes apart the old bead-test myth 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. Get your snout off my window glass, you four-hundred-pound sack of Christmas sin. You have had your ham bone, you have had the deputy's hat, and you will have nothing more from this house until New Year's, so lie down in your snowbank and think about your trespasses.
♦ Bear huffs, chain drags through crusted snow, a long disgruntled groan
Wilkins: Listen to him. He groans like a Concord alderman who has been asked to pay his own bar tab.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth, a faint jingle of sleigh bells tucked beneath the final bars
Wilkins: Good evening, neighbors, and a hard-frozen welcome 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 am Dr. George G. Wilkins: tooth-puller, blacksmith, inventor, counterstamper of the nation's loose change, and the man the county sheriff mentions in his prayers, never kindly. Tonight I am opening the Fort Wilkins archives to the Christmas Run of 1864. Snow to a horse's belly, sleigh bells stuffed with a widow's underthings, a hamper of medicine for the whole valley, and one deputy who decided, as a matter of Christian charity and a missing hat, to look the other way.
♦ Wax crackle swells, then settles
Wilkins: Before we hitch the horse, a word from the fellow who keeps my lamp oil paid for.
♪ Brisk banjo sting
Announcer: A quick word, friends! Before the snow piles up to the eaves, set your eyes on the Flame-Flow Still, protected under United States Patent 10,561,960, hand-built of pure, heavy copper. Order yours at moonshinestill.com. That's moonshinestill.com!
♪ Sting resolves into a slow, wintry fiddle air
Wilkins: SEGMENT THE FIRST. A Yankee Christmas in a Taxing Year.
Wilkins: To understand that December run, you have to understand how little New England used to think of Christmas. Our Puritan forefathers in the Massachusetts Bay held it a papist frolic. From 1659 to 1681 they fined a man five shillings just for keeping the day. Five shillings for a slice of pudding and a little joy. From the look of their portraits they never kept anything else either, least of all a smile.
Wilkins: That chill came north with them and settled in these granite hills like frost in a cellar hole. My own grandsire worked Christmas Day splitting cordwood and called it piety. Even now the government in Washington does not count it a holiday. A Treasury clerk sits at his desk on the twenty-fifth of December counting my money the same as any Tuesday.
Wilkins: The heart thaws slowly, though. The Irish and German hands at the mills along the Suncook brought their candles and their carols. Then Mr. Thomas Nast drew Santa Claus for Harper's Weekly in January of 'sixty-three, a fat old elf in a coat of stars and stripes handing out presents in a Union camp, and every mother in the valley cut it out and pinned it over the stove. Mr. Nast dressed him in the flag. Around here he would have needed a buffalo robe and a permit.
♦ Fire pops in an iron stove
Wilkins: Now, the money. Mr. Lincoln's revenue men raised the whiskey tax in steps, like a man going upstairs to fight his wife. Twenty cents a gallon at first. Sixty cents in the spring of 'sixty-four. A dollar and a half by summer. And everybody knew that two dollars was waiting for us at New Year's like a bailiff on the porch.
Wilkins: So that December, every farmer, deacon, selectman and grieving mother between Epsom and Gilmanton wanted a jug filled before the price jumped again. Seasonal demand, the merchants call it. I call it Christmas turning every Yankee into a squirrel with a cellar, and I was the nut tree.
Wilkins: And there was a war on, neighbors. That winter our New Hampshire boys sat in the frozen trenches before Petersburg, Virginia, eating hardtack you could shoe a mule with and writing letters home by candle stubs. Half the houses on this turnpike had an empty chair at the table, and some of those chairs would stay empty. Cold Harbor in June took more Granite State boys than I care to count. Mothers tied up Christmas boxes of socks, maple sugar and Bibles and sent them south by express, and prayed the box would find a living man at the end of it.
Wilkins: The good news came over the holiday. General Sherman telegraphed Mr. Lincoln on the twenty-second of December and offered him the city of Savannah as a Christmas present, with a hundred and fifty heavy guns and some twenty-five thousand bales of cotton tied on for a bow. Sherman gave the President a whole city. I gave the Widow Pease a quart jar. I would wager mine got the warmer thank-you.
