Black Flies, Blackberries, and Bounty Brides: A Summer on the Hill Farms
Dr. Alchemist G. G. Wilkins goes through a war-years summer on the Pittsfield hill farms: black-fly season, haying with boys and widows, enlistment bounties, and how the women of the Suncook Valley ended up holding the purse and running the still. Blue Ridge herbalist Clara Higgins joins him with new stories of mountain women who hid their copper in the brier patch and sent blackberry 'flux medicine' to the army. In the mailbag, Wilkins answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, NC, on hickory ashes and red oak shavings in the thump keg, and he knocks down the shake-test bead myth at his anvil.
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Full episode transcript
♦ Audible wax cylinder surface crackle, slow drip of clear distillate into a glass jar
♦ Barnaby the black bear grunting and chain clinking outside log cabin window
Wilkins: Barnaby! Settle your carcass, you great black sack of grievances! Those are black flies, not revenue men, and you cannot eat a black fly no matter how many you snap at. Look at him, neighbors. He has them in his ears, up his nostrils, and in parts of a bear I would not name before the ladies, and he has been slapping his own backside like a deacon at a camp meeting. Down, I say! Lie in the mud and suffer like a Christian.
♦ Bear grunt, chain drags, a heavy thump as Barnaby flops into the wallow
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth, swelling then settling under
Wilkins: Good evening and God keep you, every soul within earshot of this crackling cylinder. You are listening to Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, coming to you from the log fortress of Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, in Pittsfield, Merrimack County, New Hampshire. I am your host, Dr. George G. Wilkins: tooth-puller, blacksmith, inventor, coin-stamper, keeper of a bad-tempered bear, and a man the county sheriff has arrested twice and regretted both times.
Wilkins: Tonight we go up onto the hill farms in the war summers, with black flies in the hayfield, blackberries in the brambles, and widows with bounty money sewn into their petticoats. Before the women take over the program the way they took over this town, a word from the fellow who keeps my lamp oil paid for.
♪ Brief brass flourish
Announcer: A quick word, friends! Is your still held together with flour paste and prayer? Throw out the paste and keep the prayer. Heavy-Duty Sanitary Tri-Clamp Ferrules and Gaskets from Moonshine Stills make an airtight seal without the fuss. Shop hardware at moonshinestill.com!
♪ Flourish ends; fiddle drifts back under
♪ Theme fades to a lone fiddle drone
Wilkins: SEGMENT ONE. The Hill Farm Calendar in the War Years.
♦ Wax crackle; a distant cowbell; wind in the maples
Wilkins: Picture Pittsfield in the summer of 1863. Catamount Mountain is green to the top, the Suncook is running low and brown past the mills, and every hill farm above the turnpike has lost its men. They went to the Granite regiments, more than thirty thousand from this state, and the hill farms kept running all the same. The farm year does not wait for a war, so I will give it to you the way the women lived it.
Wilkins: In May you plow and plant. The old rule says you put in corn when the oak leaf is the size of a squirrel's ear, and a squirrel's ear is all the almanac a hill farmer needs. Then, just as the corn shows, the black flies come up out of every brook in the county, late May through June, in clouds so thick you could stake a tent on them.
Wilkins: Neighbors, a black fly does not bite the way a gentleman mosquito bites. He saws. He crawls behind your ear, under your hat band, and up the cuff of your trousers to the very borders of decency, then he cuts a little trench and drinks from it like a drover at a horse trough. I have seen a boy come in from hoeing with blood running down his neck in rivers and his eyes swollen shut like a prizefighter's. A black fly is the only creature in Merrimack County that takes more blood from a man than the tax collector, and the black fly at least leaves a receipt in the form of a welt.
Wilkins: So the women cooked up fly dope: pine tar stirred into lard or mutton grease and smeared on the face, neck, and wrists until you smelled like a ship's bottom. And they kept smudge fires of punky wood and green leaves going at the edge of the field. A family hoeing corn in June looked like a line of tarred sinners standing in the smoke of their own damnation, and the flies came anyway.
