The Gilman's Mill Whistle: How Sawmill and Gristmill Schedules Hid a Runner's Timetable
Dr. G. G. Wilkins explains how the daily rhythm of the Suncook Valley mills hid the whiskey runners. The head-gate roar at dawn, the noon whistle and the crowded road at dusk all gave them cover. He tells of Hosea Brackett, the gristmiller whose corn ledger knew more than the tax assessor, and of the Boston revenue man who had himself sewn into a meal sack and was found by Barnaby. Coppersmith Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister tells new stories about quiet axle bushings, pine sawdust packing, a patched whistle that runners used as a signal, and a hollow mill pick that held a runner's timetable. In the call-in segment Wilkins knocks down the blue-flame test and answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, NC, by blowing bubbles through a stick of red oak.
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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! Sit your four hundred pounds of flea-bit mutton down. That's the six o'clock whistle off Gilman's Mill, you great hairy dunce, not a dinner bell. And that fellow you're staring at is the mail carrier, who has already given you one boot this month. He has only got the one left, and he needs it for walking.
♦ Bear huffs, chain drags across the frozen dooryard, a long disappointed groan
Wilkins: There. He's gone back to licking the post where the hog fat used to be. Lord help whatever fool taught that animal that a mill whistle means supper. Oh. That was me.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth, swells, then settles under
Wilkins: Good evening, sinners, saints and fence-sitters, and welcome to Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, broadcasting from the log fortress of Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, in Pittsfield, Merrimack County, New Hampshire. I am your host, your dentist, your blacksmith, and on alternate Tuesdays your bad influence. Tonight we talk about mills: saws and stones, water-gates and whistles. For twenty years every whiskey runner in this valley set his pocket watch by the whistle at Gilman's Mill, if he owned a watch, and set his bowels by it if he didn't. Before the night is out I'll show you how a sawmill schedule made a better smuggler's almanac than anything Mr. Franklin ever printed.
♪ Theme fades beneath the wax crackle
Announcer: A QUICK WORD, friends! While the Doctor wipes his spectacles, remember the Flame-Flow still, protected under United States Patent 10,561,960 and hammered from heavy-gauge pure copper. It's waiting for you at moonshinestill.com. That's moonshinestill.com!
Wilkins: Thank you, Announcer. He talks like a man selling snake oil because he once did, and the snakes are still suing. Before we go one step further, there's a lawyer in Concord who owes me for a set of upper plates, and he insists I say this: making distilled spirits to drink without a federal permit is against the law of the United States, and everything on this program is history and education. There. Counsel is satisfied. His teeth are not.
♪ Short fiddle sting
Wilkins: Segment the first: the river, the wheel and the miller's thumb.
Wilkins: To understand a runner you must first understand a river. The Suncook comes tumbling out of the Suncook Lakes up in Barnstead and Gilmanton, and when it reaches Pittsfield village it drops. It falls over the ledge and through the narrows like a drunk going down cellar stairs, and every foot of that fall is money. Our grandfathers knew it. When this town was cut loose from Chichester and set up for itself in 1782, the first thing any man of sense bought was not a cow and not a Bible. It was a mill privilege.
Wilkins: For you soft-handed gentlemen listening in Concord, a mill privilege is the deeded right to dam a stream and use the fall of its water. It's property, it's recorded at the county, and it has caused more fistfights, lawsuits and drowned dogs in New England than whiskey and adultery put together. The man upstream holds back his pond to saw his logs, the man downstream watches his wheel go dead, and by suppertime the two of them are waist-deep in the river trying to drown each other in the very water they're fighting over. I've pulled the teeth those fights loosened. I keep a jar of them on the shelf, labeled by family.
♦ A handful of loose teeth rattled in a glass jar
Wilkins: A stream like ours carries two kinds of mill. First comes the sawmill. Most of the valley mills still run the old up-and-down saw: one straight blade stretched in a wooden sash, driven by the wheel, chunking up and down through a pine log like a hired man who's paid by the day and not by the board. Chunk. Chunk. Chunk. On a still evening you can hear it a mile off. That noise matters, so remember it.
