The Granite State Distillers' Petition: Why Pittsfield Men Wrote to Washington in 1862
Dr. G. G. Wilkins reads aloud a fictionalized 1862 petition from the cider-brandy men of Pittsfield to Congress. He explains the federal licenses, the per-proof-gallon tax and the sworn bookkeeping that baffled his neighbors, and tells why he sealed the petition with a counterstamped cent instead of his name, which turned out to be a fine idea once the petition became the assessor's list of suspects. Wilkes County runner Junior Vance tells new stories about petitions, paperwork and paying the law, and Wilkins answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller's voicemail about hickory ashes and red oak shavings in the thump keg before taking apart the blue-flame test.
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Full episode transcript
♦ Audible wax cylinder surface crackle, slow drip of clear distillate into a glass jar
♦ Barnaby the black bear grunting and chain clinking outside log cabin window
Wilkins: Barnaby! Settle your hairy carcass down. That chain is rated for an ox, and you will not test it tonight over a squirrel, or I will pull your other fang and wear it on my watch chain. Down. Down, you four-hundred-pound sack of sin.
♦ A long, sulking bear grunt; the chain drags once and goes still
Wilkins: There. He is sulking now. He has the face of a deacon who has been caught at the cider barrel and knows the whole congregation saw it.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth, swelling and then settling under the voice
Wilkins: Good evening, neighbors, sinners, and you three gentlemen from the Collector's office who I know are listening with pencils licked. 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, New Hampshire, Merrimack County, a short spit from the Suncook River and a long spit from anybody respectable. I am your host, dentist, blacksmith, inventor, and the only man in this valley who can pull a molar and pour a dram with the same hand without washing between. Tonight we talk about the summer of 1862, when the men of this town did the most dangerous thing a New Hampshire stillman can do. They wrote a polite letter to Washington.
♪ Theme fades out under crackle
Announcer: A quick word, friends! Before the Doctor gets to Washington, hear this: the Flame-Flow Still, under United States Patent 10,561,960, is hammered from pure, heavy-gauge copper, and you can have one for your own parlor or shop. Go to moonshinestill.com, that is moonshinestill.com, and see the Flame-Flow today!
♦ Wax cylinder crackle; a log settles in the stove
♪ A short banjo roll marking Segment One
Wilkins: Segment the first. History, as it was suffered.
Wilkins: Picture Pittsfield in the summer of '62. The cotton mill on the Suncook is running short, because cotton has gone south with the rebellion. Half the young men are in blue with the New Hampshire regiments. Catamount Hill is green and the orchards are heavy with fruit. Every second farmer between here and Barnstead has a little copper pot in a back shed, set by for turning windfall cider into apple brandy, the way his grandfather did and his grandfather before that. Nobody calls it crime. Here it is called autumn.
Wilkins: Then on the first day of July, 1862, Congress passes and the President signs the Internal Revenue Act. It is the size of a Bible and twice as threatening. It carves the whole Union into collection districts. Every district gets a Collector and an Assessor, appointed by the President himself, and under them come assistant assessors who go town by town like a fever, poking into barns. And for the first time in the memory of any man living, distilled spirits carry a federal tax: twenty cents on the gallon.
♦ Wilkins sets a jar down hard on a plank table
Wilkins: Twenty cents! You might say that is not a king's ransom, and I would say you are not the one paying it. But it was never the twenty cents that made Pittsfield men tear their hair out, those that had hair. It was the rules. Listen how the rules ran.
Wilkins: First, the license. A distiller had to take out a license from the Collector, and the fee was graded by how much he made. The law even gave a cheaper rate to the little apple and peach brandy men, which shows somebody in Washington had met a farmer once, though probably from the window of a railway car. So old Ezra Tilton up on the Barnstead road, who makes six barrels in a good year and drinks four of them, walks into the Collector's office and asks what he owes. The clerk wants to know how many barrels he expects to make. Ezra says that depends on the apples, the weather, the Lord, and his wife. The clerk writes down 'uncertain' and charges him for certain.