♦ Scythe swish, whetstone on steel
Wilkins: Then comes July and haying, which on these hills starts near the Fourth. You cut with the scythe at dawn while the dew holds the grass upright, spread it to dry, turn it, rake it into windrows, pile it into cocks, and pray to every saint the Pope ever thought of that it does not rain before you get it into the barn. Wet hay molds, and packed wet hay can heat up and burn a barn down from the inside. With the men gone, the swinging fell to boys of twelve, girls in their brothers' trousers, grandfathers with the rheumatism, and the wives.
Wilkins: I watched the Widow Pease's boy, eleven years old and no bigger than a churn dasher, swing a scythe longer than he was tall across a pitched field off the Barnstead road. He took the grass clean and put the point into a stone exactly once, and the word he said would have peeled the bark off a beech. A New Hampshire hayfield in July will teach a boy more cussing in a week than a sea captain learns in a voyage around the Horn.
Wilkins: My scythe and my tooth-key are close kin, friends. Both take what is ripe, both leave a stubble, and both make a grown man weep if you swing them crooked.
Wilkins: The war did one good turn for haying, though. With no men to swing scythes, the horse-drawn mowing machines that farmers had laughed at in the fifties started showing up in Pittsfield dooryards. The war put more iron mowers in Northern hayfields than ten years of county-fair speeches had, and I sharpened half the cutter bars in this valley at my own forge, which is more patriotism than most congressmen managed.
Wilkins: Then August, and the blackberries. They come ripe in late July and August along every stone wall, burned-over lot, and old sheep pasture going back to brush. The children picked and the women boiled, and what they made with it we will get to.
♪ Low, wry fiddle sting
Wilkins: Now the money, which is the real story. Mr. Lincoln's government passed the Enrollment Act in March of '63. That was the draft. A drafted man could hire a substitute, or pay three hundred dollars commutation and stay home with his cows. Every town had a quota to fill, and no town wanted its own sons drafted, so the towns paid bounties to any man who would enlist and be counted on their rolls. Add the town bounty, the state bounty, and the federal bounty together, and by '64 a recruit could pocket several hundred dollars, in some places close to a thousand. A hill farm might clear a hundred dollars cash in a good year, so that was more money than most of these families had ever seen at once.
Wilkins: And who held it? The soldier went south, and the money stayed in the sugar bowl. A private drew thirteen dollars a month, and he could allot a share of it home. Under the pension act of July '62, if he fell, his widow drew a pension. So for the first time since the Pilgrims stepped off their boat, the hill farm women of Pittsfield were the ones holding the purse.
Wilkins: That brings me to the bounty brides. Some young women around here took a sudden romantic interest in any fellow who had just signed his enlistment papers. A man with a bounty in his pocket and a train leaving Thursday found himself courted, married, and relieved of the bulk of his money inside of a week. I will not name the living, so I give you my own composite, the Widow Thankful Spragg, and every old-timer in the valley knows three women just like her.
Wilkins: Thankful was married three times in two years and widowed by none of them. Each husband enlisted and kissed her goodbye at the depot, and each allotment came home to the same sugar bowl. That made her the best-invested woman in Merrimack County and the worst-kept secret in the Congregational choir. When the war ended, all three husbands came home alive, and by bad luck they came home on the same train. The Concord depot has seen trouble, but never three soldiers discovering at the same moment that they had bought shares in the same enterprise. The two wisest of them shook hands and went west to Iowa together. The third stayed, and I pulled four of his teeth that spring, all of them loosened at the depot.
Wilkins: Here is the quiet part. With the men gone and cash in hand, a good many hill farm women went into the still-house. They were not the meek little bonnets the poets describe. Whiskey was the one crop that carried its value in a jug, kept all winter, and could be hauled to market on a bad road. A woman with a copper pot in the springhouse and a reliable boy to carry jugs down to the cotton mill hands on payday had a better income than the town minister. Women kept the stills so quietly in those years that the only man in Pittsfield who noticed was the sheriff, and he noticed only because his wife had started paying cash.
