Pig Copper and Paul Revere's Heirs: Where New England Still's Metal Came From
Dr. G. G. Wilkins follows copper from Lake Superior and Vermont ore to the Revere rolling mill at Canton, through Boston wharf merchants and Yankee tin peddlers, and finally to his own anvil in Pittsfield. He explains why rolled sheet cost so dear, how old kettles and stripped ship sheathing were turned into stills, and how a stillman tested a plate by its ring. Retired revenue officer Captain Donald Vance tells new stories: a whistling still made from ship sheathing, a peddler who sold a still in panels, a stolen widow's wash-boiler, and a fake copper pot patched with tea-chest lead. Wilkins also answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller's question about hickory ashes and red oak shavings in the thump keg, and knocks down the blue-flame myth.
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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 walking haystack, leave off that window frame. That's white pine. I split it myself and you are not a beaver, whatever your mother told you.
♦ Bear grunts lower, chain drags across frozen dooryard
Wilkins: There. Lie down on your bone and dream of deputies. He has the table manners of a Congressman and the breath of a tannery, friends, and I love him the way a man loves a bad tooth he's too stubborn to pull.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth
Wilkins: Good evening, Suncook Valley, and good evening to every hill farm, mill boardinghouse and tavern back room that can hear me. This is Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, broadcasting from the log walls of Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, in Pittsfield, New Hampshire. I am your host, dentist, blacksmith and humble alchemist. Tonight we follow the metal: where the copper in a New England still came from, how it got here, what it cost, and how a man with an honest ear can tell a good plate from a bad one with one rap of his knuckle.
Wilkins: Mind you, everything spoken at this fort tonight is history and education. Making spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of the United States, and I have the county docket to prove the law means it.
♪ Theme fades to a single banjo roll
Announcer: A quick word, friends! Every great still begins with great copper, and nobody's copper stands taller than the Flame-Flow Still, United States Patent 10,561,960, built in heavy-gauge pure copper. Go see it at moonshinestill.com. That's moonshinestill.com!
♦ Wax crackle swells, then settles
♪ Low fiddle drone under
Wilkins: Segment the first. Pig Copper and Paul Revere's Heirs.
Wilkins: Most of you know Paul Revere as the silversmith who galloped out of Boston in '75 hollering about the regulars. Here is what the schoolmasters skip. Revere spent the back end of his life getting rich off copper, and every stillman between the Merrimack and the Connecticut owes that old man a tip of the hat and a curse under the breath.
Wilkins: Revere had a foundry in Boston where he cast church bells and bronze cannon. Bells for the Lord and cannon for the Lord's enemies, which is what I call a balanced ledger. But nobody in the young Republic could roll sheet copper. Every flat sheet came from England, and the English charged for it like a Portsmouth dentist charges a drunk sailor. So around 1801 Revere set up a rolling mill on the river at Canton, Massachusetts, with ten thousand dollars of the government's money loaned to him, and he made the first successful rolled copper sheet in this country.
Wilkins: The first of that sheet went over the dome of the State House in Boston, and more went onto the bottom of the frigate Constitution. So the same copper that kept the shipworm off Old Ironsides is the grandfather of the copper that's sweating in my still-house tonight. I like to think that makes my liquor a naval veteran.
Wilkins: Paul Revere rode all night to warn that the British were coming. Had he known what his copper would cost me in '64, he'd have ridden the other way.
♦ Fire crackles in the forge, bellows wheeze
Wilkins: The old man died in 1818, and his heirs kept the works going and made it the Revere Copper Company in 1828. Now you'd think that once a Yankee mill was rolling copper, copper would come cheap. You'd be wrong, and I'll tell you why in the language of the forge.
Wilkins: First, the raw metal. They call a cast lump of smelted copper a pig, or a cake, or an ingot, depending on who's selling and how drunk he is. In my boyhood that metal came across the ocean from Cornwall and the Welsh smelting works at Swansea, with Chile ore in the holds. Then in the forties the Keweenaw country up on Lake Superior opened, and that's the strangest copper God ever buried. It lies in the rock pure, native metal, and some masses run to hundreds of tons. The miners can't blast a lump that size without wrecking the drift, so they stand there with cold chisels and cut it apart by hand, chip by chip, for weeks. Imagine pulling a molar the size of a Concord meetinghouse with a nail file and you'll have the picture.
Wilkins: Closer to home, the Vermont mines at Vershire and Strafford are sending ore down the valleys right now, and a man can stand on a ridge over there and smell the roasting heaps three miles off. Smells like the Devil burned his breakfast.