♦ Wax crackle; a kettle begins to tick on the stove
Wilkins: Now let me tell you about the roads, because a New Hampshire winter road is not a road at all. It is a rumor with ruts in it. When a storm came through, the town surveyors called out every ox team they could find to break out the roads, and they dragged a great wooden snow roller, eight feet wide and heavy as a Methodist's sermon, to pack the snow flat and hard. Nobody wanted it scraped bare. A sleigh wants packed snow under the runners, and a bare road will shred a runner like my forceps shred a sorry gum.
Wilkins: Then there are the bells. Most of the sleigh bells in this country are cast down in East Hampton, Connecticut, which folks call Belltown since old William Barton set up his foundry there. And many a town and city requires a sleigh to wear bells, so a man walking home in the dark hears you coming before your horse puts a hoof in his ribs. A sleigh with silent bells, then, is a sleigh with a reason to be silent, and every deputy in the county knows it.
Wilkins: A last word on Christmas cheer before the story. The old-time drink of this valley was flip: a mug of beer with a slug of rum and a spoon of molasses, and then you pull a red-hot iron out of the coals, a loggerhead we called it, and plunge it in. The mug hisses and foams up like a scalded cat and tastes of burnt sugar and bad decisions. I forged forty loggerheads in my day, and I have seen a man grab one by the wrong end. He left his whole palm on it like a calling card, with the skin of his life line still sizzling there, and went about for a month afterward telling everyone the drink was worth it.
♪ Fiddle bridge, quickening into a jaunty sleigh-ride reel
Wilkins: SEGMENT THE SECOND. The Christmas Run, and the Deputy Who Looked Away.
♦ Wind moaning around log walls
Wilkins: The twenty-third of December, 1864. A nor'easter had dropped better than two feet on the turnpike, and the drifts on Catamount Mountain were taller than a Concord lawyer's lies. I had twenty-two orders to deliver, from Pittsfield up to Barnstead Parade, on to Gilmanton Iron Works, and back down through Loudon and Chichester. Every jar wore a label reading Dr. Wilkins's Winter Bitters, For Chilblains and the Low Spirits of the Season, which was the God's honest truth about what was in them.
Wilkins: I had the sleigh, I had my mare, a hammer-headed sorrel named Deacon who bites, and I had my bells. Bells were no good to me. So I went to the Widow Pease and asked for her red flannel petticoat to wrap them in.
♦ Stove ticking; Wilkins chuckles
Wilkins: She told me she had waited nine years for a man to ask her for that petticoat, and was sorely let down to hear it was for the horse. She gave it over all the same and made me promise to bring it back warm. I am a man of my word. It came back warm, and smelling powerfully of horse. A sleigh bell wrapped in a petticoat is the quietest thing in Merrimack County, after an honest deputy's conscience.
Wilkins: Now to that deputy. The sheriff, still sore from our earlier dealings, had posted a young deputy named Lemuel Pettengill out on the turnpike to watch Fort Wilkins through the holidays. Lemuel was a good, tall, serious boy whose ears stuck out like a pair of jug handles. On his head sat the pride of his life, a brand-new black beaver hat his bride had bought him in Concord with money she had saved from selling eggs.
Wilkins: On the afternoon of the twenty-third, Lemuel crept up to my still-house to peek through the window. A gust of wind came down off Catamount, lifted that beaver hat right off his jug-handle ears, and carried it into Barnaby's circle.
♦ Bear grunting with interest, chain clinking
Wilkins: Barnaby sniffed it. He licked it. He licked the inside of it, neighbors, and cleaned out a full year of deputy head grease, and seemed to find it better than molasses. Then he set it on his own head, crooked over one ear, and sat up in the snow like a Concord senator wearing his first bribe: proudly, crookedly, and with no notion of giving it back.
Wilkins: Lemuel reached for it. I put my hand on his shoulder and told him what happened to the last man who reached into Barnaby's circle. That was a Gilmanton informer in the spring of 'sixty-three, a weasel-faced little tattler who meant to snatch a jar off my sill. Barnaby took the coat sleeve, then the shirt sleeve, then most of the skin from that man's wrist to his elbow, all in one long pull. It sounded like somebody tearing a wet bedsheet down the middle. The informer stood there looking at his own arm like a butcher's window display, and I laid him out on my kitchen table and stitched him up with dental silk. Forty-one stitches, and he screamed through every one in a voice I didn't know a grown man had. Then he had the gall to ask me what I charged.