♦ Barnaby grunts outside; chain clinks
Wilkins: Barnaby has opinions on the matter. Hold them, Barnaby. Your turn is coming.
♪ Fiddle bridge, quickening
Wilkins: SEGMENT TWO. Bounty Jumpers, Brokers, and the Brier-Patch Women.
♦ Wax crackle; fire popping in the forge
Wilkins: Wherever there is bounty money there are buzzards. First there were the bounty jumpers. A bounty jumper enlisted in one town, took his bounty, deserted, walked to the next county, gave a new name, and enlisted again. Some of them did it a dozen times or more. They were the most enthusiastic recruits in the Union and the worst soldiers who ever lived.
Wilkins: Worse than the jumpers were the bounty brokers, the slick fellows who supplied recruits and substitutes to the towns and kept the fattest slice of every bounty for themselves. A bounty broker is a man who sells other men's lives by the pound and complains about the price of his own boots.
Wilkins: One summer, a broker from down Manchester way came up the turnpike in a yellow buggy and a checked waistcoat, with a calfskin book under his arm full of enlistment papers and promissory notes. He was hunting widows with pension money he could borrow against, and boys too young to sign. He made the mistake of cutting through my dooryard to save a quarter mile, and he made it in August.
Wilkins: In August, Barnaby had been rolling all afternoon in the blackberry pomace I had dumped by the woodpile. That is the squeezed skins and seeds left over from the cordial, still working and fizzing in the heat. He was purple from snout to stub tail, half drunk, swarming with yellowjackets, and in the foulest temper of his life. The broker had been eating smoked herring at the tavern and wiped his greasy fingers on that calfskin book. Barnaby smelled herring, and to a bear smoked herring outranks Scripture.
♦ Chain snapping taut, a roar, a man's high scream
Wilkins: Barnaby came to the end of his chain in one leap and caught that fellow by the seat of his trousers. Neighbors, I tell you this the way it happened. There was a rip like a sail splitting in a gale, and the whole back of those checked trousers came away along with the drawers beneath and a fair bit of the hide beneath that. That broker ran down Route 28 with his bare hindquarters to the wind, white as a peeled onion apart from four long red stripes where the claws had dragged, and he was bleeding into his own boots. He squelched every step. The yellowjackets that had been on the bear chose to follow him, which I call divine justice.
Wilkins: Barnaby stayed behind with the calfskin book and ate the whole thing: cover, herring grease, promissory notes, and the enlistment papers of eleven men who had never heard of the fellow. He chewed it slow, the way a judge reads a sentence, belched purple, and went to sleep on top of what was left. Barnaby has been the most patriotic animal in New Hampshire ever since, because he carries the whole Union quota in his gut. Three widows on the hill owed that broker money, and every note went down the bear. They paid what they owed in pies, and I count Barnaby an honorary recruiting officer of the United States.
♦ Bear belches contentedly
Wilkins: Well, I am not the only one with tales of women running the trade while the men were gone. Tonight we have a guest who came all the way up from the Blue Ridge of Virginia, the mountain herbalist and scholar of old-time still-house talk, Miss Clara Higgins. Welcome to Fort Wilkins, Clara. Mind the bear. He has been drinking pomace.
Clara: Thank you kindly, Doctor. I have smelled your bear since I crossed the Merrimack line, and he smells like a church social that went badly wrong. And Lord, these black flies! In my country a chigger has the decency to bite you where nobody can see it. Your flies go for the face, like a drunk at a wedding.
Wilkins: Ha! They are Yankee flies, Clara. They want you to see the bill. So tell me about your country in the war. Did your women keep the stills while the men were off?