Wilkins: Second comes the gristmill. It has two great stones: the bedstone lying still and the runner stone turning on top of it. The best are French burr, quarried in France and shipped across the ocean, so half of Merrimack County eats bread ground on French rock and has never once said thank you in French. The farmer brings in his corn or his rye, the miller grinds it, and the miller takes his pay out of the farmer's own sack. That's the toll. The custom here is a sixteenth part or thereabouts, scooped out with the toll dish, and every farmer in the valley swears that dish is bigger on the inside than on the outside.
Wilkins: There's a saying older than this republic, older than Plymouth Rock, that goes clear back to Mr. Chaucer and his pilgrims: an honest miller has a thumb of gold. It means the miller weighs your grain with his thumb on the scale, and if an honest one ever existed his thumb would be worth its weight in gold for the rarity of it. I've pulled teeth from four millers, and every one of them tried to pay me by the scoop. One offered me his daughter's hand instead. I looked at the daughter, looked at the scoop, and took the corn. She had a jaw on her like a bear trap, and I say that professionally.
Wilkins: Now here's the heart of it. A mill runs on a schedule, and water and daylight set the schedule. Before sunup the miller goes down and opens the head gate. The water comes roaring down the flume, the wheel groans and takes up its load, and for a quarter of an hour you could fire a cannon in the Pittsfield millyard and nobody would hear it over the gate.
♦ Wooden head gate creaks open, a rush of water down a flume, a great wheel groaning into motion
Wilkins: At noon the steam whistle at Gilman's blows for dinner. Old Gilman put in a little steam engine to carry him through the low water of August, when the Suncook runs so thin a heron can stand in it without wetting his knees. A man with a boiler has a whistle, and a man with a whistle blows it every chance God gives him. There's the noon whistle and the six o'clock whistle, and on Saturday a long one that sounds like a heifer giving birth to a fence post.
♦ Distant steam mill whistle, long and mournful
Wilkins: Here's the genius of it, which no revenue man in Concord ever worked out. Every one of those noises puts people on the road. The six o'clock whistle empties the mill. Out come the mill hands on foot, teamsters hauling boards to the village, farmers fetching their meal, ox carts, horse carts, a boy on a mule, a widow with a handbarrow. For one hour at dusk, Route 28 through Pittsfield is as busy as Market Street in Portsmouth. And every wagon is carrying sacks, barrels, or boards with something under the boards. A loaded wagon leaving a mill at dusk is the most ordinary sight in New England, so ordinary that nobody sees it. A deputy could no sooner stop every loaded wagon at six o'clock than stop every cow in Merrimack County from lying down before rain.
Wilkins: So a runner learned the mill's day the way a deacon learns the Psalms. When the gate opens, its roar covers your wheels. When the noon whistle blows, the deputy is at the tavern with pie and gravy on his chin. At six the road fills up and you fill up right along with it. And when the mill shuts down for low water or a broken wheel, the runners shut down too. A lone wagon on a quiet road is like a bell rung in an empty church: everybody turns to look.
Wilkins: Winter was the dry spell. Ice in the flume froze the wheel up like a widow's affections, and the mill sat dead for weeks. Then spring came. When the snow lets go and the freshet comes down, a sawmill runs all hours to catch the high water, sawing night and day by lantern light. Wagons came and went at two in the morning, all of them hauling lumber, and some of them hauling lumber stacked around a hollow the size of a coffin, packed tight with jugs. Mud season, they call it. The runners called it Christmas.
♪ Banjo roll transition
Wilkins: Segment two: legends, outlaws and runners. I'll start with a man who was neither an outlaw nor a runner, which made him the most dangerous man in the valley. I'll call him Hosea Brackett. That's close enough to his name that his grandchildren will know him and far enough off that they can't sue me.