Wilkins: Second, the rolling. You don't just push a pig of copper between two rollers and get a bedsheet. Copper hardens as you work it. Roll it, hammer it, bend it, and it goes stiff and cranky until it cracks at the edges like a spinster's patience. So the mill rolls it a little, then heats it to a dull red and anneals it soft, then rolls it again, heats it again, over and over. That takes water power, iron rolls as heavy as an ox, coal, and men who know when to stop. Here's the queer part, and every blacksmith who comes from iron has to learn it the hard way: heat steel red and plunge it in water and it goes hard as a sheriff's heart. Heat copper red and plunge it and it comes out soft as butter. Copper is the only metal in New England more stubborn than a Pittsfield selectman, and the only one that softens when you throw cold water on it.
Wilkins: Third, the war. Every Napoleon cannon the Union cast is bronze, and bronze is mostly copper. Every percussion cap that went off at Gettysburg was a pinch of copper. The army ate copper the way Barnaby eats a dropped ham, and by '64 ingot had run up near half a dollar a pound and sheet more than that. A good forty-gallon pot wants thirty or forty pounds of heavy plate, and you can do the sum. That's a year of honest farm cash, which is why nobody around here buys a still with honest farm cash.
♦ Wagon wheels on frozen ruts, harness jingle
Wilkins: Now how does sheet get from Canton to Pittsfield? It goes into Boston to the merchants on the wharves, the metal dealers and ironmongers along Long Wharf and Broad Street. A Boston copper merchant smiles at you the way I smile at a molar: friendly, patient, and fixing to take something out of you that you will never get back. From Boston it rides the cars north to the Concord depot. And there it stops, because Pittsfield has no railroad. The gentlemen keep promising us a Suncook Valley line and keep not building it, so the last fifteen miles come up the turnpike by wagon, past the mills, through the mud, with a teamster who drinks a toll at every tavern.
Wilkins: Then there are the peddlers. The Yankee tin peddler started in Berlin, Connecticut, last century and now he covers every road in New England with a cart that clanks like a drunk knight. He sells tin pans, sad irons and pins, and if you lean close and pay cash, he'll sell a roll of copper and not ask what it's for. He also buys old copper. That brings us to the dirty secret of the New England still. Most of them were never new.
Wilkins: A country stillman builds out of what wears out: a cracked brewing kettle from a dead aunt's kitchen, a wash-boiler, a dented apple-butter pot, a broken dyer's vat from the woolen mill. And best of all, ship sheathing. Every few years a ship's copper bottom gets stripped and replaced, and the old sheets go off to the junk yards in Portsmouth, Salem and New Bedford by the cartload. They're thin, bent and full of nail holes, but it's copper, and cheaper than new. Since the thirties a lot of ships have gone over to Muntz's yellow metal, which is brass, copper and zinc together, and that's a different animal I'll come back to.
♦ Barnaby grunts, chain clinks
Wilkins: Yes, Barnaby, I'm getting to the thief. Hush.
Wilkins: Two winters back I had a fine stack of sheet copper under the woodshed eave, waiting on the anvil. One moonless night a fellow from over Barnstead way, whose name I won't give out of Christian charity, came with a pry bar and a feed sack. He never reckoned on the length of Barnaby's chain. I woke to a sound like a barn door being torn off its hinges by a hurricane, and that was only the man's homespun trousers. Then came a yelp, high and thin, like a hinge in need of oil, then a wet sort of thump, and then a long silence that worried me more than the yelling. By lantern light I found the feed sack, one boot with a good deal of sock still in it, a hank of hair on the chain, and three teeth lying in the frost like dropped dice. Barnaby was licking his paw, satisfied as a deacon after a fish chowder. The thief had gone over the stone wall and up the road at a speed I'd call medically remarkable. I knew him by the teeth. I had filled one of them myself in '59, and I never forget my work, though my patients try hard to. He came back in the spring to have the rest looked at, and I charged him for the three he left in my dooryard.
♪ Fiddle sting, wax crackle
♪ Banjo walk-up
Wilkins: Segment the second. Legends, outlaws and the men who chase them. And tonight I've got one of the chasers sitting in my own cabin, in my good chair, drinking my coffee. Coffee, I swear it on Barnaby's fleas. Friends, a revenue man. Captain Donald Vance.
