The Collector's Ledger Audit: How Revenue Books Were Checked in 1865
As the war ends, Dr. G. G. Wilkins explains how the new Internal Revenue men caught distillers by checking their sworn returns against the miller's toll book, the cooper's sales, the woodpile and the teamster's waybills. He also confesses that his secret second ledger, disguised as a dentist's tooth chart, was his cleverest idea and his worst worry, including the day a toothache put an assistant assessor in his chair. Retired revenue officer Captain Donald Vance tells four new audit stories: a ledger that was too perfect, a horsefly in the wrong month, a farmwife's egg-money book and a sugar-house that hadn't boiled sap in years. Wilkins answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller's voicemail about hickory ashes and red oak shavings in the thump keg and knocks down the 'lead burns red' flame-test myth at his anvil.
▶ Listen in the Radio Moonshine app
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! Quit rattling that chain like a Shaker at a barn dance. Nobody is coming up the turnpike tonight but the moon, and the moon pays no taxes either. Lie down, you great stinking rug. Lie DOWN.
♦ A heavy thump against the log wall, one long disgusted bear exhale
Wilkins: There. He has laid down on the woodpile again, which is where he keeps his opinions.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth
Wilkins: Good evening, neighbors, sinners, widows, mill hands, and any assistant assessor pressing his ear to the wire. This is Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, coming to you from the log walls of Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, in Pittsfield, Merrimack County, New Hampshire. I am your host: dentist, blacksmith, inventor, coin-stamper, twice-arrested man of letters, and the only doctor in the Suncook Valley who will pull your tooth and pour your courage from the same bench. The war is done, the boys are coming home up the turnpike thin as fence rails, and Washington has turned to the next battle. And neighbors, the most frightening thing to come out of Washington since the war started is not a cannon. It is a pencil. Tonight: The Collector's Ledger Audit, how revenue books were checked in 1865. Pull your chair to the stove and hide your arithmetic.
♪ Theme swells, then fades under the crackle
Announcer: A quick word, friends! Before the Doctor opens his books, start a fine new page of your own: the Flame-Flow Still, United States Patent 10,561,960, handcrafted in gleaming pure copper by Moonshine Stills! See it today at moonshinestill.com. That's moonshinestill.com!
♦ Wax crackle, a log shifts and settles in the stove
♪ Short fiddle sting
Wilkins: Segment the first. Picture the most dangerous man in New Hampshire. He is not a bushwhacker or a horse thief or a Concord lawyer, though he may be related to all three. He is five foot six, he has ink on his cuff, dyspepsia in his gut, and a little book under his arm. He is the assistant assessor, and he walks.
Wilkins: Here is how the machine is built. In '62 Congress built itself an engine for squeezing money, the Internal Revenue. A Commissioner sits at the top in Washington, as remote as God and twice as hard to bribe. Under him the whole country is cut into collection districts. Each district has a collector, who takes the money, and an assessor, who decides how much money there ought to be, which is the more dangerous job. Under the assessor is a flock of assistant assessors, one to a division, walking the roads of every town from Pittsfield to Pittsburg with their pencils sharpened like the teeth of a weasel.
Wilkins: A distiller has to register, take out his license, keep books of his business, and render his returns, and he swears to those returns. Remember that word, swears. Since the first of January the tax is two dollars on the proof gallon. Proof spirit, as the government reckons it, is half alcohol by volume at sixty degrees by the thermometer. So you cannot cheat the tax by pouring creek water in the barrel. The gauger floats his hydrometer, does his figuring, and taxes you on the proof gallons no matter how much water you added. You will only have made worse whiskey and paid the same tax for it, which is a double sin.
Wilkins: Through the war the revenue men were short of men, short of horses, and long on territory. But now the war is over, neighbors. Clerks and captains are coming home, the government owes more money than the Devil owes apologies, and the assessors have time to sit down and DO SUMS. And the sums are where they catch you.