Wilkins: Lemuel went the color of skim milk and took his hand back.
♦ Wind gusts; bear yawns hugely
Wilkins: Now consider the boy's position. He could not go home to his bride bareheaded in December. He could not go back to the sheriff and report that a bear had seized his hat in the line of duty, because he would be called Beaverless Pettengill from then until his funeral. So I made him an offer, man to man. I said, 'Lemuel, that bear will give up your hat on the twenty-sixth of December, a little damp but whole, provided your eyes are somewhere else on the night of the twenty-fourth.'
Wilkins: He thought about it the way a man thinks about a bad tooth: hard, and with a hand on his jaw. Then he said, 'Doctor, I have always been partial to astronomy.'
♪ Soft sleigh-bell jingle, muffled as if through flannel
Wilkins: Christmas Eve, then. Hot soapstones at my feet, a buffalo robe to my chin, a hamper of jars packed in oat straw behind me, and Deacon blowing steam like a locomotive. As I came past the Fort gate onto the turnpike, there stood Lemuel Pettengill in the middle of the road, bareheaded, with his ears going purple, staring straight up at the North Star like he meant to arrest it. He studied the sky so hard he must have discovered two new comets and a constellation shaped like an alibi. I went by close enough to spit on his boots. He never so much as blinked.
Wilkins: Did I have trouble? Of course I had trouble. On the Barnstead side of Catamount the drifts had blown in again over the rolled road, and Deacon floundered in up to her withers. The sleigh tipped and laid me in the snow with eleven jars on top of me. Not one broke, praise be to oat straw. Deacon looked back over her shoulder at me with the exact contempt my first wife saved for Sundays. I dug for an hour with a shovel and a dentist's patience and cursed in Latin, English, and a little Abenaki I picked up from a trapper, and the hills cursed back at me in echo.
Wilkins: But the deliveries went through. A jar for the Widow Pease, along with her petticoat. A jar for the miller with the cough. A jar for old Captain Hoyt, who had lost a leg at Chancellorsville and wanted something to warm what was left. And the last one went to a farmhouse out past Loudon, where a mother had lost her boy at Cold Harbor. She took the jar, thanked me, and before I was off the step she poured a small measure into a tin cup and set it at his empty place at the table. Then she shut the door, quiet. I stood a minute in the snow with my hat off. I have pulled perhaps four thousand teeth and I have seen men cry for every one of them, but that is the only thing in my life that ever made me cry.
♦ Wax crackle; long pause; the drip into the jar
Wilkins: On the twenty-sixth, as promised, Barnaby gave back the hat, in exchange for a smoked ham hock and some negotiation. It was licked clean, the brim was chewed in a sort of wave pattern, and it carried a smell nobody could wash out. Lemuel wore it anyway. To this day the boys in Concord call it the Bear-Blessed Beaver, and he is prouder of it than of his badge.
Wilkins: Now, my guest tonight comes to us from a long way down the road, Wilkes County, North Carolina, and from further down the calendar than I care to puzzle over. He drives a horseless steel contraption he calls a Ford coupe. He has run more whiskey through more snow than any man I know of south of the Merrimack, and I have quit asking questions. Welcome to Fort Wilkins, Junior Vance.
Junior: Doc, it's good to be here. That bear just looked me up and down like I was a pork chop wearin' boots.
Wilkins: He does that to every guest. If he takes your hat, you are family. If he takes your arm, you are a revenue man. Junior, you have heard about my Christmas run. Did your mountains keep the holiday the same way?
Junior: Lord, yes. Christmas was the busiest week of the whole year up in the Brushy Mountains. Folks who wouldn't touch a drop come July all of a sudden needed some for the eggnog, some for the fruitcake, and some for the in-laws. Mostly for the in-laws.
Wilkins: A sound medical position. Tell me about a Christmas run, and make it one you have never told on any porch.
Junior: All right. Christmas Eve, 'sixty-two, I mean nineteen sixty-two, Doc, don't get confused on me. There was an ice storm coming over the Brushies. Every limb in the county was glazed like a doughnut and the power lines were snapping like banjo strings. I had a load bound for Charlotte, and word was the law had a roadblock set up right outside Wilkesboro. So Mama and my aunt Ruby sat up half the night and wrapped every jar in red and green paper, tied a bow on every one, and we packed the whole trunk in Fraser fir boughs out of Ashe County. Smelled like a church on Christmas morning.