Captain: Evening, Doctor. Evening to your listeners. And I'll say on the record that this is the first time I've sat inside Fort Wilkins without a warrant in my coat.
Wilkins: The night's young, Captain. Now, before you tell your tales I'll tell one of mine, so you'll know what kind of company you've fallen into.
Captain: I'd expect nothing less.
Wilkins: In the winter of '63 a Boston dealer wrote to me, all copperplate handwriting and lies, offering old sheathing off a New Bedford whaler being broken up, sold by the hundredweight and cheap. I sent the money and down came the wagon, and the sheets were sound enough. But every square foot was still full of copper tacks, hundreds and hundreds, driven in by some shipwright who must have hated the world. I had no puller fit for the job. So I sat by this stove for three nights with my dental forceps, the same instruments I use on the jaws of this county, and pulled two thousand tacks out of that whaler's sheathing. Every one of them fought harder than a deacon's bicuspid. I counted them into a crock, and the crock of tacks alone weighed eleven pounds, which I sold back to the same dealer for more than he charged me for the sheets. So in the end Boston paid me to do dentistry on a whale ship.
Captain: Ha! You know, Doctor, I've seen that very kind of copper go into a still, and that's my first story for you.
Wilkins: Then out with it.
Captain: There was a camp in the hills above the Piscataqua, back from the coast. My men and I knew there was a still running at night, because we could smell it on the wind, but we couldn't find it for a fortnight. The woods were thick, the boys were careful, and they ran no fire by day. Then one still night in October I heard whistling. Not a tune. Something thin, many-voiced and wavering, like a dozen teakettles all at once.
Wilkins: Sounds like the Methodist choir at a funeral.
Captain: Not far from it. We followed that whistle a half mile through the brush and found the still running in a hemlock hollow. It was built out of stripped ship sheathing, and the fellow had plugged every old tack hole with a whittled pine peg. When the pot got hot the pegs shrank and the vapor came singing out around them. He had built himself a church organ and didn't know it.
Wilkins: That still whistled like a teakettle choir. It was the first church music some of those boys had heard since their christening.
Captain: And the copper told me where it came from. There were barnacle scars on the outside, the little rings where the shells had grown, and the edges were sheared in the pattern of one particular shipbreaker's yard in Portsmouth. I paid that yard a visit the next week, and the owner's ledger had a line in it that read 'old copper, to a gentleman, paid in cheese.'
Wilkins: The revenue men say they follow the money. I follow the copper, because the money in this county is mostly my coins with my name on them. Go on, Captain. You've got a second, I can see it in your mustache.
Captain: There was a tin peddler who worked the hill towns between the Merrimack and the Connecticut. A cheerful man with a cart full of pans and a laugh you could hear across a mill pond. In the course of one summer he sold a big copper milk pan, a curious one with a flanged edge and rivet holes along one side, to seven different farms in the same township. Each farmer got one panel. Then at a husking bee in the fall, all seven panels came out of seven wagons and were riveted together in an evening, and there stood a still, neat as you please. Every man owned a piece and no man owned the whole.
Wilkins: Seven farmers each bought a milk pan, and not a one of them owned enough cows to fill a teacup.
Captain: That's how I got wind of it, Doctor. The assessor's rolls showed eleven cows in that township and seven new milk pans. So I went and found the peddler and bought the eighth panel myself, the lid. He sold it to me cheerful as a lark. Then I gathered the other seven by warrant and laid all eight pieces out on the courthouse table, and they fit like a jigsaw map. The peddler stood in the gallery whistling, the farmers stood in the dock looking at their boots, and the judge said he'd never seen a better-made piece of evidence in his life.
Wilkins: And the peddler?
Captain: Fined for the panels and acquitted of the rivets. He was back on the road in a month, selling the judge's wife a colander.
Wilkins: God bless the Yankee peddler. He'd sell a sheriff his own handcuffs and throw in a key for a nickel. Now Captain, I'm told you once caught a man with a widow's property.
Captain: That I did. An elderly widow came to my office in tears, on foot, eight miles in the rain. Her copper wash-boiler was gone off her back stoop. It was the one thing her late husband had bought her new, and she'd boiled his shirts in it for thirty years. Now, the sheriff wasn't interested in a wash-boiler. I was, because a wash-boiler is the right size and shape for a still's cap.
Wilkins: By God, it is.
Captain: Two weeks later we raided a sugarhouse up a back road, and there it was sitting upside down on a pot, with a pipe soldered into the bottom of it and her husband's initials stamped in the handle. The fellow had stolen a widow's washtub to make a still head, and he'd done it badly besides.
