The Drover's Road: Cattle, Corn Liquor, and the Roads Between Pittsfield and Concord
Dr. G. G. Wilkins walks the old drover's road from Pittsfield to Concord and on toward Brighton market. He covers turnpike tolls and shunpikes, drove-yard taverns, and drovers working as postmen, bankers and cover for jug runners, plus what a dentist hears with his forceps in a drover's mouth. Retired revenue officer Captain Donald Vance tells three new stories: a lead ox that knew every liquor barn on the Northwood road, a drover's tally book that hid jugs under the name of brindle heifers, and a toll-gate dog that ran contraband. Wilkins then answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller's question about hickory ashes and red oak shavings in the thump keg and debunks the old 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! Barnaby, you great furry sack of grievances, settle down! Yes, a drove went by this afternoon. Yes, you smelled two hundred head of Coos County beef walking past your window like a church supper on legs. You may not have one. The last steer you got your paws on cost me eleven dollars to the drover, and I had to fish the cowbell out of your dung with the fire tongs. Lie down.
♦ Bear huffs, chain drags across frozen dirt, a heavy body thumps down against the log wall
Wilkins: That is the sound of four hundred pounds of resentment going to sleep. God keep him, because I am tired of it.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth, swells, then settles under
Wilkins: Good evening, neighbors, sinners, and the two of you in Barnstead who are both. This is 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. I am your host, your dentist, your blacksmith, and, if the county is listening, your humble maker of tooth tincture. Tonight we walk the drover's road: cattle, corn liquor, and the long, manure-spattered miles between Pittsfield and Concord. Coming up we have a gentleman out of Manchester who once had the authority to ruin me and was gentleman enough not to, and a talking cylinder sent all the way from North Carolina. But first, a word from the fellow who keeps my lamp oil paid.
♪ Quick banjo vamp
Announcer: A quick word, friends! The Flame-Flow Still, protected under U.S. Patent 10,561,960, built of heavy-gauge pure copper, is waiting for you right now at moonshinestill.com. Copper as honest as a Sunday deacon and twice as handsome. Go to moonshinestill.com!
♪ Theme resolves and fades
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
The Drover'S Road
♪ Slow fiddle under, distant cowbells
Wilkins: Now then. Before there was a railroad worth spitting on in this valley, and there still is not one, though the gentlemen in Concord keep promising us a Suncook Valley line the way a Chichester suitor promises a ring, loudly, often, and with no intention of paying for it. Before all that, the way New Hampshire beef got to a Boston dinner plate was on its own four feet.
Wilkins: Every fall since before my granddaddy lost his first tooth, the drovers come down out of the hill country. They buy young stock and grass-fat steers from the farms up in Coos and Grafton and the Lakes, and over the Connecticut from the Vermont side, and they walk the whole bawling, farting, stamping procession south to Brighton market, just outside Boston. Brighton is the great cattle market of New England. Every week of the season the pens there fill with animals that walked a hundred miles or more to get eaten.
Wilkins: Some droves come down through Pittsfield, along the Suncook, past my very door, which is why Barnaby gets so worked up. Some swing west to Concord to pick up the river road south. Others cut across Chichester and Epsom to the old First New Hampshire Turnpike. That road was chartered in 1796, the first turnpike in this state, running from Portsmouth up through Northwood and Epsom and Chichester to Concord. And Chichester, mind you, is our mother town. Pittsfield was set off from Chichester in 1782, so every Pittsfield man is just a Chichester man who got tired of the Chichester men.
Wilkins: A turnpike is a road that charges you to walk on it, and the turnpike companies charged drovers by the head or by the score of cattle. You never heard such cussing as a drover counting out coppers at a toll gate for animals that were going to crap on the company's road for free. So the drovers did what any honest Yankee does when asked to pay: they went around. A road built or used to dodge the toll gate is called a shunpike, and this county is laced with them. Cow paths, wood roads, a lane behind a widow's orchard. A man who knows the shunpikes knows every back way between here and Concord, and I want you to remember that, because the drovers were not the only fellows who wanted to get somewhere without passing a gate with a man at it.