Wilkins: Second, the books. A licensed distiller had to keep accounts. What grain or fruit went in, how much spirit came out, sworn under oath and returned to the government. Now I ask you, neighbors. Ezra Tilton cannot write his own name. He signs with an X that leans to the left like a drunk on a fence post. And Washington wants a ledger out of him? The only accounts Ezra ever kept were notches cut in the door frame, and his grandson ate the door frame the winter they ran short of molasses. That last part is a lie, but it is the kind of lie this valley deserves.
Wilkins: Third, and this is the part that set the whole Suncook Valley to cussing in two languages, both of them English: the tax was not charged by the plain gallon. It was charged by the proof gallon. Proof spirit in this country, by a rule the government settled back in '48, is spirit that is half alcohol by volume. Run your brandy strong, and the government counts every gallon as more than a gallon. Run it weak, and they count it as less, but you have paid all the same for the alcohol in it, so you have saved nothing but water.
Wilkins: Hiram Drake did not grasp that. Hiram thought he had found the hole in the fence. He watered his brandy half again to cheat the government, and he cheated nobody but his customers, which was a business he had been in long before Mr. Lincoln. The assistant assessor floated a glass hydrometer in Hiram's barrel, read the stem, scribbled a figure, and charged him exactly what he would have paid anyhow. Hiram stood there with a barrel of brandy so thin a trout could have lived in it, and a tax bill just as fat as before.
♦ Barnaby grunts outside, a low, questioning rumble
Wilkins: Yes, Barnaby, I know. You'd have eaten the assessor. Patience. We will get to the eating.
Wilkins: Fourth: the paper itself was taxed. The same Act put stamp duties on legal papers, deeds and contracts and bank checks and such, so that every bit of business a man did came with a little engraved stamp stuck on it. They taxed the liquor, then they taxed the paper you wrote the liquor down on, and I fully expected them to tax the ink and the thumb that held the pen.
Wilkins: Now. When a Pittsfield man is wronged he has three remedies. He can fight, which the war had used up our supply of. He can hide, which is the traditional remedy and the one I prefer. Or, as a last and most desperate measure, he can be polite. The Constitution of the United States, in its very First Amendment, gives every citizen the right to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. And so, that September, a dozen orchard men met in the back room of a store near the Turnpike, smelling of pipe smoke, horse, and fear, and they drew up a petition to Congress.
Wilkins: I have it here. I must tell you plainly that what I read now is my own telling of it, pieced together from memory and from the cussing that went into it. The words are not sworn record, no more than anything I say is. But it is true to the spirit, and spirit, neighbors, is my trade.
♦ Crackle of stiff old paper unfolding
♪ A slow, solemn fiddle line, mock-patriotic, under the reading
Wilkins: Ahem. 'To the Honorable the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States, in Congress assembled. The petition of the undersigned, farmers, cider-makers, and small distillers of the town of Pittsfield, in the County of Merrimack and State of New Hampshire, respectfully sheweth.'
Wilkins: 'That your petitioners are loyal men, who have sent their sons to the war, and their apples to the press, and both with the same full hearts.'
Wilkins: 'That your petitioners have lately learned they must purchase a license, keep books under oath, and pay a duty by the proof gallon. Your petitioners do not object to paying for the Union. They object to being made to understand how.'
Wilkins: 'That the stills of this town are small, most holding less than a washtub, and are run but a few weeks each autumn, when the windfalls would otherwise rot and feed only the hogs and the wasps, both of whom are already in a sufficiently intoxicated condition.'
Wilkins: 'Your petitioners therefore humbly pray: First, that stills of a farm size, run only on the farmer's own fruit, be spared the license, or charged a fee proportioned to a washtub and not to a Philadelphia distillery. Second, that the duty be payable at the close of the season, when the brandy is sold, and not before, when it is only hoped for. Third, that the assistant assessor be instructed to shut the farmer's gate behind him, wipe his boots, and refrain from drinking the evidence. And fourth, that Congress send down someone who can explain the proof gallon in plain English, in words of no more than two syllables, or failing that, with pictures.'