Clara: Doctor, half the copper in the Blue Ridge was in women's hands by '63. My great-great-grandmother Lettie ran her man's still on a branch of the Dan River after he went off with his company. Now, the conscription officers came through our hollows the same as your bounty brokers, hunting men and anything worth seizing, and copper was worth seizing. Copper was dear in the war. So Lettie took the cap and the arm off that still every night and carried them deep into a blackberry brier patch behind the hog lot, as deep as a body can go.
Wilkins: Into the briers! How did she get in herself?
Clara: In her husband's old leather britches and a feed sack over her head with eyeholes cut in it, the children said. The officers searched the house, the spring, the barn loft, and the corn crib, and not one of them would wade into briers in August. One young fellow tried. He came out looking like he had lost a fistfight with a hay rake, all bloody stripes, and his hat stayed in there till Christmas. Ever after, in our family, anything hidden where no man is fool enough to look is called brier-patch copper.
Wilkins: Clara, a revenue man in a brier patch looks like a Sunday ham that lost an argument with a cat. I would pay a silver dollar to see it, and I would stamp my name on the dollar first.
Clara: Well, Lettie would have taken your dollar and sold you a jar of the hearts for it. The berries in that patch earned their keep twice over. You know the flux tore through the armies worse than bullets did, the bloody flux. Every woman in the mountains knew blackberry cordial for the summer complaint. Those berries are puckery and strong with tannin, and they would bind up a gut that was running like a millrace.
Wilkins: Same up here. Every Pittsfield grandmother has a crock of it on the cellar stair for the children's bellies in August.
Clara: Well, our women sent jugs of it down to the boys in camp, packed in straw in crates marked 'preserves,' because an honest jug of cordial would have been drunk by the first quartermaster who opened it. One crate went out from our hollow with six jugs. Come spring, a single jug came back up the road with the mail carrier, empty, with a note tied to the handle in pencil. It said: 'Preserved the whole company. Send more.' My granny kept that note in her Bible right next to Lamentations, and she said it was the more cheerful page.
Wilkins: Ha! Clara, that is the finest review a cordial ever got, and the only time a quartermaster told the truth on paper. What did your people call the stuff?
Clara: Sunday purple, mostly, because you could drink it in front of the preacher and call it medicine. The old men called it bramble brandy. A cordial is what a lady calls whiskey when the minister is in the parlor.
Wilkins: I am going to steal that one, Clara, and claim I said it in '58.
Clara: You can have it if you pay the toll, Doctor. We had our own saying for a lazy wash, too. If the mash sat in the barrel and wouldn't work, folks said it was caught in blackberry winter. That's the cold snap we get in May right when the brambles bloom white. Any slow, sullen thing in the mountains was caught in blackberry winter: a mash, a mule, or a husband.
Wilkins: Up here we would say he was froze in the Notch. Now, the picking. Is it as much of a trial down there as up here, with flies and briers and wasps?
Clara: Worse, Doctor. Chiggers. Red bugs, we call them. Every mountain girl knows to dust powdered sulfur in her stocking tops and her drawers before she goes into the berry patch, because a red bug crawls upward, as determined as a Baptist. My great-aunt Dorcas thought herself too fine for sulfur one August. She said it made her smell like the pit of Hell. She picked four gallons and came home with chiggers in places a lady does not name, in a ring around her like a garter. She sat three days in a washtub of salt water with a quilt over the top, cussing in verse, and the verse rhymed, Doctor. She was a schoolteacher.
Wilkins: Ha! I have pulled teeth from men who could not cuss that well in plain prose. Three days in a tub. I would have charged admission.
Clara: Her brothers tried. She threw the tub brush at them. Now, I have to tell you about your bounty brokers, because we had them too. There was a widow in Floyd County named Patsy, a hard little woman with a jaw like a bear trap. A broker came around offering widows ready cash, a 'loan,' against the pension money that hadn't come through yet. Wicked interest. Patsy took the loan, smiling sweet as honey. And then she paid him back every penny, in blackberry cordial at full city price.