♦ Distant lowing of cattle, a dog barking
Wilkins: A drove is a slow beast. It makes twelve miles a day if the drover is sober and eight if he is not, and the cattle can tell you which by suppertime. Walking takes flesh off an animal. The drovers call it the shrink, and a steer that shrinks too much fetches less at Brighton. So the drover rests his herd every night at a tavern that keeps a drove yard and pasture, and he pays the keeper by the head for a night's grass. Up and down these roads you will find taverns with great stone-walled yards out back, and a tavern-keeper who could tell you the price of beef in Brighton before the Boston papers got it.
Wilkins: Here is the thing the fine people in Concord never understood. A drover is not just a cattle man. He is the post office, the newspaper and the bank, all walking on a sore pair of feet. He carries letters south for farm wives whose sons went to the mills at Manchester or to the war. He sells the herd at Brighton and carries the money home sewn into a belt under his shirt, and pays out what is owed to every farm he bought from, and carries a widow's mortgage payment to the lawyer for her besides. He knows who is sick, who is courting, who is broke, and whose barn burned. And many a copper cent I stamped on that anvil there, G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., went south in a drover's pocket and turned up at Brighton. My advertising walks to Boston on hooves and comes back in a rum bottle.
Wilkins: And, now and again, a drover carries a jug. Or nine.
♦ Glass jugs clinking in straw
Wilkins: Think on it like a revenue man. You are a federal collector, freshly appointed, sitting in a Concord tavern with a list of suspicious persons and a new hat. Down the turnpike comes a drove of two hundred steers filling the road from stone wall to stone wall for a quarter mile, raising dust like a Bible plague and laying down fresh manure in a carpet six inches deep. Dogs nipping. A boy on a pony. And way at the back, a hay wagon, or a drover's horse with fat saddlebags. Now. Will you wade a quarter mile of steaming cow shit in your new hat to poke at that hay wagon? You will not. Nobody does. A revenue man will search a peddler's cart to the axle, but he will not touch the back end of a drove.
Wilkins: That is why the runners love the drovers. A drover has a reason to be on every road in the county. He moves at the same pace every season, so his comings are expected and nobody finds them odd. He stops at every tavern and every barn with a good well. And nobody alive asks a man with two hundred cattle why he is traveling. He is traveling because the cattle are. A runner who rides along with a drove is about as noticeable as a fly on a cow's arse.
Wilkins: The suppliers along the way are discreet folk. A barn on the Chichester road with a lantern in the left loft window means one thing. A lantern in the right means the sheriff's cousin is visiting. A drover learns which barns sell hay and which sell the thing that makes hay fever pleasant.
♦ Clink of forceps dropped in a tin basin
Wilkins: Which brings me to my chair. A drover's teeth are a ruin. Three weeks on the road chewing plug tobacco, salt pork and ship's biscuit hard enough to shoe a horse with, and he rolls into Pittsfield with his jaw swollen up like a summer squash. He comes to me. I sit him down and give him a swallow of something medicinal. I take hold of that molar with the forceps, and while I rock it, he talks. Lord, how they talk. Which deputy is calling on which widow. Which tavern-keeper waters his rum. Where the new collector sleeps and whether he snores. A man with forceps on his molar tells the truth faster than a man under oath, and he does not get to bring a lawyer into my chair.
Wilkins: The drover gossip is how I heard about Hosea Crumb. Hosea was a Concord cattle-jobber, a buyer, the kind who meets a tired drover at the edge of town and offers him half what the herd is worth. He weighed with a crooked steelyard and dealt cards the same way. Some of the drovers let slip to me, mid-pulling, that Hosea had a mind to make himself a reward for informing on a certain Pittsfield dentist's still-house. And sure enough, one moonless night in October, Hosea Crumb comes creeping round my woodpile in the dark in his Concord shoes, feeling his way along the log wall toward the still-house window.