Wilkins: 'And your petitioners, as in duty bound, will ever pray.'
♪ Fiddle line ends on a sour, comic note
Wilkins: Then come the signatures. Ezra Tilton, his mark, X. Hiram Drake, in a hand like a hen walked through ink. Josiah Batchelder. Two of the Fosses, though they spell it three different ways between them. And at the bottom of the sheet, in a blob of red sealing wax the size of a silver dollar, pressed deep and clean, there is no name at all. There is a copper large cent, and stamped across Liberty's forehead are the letters G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin, ringing off the anvil
Wilkins: And that, neighbors, is the story of how I came to sign a letter to the Congress of the United States with a penny.
♪ Banjo bridge, quick and sly
♪ Banjo bridge fades, marking Segment Two
Wilkins: Segment the second: legends, outlaws, and the fools who wrote things down.
Wilkins: Here is why I would not put my name on that paper. A petition is a prayer with postage, and about as likely to be answered by return mail. But a petition from distillers is something worse. It is a list. A neat, clean, alphabetical list of every man in town who owns a still, in his own hand, sworn to by his own pride. I told the boys in that back room: gentlemen, you are not writing to Congress. You are writing to the Collector, and you are doing his work for him free of charge, and you have even put it on good paper.
Wilkins: They would not listen. Josiah Batchelder said a free man ought to sign his name to his grievance. I said a free man ought to stay free, and a name is a confession, but a penny is only a penny, and no assessor in Merrimack County has yet hanged a coin. So I took one of my stamped cents, heated the wax at the lamp, and pressed Liberty face-down into it like a man putting a baby to bed. It was the first petition in the history of the Republic to arrive in Washington with its own tip in the wax.
Wilkins: Did Washington answer? It did, in a fashion. Some weeks later there came a printed circular, the same one sent to every grumbler from Maine to Minnesota, explaining that the law was the law and thanking us for our patriotic interest. Josiah framed it. And about the same week, as I had said would happen, a copy of our names found its way to the assistant assessor for this end of the county. That is a polite way of saying some clerk in Concord turned our prayer into a hunting license.
♦ Barnaby grunts, chain clinks sharply
Wilkins: Yes, Barnaby, now. Now comes the eating.
Wilkins: The assistant assessor went down that list like a fox going down a henhouse roost. Tilton, Drake, Batchelder, the Fosses. He licensed them, gauged them, wrote them up, and drank a sample at every farm, so by the time he reached the bottom of the sheet he was in the condition our petition had so delicately described. He came up the Turnpike in a hired gig at four in the afternoon, with his ledger under one arm and his gauging rod under the other. A brass rod, neighbors, marked off in inches, near five foot long, and he carried it so proud and pointed so forward that I told him from my doorway that a man who has to carry one that size is surely making up for something.
Wilkins: He did not care for that. He said he had come to find whoever owned the stamped cent in the wax, since he had a strong suspicion. I said a suspicion was not a signature. He said he would just measure my still all the same. And he stepped off the path, toward the still-house window, toward the woodpile, and toward a black shape lying in the shade that he took for a pile of old buffalo robes.
♦ A deep, rising bear growl
Wilkins: Barnaby does not get up like a dog. He gets up like a hill deciding to stand. First the hump of the shoulders comes up, then the head swings round, and then you smell him. Rotten apples and wet wool and something dead he found in July. The assessor smelled him before he saw him and turned, and he swung the brass rod like a sword, which was an error, because Barnaby took it in his jaws as a gift. I heard the brass bend. That is a sound you do not forget, neighbors, a long, groaning squeal like a gate hinge in January, and when Barnaby let go there were four tooth marks punched clean through the metal. That rod, since you ask, now measures exactly nothing, which is about what the Act had measured in this valley.
Wilkins: Then the assessor ran. A sensible man runs straight. This one ran round in a circle, inside the length of the chain, which is the same as running in a circle round a lit stove. Barnaby got one swipe in, and he took the seat clean out of that man's britches with a sound like a sail tearing in a gale. Wool, linen drawers, and a fair slice of the hide beneath, a strip as long as my hand. I saw it hanging off a claw like a pennant. The man let out a noise like a steam whistle being strangled. Then he went straight at last, down the Turnpike, bleeding at a modest rate and showing all of Pittsfield the moon at four in the afternoon. The widow Foss was at her window. She says it was the most she had seen of the federal government in her life and she was not impressed.