Wilkins: Fair enough so far.
Clara: Except she had watered it half and half from the spring branch and colored it up with pokeberry juice so it looked as rich as communion wine. He hauled it to Lynchburg and couldn't sell a jug, and the one man who did buy one chased him out of a tavern. When the circuit preacher took Patsy to task for cheating, she folded her hands and said, 'Brother, I was only stretching the Lord's provision, like the loaves and the fishes.' The preacher laughed so hard he forgot to make her repent.
Wilkins: Clara, I love that woman, and I would not do business with her for all the copper in Vermont. Pokeberry, though. Folks, I'll be plain: pokeberry is poison to eat. That was a dye for a crooked broker's jug, not a receipt for your Sunday table.
Clara: That's the truth, Doctor. We never put poke in anything meant for the family. That jug was strictly for the broker.
Wilkins: A woman of principle. Clara Higgins of the Blue Ridge, stay right where you are, because I want you here when I start cooking berries. First, our sponsor, before Barnaby eats the microphone horn.
♦ Bear grunt; chain rattle
♪ Banjo vamp rises into a brassy medicine-show fanfare
Announcer: Step right up, friends of the copper and keepers of the flame! Hear this, all you who have ever sat by your still at midnight and smelled vapor leaking where no vapor ought to be! I know the trouble. You sealed your joints with a paste of flour and water. You lashed them with a slipping hose clamp and a muttered oath. Now there is a hiss at the column, a whiff at the arm, and your heart is pounding! A leaking joint is vapor going right past the open fire, and that is how a still-house burns!
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♪ Fanfare ends with a cymbal crash
♪ Slow, warm fiddle with a low banjo roll
Wilkins: SEGMENT THREE. Copper and the Craft: Bramble Brandy and the Cordial Crock.
♦ Forge bellows; a copper kettle set on iron; berries poured into a crock
Wilkins: Now to the berries. Before I say a word about stills, here is my standing warning, plain as a fence post: making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against United States law, and everything on this program is history and education, nothing more. Hear the old ways and keep your neck out of the noose.
Wilkins: The good news for a lawful household is that the cordial, the thing every Pittsfield grandmother keeps on the cellar stair, takes no still at all. A cordial is steeped and fortified, not distilled. Here is the old receipt, the way the hill farm women made it, near enough.
Wilkins: First, pick your blackberries dead ripe, black and soft, not red, in the cool of the morning before the wasps wake up. Pick them over and throw out the leaves, the stems, and any berry with a worm looking out of it. Mash them in a crock with a wooden pestle and strain the juice through a flannel bag hung from a hook overnight. Do not squeeze the bag if you want the cordial clear, and squeeze it anyway if you are poor, which is everyone on a hill farm.
Wilkins: Second, to each quart of juice add about a pound of sugar, or less in the war years when sugar cost like opium. Add a little cinnamon stick, a few cloves, and a grating of nutmeg. Boil it gently a quarter of an hour, skim off the scum, and let it cool.
Wilkins: Third, to each quart of that cooled syrup add a pint or so of good brandy or sound whiskey, bought from a proper merchant if you are a law-abiding soul, then bottle and cork it. It keeps through the winter and doses a child's summer complaint with a spoonful, or a grandfather's with a tumbler.
Clara: That's near word for word my granny's, Doctor, only she put in a little allspice and kept the bottle in the springhouse where the men couldn't get at it.
Wilkins: A wise woman. The men in my family would drink cordial out of a dead man's boot. Now, for the history, here is how a hill farm woman made bramble brandy itself, the distilled spirit, in the war years, and why the fruit makes it a more dangerous road than corn.
Wilkins: Step one, the wash. Crush the berries, add water and sugar, and pitch in yeast. Keep it in a covered barrel in a shaded, airy place, because a fermenting barrel breathes out a choking gas that will lie in a cellar and smother a careless man. It works for a week or two until the bubbling stops and it tastes dry and sour. Strain out the skins and seeds before it ever goes in the pot, because fruit solids will settle on the bottom over the fire, scorch, and give you a burnt, bitter run.