Wilkins: What did the court do to him?
Captain: The magistrate was a practical man. He fined the fellow and then sentenced him to do the widow's laundry every Monday for a month, in her kitchen, under her eye, wearing her apron. I went by on the second Monday to check on him. She was sitting in her rocker with a cup of tea telling him he was wringing the sheets wrong, and he looked like a man who'd have rather gone to Concord prison.
Wilkins: There is no punishment in the statute books crueler than doing a New Hampshire widow's laundry with her watching. I'd take Barnaby's chain first.
Captain: He said the same. Didn't steal a thing again that I ever heard.
Wilkins: Captain, you'll stay on for the copper talk after the pitchman has his say?
Captain: I wouldn't miss it. I'd like to hear how a dentist rings a plate.
Wilkins: And you'll keep your feet out of the dooryard. Barnaby has never met a revenue man he didn't want to taste.
♦ Barnaby grunts, long and low, chain rattles
Captain: I'll keep my boots where I can see them, Doctor.
♪ Brisk banjo vamp, patent-medicine wagon flourish
Announcer: Step right up, ladies and gentlemen, step right up to Fort Wilkins! You have heard tonight how hard good copper is to come by: shipped from Lake Superior, rolled at the mills, carted up muddy roads, and patched together from old kettles and worm-eaten ship bottoms. Friend, those days are done! Behold the Flame-Flow Still, the flagship of Moonshine Stills, protected under United States Patent 10,561,960! If you appreciate authentic American craftsmanship, look no further. The Flame-Flow is built of heavy-gauge, high-purity electrolytic copper. There are no tack holes, no lead patches and no widow's wash-boiler! The joints are precision-machined brass unions, cut true as a watchmaker's gear. It is engineered to maximize convective circulation and give unmatched purity for essential oils, herbal tinctures, and traditional distillation demonstrations. Rap it with your knuckle and hear it sing! All this for eight hundred ninety-nine dollars. Stop by the showroom at Fort Wilkins on Route 28 in Pittsfield, New Hampshire, where the bear will greet you, or order direct at moonshinestill.com! I'll say it again, so write it on your cuff: moonshinestill.com, slash products, slash flame-flow-copper-still. That's https://moonshinestill.com/products/flame-flow-copper-still. The Flame-Flow Still, real copper for real craftsmen!
♪ Wagon flourish ends on a banjo strum
♦ Wax crackle, forge fire, a hammer rests on the anvil
Wilkins: Segment the third. Copper and the craft. Captain, you're still with us?
Captain: Still here, and the coffee's still coffee.
Wilkins: First, why copper at all? Iron rusts and stinks, and so a cheap still makes cheap liquor. Copper does two things. It carries heat even and quick, so your charge doesn't scorch in one corner and sulk in another. And it takes hold of the sulfur in the vapor, the rotten-egg, boiled-cabbage foulness, and keeps it on the metal, so your spirit comes out sweet. That's the alchemy of it. The copper sacrifices itself a little, black and dull, to keep your jar clean. That's why you scrub the still bright after every run.
Wilkins: Now the ring. When I buy a plate, whether it's new sheet off a Concord wagon or old copper off a peddler's cart, I don't trust my eyes. Paint, grease and soot will hide anything. I hang the sheet by one corner from a string so nothing touches it, and I rap it with a knuckle or a small hammer. A sound plate rings clear and even and dies away slow, like a church bell across a valley. If there's a crack, even one too small to see, or a blister, or a place where the sheet has split into layers inside from bad rolling, it buzzes like a hornet in a jar or goes dead with a thud. It's the same test the railroad's wheel-tappers use at the depot and that Revere's bell-casters used on a new bell. Mind one thing: hard-rolled copper rings bright and high, and annealed copper rings softer, so a dull note doesn't damn a plate by itself. A buzz does. A rattle does.
Captain: May I tell one on that, Doctor? It's the sorriest still I ever seized.
Wilkins: The floor's yours.
Captain: A traveling dealer was going round the Merrimack towns selling 'pure copper pots' cheaper than any honest smith could. One family bought one. The man of the house used it for his cider brandy and the whole family went down sick, all of them pale with gripes in the belly, and the doctor called it colic. When I went in, I rapped the pot with my cane and it buzzed like a saw. I scraped it with my knife, and under the shine was sheet iron, painted over with bronzing powder.