Wilkins: And his ledger? He dropped it. Barnaby ate the first nine pages, which were the Pittsfield pages. He spat out the binding, he spat out the brass corners, and he chewed the rest down to a gray paste that sat in his belly two days and came out the third behind the woodpile, where I am told the paper was still taxable. The government wanted my books kept under oath. I keep my books under the bear, and they are safer there than in any vault in Concord.
Wilkins: Now don't you go chaining bears to your woodsheds on my account. A bear is a menace and Barnaby is a tall tale of this valley, and I want no letters. But I did pull a splinter of brass out of his gum afterward with my number-three forceps, and he let me, and then he licked my whole face from chin to hairline. That is the closest thing to a thank-you I have ever had from a client.
♪ Banjo and fiddle pick up a fast, rolling breakdown under the introduction
Wilkins: Now. I have a guest tonight who comes to us down a long and crooked road from the Brushy Mountains of North Carolina, out of Wilkes County. He is a man who has had his own quarrels with the Revenue and his own dealings with paper. Please welcome Mr. Junior Vance. Junior, sit down. Mind the stool, it has a short leg, like most of my arguments.
Junior: Doctor, I've sat on worse. Sat in a jail in Wilkesboro on a bucket for two days once. Proud to be here. That bear of yours looked at me through the window like I was a ham with a hat on.
Wilkins: He judges every man by his tenderness, Junior. Don't take it personal. Tell me, and I ask because tonight's sermon is all on paper: did anybody in your country ever try the polite road with the government? Petitions? Letters?
Junior: Lord, yes. Best one I know of, there was a gravel road out past our church. Washboard and mudholes, you'd lose a wheel or a kidney, take your pick. And the preacher gets up a petition to the county to have it paved. Well, every runner in the holler signs it, 'cause a paved road is a fast road. Then come Sunday next, here's two federal men in the back pew, and they sign it too, 'cause a paved road means they can catch the runners. Same paper, Doctor. Outlaw, lawman, outlaw, lawman, all the way down the page like a checkerboard.
Wilkins: The lion and the lamb, signing one sheet in the house of God.
Junior: And it worked! County paved it. And come the first night, the runners cussed it 'cause the agents could see 'em coming from a mile off on that smooth black road, and the agents cussed it 'cause the runners was going too fast to catch on it. Only folks happy was the preacher and the fella that sold the gravel.
Wilkins: There's a lesson in that, and the lesson is: always own the gravel. What of your own people, Junior? Ever write to a congressman?
Junior: My mama did. The agents was always tromping across our pasture hunting stills, and they never would shut a gate behind 'em. Our milk cow got out three times and once got clear down to the highway and stood in it like she was waiting on a bus. So Mama sat down at the kitchen table and wrote our congressman, real polite, Christian hand. Said, dear sir, I don't ask you to stop the revenue men, I just ask you to learn 'em how a gate works.
Wilkins: The same prayer as our petition, word for word near enough. The gate! It is always the gate. Did he answer?
Junior: Sent back a printed letter thanking her for her interest in good government, and a picture of himself. Signed. Big shiny picture with a grin like a possum eating a sweet potato.
Wilkins: And she framed it in the parlor, I suppose.
Junior: She hung it in the outhouse, Doctor. Right over the catalog. Said that way he'd be looking at the public service he deserved.
Wilkins: Junior, your mother has hung a politician in the only place in Wilkes County where one has ever been of daily use. I'd like to send her a stamped cent.
♦ Wilkins laughing, a slap on the table; Barnaby grunts in sympathy
Wilkins: Now our Pittsfield boys bought licenses and thought the license made them safe. Did you ever see that kind of foolishness down your way?