Wilkins: Step two, the fill, and here is something a corn man may not know. Fruit foams. A pot of fruit wash heats up and climbs like a yeast loaf in August. Fill the pot no more than about two-thirds. If you fill it to the neck, it puke up the arm, carrying foam and pulp into the vapor line, and it can plug that line. A plugged still with a fire under it is a bomb with a copper hat. If your pot pukes up the arm, you will learn the meaning of 'an explosive temper' faster than any Pittsfield husband ever has.
Wilkins: Step three, the fire. Bring it up slow and keep it low. You want a steady thread of spirit, not a gush. Keep the still where vapor cannot gather around an open flame. Any leak at the joints near the fire, and I promise you it is no joke, can burn the still-house to the sills with you in it. Keep water and a wet sack handy and never leave a running still alone.
Wilkins: Step four, the cuts, and with fruit they matter more than ever. Berries and apples are full of pectin, the stuff that makes jelly set. When fruit ferments, the pectin gives off more of the wood spirit, methanol, than a corn mash does. Methanol and the other sharp, early volatiles come over first. So with fruit, the foreshots are thrown away. Every drop goes on the ground, never into a cup, never into a jar for later, and never into the cordial. Then the heads come, sharp and solvent-smelling, and with fruit you take a generous heads cut. Throw them out too, or keep them only for cleaning tools, well marked, and never let anyone drink them. When the spirit turns soft, sweet, and smells of berries, those are the hearts, the only part fit to keep. When it turns flat, oily, and smells like a wet dog in a hayloft, those are the tails. Set them aside.
Wilkins: The copper does its quiet work all through the run. The old hands always said a copper pot gives a sweeter fruit spirit, and they were right. Keep it bright, and keep it joined with sound mechanical unions or silver solder, never lead, since a sealed joint is your life.
Clara: Doctor, my granny used to say the worst drunk in the hollow was always the man who couldn't wait for the hearts.
Wilkins: Your granny and my forceps would have agreed, Clara. A man too impatient for the hearts is the same man who wants his molar pulled before the forceps are on it. Both end up bleeding into a bucket and crying for their mothers.
Wilkins: So the hill farm women of Pittsfield kept the corn growing, the hay dry, the berries picked, the cordial in the cellar, and some of them the copper fired in the springhouse. The money stayed in their sugar bowls, and when the men came home, a good many of them found they were working for their wives. Most never got over the shock, and the wise ones never tried.
Wilkins: Clara Higgins, you have been a delight and a menace, and I mean both as compliments. Thank you for coming up the mountains to visit us.
Clara: Thank you, Doctor. Feed that bear something besides brokers. It can't be good for his digestion.
♦ Barnaby grunts, offended
♪ Fiddle bridge, playful
Wilkins: SEGMENT FOUR. The Mailbag, the Myth, and the Anvil.
♦ Wax crackle; a cylinder machine being cranked; a hiss of playback
Wilkins: Now to the call-in cylinder, where our listeners leave their questions. This one has come a long way, from the Carolina hills. Play it, boy.
♦ Faint, scratchy playback, a recorded voice
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?
♦ Playback ends with a click
Wilkins: Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina! Rabbit, your uncle has put two things in one keg, so I'll take them apart one at a time like a bad set of teeth.
Wilkins: The hickory ash first. Here is something your uncle may not know. Hardwood ash is potash, the alkali you leach to make lye and soft soap. Sixty years ago this very state burned whole hillsides of hardwood to make potash and pearl ash, boiled down in iron kettles and hauled to Boston and over to England. It was the first cash crop many New Hampshire farms ever had. So I know ash, Rabbit. I have burned more of it than your uncle has stepped in.