♦ A quill scratching on rough paper
Wilkins: Here is the arithmetic that hangs men. A bushel of good corn, cracked, cooked, and fermented by a man who knows his business, gives near three gallons of proof spirit. Two and a half if you are clumsy, a hair over three if you are blessed. The assessor knows that number the way a parson knows Psalm Twenty-Three. So say Ezekiel Somebody of the upper Suncook buys three hundred bushels of corn in a season and swears on his return that he made four hundred gallons. The assessor licks his pencil. Three hundred bushels times three gallons is nine hundred. Nine hundred less four hundred leaves five hundred gallons gone into the fog. Five hundred at two dollars is a thousand dollars. And Ezekiel is either running the worst still in Christendom or he is a liar. The assessor always bets on liar, and the assessor generally wins.
Wilkins: And how does the assessor know Ezekiel bought three hundred bushels? Because Ezekiel is not the only man in Merrimack County with a book. The miller keeps a toll book, since he takes his pay in meal and has to account for every sack he grinds. The cooper keeps a book of barrels sold. The teamster keeps his waybill, and here in Pittsfield, with no railroad yet, every sack of western corn comes up from the Concord depot on a wagon with a waybill riding under the driver's seat. So the assessor does not need to catch you. He only needs to catch your neighbors writing things down, and New Englanders will write down anything. My grandmother kept a book of every egg she ever gathered and who she suspected of stealing them.
Wilkins: Then the barrels. A whiskey barrel holds forty-odd gallons. If the cooper sold you thirty barrels, you have room for twelve hundred gallons. A man does not buy thirty barrels to hold four hundred gallons unless he is storing his mother-in-law in sections. The assessor knows that too.
Wilkins: Then the fuel. A pot of a given size wants a given amount of hardwood to bring her through a run. An assessor who means business counts your woodpile in October, walks by again in March, and does a subtraction. He asks the neighbor's boy whether your chimney smokes at two in the morning. The neighbor's boy will tell him for a penny, and I say that as a man who has stamped a few hundred pennies myself.
Wilkins: So there are four numbers: grain in, wood burned, barrels filled, gallons sworn. Those four have to shake hands. If one of them pulls its hand back, the assessor smells it the way I smell an abscess, before the patient even opens his mouth.
♪ A sly little banjo walk-down
Wilkins: Now, how does a small town blur those numbers? I am only reporting what I have heard at the barbershop, the church steps, and the bottom of a jug.
Wilkins: Trick the first: you spread your grain around. Buy a little at Barnstead, a little at Epsom, some in Chichester, some up in Gilmanton, and none of it in your own name. Buy under your brother-in-law, your wife's maiden name, the hired man, the dead. My Uncle Asa has bought more corn since his funeral than he ever did alive. The trouble is that assessors talk to one another, and sooner or later one of them notices that a dead man in Epsom is the best customer in the county.
Wilkins: Trick the second is the hog alibi. Where did the grain go? Why, to the hogs. Then the assessor comes and looks at your hogs. A hog that eats a hundred bushels in one winter is either a miracle or a lie, and the only miracle hogs in Scripture ran off a cliff full of devils. One fellow down the valley declared eleven hogs. The assessor counted four hogs and a goat, and the goat looked guilty.
Wilkins: Trick the third: build your own barrels. You buy staves and hoops loose, as if for mending, and raise the barrels yourself in the barn at night, so the cooper never writes down a whole barrel. Or you book every barrel as cider. Honest cider is not taxed like distilled spirit, so half the barrels in Merrimack County were swearing to be cider when they were something a good deal livelier.
Wilkins: Trick the fourth is leakage. Every return in this county claims a powerful lot of loss to leakage and evaporation. Barrels in Pittsfield leak more than a deacon's confession.
Wilkins: And trick the fifth is my own, and I am proud of it. I am a blacksmith. My forge burns charcoal and hardwood from cockcrow to supper, honest as Sunday. So when an assessor counts my woodpile, I say, sir, I shoe horses, I mend plows, I hammer hinges for half the valley. He cannot tell which cord went under the anvil and which went under the pot. My best disguise was my own honest trade.
Wilkins: And then there is the double ledger.