♦ Bear growl rising, chain snapping taut
Wilkins: He stepped on Barnaby. Not near him, friends. On him. Planted one Concord shoe square in the middle of a sleeping bear's belly. Barnaby came up off the ground like a black thunderhead and took Hosea by the seat of the trousers, and I mean the trousers and some considerable portion of what was in them. I heard cloth go, then something wetter than cloth. Hosea let out a squeal like a gate hinge in January and kept on squealing in one long note for so long I wondered where he found the wind. Barnaby shook him the way a terrier shakes a rat, three good shakes, and Hosea's hat went one way and his teeth, the false upper plate I had made him two summers prior, went the other. When the chain finally ran out and Hosea tore loose, he left behind half his breeches, one shoe, a stocking, and four long furrows down his backside you could have planted turnips in. I found the plate in the morning in the bear's water dish. Barnaby kept the shoe. There was something in the stocking that I chose not to look into.
Wilkins: Hosea Crumb rode out of Pittsfield the next dawn lying belly-down across the back of a big brindle steer like a sack of meal, bleeding gently into its hide. The drovers made him pay toll at the Chichester gate as one head of cattle, and the gatekeeper said he was overcharged. He never informed on anybody. He moved to Lowell. I hear he stands up to eat.
♪ Fiddle sting
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Runners On The Drover'S Road, With Captain Donald Vance
♪ Brisk banjo reel under, then down
Wilkins: The county has arrested me twice, and both times I was home in time for supper, so I will not bore you with the law. But I will tell you about the afternoon the Merrimack County sheriff learned what a drove is for.
Wilkins: October, two years back. A Coos drover I will call Lem, because that is his name and he cannot read, was bringing three hundred head down through Pittsfield toward Concord. I had eighteen jugs of my finest going to certain thirsty parties in Epsom and beyond. So the jugs went under the hay in Lem's wagon at the tail of the drove, and Lem's boy sat on top of the hay chewing a straw, looking as innocent as a choirboy who has just stolen the collection.
Wilkins: Two miles down the Chichester road, who comes trotting up behind but the high sheriff himself, on that gray mare of his, in a hurry to get to Concord. He comes up behind the hay wagon and he cannot pass. Stone wall on the left, stone wall on the right, and three hundred steers in between, all of them walking at the speed God and the shrink allow. He hollers. Lem waves his hat and hollers back that he will make room directly. He does not make room. For four miles that sheriff rides in the wake of three hundred steers, eating their dust, breathing their wind, and at one point some brindle steer let go a green cataract square on the sheriff's horse's forehead, and that mare has not trusted government work since.
♦ Wet splat, a horse whinnies in outrage
Wilkins: By the time the drove turned into the drove yard at the Epsom tavern and the sheriff got around it, there was nothing in that wagon but hay and a boy. The jugs had gone into a certain barn a mile back while the sheriff was wiping his eyes. And the sheriff, filthy as a hog and sore as a boil, stomped into that very tavern and ordered a drink to settle himself. And he was served, friends, out of one of my jugs. He said it was the best thing to happen to him all day. I agree with him. It is the only time he and I have agreed on anything.
♦ Coin dropped on a wooden counter
Wilkins: Now, my guest tonight has sat behind more cattle than that sheriff and done it with better manners. He is a revenue officer, retired out of Manchester, a man who spent his best years on the back roads of these mountains and the Green Mountains besides. He is a stern man, an upright man, and a man who has politely declined to put me in irons. Please welcome Captain Donald Vance. Captain, you have the jaw of a man who has been told no by every tavern-keeper in Hillsborough County and believed none of them.
Captain: Good evening, Doctor. Good evening, everyone. I believed one of them once. He sold me a horse. I am still walking.
Wilkins: Ha! Captain, I have pulled teeth that were more grateful than that bear out there, and I mean to ask you about the drovers. Did you ever work the cattle roads?