Junior: Doctor, I seen the champion of it. There was a fella on the other side of the ridge, I won't say his name 'cause his grandchildren still go to church. He heard you could buy a federal tax stamp for selling liquor. Which you could, they'd sell it to anybody, dry county or wet, didn't matter none to the people taking the money. So he buys one. Nice green paper, eagle on it, and he nails it right to the side of his still with a horseshoe nail. Figures he's legal as a Baptist wedding.
Wilkins: Oh, no.
Junior: Oh, yes. Agents come up the branch, find the still. He's stood there proud with his thumbs in his galluses, points to the stamp, says, I'm paid up, boys. And the head agent looks at it a long while and says, son, that says you can sell it. It don't say you can make it. Then they took axes to the pot, and every time an axe hit, that fella would holler, I got a stamp! I got a stamp!
Wilkins: That man nailed a federal stamp to his still and believed it a license. I once nailed a horseshoe over my door and believed it a lightning rod, and we were both corrected by Providence.
Junior: Sheriff's still got that stamp. Pried it off the copper with the nail hole in it and framed it up in his office. Folks would come by just to look at it, like it was a two-headed calf.
Wilkins: Now my favorite part of tonight's tale is the penny in the wax. When the law came to collect from you, Junior, how did you pay?
Junior: Well. One time I got fined two hundred dollars. And I'll be honest, the judge had a mean streak and I had one too. So I went home and dug up Mama's pickle crock, where we kept the quarter money, and I paid that fine in quarters. Eight hundred of 'em. Brought 'em in a feed sack and poured 'em on the clerk's desk, and they rolled off every side of it like rain off a tin roof.
Wilkins: Eight hundred quarters!
Junior: The clerk had to count every one, out loud, with the judge setting there watching to be sure I didn't short 'em. Started at about two in the afternoon. They lit the lamps. Clerk got to a hundred and sixty dollars and lost count when a quarter rolled under the radiator, and he had to start over. Judge said, Mr. Vance, are you trying to make a point? I said no sir, Your Honor, I'm trying to make a payment.
Wilkins: Two hundred dollars in quarters is not a fine, Junior, it is a siege, and you won it. I sealed a petition with one cent; you settled with the law in eight hundred pieces. Between the two of us we have proved the coin of this Republic is a weapon if you only know how to swing it.
Junior: Doctor, a man can't put you in jail for paying too honest.
Wilkins: Junior Vance of Wilkes County, ladies and gentlemen. Stay by me, Junior, and don't feed the bear. He's had his paperwork for the week.
Junior: Yes sir. I'll keep my hands in my pockets and my britches on.
♪ Breakdown resolves on a bright chord; crackle swells
♪ A brassy, carnival-style fanfare on cornet and banjo for the ad break
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♪ Fanfare ends with a cymbal crash and a single banjo pluck
♦ Wax crackle; slow drip into the jar resumes
♪ A low, warm fiddle drone for Segment Three
Wilkins: Segment the third: copper and the craft. And before one word, the plain law, the same as every week. Making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of the United States, and everything I say on this program is history and education, nothing more. I would no more have you running an unlicensed still on my say-so than have you pulling your own wisdom teeth with a pair of fence pliers, though I have seen both done, and the second one had a better outcome.
Wilkins: Since tonight is a New Hampshire story, let me tell you how the orchard men of this town made apple brandy, the very spirit our petition begged for. Step by step, the old way.
Wilkins: First, the cider. You press the apples, windfalls and all, though you pick out the rotten ones unless you fancy brandy that tastes of a dead mouse's Sunday shoes. The sweet cider goes into clean barrels, and the bung is left loose, or a cloth is tied over it, because fermenting cider throws off gas and a sealed barrel can burst like a Rebel shell. The wild yeast on the fruit will do the work, though a careful man adds a dose from a good batch. Three weeks or so, in a cool cellar, and the sweetness is gone and you have hard cider, a few parts in a hundred alcohol, sour and dry as a Concord selectman.
Wilkins: Second, the stripping run. The hard cider goes into the copper pot, filled no more than three parts full so it cannot foam up into the cap and choke the arm. A low fire. Not a roaring fire, a low one. You run it through once, quickly, and catch everything that comes out. This is called low wines: weak, cloudy, and stinking. You don't drink it. You don't even look at it with affection.