Wilkins: Jars dressed as presents. It is pure poetry.
Junior: So I pull up to the roadblock with chains on the tires, slow and polite as a deacon. The deputy shines his flashlight in at all them pretty bows and the fir needles, and he gets this look like somebody stepped on his puppy. He says, 'Son, I ain't about to open another man's Christmas.' And he waved me on through.
Wilkins: Junior, your deputies won't open a man's Christmas. Ours won't open a man's barn without a bear's say-so. Different regions, same cowardice, and God bless it.
Junior: Now I got one about a deputy lookin' away that's kin to yours, Doc. Christmas morning, couple years later, about four inches of snow on the ground. I'm running a load back up toward North Wilkesboro and I come around a bend, and there's a county cruiser nosed into a ditch with its back wheels spinning, throwing mud and snow all over, and the deputy cussing so hard the snow was melting off the hood.
Wilkins: You could have driven right past him.
Junior: I could have. But it was Christmas, and Mama raised me right, mostly. So I got out my log chain, hooked it to his bumper, and pulled him out of there with a full load in my trunk. That car was riding so low the chain was dragging the road. When he's back on the pavement, he walks over and looks at my back end sitting about two inches off the ground. Then he looks me right in the eye and says, 'Junior, I ain't seen a thing all day but the inside of that ditch. Merry Christmas.'
Wilkins: There you have it, neighbors: the whole law of mercy in one sentence. Was he ever any trouble to you afterward?
Junior: Never. He'd wave every time he saw me. Kinda sad about it, like a man waving at a fish he let go.
Wilkins: Tell me about your winter roads. Mine have oxen and snow rollers. What do yours have?
Junior: Mine had nothing, Doc. The county didn't plow back up in those hollers. Here's the thing nobody tells you. A loaded car in snow is the easiest thing in the world to drive, because all that weight's sitting over the back wheels. It's coming home empty that kills you. Back end's light as a church collection plate and you spin on every hill.
Wilkins: How did you cure it?
Junior: Cinder blocks. Three hundred pounds of them in the trunk every time I ran back empty. Well, one evening I plumb forgot to take 'em out, and here comes a deputy behind me with his light going, because he sees my back end sagging and figures he's caught himself the haul of the year. He chases me eleven miles. I finally pull over just to quit wasting his gas. He pops the trunk, and there's nothing in it but cinder blocks. He stands there and says, 'Junior, you hauling concrete to Charlotte now?' And I said, 'No sir, I'm building a church.'
Wilkins: Junior hauled cinder blocks to build a church. I hauled jars to fill one. Between us the Lord's house is in excellent shape.
Junior: One more, Doc, and it's my favorite. Mama had a rule. Every customer at Christmas got one of her fruitcakes, no exceptions, because she said we were in a service business. So I'm handing out fruitcakes all over two counties. I had one regular customer, a sweet old lady in a little white house who bought a pint every December for her rheumatism and always gave me a slice of pound cake for the road. Well, the third year I come up to the porch with my fruitcake, and who opens the door but the high sheriff himself, in his house slippers. That sweet old lady was his mama.
Wilkins: Good Lord. What did he do?
Junior: He took the fruitcake, smelled it, looked at me a long time, and then said, 'Mama says you're a real polite young man.' Shut the door. Never said another word about it as long as he lived. And she kept right on buying.
Wilkins: A mother's endorsement beats any warrant in the land. Junior Vance, from Wilkes County, North Carolina. Stay by the fire, and keep your hat well away from that window.
Junior: Doc, I'm sitting on it.
♦ Bear grunts, disappointed
♪ Banjo flourish into the advertisement
Announcer: Ladies and gentlemen, gather 'round the stove! The snow is deep, the nights are long, and what does every serious practitioner of the distilling arts want under his tree this season? The Flame-Flow Still, flagship of Moonshine Stills, protected under United States Patent 10,561,960! If you appreciate real American craftsmanship, look no further. Every Flame-Flow is handcrafted from heavy-gauge, high-purity electrolytic copper, with precision-machined brass unions that seal up tight and true. It is engineered for strong convective circulation, which means even heat, a steady run, and outstanding purity for essential oils, herbal tinctures, and traditional distillation demonstrations. It's no rusty kettle and no patched-up pot. It's an heirloom that gleams like a new penny on Christmas morning! All this for just eight hundred ninety-nine dollars. Order today at moonshinestill.com, that's https://moonshinestill.com/products/flame-flow-copper-still, or come see it in copper and brass at the showroom at Fort Wilkins on Route 28 in Pittsfield, New Hampshire. Once more, friends: moonshinestill.com! The Flame-Flow Still. Buy it once and your grandchildren will fight over it!