Wilkins: Hosea kept a gristmill below Gilman's, and Hosea kept a ledger. Every sack in, every bushel ground, every scoop of toll, every farm by name, all in a hand so neat it would make a schoolmarm weep into her apron. Hosea knew how much meal a family of six eats in a month, down to the johnnycake. So when a hill farm with four children and one consumptive mule bought enough coarse-cracked corn to feed a regiment of Zouaves, Hosea knew exactly what that corn was for. He knew who was running whiskey in the Suncook Valley better than the Bureau of Internal Revenue knew it, better than the sheriff knew it, and better than their own wives did.
Wilkins: Did he tell? He did not. He wrote it down. Beside every one of those big corn orders he drew a little crescent moon in the margin, nothing more.
Wilkins: In the spring of '65 the assessor came through to tally the town for the excise and asked to see the mill books. Hosea handed over the ledger smooth as butter. The assessor turned page after page, saw all those little moons, and asked what they meant. Planting by the moon, Hosea told him, as any fool knows. Then the assessor brought out his own tally of how much corn Pittsfield grew and ground, and Hosea glanced at it and said, You're three hundred and twelve bushels short, sir, and your Barnstead line is added wrong. He corrected the federal government from memory, standing there in his flour apron. The assessor went home and copied Hosea's figures into the official report. For years after, Washington's own count of corn in Pittsfield came straight from the one man who knew where every kernel went. And Hosea took his toll, as millers do: he asked the assessor for the loan of his pencil, and kept it.
Wilkins: When Hosea died, his widow found the ledger. She sat by the cookstove and fed in the pages with moons on them one at a time, and folks swear the smoke out of that chimney smelled of corn liquor for a week. A tax man counts what you tell him, a miller counts what you eat, and your wife counts what you drink, so no man in Pittsfield has gone uncounted one day of his life.
♦ Bear grunts outside the window
Wilkins: Yes, Barnaby, it's your turn. Gather close, children. Actually, send the children to bed.
Wilkins: A few years back the Bureau sent a man up from Boston. I'll call him Mr. Pike. He had a waxed mustache, a waistcoat the color of an infected gum, and a theory. His theory was that if the runners moved in plain sight among the mill wagons, he would too. So he paid a farmer who hauled corn to my still-house to sew him into a meal sack, lay him on top of the load, and drive him in at dusk under the six o'clock whistle. He meant to ride right into Fort Wilkins and catch me red-handed.
Wilkins: What he didn't know is that Barnaby can smell cracked corn through a meal sack, a wagon bed and two feet of snow, and that he'd been taught to think the six o'clock whistle means supper. The whistle blew. The wagon creaked into the dooryard. Barnaby stood up on his hind legs to the full length of his chain, which reaches the wagon if the farmer is careless, and this farmer was paid by Boston and therefore careless. Barnaby hooked the top sack with one paw.
♦ Heavy canvas ripping, a man's high falsetto scream, a burst of dry meal
Wilkins: It sounded like a bedsheet tearing in half with a church organ inside it, and the organ had a cat caught in its pipes. Cornmeal went up in a white cloud you could have seen from Catamount Hill. Out of that cloud rolled Mr. Pike, floured like a ham for frying, with meal in his ears, his nostrils, and places a man has no corners. Barnaby had raked him once across the seat of his trousers and opened four red furrows in his backside, neat as a plowed field, bleeding pink through the flour like strawberry jam soaking into a johnnycake. Then the bear sat on his legs. He didn't bite him. He licked him. That tongue is like a wet curry comb, and one long lick from chin to scalp took off the cornmeal, the waxed mustache and both eyebrows, and left Mr. Pike looking like a newborn mouse in a bad waistcoat.
Wilkins: I came out with a ham bone and pried four hundred pounds of affection off him. I'm a dentist, so I washed his hindquarters with spirit and stitched him with dental silk, and out of pure habit he bit me. He went back to Boston and wrote in his report: No still located. District overrun by very large dogs. The Bureau hasn't sewn a man into a sack in this county since.