Captain: Doctor, half my working life was spent behind the back end of a steer. I have smelled more cattle than a Brighton butcher. You are right that a revenue man does not like to search a drove. But there is something you missed. A drove does not search itself, but sometimes a drove will tell on itself.
Wilkins: Tell on itself? Cattle don't talk, Captain. Except the ones in Concord who run for office.
Captain: Not with words. Let me tell you about an ox called Deacon. This was on the Northwood road, the turnpike, some years back. A drover out of the north came through every fall, regular as Thanksgiving, and every fall he was suspected and every fall he came up clean. Out front of his drove walked his lead ox, a great slab of an animal with one horn bent down like a question, and the drover called him Deacon, for his solemn look.
Wilkins: I have known deacons who looked like that. Mostly after the collection was counted.
Captain: Well, I was trailing along behind, pretending to be a farmer going to market. I noticed that every so often Deacon stopped dead in the road and turned his head to a certain barn. Not every barn. Certain barns. The drover would cuss him and prod him on. Now, an ox is a creature of habit, Doctor. Years of that drover stopping at the same barns had taught that ox where the stops were, and the ox did not know the drover was trying not to stop that year, with a revenue man trailing behind. By sundown I had marked three barns, and every one of them had a kettle and worm in the loft. Three suppliers in one day. And the ox found every one.
♦ Wilkins slaps the desk, laughing
Wilkins: Captain, if that ox had testified, he would have been the first honest witness in Rockingham County, and they would have hanged him for it out of plain confusion.
Captain: I did think about swearing him in. I decided he would be hard to fit in the witness box and harder to cross-examine. I wrote in my report that information was received from a reliable source who wished to remain anonymous. It is the only time I have called an ox reliable on paper.
Wilkins: What became of Deacon?
Captain: He went to Brighton with the rest. And I will tell you, Doctor, I did not eat beef for a week. A man ought to respect his informants.
Wilkins: That is the softest thing I have ever heard come out of a federal mouth. What else have you got? I want the crooked ones.
Captain: The crooked ones. There was a drover in Epsom, a careful fellow, kept a tally book. Every drover keeps one, bought this many head at such a farm, paid so much, sold so many at Brighton. Honest men keep them, and so do the clever ones. I got hold of his book one fall, lawfully, mind you, and I read it close by the lamp. Bought one hundred forty head. Sold one hundred forty head. All square. And then, sold at Brighton, eleven brindle heifers, at a price no heifer ever fetched.
Wilkins: A rich man's heifer.
Captain: That was what caught me. I had walked behind that very drove from Northwood to the Massachusetts line, Doctor, and there was not one brindle in it. Reds, blacks, a speckled ox with one eye. Not a brindle heifer in the lot. Brindle heifers was what he called the jugs. He bought them at the barns, sold them at Brighton to the tavern men, and wrote it all down as livestock, plain as Scripture. He kept honest books. He just kept them in his own language.
Wilkins: Hah! So he was a bookkeeper and a poet.
Captain: And a fool. A man ought not keep a record of what he does not want read. When I put the book in front of him, he looked at it a long while and said, Captain, them heifers was awful thin. I said they must have been, to fit in a jug.
♦ Wilkins wheezes with laughter, chair creaks
Wilkins: Captain, did you ever lose one? I like to hear a lawman lose. It is good for my digestion.
Captain: I have lost many, Doctor, and the one that hurt most was a dog. The Chichester toll gate on the turnpike. A drover comes up, counts out his toll by the score, all proper, and stands there chatting with the gatekeeper about the price of salt. And while he is chatting, his dog trots on through the gate. A big shaggy black and white fellow, belly near to the road. Now, I happened to be standing by the gatehouse, and I notice that the dog walks peculiar. Like a man with a full bladder in church. Wide in the hind legs.
Wilkins: I know that walk. I have walked it.