♦ A heavy book dropped on a plank table, a puff of dust
Wilkins: I kept two books. The first was the White Book, for the government: neat as a Quaker's parlor, small in its numbers, sworn before the proper officer. The second was the Molar Book, and in it I kept the truth disguised as dentistry. Every entry reads like a tooth chart. 'Widow Pease, lower left first molar, three shillings' means three bushels of corn bought on the Barnstead side. The upper jaw was grain coming in. The lower jaw was spirits going out. Incisors were barrels. The wisdom teeth stood for cordwood, because it takes wisdom to burn it where nobody can see the smoke. It was the cleverest thing I ever did, because no assessor alive will open a dentist's book. It is full of blood, spit, and Latin, and I added the Latin myself.
Wilkins: It was also my greatest worry, and I will tell you why. A return is sworn. Lie on it and you have not just dodged a tax, you have committed perjury. And a second ledger in your own handwriting, with the true numbers in it, is nothing but a written confession you have signed in advance and kept on the shelf. Two books means two sets of sums, and a man has to keep both straight in his head. The day the two of them disagree, you are finished. I lay awake over that book more nights than over any sheriff. And one day the worry came and sat down in my own chair, which I will tell you about after we meet my guest.
♪ Fiddle bridge, rising and mischievous
♦ Wax crackle
Wilkins: Segment the second: legends, outlaws, and bookkeepers, the worst outlaws of all. First a story about a man who came to audit me personally.
Wilkins: One night last autumn an assistant assessor came up the turnpike. I will call him Mr. Pratt. That is not his name, and his grandchildren may yet turn out decent. Mr. Pratt decided he would count my barrels without the bother of asking. So he came at moonrise with a dark lantern, a nail keg to stand on, and a pencil in his teeth, and he set that keg directly under my still-house window. That is the same window Barnaby is chained beneath. I believe the man thought Barnaby was a pile of old buffalo robes. In his defense, Barnaby smells exactly like a pile of old buffalo robes that died in a tannery.
Wilkins: So Mr. Pratt climbs his keg, shades his lantern, and starts counting under his breath. 'Nine. Ten. Eleven.' And behind him, in the dark, the buffalo robes stand up.
♦ Low, rising bear growl, chain going taut with a snap
Wilkins: Barnaby did not roar. A bear that means business does not announce it, same as a good tax collector. He just opened his mouth and took the whole seat of Mr. Pratt's trousers, wool and drawers and all, with a sound like sailcloth tearing in a nor'easter. Then came a second sound, wetter, the sound of a man finding out he had lost more than his trousers. Barnaby had taken a piece of him about the size and shape of a good pork chop off the left cheek. Mr. Pratt screamed in a key I have only heard from a hog at butchering, which was fitting, since by then he had lost about a pork chop's worth of himself. The lantern went down, the oil flared up across the grass, and I came out the door in my nightshirt with a bucket in one hand and a lamp in the other.
Wilkins: Neighbors, I have pulled six thousand teeth, and that was the bloodiest thing I have seen outside a jaw. It ran down the backs of his legs into his boots, and when he tried to run his boots went squelch, squelch, like a man wading a cranberry bog. Barnaby sat back on his haunches chewing the trousers like a cow with her cud, very thoughtful. Then he spat out the man's little tally book, licked it, turned around twice, and relieved himself on it at length. That was the only honest audit his tally book ever got, and Barnaby did it without a pencil.
Wilkins: I laid Mr. Pratt face-down across my dentist's chair with his bare backside up to the lamplight like a harvest moon, washed the wound with high-proof spirit until he called me names they do not teach at Dartmouth, and put eleven stitches of silk into him with a curved needle. I charged him nothing, which is the only time I ever lost money on a revenue man's arse. He limped home to Concord, and his return for my division said, and I quote from rumor, 'records lost to an animal.' Barnaby took the rest of the trousers into his den and kept them all winter, the way a bachelor keeps a lady's glove.
♦ Satisfied bear grunt outside the window
Wilkins: You hear him? He remembers.
Wilkins: Now I promised you the worry made flesh. This past March an assessor turned up at my door on business of the ordinary kind, and his jaw was swollen up like a pumpkin on one side. Abscessed lower molar, angry as a Baptist at a cotillion. A man in that kind of pain forgets he came to audit you. I sat him down and got the forceps ready, and while I was warming them, God help me, he reached up to the shelf for something to take his mind off it, and the thing he took down was the Molar Book.