♪ Fiddle flourish
Wilkins: Now I've got a guest in the studio who's been banging copper at the Fort Wilkins foundry long enough that he can hear a bad seam the way I hear a bad molar: from across the room, and with the same expression. Ladies and gentlemen, Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister. Silas, welcome, and wipe your boots. Barnaby has been in here.
Silas: Evening, Doctor. Evening, folks. I wiped them on the way in, but I can't speak for what I stepped in.
Wilkins: Silas, tonight is about mills and the men who moved through them. Your family has been working metal in this valley longer than my bear has been holding a grudge. Tell the folks about axles.
Silas: Well, my grandfather had a rule, and he said it so often my grandmother stitched it on a sampler: a squeaking axle is a confession. Put a heavy load on a wagon, iron rubbing iron, dry hub, and she squeals. A wagon full of boards squeals one way. A wagon full of jugs is heavier and squeals another way. Any deputy with ears could tell the difference coming over a bridge.
Wilkins: And I've known deputies with very little else between those ears.
Silas: So Grandfather fitted brass bushings into the hubs, filed and fitted by hand so true you could spin a wheel with one finger, and packed them with tallow worked up with black lead. Plumbago, the old men called it. Rub it between your fingers and it's slick as a church floor on Easter. A wagon done his way rolled over the Pittsfield bridge as quiet as a cat crossing a feather bed.
Wilkins: Tell them about the deputy.
Silas: There was a deputy, I won't name him, who took to lying flat on the bridge planks of a summer evening with his ear to the wood, listening for loaded wheels. He'd lie there through the whole six o'clock traffic like a man listening at his neighbor's bedroom wall. One night a wagon with Grandfather's bushings came across so quiet he never heard it until the near wheel rolled clean over his hat. He wasn't wearing it on his head, I'm glad to say. He'd set it down beside his ear to listen better.
Wilkins: That's the only time a Merrimack deputy ever took his hat off for a load of whiskey. Most of them take it off to hold out for the bribe.
Silas: Grandfather fixed the hat for him. He didn't charge.
Wilkins: A gentleman. Now, Silas, the boards. Tell them about your great-uncle and the sawdust.
Silas: My great-uncle worked a sawmill up the river and drove the lumber wagon besides. The trouble with jugs is they clink. You can quiet an axle, but you can't quiet glass against glass on a frost-heaved road. So he packed them in sawdust, which a sawmill makes by the ton and gives away. Fresh white pine sawdust from the pit, jugs bedded in it like eggs in bran, boards stacked over the top.
Wilkins: And somebody came at it with a pitchfork, I'll bet.
Silas: You'd win that bet, Doctor. A deputy stopped him at dusk and drove a pitchfork down through the boards, and he hit a jug. You could hear it break. Whiskey ran right down into the sawdust. But fresh pine sawdust is full of pitch, and it reeks of turpentine strong enough to water your eyes. The deputy stuck his nose in to sniff for liquor and got a noseful of pine pitch, and he started sneezing. Sneezed nine times, my great-uncle said, and counted every one aloud. The deputy waved him on just to get out of the stink. My great-uncle sold that soaked sawdust to a man in Epsom as fire-starter, which, as you'll tell them later, it surely was.
Wilkins: I will, and it's no joke. Now, Silas, the whistle. Gilman's wasn't the only steam whistle in the valley, and I'm told your father once got his hands on one.
Silas: He did. A mill down the river split the bell of its whistle in a hard frost. Water got in and froze, and the brass cracked like a dropped teacup. They brought it to my father. He couldn't cast a new bell in time, so he sleeved the crack with a band of copper, sweated it on proper with silver solder, mind you, never lead, and fitted it back. It held. But it came out a half-tone flat, with a wheeze on the end like an old woman climbing stairs.
Wilkins: I've heard it. It sounds like a mourner at a burying who wasn't left anything in the will.