Captain: So I look closer, and strapped under that dog's belly, nestled up in all that long hair, is a harness with a stone jug in it. I sang out to the gatekeeper, what is the toll on a dog? He looked at me odd and said he supposed a penny. So I paid it, being a lawful man. I paid the dog's toll, and then I took after the dog.
Wilkins: Oh no.
Captain: Doctor, that dog ran half a mile and never spilled a drop. I ran half a mile and spilled everything I had. He went straight into a cedar swamp off the road, and I followed, and the swamp kept my left boot. I came out wet to the waist, short one boot and one penny, and the drover was still at the gatehouse talking about salt. He tipped his hat to me. The dog was waiting for him a mile down the road, dry as you please.
Wilkins: Captain, that dog had better legs and a cleaner conscience than any deputy in this state.
Captain: He did. And I will tell you something else. I never did go after that drover again. A man who could train a dog like that had earned his freedom. I wrote it up as one jug, transported by an unknown party, presumed canine.
Wilkins: Captain, you are a terrible revenue man and a splendid human being, and I mean both as a compliment.
Captain: I will take the second half, Doctor. The first half, I expect my old superiors would agree with. And I will say one thing more, for your listeners, since you have been so generous with my embarrassments. I was hard on the drovers who hauled bad liquor, the kind cooked in any old kettle and poured raw, because I saw what it did to men. A clean jug and an honest maker was a different animal. I never lost sleep over a brindle heifer. I lost sleep over a poisoned one.
Wilkins: Captain Donald Vance, of Manchester. Sir, you are welcome at Fort Wilkins any time, and Barnaby has promised not to eat your remaining boot.
Captain: I would hold him to it in writing, Doctor.
♦ Bear grunts outside, chain clinks
Wilkins: He cannot write, Captain. That is why he has never been convicted of anything.
♪ Banjo reel swells and cuts
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Ad Break
♪ Bright, rollicking medicine-show piano and banjo under
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♪ Medicine-show flourish, ends on a cymbal crash
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Copper And The Craft
♪ Low, warm fiddle drone
♦ Fire crackling under a kettle, a soft bubbling
Wilkins: Now let us talk about the craft, and I will say plainly what I say every week and mean every time: making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of these United States, and every word I say here is history and education, not a recipe for your woodshed. The Captain is still in the room and he has one boot left to kick with.
Wilkins: The drovers move more than cattle. In a lean year a hill farmer pays the drover in corn, or a drover brings a few sacks of southern corn north on the empty wagon, and that corn comes to men like me. So here is how corn becomes a wash, the way the old men did it.
Wilkins: Step one. You crack your corn. Cracked, not ground to flour, or it will glue up like wallpaper paste. To a bushel of cracked corn, figure fifteen gallons of water or thereabouts. You heat it and cook it, stirring the whole while, until it goes thick and sweet-smelling, like a porridge for a giant. Stir, I say, or it will scorch on the bottom, and a scorched mash makes a spirit that tastes like a burned-out church.
Wilkins: Step two, and here is where the ignorant fail. Corn is starch, and yeast cannot eat starch. Yeast is a picky little beast, like a Concord widow, and wants its sugar handed to it. So when the cooked mash cools to about one hundred fifty degrees, hot enough that you yank your finger back but not scalding, you stir in your malt. Malted barley, or sprouted corn the old way, which is corn you have wetted and let sprout, then dried. The malt carries the enzyme that turns starch to sugar, and you hold your mash in that heat, roughly one forty-five to one fifty-five, an hour or more, and you can taste it go sweet on your tongue. That is alchemy, friends. That is a dead grain turned to sugar by the life in a sprouted one.
Wilkins: Step three. Let it cool to about blood warm, the way you would test a baby's milk on your wrist. Too hot and you will cook your yeast to death. Then pitch the yeast, good brewer's barm, and cover it loose. Let it work four days, five, a week, in a warm spot, until the bubbling quiets and the cap of grain sinks and it smells sour and strong. Now you have a wash of a few percent alcohol, about as strong as a weak beer.