Wilkins: Now, here is the grain of truth he's chewing on. An alkali will eat acid. If a wash had gone sour and vinegary, a handful of ash could knock down some of that sour bite, and an old-timer would taste the difference and swear he'd cured the run. But the bad heads he's afraid of, the wood spirit, the methanol that blinds and kills, cannot be scrubbed out by ash, by shavings, by a prayer, or by anything else tossed into a keg. That wood spirit comes over early in the run, and the only cure is to cut those foreshots and heads away and throw them out. The keg can't do it for you, the ash can't, and your uncle can't.
Wilkins: Now the red oak shavings. Rabbit, look at the end grain of a red oak board. It is full of open pores, little tubes running the length of it. You can put one end of a red oak stick in a glass of water and blow bubbles out the other. That's why no cooper worth his adze makes a whiskey barrel of red oak. It weeps through the staves like a widow at a wake. Barrels are white oak, because white oak plugs its own pores with little growths the coopers call tyloses, and it holds liquor tight. Rabbit, a red oak keg holds whiskey the way a deputy holds a secret: everything leaks out through the pores by Tuesday.
Wilkins: Throw oak shavings in the hot keg and you will get tannin, color, and a bit of a woody bite. That's flavor, Rabbit, a quick dressing-up of raw spirit. It is not cleaning and not a cure for bad heads. Your uncle has invented a way to make a dangerous jar look respectable, and that is the most dangerous kind of jar there is.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: There. That's one large cent stamped G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., and I am sending it down to Wilkesboro for Rabbit Miller, for asking an honest question instead of drinking the answer.
Wilkins: Now, while the anvil is warm, I'll break another myth. You have all seen it: a man takes a jar, shakes it hard, and watches the bubbles. 'Look at that bead,' he says. 'Big and lasting. That's good whiskey.' That's the shake test, and here is what the bead tells you. It gives a rough guess at the strength. Big bubbles that sit a while mean strong spirit, and small ones that vanish quick mean weak spirit. That's all it tells you.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: The bead says nothing about whether the jar is safe, or full of foreshots, or whether the still that made it had lead solder in the joints. Strong poison beads as handsomely as strong whiskey. The bead tells you the strength and nothing about the safety, the same as a revenue man's handshake. A man who judges his whiskey by the bead is the same man who judges a wife by her bonnet, and he deserves what he gets on both counts.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: That's three coins for one evening. I have struck so many coins at this anvil that the town clerk counts me as a mint and taxes me as a menace. Rabbit, God bless you and every Miller in Wilkes County. Tell your uncle I mean no harm. Tell him to keep the ashes for soap, the red oak for his fence posts, and his jug for the hearts only.
♪ Banjo picks up, bright
Announcer: Another quick word, friends! Make every seal of your still a sure one. Heavy-Duty Sanitary Tri-Clamp Ferrules and Gaskets, with food-grade PTFE gaskets and stainless wing clamps, are just thirty-four ninety-five. Shop hardware at moonshinestill.com!
♪ Banjo settles into the closing theme
Wilkins: SIGN-OFF.
♦ Crickets; the forge settling; wax crackle
Wilkins: Well, neighbors, the flies have gone to bed, the hay is in, the cordial is corked, and the widows are counting their money by lamplight. If tonight has made you want to learn the copper arts properly, with honest cuts, a low fire, sealed joints, and every drop of the foreshots thrown out, then enroll in the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. I will teach you the history, the metallurgy, and the safe craft of the still, the way I would teach my own apprentice if I could find one the bear hasn't run off. Do it according to the law of the land, and I promise you'll know more than the sheriff, which is a low fence but an honest one.
Wilkins: My thanks to Clara Higgins of the Blue Ridge, to Rabbit Miller of Wilkesboro, to the hill farm women of Pittsfield who kept this town alive while the men were gone, and to Barnaby, who served his country by eating a bounty broker's ledger.
Wilkins: Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.
♦ Bear grunt and final drip into jar
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme swells and fades into wax cylinder crackle