Silas: That's what the town said. They named it the Widow. Within a month everybody in the valley could tell the Widow from Gilman's whistle with their eyes shut, and the runners picked up on it. If somebody leaned in a tavern door and said, The Widow's blown, it meant the shift had let out, the road was full, and you could go. It got so even honest folks said it. A farmer's wife would tell her husband the Widow's blown when she meant come in to supper.
Wilkins: A whistle at six o'clock tells a decent man to go home to supper and tells an indecent one to go to work. Silas, I saved the best for last. The pick.
Silas: This one is mine, not family. Last fall I was at a farm auction over in Barnstead and bought a box of old tools for a dollar, mostly for the iron. In the bottom was a mill bill, the little double-ended pick a miller uses to dress his stones and cut the furrows fresh. Good steel, tempered right, a straw color at the point. But the handle felt light. I knocked it on the bench and it rattled. The end cap was a plug of wood, and inside the handle was a hollow bored out, and inside that was a rolled-up slip of paper.
Wilkins: Don't keep them waiting, man. What did it say?
Silas: It was two columns in pencil. On the left: Gate, half past four. Noon, Gilman's. Six, Gilman's. Saturday long blow. On the right, next to each one: Roar, go by the lower road. P. at dinner. Go with the boards. Stay home, church folk about. That was a runner's whole timetable, laid against the mill clock, rolled up inside a miller's own tool.
Wilkins: P. at dinner! The deputy's initial, set down in history beside his pie. Silas, do you know whose pick it was?
Silas: No, sir. The box had no name on it. But the pick was dressed to the same furrow pattern Hosea Brackett's stones were cut to. I'll say no more than that.
Wilkins: You don't have to. Folks, that pick is going up on my wall, and Silas is going to name his price, and I'm going to pay half of it. Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister, stay put. I want you back for the copper talk.
Silas: I'll be here, Doctor. I'll sit away from the window.
♪ Brass-band stinger, bright and brash, under the crackle
Announcer: LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, has your old pot gone thin? Does your coil weep at the seams? Are you still trusting a kettle some fellow cobbled together from scrap and good intentions? Then hear me now! If you appreciate honest American craftsmanship, look no further than Moonshine Stills, proud home of the FLAME-FLOW STILL, the flagship, protected under United States Patent 10,561,960! It's built from heavy-gauge, high-purity electrolytic copper, the cleanest copper a man can lay hands on, with precision-machined brass unions that seal tight and stay tight. The Flame-Flow is engineered to drive convective circulation through the whole vessel so the heat works evenly and the result runs pure, for essential oils, herbal tinctures and traditional distillation demonstrations. It looks handsome on a hearth and it's built to outlast the man who buys it, all for eight hundred ninety-nine dollars! So don't wait for the next whistle. Go to moonshinestill.com and see the Flame-Flow for yourself at moonshinestill.com/products/flame-flow-copper-still. That's https://moonshinestill.com/products/flame-flow-copper-still. Or come lay your own hands on that copper at the Fort Wilkins Showroom on Route 28 in Pittsfield, New Hampshire. Once more, friends: moonshinestill.com! Order your Flame-Flow today!
♪ Stinger resolves; banjo theme returns briefly
Wilkins: Moonshine Stills. Silas hammers copper beside them in my foundry, and if they ever cut a corner he'd cut them.
♪ Low fiddle drone
Wilkins: Segment three: copper and the craft. Since tonight's a mill night, we'll start where the corn starts, which is between the stones.
Wilkins: When you take your corn to the miller for a mash, tell him to set his stones wide and crack it coarse. Fine meal is for bread. Put fine meal in a direct-fired pot and you get a porridge that would patch a barn roof. It settles on the bottom, it sticks, and it scorches like a sinner's conscience, and the scorched taste carries clear through to the jar.