♪ Banjo flourish fades into the crackle
Wilkins: SEGMENT THE THIRD. Copper and the Craft: Distilling in the Dead of Winter.
♦ Iron stove door creaks open; coals hiss
Wilkins: Now, neighbors, the alchemy. First, the law, and I say this as a man twice hauled before the bench: every word of this program is for historical and educational purposes only. Under the law of the United States, it is illegal to make distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit. Listen for the learning, and leave the arresting to me.
Wilkins: My Christmas mash was a corn-and-rye mash, and here is how it was built. Cracked corn goes into the kettle with clean water and is cooked at a rolling boil until it turns thick as Sunday porridge. Then you let it cool. I do not guess at the heat. I hang one of Mr. Fahrenheit's glass thermometers in the mash, and when it falls to about one hundred fifty to one hundred fifty-five degrees, I stir in the rye and a good measure of malted barley. The barley malt carries the enzymes, the little alchemists of the grain, that turn starch into sugar. Hold it there about an hour, stirring like a man courting, and the mash goes from paste to sweet.
Wilkins: Then you cool it again, below about eighty degrees, before you pitch your yeast. Pitch it hot and you scald the poor beasts to death. Cover it loosely, never sealed, and let it work several days until the bubbling quiets down. What you have then is a beer of a few percent strength, and that is what goes into the still.
Wilkins: Here is the winter trouble. A cold ferment is a stressed ferment. Yeast that is shivering, or starving for want of nourishment, gives off hydrogen sulfide, and your still-house will stink like rotten eggs and a deacon's boots after a three-day revival, and for the same reason: too much strain and not enough warmth. So I kept my fermenter on the warm side of the chimney, wrapped in old horse blankets, so the yeast worked steady instead of sulking.
Wilkins: And this is where copper earns its keep. Copper does its finest work against sulfur where the hot vapor touches it, in the cap, the helmet, and the arm that carries the vapor over to the worm. Copper sitting under the liquid does far less. A pot of iron with a copper cap is a better still than a copper pot with an iron cap. Put your best copper where the steam goes, and keep it bright.
♦ Copper lid set down on stone with a deep ring
Wilkins: Now the running. Fill your pot no more than about three-quarters full. A charge filled to the brim will foam and puke up into the vapor arm and the worm, and then you get scorched mash in your condenser, a blocked pipe, and a mess that will take you till Easter to clean. Never seal a still tight, and never let the outlet clog. A sealed kettle over a fire is not a still. It is a bomb with a Christian name.
Wilkins: Winter has one gift for the distiller: cold water. Snowmelt and creek water make the worm tub as cold as a revenue man's heart, and a cold worm turns every wisp of vapor into liquid. But watch that tub. If the water warms up, vapor comes out of the worm uncondensed, and alcohol vapor drifting toward an open flame will light up the whole building quicker than a Merrimack grand jury. Keep fresh cold water running through it, keep the fire low and steady, and keep a bucket of sand by the door.
Wilkins: Then the cuts, the four seasons of the run. I catch the run in many small jars, numbered with chalk, one after another, so I can judge each by itself. The first runnings, the foreshots, are poison, and I pour them out on the ground without pity. Then come the heads, which smell like shoemaker's cement and fresh varnish and will split your skull wide open by morning. Those are set aside, never drunk. Then the hearts, sweet and clean and full of the grain: that is the spirit. Last come the tails, which smell of wet dog and damp pasteboard and leave an oily slick. Those I set aside to run again another day.
Wilkins: Smell every jar. Rub a drop between your palms and smell it again. Your nose is a better chemist than any book in Boston, and a greedy man who keeps too much of the heads is the reason other men go blind. Honest cuts are what keep the craft decent.