Wilkins: Bronzing powder on sheet iron is like rouge on a mule: it fools you from the road and nowhere closer.
Captain: Worse than that. The seams were patched with soft gray metal, and when I peeled it back I found writing in Chinese. He'd cut up the lead foil from the inside of a tea chest and patched his still with it. That family had been drinking lead all winter. The doctor's 'colic' was lead colic. They lived, thank God, but the youngest boy was poorly a long while. I never found the dealer, and I hope I never do, because I'm too old to hang a man.
Wilkins: There's no joke in that one, friends, and I won't make one. Lead in a still is poison, plain and certain. Tea-chest lining, old pewter, soft solder, lead patches, none of it goes near the vapor. When I join copper I rivet it and braze it hard with brass spelter or silver. When I take an old cooking kettle, I scour the inside down to bare red metal, because old tinning may carry lead. And I don't trust brass or Muntz metal as if it were copper. It's got zinc in it and sometimes lead, and it isn't the same metal no matter how yellow and pretty it is.
Captain: That's the difference between a craftsman and a killer, Doctor. I've shaken hands with craftsmen.
Wilkins: And I've pulled teeth for the killers' victims. Now, the run, start to finish, for the education of the young and the history books. I say again, without a federal permit this is against the law, and this is told as history.
Wilkins: One, the mash. Cracked corn cooked in water, or crushed apples, or rye, cooled to blood-warm, and yeast put in. You leave it to work for some days in a warm room with air moving, because the gas it gives off will put a man to sleep for good in a closed cellar. When it's done working you have a wash, a sour, weak beer of a few parts in a hundred spirit.
Wilkins: Two, the charge. You strain the wash and fill the pot no more than three-quarters full, because if you overfill it or fire it too hard, it foams up the neck and pukes into your worm, and you'll be cleaning sour mash out of a coil till Easter. You never seal a still tight. The vapor must have a clear road from the pot through the cap and arm to a worm sitting in cold running water. A stopped-up still is a bomb with a handle on it.
Wilkins: Three, the fire. Low and patient. Alcohol vapor burns, and a leaking joint over an open flame has turned many a still-house into a bonfire and many a stillman into a story. Keep your joints tight with flour paste or rye-meal paste, keep a bucket of water and a bucket of sand by the door, and keep your lantern well away from the tail of the worm.
Wilkins: Four, the cuts. This is where an honest man shows he's honest. The very first spirit off the worm is the foreshots, the sharp, solvent-smelling first part, and that's where most of the methanol runs. It gets thrown out every time, not drunk, not saved for your uncle and not sold to the deputy. I throw out a good generous measure, more than seems needful, and I don't feel sorry about it. Next come the heads, still harsh, smelling of glue and nail varnish, and you keep collecting in small jars until that smell goes away. They go out too. Then come the hearts, smooth and sweet and clean on the tongue. That's your spirit, the only part fit for anything. Last come the tails, oily and wet-dog smelling, with a rough taste of fusel. You set them aside, and a careful man runs them again with his next charge.
Wilkins: Five, the cleaning. When the pot's cool, rinse it, scrub it, and get the black and the green off. Bright copper works, and crusted copper loafs. Barnaby could tell you about loafing.
♦ Barnaby snores outside, chain shifts
Captain: In all my years on the road, Doctor, every man I ever found dead or poisoned by a still was poisoned by bad metal, bad cuts, or a fire. Not one was killed by doing it slow and clean.
Wilkins: Spoken like a man who's carried the bodies out. Thank you, Captain Donald Vance, for sitting in the lion's den, or the bear's den, and drinking my coffee.
Captain: Thank you, Doctor. Keep that bear chained short and your seams brazed hard.
Wilkins: My copper is cleaner than my reputation and a good deal better hammered.
♪ Fiddle bridge, wax crackle
♦ Footsteps, a door creaks, a cylinder machine winds up
Wilkins: Segment the fourth. Myths, slang and the listener's line. We've got a call recorded on the cylinder machine from way down south, Wilkesboro, North Carolina. Let's hear him.
♦ Cylinder hiss, faint tinny playback
Wilkins: Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller, of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, asks it this way: '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?'
♦ Cylinder clicks off
Wilkins: Rabbit, you've got a long road from Wilkesboro to Pittsfield and you sent a good question up it. Let's take your uncle's two medicines one at a time, the ash and then the oak.