Wilkins: Here's an old-fashioned recipe, for the history books only. Take about eight pounds of coarse-cracked corn, a pound and a half or two of malted barley ground fine, and five gallons of good water. Bring the water near a boil, and if you've an apothecary's thermometer, a hundred sixty-five degrees by Mr. Fahrenheit is about right. Stir in the corn and keep stirring till it thickens and goes glossy. That's the starch cooking open. Let it cool to about a hundred fifty-two degrees before the malt goes in, and that's the step men skip. The malt carries the ferments, the enzymes, that turn the corn starch into sugar. Raw yeast can't eat starch, and if you throw malt into a boiling pot you scald those ferments dead, and your corn stays starch like a deacon stays sober: on purpose and to nobody's benefit. Hold it warm an hour and more, stirring now and then, and taste it. It'll turn sweet on your tongue as the starch converts.
Wilkins: Then cool the whole lot down to about blood-warm or a bit under before you pitch your yeast, or you'll cook the yeast too. Keep it somewhere sensible and let it work several days until the bubbling quits. What you've got then is a wash, a sour, beery liquor of a few percent, and only then does it go to the still.
Wilkins: Silas, the swan neck. Folks think it's curved because the coppersmith was feeling romantic.
Silas: That curve does work, Doctor. The swan neck, the lyne arm, carries vapor from the pot to the condenser, and the angle matters. Tilt it up and more of the heavy vapor condenses on the way and runs back into the pot, which gives a lighter, cleaner spirit. Tilt it down and more of everything comes over, heavy and oily. A dephlegmator does the same work on purpose: it's a little cooling jacket that knocks the heavy stuff back down so the light vapor goes on. You set the angle for the spirit you want. You don't set it by guess.
Wilkins: Now the cuts, and listen close, because this part keeps men alive. Bring the pot up slow. The first runnings to come off are the foreshots. They smell sharp and nasty, like a hatter's shop or a varnish pot. Those go on the ground or in the lamp, never in a mouth. Then come the heads, still sharp and solvent-smelling and full of the stuff that splits skulls in the morning. Set them aside and don't drink them. Here's what the old-timers got wrong. They thought the poison comes off in the first spoonful and then it's done. It doesn't come off all at once. It trails out and smears into the run, so a careful distiller cuts generous, not stingy. Throw away a little too much rather than a little too little. Nobody ever went blind from being wasteful.
Wilkins: After the heads come the hearts, sweet and clean and smooth, the reason for the whole affair. Then the tails come on, smelling like a wet dog under a porch and running oily, and those get set aside to run again. Collect in small jars, one after another, so you can smell each one and make the cut by nose instead of guessing in the dark.
Wilkins: Last, the fire, and this is a mill story too. More sawmills in this valley have burned than ever wore out. Dry sawdust, wood dust hanging in the air, a bearing run hot for want of grease, and one spark makes the whole place a torch. A still-house is worse. The vapor coming off that worm is strong spirit and it will catch. Keep your collecting jar well away from any open flame. Check every joint for leaks before you light. Never walk off and leave a running still. And Silas's great-uncle's pitch-soaked sawdust doesn't belong within a mile of your firebox. Keep a bucket of sand and a wet blanket by the door, and know where the door is.
Silas: And keep the copper true, Doctor. A tight seam is a safe seam.
Wilkins: Spoken like a man who's never had a seam split on him. Thank you, Silas.
♪ Banjo walk-down
Wilkins: Segment four: myths, slang and the call-in line. I've got a fresh copper cent on the anvil and a punch in my hand, and every time I bust a lie, this coin gets my name on it.
Wilkins: First myth: the blue flame. Some old fool pours a spoonful of liquor on the stove lid, puts a match to it, sees a pretty blue flame and says that's how you know it's good and safe. He'll tell you lead burns red and good whiskey burns blue. Hogwash. The poison spirits, the wood alcohol, burn with a pale blue flame too, near as pretty, and a flame can't tell you which is which. Lead can't be read in a flame on a stove lid either, not by any farmer's eye. So light your liquor and admire the pretty blue flame, then go admire your pretty blue lips in the mirror at the undertaker's. The only safe spirit is the one made with honest cuts in clean copper.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. One lie down. Now to the call-in line. This one came all the way from the mountains of North Carolina by way of our speaking cylinder. Let's hear it.