Wilkins: He opened it to March. He read for a while. Then he said, through his swollen face, 'Doctor, you pulled a powerful lot of molars this spring.' I said, sir, Pittsfield has a great weakness for maple sugar. He turned the page. 'Widow Pease, lower left first molar, Widow Pease, lower right first molar, Widow Pease, upper left...' Then he looked up at me with one good eye and said, 'Doctor, I boarded with Widow Pease in '58. She has not had a tooth in her head since Polk was President.'
Wilkins: Neighbors, I pulled that tooth before he could finish thinking the second half of his thought. Root and all, with a crack like a pistol shot. He fainted dead away, and a man in a dead faint is a very poor accountant. While he was out I tore March out of the Molar Book and fed it to the forge, page by page, and pumped the bellows until the whole spring of 1865 went up the chimney as smoke. When he came to I gave him a cup of water and a clean rag to bite on. He asked about the book. I asked, what book? He has never been sure since whether he dreamed it. I have been sure ever since that I am an idiot who owns a very clever system.
♪ Banjo flourish
Wilkins: And now, a man who has looked into more ledgers than I have looked into mouths. He spent twenty-eight years following copper through the White Mountains and the Green, he comes down to us from Manchester, and he has never once been bitten by my bear, which he credits to clean living and I credit to luck. Please welcome Captain Donald Vance. Captain, sit, sit. Not that chair, that is where the assessor fainted.
Captain: Evening, Doctor. I will take the stool, thank you. I can smell the forceps from here.
Wilkins: Captain, you have the face of a man who has read ten thousand ledgers and believed eleven of them.
Captain: Twelve, Doctor. One was a child's copybook, and it was honest because the boy had not learned to lie in arithmetic yet. And I have seen your penmanship. It is the finest defense you own, since no jury in New England could read it.
Wilkins: Ha! Fair hit. Now, Captain, tonight is all about the books. When you sat down with a distiller's ledger, what were you looking for?
Captain: The truth lives in the untidy places, Doctor. Honest books are messy. A man is sick one week, the corn comes in late, the yeast sulks, it rains on wash day, and the numbers wobble like a drunk on ice. When I find a book that never wobbles, I put down my coffee.
Wilkins: Tell me about one that never wobbled.
Captain: There was a man up at Bethlehem, under the big hills. His returns showed forty-one gallons every week, for two years. Forty-one, forty-one, forty-one, written as neat as a hymnal. I admired it for a while the way you admire a well-shod horse. Then I came to the week after Christmas in the year of the great blizzard. I had been through that storm myself, Doctor. No team moved on any road north of Plymouth for nine days. The snow was over the fence posts. The man could not have got corn in or carried wood across his own dooryard. And still the book said forty-one gallons.
Wilkins: Faithful man. The blizzard did not stop him.
Captain: Nothing stopped him, Doctor, and that was what hanged him. Nature is never that tidy. Even the Lord's own rain comes in uneven. When I asked him about it, he looked at his book a long while and said, 'Captain, I reckon I got into the habit.' He was making a good deal more than forty-one in good weeks and writing down forty-one regardless. I settled him for the difference. He thanked me. He said he was tired of writing the same number. Said it was like being married to it.
Wilkins: Ha! A man can only lie the same way so long before the lie gets boring. Give me another, Captain.
Captain: Over in Vermont, near Woodstock, a fine big farm with a fine big ledger. Six months of entries, June through December, and every page perfect. Same brown ink, all of it. Ink fades and changes, Doctor. A bottle opened in June does not look like that same bottle in December. And the nib was split, and it left the same little double line on every stroke, every page, half a year long. No pen nib lasts six months on a farm. A man sat down one night with one pen and one bottle and wrote out half a year.
Wilkins: Could have been a very loyal pen.
Captain: That is what he said. Then I turned to a page dated December the fourteenth, and pressed flat in the crease was a horsefly. A big green-eyed June horsefly, Doctor, flattened like a pressed flower. A June horsefly does not die in a December ledger unless he is a very dedicated bookkeeper. I held it up to the light and asked him what that fly was doing in the snow. He sat right down on his own porch step and said, 'Well, Captain, he must have been doing what I was doing, which is lying.'