Wilkins: Ash first. Every farmer in New Hampshire knows what wood ash is, because our grandfathers paid their taxes with it. When this country was all stumps, the settlers burned the forest, leached the ash with water, boiled it down in iron kettles and sold the potash, and that's how half of Merrimack County got its first hard money. Ash is lye. It's alkali. That's why your grandmother mixed it with fat and made soap. Put it in a thump keg and it does just that sort of work. It can cut some of the sour acid that rides over from a bad mash, but it also makes the charge foam and puke, and it can lend a bitter, soapy taste. And it does nothing at all to the methanol. Methanol comes off the still first, in the foreshots and the heads, and the only cure that has ever worked is to catch those jars and throw them out. Put lye ash in your doubler and you'll make soap. That's a fine thing for your wife's washtub and a poor thing for your Saturday night.
Wilkins: Now the oak. There's a little truth in this one, and it's a crooked truth. Oak shavings in a hot thump keg give up their tannin and color fast, and the spirit comes out the worm amber, with a bite on the tongue that a greenhorn takes for age. The rectifiers in the city cellars use that very trick to sell new white liquor as old whiskey. It colors the spirit and roughs up the taste, and it doesn't take the heads out. Rabbit, your uncle's red oak shavings will make that liquor look old the same way gray whiskers make a fool look wise. A thump keg is a second boiling and nothing more. It isn't an apothecary.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: That one's for you, Rabbit. A copper cent struck tonight, G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., and I'll mail it to Wilkesboro so your uncle can put it in his thump keg and see if it does any better than the ashes. Tell him Doctor Wilkins sends his respects and his correction in the same envelope. And keep listening down there, Rabbit. You're the farthest-off friend this fort has.
Wilkins: Speaking of cents, here's a little coin history for the young ones. The big fat copper cent your grandfather jingled is gone. The Mint quit striking the large cent back in '57 and put out a little one, first in copper and nickel and now, since last year, in bronze. A large cent is a fine broad piece of copper and I hate to see it go. I don't melt them. I stamp them. I stamp my name on these coins so that when the sheriff finally gets one, he will know who paid for his supper.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Now tonight's myth, and it's a dangerous one, so listen close. Up and down these hills you'll hear that you test a jar by setting a spoonful on fire. Burns blue, they say, it's pure and safe. Burns yellow, or red, it's got poison in it. Men will swear on their mothers' Bibles to this.
Wilkins: It's hogwash. Good spirit burns with a pale blue flame, and so does the methanol that blinds and kills. Methanol burns so pale you can hardly see it by daylight. So a blue flame tells you exactly one thing, which is that the stuff will burn. A blue flame tells you the spirit will burn. So will a Concord tax ledger, and that's no proof it's honest either. A yellow flame may only mean there's something in the spoon, or the spoon is dirty. It proves no more than the blue does.
Wilkins: And now the grisly part. Over in Loudon there was a man, years back, who set his spoon alight to show off the color to a crowd of loafers inside his own still-house, two steps from a leaking cap. The vapor caught. I'm told the sound was a soft whump, like a featherbed dropped down the stairs, and then the whole roof went up in a sheet of light. They found him in the snowbank with no eyebrows, no beard, a face like a boiled ham, and the spoon still in his fist. He lived, and he wore a knit cap pulled to his chin for the rest of his days, and children followed him through town to ask why he smelled like burnt pig. There's your blue-flame test. Do your cuts, throw out the heads, and keep fire away from the vapor.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: One for the Loudon man's eyebrows, wherever they've gone.
♪ Slow fiddle, parlor banjo creeping in
Announcer: A quick word before the doctor says goodnight! Don't build your pride out of a widow's wash-boiler. Get the Flame-Flow Still, United States Patent 10,561,960, in heavy-gauge pure copper that rings true. Order today at moonshinestill.com!
♪ Theme rises warm and slow
Wilkins: That's our night, friends. Tonight we went from the Lake Superior copper country to Revere's Canton mill, down Long Wharf, up the Concord road, past a whistling still and a peddler's puzzle, and into a widow's laundry. My thanks to Captain Donald Vance, the most honest revenue man who ever drank my coffee and didn't ask what else was on the shelf.
Wilkins: If you want to learn this craft properly, with history, metallurgy, cuts and fire sense, enroll in the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. I'll teach you to read a copper plate by its ring, judge a run by your nose, and respect the law and the flame both. You'll take it all slow, the way the old craftsmen did, and you won't lose any eyebrows doing it.
♦ Barnaby grunts, chain clinks against the log wall
Wilkins: Yes, Barnaby. You too. Goodnight.
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