♦ Cylinder needle drop, hiss and pop, a faint wind noise behind the 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?
♦ Cylinder clicks off
Wilkins: Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina! Rabbit, I'll take the two of them in turn.
Wilkins: The hickory ashes first. Up here in New Hampshire, our great-grandfathers cleared this land by felling every hardwood in sight and burning it, then soaked the ashes in water and boiled them down into potash. They hauled it to Boston by the barrel, and for many a hill farm that was the only cash money of the year. Do you know what you get when ash meets water? Lye. That's the stuff your grandmother made soap from, the stuff that ate the skin off her knuckles. Throw a shovel of hickory ash in a keg of hot liquor and you're making a weak, nasty lye soup. It might knock back a little sourness, and it'll leave you a taste like licking a fireplace. But it won't touch the poison spirits, not one drop. The heads come out in the cuts or they don't come out at all. Your uncle may as well drop a hymnal in the keg. It'll clean the heads exactly as well, and the singing might improve.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Now the red oak, and here's a parlor trick for you, Rabbit. I've got a stick of red oak in my hand, about a foot long and cut across the grain at both ends. I'm putting one end in this jar of water. Listen.
♦ Wilkins blows hard; a stream of bubbles gurgles up through the water
Wilkins: You heard it. I blew straight through a foot of solid red oak like it was a soda straw. Red oak is shot full of open pores end to end, and that's why no cooper with an ounce of sense makes a whiskey barrel out of it. A red oak barrel would weep its whole contents onto the cellar floor by Thursday. Coopers use white oak, whose pores are plugged up tight by nature. Oak shavings in the keg will give your liquor color and a pucker of tannin, a little of the barrel's work done fast and badly. That's flavor. It isn't medicine, and it doesn't clean a blessed thing. Down in Tennessee they drip their new spirit through sugar maple charcoal to mellow it, and charcoal does take the rough edge off a finished spirit, but that's charcoal in a filter, not shavings in a boiling keg. Your thump keg strengthens the run. It doesn't wash its sins. A bad head is cut out by the man at the worm with his nose and his jars.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: So, Rabbit, your uncle's half right, which in my experience makes him an uncle. The old-timers did throw those things in, and they were wrong about what it did. Tell him Dr. Wilkins says keep the ash for the soap kettle and the oak for the woodbox. And a shout from Fort Wilkins to all of Wilkesboro and Wilkes County. I'm told your county was named for John Wilkes, the English radical who mocked the King, dodged the law and got himself thrown out of Parliament more times than I've been thrown out of the Pittsfield Grange. Cletus, your county is very nearly named after me, and I'll expect a jar at Christmas.
♦ Bear grunts approvingly outside
Wilkins: Barnaby agrees. He'll take the jar.
♪ Brass-band stinger, short
Announcer: A QUICK WORD before the Doctor bids you goodnight! The Flame-Flow still, U.S. Patent 10,561,960, is heavy-gauge pure copper and built to outlast you. See it at moonshinestill.com or at the Fort Wilkins Showroom on Route 28. Moonshinestill.com!
♪ Parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme returns softly
Wilkins: That's our night, friends. If you'd rather learn the craft properly than learn it from your uncle and a shovel of ash, sign on for the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. You'll get mash, copper, cuts and fire safety, all the history and the hard sense together, and you can enroll by way of moonshinestill.com. Thanks to Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister, who goes home tonight with all his eyebrows, which is more than Boston managed. Thanks to Hosea Brackett, wherever his ledger went. And thanks to every miller who ever blew a whistle and never looked to see what drove off under it.
Wilkins: The six o'clock whistle has blown, the gate is shut, and the road out front has gone quiet. Barnaby's asleep with his head in the meal bin. 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