Wilkins: God bless an honest liar. Now, Captain, I have heard it said the most dangerous book in any farmhouse is not the man's.
Captain: It is the wife's, Doctor, every time. Down in Haverhill on the Connecticut there was a man whose return showed modest amounts of everything. His grain was modest, his barrels were modest, and so was his conscience. Meanwhile his wife ran her own account at the village store, eggs and butter in against coffee and calico out, and the storekeeper had been charging the corn against her butter credit. She had written down every sack, Doctor. She did not trust the storekeeper, so she wrote everything down, date and weight. Her book showed sixty bushels more than her husband had ever sworn to.
Wilkins: Did she turn him in?
Captain: Not exactly. She came out to the barn while I was there, set her book on the barrelhead, and said, 'Captain, I have been carrying that corn on my butter for a year and I am done carrying it.' I could have written him up for a good deal worse. I assessed him for the difference and left the rest alone. She told me she would pay it out of his tobacco money, and she did, to the penny. He did not smoke for a year and a half. I am told it improved his temper and his breath.
Wilkins: There is your real revenue service, neighbors: a New England farmwife with a pencil and a grievance. Washington ought to hire them by the thousand. Captain, what about fuel? I confess that is my own territory.
Captain: I know it is, Doctor. I have heard about your forge. Over in the Green Mountains I had a man with a woodpile that disappeared like snow in April, and he said every stick of it went to boiling sap. A great sugar-maker, he said, the finest in the county. So I asked to see the sugar-house. He took a while finding the key. When we got in there were cobwebs over the arch thick as horse blankets, no ash in the firebox at all, and in the sap pan, which is supposed to be boiling forty gallons of sap down to one every spring, a mouse had built a nest out of chewed newspaper and raised three litters. Three generations, Doctor. That pan had not been warm in years.
Wilkins: The mouse had a better sugar season than the man did.
Captain: The mouse paid no tax either, and I did not write him up. I am a merciful officer.
Wilkins: Now, Captain, I have confessed my Molar Book on the air in front of God and Merrimack County. As a lawman, what do you say about a man who keeps two books?
Captain: I say what I always said, Doctor. The trouble with two books is that a man cannot remember which lie he told to which book. Most men I caught were not caught by me. Their own two ledgers caught them, arguing with each other like a married couple at a church supper. And I will add this. A clean copper pot, run by a man who knows his cuts and keeps his fire low, I respected, even when I had to put the law to it. The men I lost sleep over were the ones running whatever scrap and soldered junk they could find, selling poison to boys who did not know better. You can fight a ledger with arithmetic. You cannot fight a funeral.
Wilkins: Spoken like a man I would let near my bear. Captain Donald Vance, everybody, the only revenue officer ever to sit in my parlor and leave with all of his trousers.
Captain: And I mean to keep it that way, Doctor. Good night to Barnaby.
♦ Bear grunts once, as if answering
♪ Fiddle sting into the patent-medicine march, bright and brassy
Announcer: Step right up, friends, step right up! Are you tired of dented kettles, leaky tin, and pots patched together with God-knows-what from the junk wagon? Then hear me now! Moonshine Stills is proud to present the Flame-Flow Still, the flagship of American copper craftsmanship, protected under United States Patent number 10,561,960! It is made from heavy-gauge, high-purity electrolytic copper, the cleanest copper money can buy, and fitted with precision-machined brass unions that seal tight and come apart clean! The Flame-Flow is built to move heat in a smooth, even, rolling circulation, so you get the purest results for essential oils, herbal tinctures, and traditional distillation demonstrations that will make your neighbors stop and stare! Any handsome piece of copper will look fine on a shelf, but the Flame-Flow will do honest work for years. And the price, friends: just eight hundred ninety-nine dollars for the flagship of the line! See it with your own eyes at the showroom at Fort Wilkins, on Route 28 in Pittsfield, New Hampshire, where the bear stands guard and the copper shines! Or order direct right now at moonshinestill.com/products/flame-flow-copper-still. Once more so you have it: moonshinestill.com/products/flame-flow-copper-still. The Flame-Flow Still from Moonshine Stills: pure copper and real craftsmanship, made to last you a lifetime!