Wilkins: Third, the spirit run. The low wines go back into a clean pot, and this time you run slow, slow as a deacon's sermon, and here, neighbors, is where you make or break your soul. Here are the cuts.
Wilkins: The very first trickle off the worm is the foreshots. It smells like a varnish shop on fire, sharp enough to make your eyes water at an arm's length. Methanol lives there thickest, the wood spirit, the poison that blinds and kills. Methanol boils at about a hundred and forty-eight degrees by Fahrenheit's glass, sooner than good spirit at about a hundred and seventy-three, and so it rushes out early. But mark me well. It does not all come out in one neat little dose and leave politely. It comes off heaviest first and then smears on into the run behind it. So you throw away a generous measure of foreshots, not a stingy one. A man who saves his foreshots to save money is a man who will be paying the undertaker in installments.
Wilkins: After the foreshots come the heads, still sharp, still solvent-smelling, a headache in a jar. Those come off too, set aside, never drunk. Then, when the smell sweetens and rounds out and the apple comes through like a June morning in the orchard, you are in the hearts. That's your brandy. You catch it in small jars, one after the other, never one great crock, so if you misjudge a cut you've spoiled a pint and not a gallon. Then, as the run goes on, the spirit weakens and turns oily and smells of wet dog and old cardboard. Those are the tails. Set them by for the next run, or throw them out. The foreshots never go back in.
♦ Wilkins taps a copper pot; a deep, bell-like ring
Wilkins: Now, why copper? Not for beauty, though she is beautiful. Cider, and grain mash worse, throws off sulfur in the vapor, and sulfur is the devil's own perfume: rotten eggs, the back end of a goose, a smell like Barnaby after he's eaten a skunk in the dark. Hot copper grabs the sulfur out of that vapor and holds it on its own skin, so what comes out the worm is sweet. It's the closest thing to true alchemy in all my shop. The metal is changed so the spirit can be clean. That's why you keep the copper bright and scoured. The working part is the clean metal, and a dirty pot is only a pot.
Wilkins: And this brings us round to the tax, because the Collector's man did not taste your brandy or care for your cuts. He floated a hydrometer, that little glass float with a stem, and it sank deep in weak spirit and rode high in strong. From that he reckoned your proof gallons, and from your proof gallons, his twenty cents. Mr. Lincoln taxed the spirit by the proof gallon, which made every jar in Pittsfield the first thing in this county ever made to prove anything.
Wilkins: Three last commandments from the anvil, for safety's sake and they are no joke. One: never seal a still. A still must breathe out the worm, or it will build up steam until it lets go like a cannon, and I have pulled copper shrapnel from a man's cheek that taught me so. Two: no lead, anywhere, not in the solder, not in the worm, not in the jar lids. Lead is a poison, slow and sure. Three: keep your fire low and your eye on it, because spirit vapor catches like dry hay. More still-houses in this valley have burnt than were ever raided, and the fire is less forgiving than the sheriff.
♪ Fiddle drone resolves into a playful banjo roll for Segment Four
Wilkins: Segment the fourth: myths, slang, and the voices of the far-flung. We've had a message come to us on the call-in line, all the way up from Wilkes County, Junior's own country. Let us hear it.
♦ Wax cylinder crackle deepens; a hiss and click as the voicemail tape plays
Wilkins: Here's the tape.
♦ Faint, tinny playback of the caller's voice reading the question, with surface 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?
♦ Click as the playback ends
Wilkins: Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina! Rabbit, I have no notion how you got that nickname and I'll thank you not to write and tell me. Your uncle has done half a good thing and half a fool thing, and I mean to sort the two halves apart like a dentist sorting teeth from gravel.
Wilkins: The oak shavings first. There's a grain of truth in there. A thump keg, or doubler, has hot spirit and hot vapor working through it, and if you drop good oak in, the spirit pulls out the wood's tannin and color and a woody flavor, a little the way a barrel does over a year, but quick and crude. So your uncle's red oak may make his liquor darker and more flavorful. But making it taste of wood does nothing about where it came from. If the bad heads went into the jar, they're still in the jar, only now they're wearing an oak coat.