♪ Low fiddle drone
Wilkins: SEGMENT THE FOURTH. The Mailbag, the Anvil, and an Old Wives' Tale.
♦ A wheezing mechanical whirr; a scratchy recorded voice begins
Wilkins: We have a voice captured on the call-in apparatus, which I am told works by some devilry I don't care to examine. Let's hear it.
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?
♦ Recording clicks off; wax crackle
Wilkins: Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller, of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, the same country our friend Junior hails from. Junior, do you know this boy?
Junior: Doc, there's a Miller under every rock in Wilkes County, and half of 'em are named Rabbit.
Wilkins: Then I'll answer for all of them. Rabbit, start with the hickory ashes. What is wood ash? It's potash. It's what your great-grandmother leached through a barrel of straw to make lye for her soap. In my granddaddy's time, New Hampshire and Vermont farms shipped potash off in barrels by the wagonload. It's an alkali, a strong one. Toss a fistful into a doubler and you might knock down some of the sour smell of a souring mash, but you get a soapy, bitter bite in the spirit and a crust in the bottom of your keg like a dead man's kidney stone.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: There, I struck a cent for that. Rabbit, ash in the doubler makes your whiskey taste like Saturday-night soap, which is as close to clean as some of your uncle's whiskey will ever get.
Wilkins: Now the red oak shavings, and this one's a coopering lesson. Red oak is porous. The wood is full of little open tubes, and you can blow a puff of pipe smoke clean through a stave of it. That's why no cooper worth his adze makes a tight whiskey barrel of red oak. The whiskey would weep right out through the sides. White oak plugs its own pores, so white oak holds the spirit. Shavings in the keg will put a little color and some tannin into the run, so it looks a few years older than it is. But it's rouge on a hog, Rabbit. It adds color and fools nobody who's ever kissed one.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Here's the straight truth so your uncle stays sighted. Nothing you throw into a thump keg cleans out bad heads. The poison goes in the cuts, and only the cuts: you pour out the foreshots, you set aside the heads, and you trust your nose. Your uncle is not a liar, Rabbit. He's a romantic, which is worse, because a liar at least knows he's wrong. Give him my compliments, and a shout from Fort Wilkins to all the Rabbits of Wilkesboro.
Wilkins: While the anvil's warm, let's knock down one more old wives' tale: the bead. Every tavern sage in New England shakes his jar, holds it up to the lamp, and watches the bubbles rise. Big beads that sit there, he says, mean good whiskey. Small beads that vanish fast, he says it's weak.
♦ Glass jar shaken, liquid sloshing
Wilkins: Here's the truth of it. The bead does tell you something about strength. High-proof spirit throws big beads that linger, and watered spirit throws small ones that pop and disappear. But that is all it tells you. A jar full of foreshots will bead as pretty as a choir girl's pearls. So will spirit run through a lead-soldered pot. The bead knows the proof and nothing else, and it never knew if the stuff was safe.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin, twice, ringing
Wilkins: A bead in the jar proves the spirit is strong, the way a loud sermon proves the preacher is sober, which is to say not at all. G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., stamped and settled.
♪ Banjo brightens
Wilkins: One more word from the gentleman with the patent.
Announcer: A quick word before the fire burns low! The Flame-Flow Still, protected under U.S. Patent 10,561,960, is heavy copper built by hand to last for generations. Order at moonshinestill.com, or visit the showroom at Fort Wilkins on Route 28. That's moonshinestill.com!
♪ Parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme returns softly
Wilkins: That's the Christmas Run of 1864, neighbors. Barnaby has the memory of the hat, Lemuel has his dignity back, and I have a bear who now thinks he outranks a deputy, which in this county he does. My thanks to Junior Vance of Wilkes County.
Junior: Merry Christmas, Doc. Tell that bear I'm keeping my hat.
Wilkins: He heard you, and he's made a note of it. If you want to learn the craft properly, the mash, the copper, the cuts, the fire, and the honest judgment that goes with it, enroll in the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. I teach it the way I pull a tooth: plain, quick, and with no pretty lies. Ask for it at the Fort Wilkins showroom on Route 28, and the boy at the counter will set you right.
Wilkins: And to every mother with an empty chair this winter, God keep your boys, wherever they lie.
Wilkins: Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.
♦ Bear grunt and final drip into jar
♪ Theme fades beneath wax cylinder crackle to silence