♪ March ends on a brassy chord
♦ Wax crackle, slow drip into jar
Wilkins: Segment the third: copper and the craft. Here is the joke of everything we have said tonight. An honest cut looks like a lie in the ledger, and a dishonest cut looks like a funeral in the churchyard. The assessor says three gallons to the bushel. A careful distiller who throws away what ought to be thrown away will come up short of that figure on paper. So let me walk you through the work, step by step, the way I learned it at this bench. Then you will see where the gallons go and why a man should write it down.
Wilkins: First, a word I say plainly and mean. Under the law of these United States a man needs a federal permit to distill spirits for drinking. What I tell you tonight is history and education, the way a schoolmaster tells you about Bunker Hill without handing you a musket.
Wilkins: Step one is the mash. Cracked corn goes into hot water and gets cooked until the starch gives up its sweetness, with a little malted grain stirred in to do the converting. Let it cool to blood-warm, never hotter, then pitch your yeast. Keep it warm but not hot, and keep the room aired. Here is something the old-timers never wrote down: yeast that is cooked too hot or starved for nourishment gets sullen and gives off a stink like rotten eggs. That is hydrogen sulfide. Copper will scrub some of that out later, but a careful brewer makes less of it in the first place. Treat your yeast like a good hired man. Feed him, keep him warm, and do not work him to death. After some days the bubbling slows and you have a wash, a sour beery liquid with less than a tenth part alcohol in it.
Wilkins: Step two is the stripping run. The wash goes into the copper pot, the fire comes up slow, and you pull off everything the pot will give, fast and rough, to get a low wine. Never run the pot dry. A dry pot scorches the charge, stinks up the spirit, and can ruin the vessel. And never, ever put an open flame near a joint that is weeping vapor. Alcohol vapor is invisible and it burns. I have seen a still-house on the Gilmanton road go up like a haystack in August because a man held his candle up to see where the smell was coming from. He found it.
Wilkins: Step three is the spirit run, and this is where you earn your honesty. Bring her up slow and gentle, and here come the cuts. The very first off the worm are the foreshots, a small and wicked portion. Out they go. Do not drink them, do not doctor a tooth with them, do not give them to your enemy, though I have been tempted. Next come the heads, sharp-smelling like cobbler's cement and lamp spirit. They go too, and be generous about it. You cannot smell or taste the poison in them for certain, so a careful man cuts by measure and good judgment and throws away more than he thinks he has to. Then the hearts come on, sweet and clean. Those are what you were working for. Last come the tails, oily and flat, smelling like a wet dog in a cellar. You set those aside to go back in the next run.
Wilkins: Step four is the proving. Cool a sample to sixty degrees, float your hydrometer, and read the proof, correcting for heat if you must, because warm spirit lies about its strength like a horse trader about a horse's age. Proof gallons are what the gauger counts, so they are what you should count.
Wilkins: Step five is the copper itself. Look inside your pot after a run and you will find a dark film where the copper has grabbed the sulfur and kept it. That copper is working on your behalf, so scrub her bright after every run and she will keep on working. And join your pot with proper metal and proper unions. A man who patches his still with lead from the junk heap is pouring poison into every jar and lying about it in his book.
Wilkins: And step six is what ties back to the assessor. Write down your discards the day you pour them out: foreshots and heads, so many quarts, with the date. Then when the assessor's three gallons to the bushel does not match your book, the book can explain itself. A distiller who throws away poison and then lies about the shortfall is a fool twice over. Be honest at the condenser and honest at the desk.
♪ Gentle fiddle interlude
♦ Wax crackle
Wilkins: Segment the fourth: myths, slang, and the mailbag, or the talking-cylinder bag, I suppose, since this one came in on the call line. Somebody wound up the machine down in the Carolina hills. Let us hear it.