Wilkins: Step four. Strain it. Get the solid grain out before it goes in the pot. Thick mash on the bottom of a fire-heated still will scorch no matter how good your copper is. Copper spreads the heat better than iron, which is a large part of why we use it, but even copper cannot save a man who boils oatmeal over an open fire and walks away.
♦ Kettle lid clanks
Wilkins: Step five. Charge the still, and I mean no more than three-quarters full. Here is a danger every green fool learns the hard way. Overfill your pot or fire it too hot, and the wash foams up and comes boiling over into the cap, into the vapor arm, into the worm. We call it puking, and it is exactly as pretty as it sounds. Puked mash clogs your line. A clogged line on a hot still builds pressure, and a still with nowhere to vent is a bomb with a copper jacket. So: low fire, steady fire. Never seal the thing tight. Keep the path from pot to worm to jar open and clear. And never walk off and leave a running still, not to piss, not to pray, not to chase a bear.
Wilkins: Step six. The first run is the stripping run. You run the wash fast enough to pull the alcohol out of it, and you get a cloudy, rough low wine. Then you clean the still and do a second, slower spirit run on that low wine. And that run is where your soul is weighed.
Wilkins: Step seven, the cuts. Your spirit comes off in stages. Ethanol boils at about one hundred seventy-three degrees. Methanol, the blinding poison, boils lower, about one hundred forty-eight. But in a mixed pot they do not leave separately, like passengers stepping off a coach one at a time. They come off tangled together. The methanol and the harsh stuff are thickest at the start, but they do not leave all at once. So the first trickle, the foreshots, goes on the ground or in the lamp. Never in a mouth. After that come the heads, sharp and solventy, smelling like a paint shop. A wise man throws those out generous, more than he thinks he needs to. Then the hearts, sweet and clean and smooth. That is your spirit. Then the tails, oily and wet-dog, which you set aside.
Wilkins: And how do you tell where one ends and the next begins? Not by guessing. You collect in small jars, a dozen or two of them, numbered in a row. You let them air and you smell each one. You do not pour them all into a bucket and hope. A man who catches his whole run in one barrel has made a barrel of mistakes.
Wilkins: And step eight. Keep your fire away from your spirit. Alcohol vapor is invisible and it burns. More than one still-house in these hills has gone up with its owner in it because he set a candle beside the collecting jar to see by. Hang your lantern high and away, and keep a pail of water and a wet sack handy. Copper is forgiving. Fire is not.
♪ Fiddle drone resolves
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Myths, Slang, And The Call-In Cylinder
♪ Jaunty banjo pick under
Wilkins: Now, by the wonder of the age, we have a talking cylinder that came all the way up from the Carolinas, packed in sawdust, rattling up the coast by ship and rail and finally to my door on the stage from Concord, where Barnaby tried to eat the box. Let us crank her up.
♦ Phonograph crank winding, needle scratch, hiss
Cletus: Alchemist, my uncle swears old-timers used to throw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads. Is there any truth to that, or was he just making swamp medicine?
♦ Needle lifts, hiss stops
Wilkins: Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina! Rabbit, a man named Rabbit hailing from a town called Wilkesboro is the closest I have come to having a relation in the Carolinas, and I will not be sending you money. But I will give you an answer, because your uncle is half a scientist and half a liar, and that is better odds than most uncles.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: That's one cent struck for you, Rabbit. First, the hickory ashes. Ash from hardwood is mostly potash, that's potassium carbonate, a strong alkali. Lye, near enough. The first settlers of New Hampshire cleared their land by burning the forest and leaching the ashes, and they boiled down potash in big iron kettles and shipped it to Boston and England for soap and glass. Many a hill farm in this state was paid for in potash before it ever grew a turnip. So your uncle's ash is a real substance with real powers. An alkali will neutralize sour acids, and an old-timer who tasted a sharp, vinegary run and dumped ashes in might have tasted it come off less sharp and thought he had worked a miracle.