Wilkins: Now the hickory ash. Rabbit, hardwood ash is what your great-grandmother leached with rainwater in a hopper behind the house to make lye for soap. Lye. The stuff that takes the hide off your knuckles. Ash in the doubler is soap-making, not distilling, and if your uncle's whiskey lathers, he's made the only spirit in Carolina that will wash his own mouth out for him. The only cure for a bad head is the cut. Throw away the foreshots, throw away the heads, keep your hearts honest. There's no powder or wood shaving or charm in God's creation that does that work for you.
Junior: Doctor, I knew a man put a whole peeled peach in his thump keg. Said it was for flavor.
Wilkins: And was it?
Junior: Tasted like a peach that'd been through a war.
Wilkins: Then it was honest, at least. Rabbit, you get a stamped Wilkins cent in the mail for that question, and tell your uncle I said his heart is in the right place even if his ashes ain't. Shout out to Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller and all of Wilkesboro!
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: There's one cent for Rabbit. Now, while the anvil is warm, let's kill a myth. The blue flame. Every tavern-keeper from here to Portsmouth will pour a spoonful of spirit, set a match to it, and say: see how she burns blue, boys, she's pure. And if she burns yellow, there's lead in her, or poison, or the Pope.
Wilkins: Hogwash. Wood spirit, the poison, burns with a pale blue flame just as pretty as good spirit. You can set fire to a spoon of death and admire it like a lady's sapphire. The color of the flame is no safety test, and never was. A man who trusts a blue flame to judge his liquor will also trust a blue-eyed horse trader to judge his horse.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: There. That one's struck for the blue flame, may it rest in peace. And now some slang, since the petition gentlemen made such a fuss over it: proof. Where does 'proof' come from? The tale goes that in the old days sailors and soldiers, being paid in part with spirit and trusting nobody, would wet a pinch of gunpowder with the liquor and touch fire to it. If the powder still lit, the spirit was strong enough and it was proved. If it only fizzled, the quartermaster had been watering it, and was proved a cheat. I give you that as a tale and not as a sworn deposition. But I like it, because it means the first proof test was a little explosion, and so was the first tax bill.
Junior: Down home, Doctor, we proved it by whether Uncle Rafe could still find the porch.
Wilkins: And how did that test go?
Junior: Rafe's sleeping in the corn crib to this day.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin, a final ringing strike
Wilkins: And that one's for Uncle Rafe, wherever he lays his head.
♪ Theme returns softly, banjo and fiddle with antique warmth
Announcer: One more quick word, friends! The Flame-Flow Still, under United States Patent 10,561,960, is handcrafted of pure, heavy-gauge copper, ready for your tinctures and oils. Get yours at moonshinestill.com. Moonshinestill.com!
Wilkins: Thank you, Announcer. Neighbors, if tonight's talk of cuts and copper has stirred some curiosity in you, the honest, legal, schoolhouse kind, then I'll mention the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. It's the whole craft, set down plain: copper and how it works, mash and cider, heat and fire, and above all how to make your cuts so that nothing poisonous gets past you. It's taught with the respect for the law and the safety this trade has always deserved and too seldom got. Ask after it with the folks at Moonshine Stills.
Wilkins: My thanks to Junior Vance of Wilkes County, who has proved that a pickle crock of quarters is mightier than a judge. And to Rabbit Miller, and to Barnaby, who did the Republic the service of eating nine pages of its paperwork. And to the men of Pittsfield who wrote to Washington in 1862. They were wrong to sign their names, and right to say their piece. The law did change, neighbors, and change again, more times than a Turnpike stagecoach changes horses. That's the thing about a free country: a man may petition his government, and his government may ignore him, and both may go on loving the same land.
Wilkins: Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.
♦ Bear grunt and final drip into jar
♪ Theme closes on a last fiddle note; wax cylinder crackle fades to silence