♦ A click, a hiss of a recorded line, distant crickets
Cletus: Alchemist, this is Cletus Miller, folks call me Rabbit, from down in Wilkesboro, North Carolina. 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, hiss ends
Wilkins: Rabbit Miller of Wilkesboro, on the Yadkin River, in Wilkes County, which as near as I can tell is named after a relative of mine who made better decisions. Rabbit, the war is over and I will gladly shake a Carolina hand across the Potomac, especially one that writes in with a question this good. Let me take your uncle's two medicines one at a time.
Wilkins: First, the hickory ash. What is wood ash? Potash. Your grandmother steeped it in the ash hopper and ran water through it to make lye, and that lye made her soap and her hominy. Ash is an alkali. Throw it into a sour liquid and it will knock down some of the sourness, the vinegar sharpness of a mash that went off. So if your uncle's last batch tasted like a pickle barrel and the next one tasted a hair less like a pickle barrel, he may have honestly believed he fixed something.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: That is myth number one struck flat. Lye does nothing whatever to the poison that rides in a bad head. That poison is a neutral spirit and it does not care one fig about alkali. Your uncle's ash is like a revenue man's smile: it changes the taste of the afternoon but not one figure in the book.
Wilkins: Second, the red oak shavings. Put oak in spirit and it bleeds tannin and color and a woody taste. White liquor goes the color of weak tea and drinks a little rounder, so a man thinks he has aged it or cleaned it. He has only dressed it up for church. And here is a cooper's fact for you, Rabbit. Barrels are made of white oak, because white oak's pores are corked up inside with little natural plugs. Red oak's pores run open end to end. Cut a short stick of red oak and you can blow your pipe smoke clean through it. Red oak holds liquor about as well as a Concord alderman holds a secret.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: That is myth number two flattened on the anvil. Neither the ash nor the shavings will clean a bad head. Only the cut cleans a bad head: foreshots and heads go out in the dirt, the hearts go in the jar, and no amount of witchcraft in the thump keg replaces it. So, Rabbit, your uncle is half a chemist and half a swamp doctor, and that is more chemist than most uncles. Give him my regards and do not let him near the doubler with a shovel.
Wilkins: Now, while the anvil is hot, one more myth that has killed better men than me. The flame test. You have all heard the rhyme. Pour a spoonful, put a match to it, and if it burns blue it is true, but 'lead burns red and makes you dead.'
♦ A match struck, a soft whoosh of flame
Wilkins: The color of that flame depends on how strong the spirit is, what the spoon is made of, how much soot is on it, and whether the cat sneezed. The real poison from a careless head burns with a pale blue flame, the same as good spirit. It will pass your fine little test and kill you anyway. And a pinch of dissolved lead from a soldered radiator pipe will not turn anything red that you can trust your life to.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin, twice, ringing
Wilkins: There. Lead burns red, makes you dead, is a fine rhyme, and so is 'Mary had a little lamb,' and I would not test a jar by either one. Clean copper, no lead, generous cuts. That is the only test, and it is done before the jar is ever filled. I have just stamped two pennies, G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., and the first goes in the mail to Rabbit Miller in Wilkesboro so he will have proof he beat his uncle in an argument. The second goes to Barnaby. He will not spend it. He will hide it in Mr. Pratt's trousers.
♦ Bear grunt, chain clink
♪ Banjo and fiddle reprise, warm and slow
Announcer: A quick word before we part, friends! When you want copper you can trust, choose the Flame-Flow Still, United States Patent 10,561,960, from Moonshine Stills. Visit moonshinestill.com today, that's moonshinestill.com!
Wilkins: Neighbors, if tonight has made you want to learn the craft properly, from the mash tub to the hydrometer to the honest cut, sign up for the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. I teach copper, cuts, fire, and arithmetic, and how to keep one honest book instead of two, which I learned the hard way so that you do not have to. Ask for it at the Fort Wilkins showroom on Route 28 in Pittsfield, and I will teach you everything I know except where I hid the Molar Book I started in April.
Wilkins: My thanks to Captain Donald Vance for his flies, his mice, and his farmwives, to Rabbit Miller down in Wilkesboro, to the Widow Pease for her sacrifice to science, and to Mr. Pratt, wherever he is sitting tonight, carefully. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.
♦ Bear grunt and final drip into jar
♪ Theme fades into wax cylinder crackle, then silence