Wilkins: But here is the catch. Lye does not care what it eats. Put an alkali in hot liquor with the fatty oils that ride in a corn mash, and you are halfway to making soap. I have tasted a run where a fellow over-ashed his doubler, and it was like gargling a washerwoman's bucket. And the bad heads your uncle wants to scrub out? The ash does not touch them. Wood ash in the doubler is like a Concord preacher in a tavern: it may take the sour edge off the room, but it will not save a single soul in it.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Now the red oak shavings. Oak in liquor does something, sure enough. It gives color and tannin and a woody sweetness. That is why spirit in a barrel turns amber and soft. And plenty of old-timers seasoned their thump keg on purpose. They would throw in peaches, apples, a handful of something for flavor, and the vapor would carry some of that taste through. So oak in the keg is seasoning, Rabbit. It is cooking, not cleaning.
Wilkins: But mark this: red oak. Ask any cooper. A cooper will not build a whiskey barrel from red oak, because red oak's pores run open end to end like a bundle of straws. You can blow smoke through a red oak stave. White oak has its pores plugged up with natural growths, the coopers call them tyloses, and so white oak holds liquor and red oak lets it weep out the sides. Red oak in a whiskey barrel is like a Boston promise: the contents leak out before you get home.
Wilkins: So here is the true answer, Rabbit. Your uncle's ashes may sweeten the sour, and his shavings may season the taste. Neither one, nor anything else you put in that thump keg, will take the bad heads out. The only way the bad heads leave the house is in your hand, in a numbered jar, poured out on the ground where they belong. Tell your uncle he is a fine cook and a poor physician, and tell him Dr. Wilkins of Pittsfield sends his compliments and a stamped cent.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Now, while I have my punch hot, I have a myth to bury. The blue flame. You have all seen it in some tavern. A fellow pours a spoonful of liquor, puts a match to it, and declares that if it burns blue it is pure and safe, and if it burns yellow or red there's lead in it. Folks will swear on their mother's grave to it.
Wilkins: Hogwash. Every word. A flame tells you one thing: there is enough alcohol in that spoon to burn. That is all. Methanol, the very poison that blinds men, burns with a pale blue flame of its own, so pale you can scarce see it in daylight. A spoon of poison will burn as pretty and blue as a spoon of the finest. And a flame is no proper test for lead either. A dirty spoon or a bit of salt will turn a flame yellow, and the lack of yellow proves no man safe. A blue flame tells you the liquor will burn. So will the barn, and nobody judges a barn by the color of its fire either.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin, ringing out
Wilkins: That is four cents struck tonight, every one stamped G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., and every one will go south in some drover's pocket by Thursday. If you find one, friends, I made it. If you find a fifth one, I made that too, and I was drunk.
♪ Banjo pick fades
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Sign-Off
♪ Theme returns, soft and slow
Announcer: One more quick word, friends! Clean copper makes clean work, and the Flame-Flow Still, U.S. Patent 10,561,960, is the cleanest copper in the land. See it at the Fort Wilkins showroom on Route 28, or order direct at moonshinestill.com. That is moonshinestill.com!
Wilkins: Thank you, sir. Friends, if tonight's talk of malt and cuts and jars has you wanting to understand the old craft proper, the history and the metal and the chemistry, and above all the safety, then inquire after the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. The lessons go out by post and come with my own hand-drawn plates of still and worm. They cover the history of the craft, how copper is worked, how cuts are judged, and why the law is the law. Ask at the showroom here at Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike. Mind the bear.
Wilkins: My thanks to Captain Donald Vance of Manchester, who has lost a boot, a penny and his heart to a dog, and to Rabbit Miller of Wilkesboro, and his uncle, the finest swamp physician in the Carolinas. And to every drover walking the long road tonight between here and Brighton: may your steers stay fat, your toll gates stay asleep, and your brindle heifers stay quiet in the hay.
♦ Distant cowbells, fading
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 out under wax cylinder crackle