The Contraband Cent Pouch: How Runners Carried Coin, Receipts, and Warning Signs
Alchemist G. G. Wilkins opens the small leather pouch that runners carried on the Pittsfield-to-Concord roads. He explains the stamped cents they showed as recognition tokens, the folded and revenue-stamped receipts that backed up a cover story, and the notched coppers left on stone walls to tell a runner whether a farm was safe. He tells how Barnaby caught a deputy carrying a counterfeit Wilkins cent. North Carolina runner Junior Vance shares new stories about a drilled dime on a bootlace, red flannel warning signals, a feed-store receipt that went wrong, and a bribed deputy's nicked penny. In Segment 4, Wilkins answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller's question about hickory ashes in the thump keg and debunks the blue-flame test.
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Full episode transcript
♦ Audible wax cylinder surface crackle, slow drip of clear distillate into a glass jar
♦ Barnaby the black bear grunting and chain clinking outside log cabin window
Wilkins: Barnaby. BARNABY. Settle your great hairy carcass down. That's hearts dripping into a jar, not your supper. All you'll get out of this window tonight is the smell of it and the back of my hand.
♦ Bear huffs, chain drags across frozen ground, a wet chewing sound on timber
Wilkins: Now he's gnawing the sill again. Four hundred pounds of fur and appetite, and he gnaws my window frame the way a widow gnaws a grudge, slow, thorough, and with no plan to stop before Judgment. Lie down, you moth-eaten sofa. Lie DOWN.
♦ Heavy thud of the bear settling, one long disgruntled groan
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth, swelling, then settling beneath the voice
Wilkins: Good evening, friends, neighbors, and you sneaking revenue men with your ears to the knothole. This is 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, tooth-puller, blacksmith, coin-stamper, and twice-arrested public nuisance, Dr. George G. Wilkins. Tonight we talk about the smallest piece of luggage a runner ever carried and the most important one: the contraband cent pouch. A little sack of leather that held a man's name, his alibi, and his warning signs, all in copper and paper. We'll open it up, shake it out on the table, and see what falls out.
Wilkins: First, a word from the people who keep my copper shining.
♪ Brief bright banjo flourish
Announcer: A quick word, friends! The Fort Wilkins 2-Gallon Tabletop Alembic is pure spun copper, sized for your table, and built for botanical waters and fragrant floral oils. See it at moonshinestill.com. That's moonshinestill.com!
♪ Theme fades out
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, a log shifting in the stove
SEGMENT 1: THE POUCH, THE PENNY, AND THE PAPER
Wilkins: Picture the thing first. A pouch of calfskin or smoked deer hide, about the size of a hen's egg, on a rawhide thong around the neck and tucked inside the shirt. Or it might be sewn into the armpit of a wool coat, where no decent deputy would care to put his hand. Every runner on the Pittsfield-to-Concord road carried his pouch close to his privates, and I mean that in both senses. A deputy who wants to search it had best be on very friendly terms first.
Wilkins: A good pouch had three pockets, stitched with waxed linen thread. The left pocket held stamped cents. The middle held folded paper. The right held notched coppers. Left for who you are, middle for why you're here, right for whether you ought to be here at all. A runner who mixed up his pockets was soon a runner who mixed up his teeth with the road.
Wilkins: Now, the road. From my door to the State House in Concord is about fifteen miles as the crow flies, and the crow doesn't carry jugs. You go down the turnpike through Epsom, or cut across through Chichester. If the Chichester bridge has a deputy on it smoking his pipe and feeling important, you swing north round through Loudon and come at the capital from behind, the way a sensible man comes at a mule.
Wilkins: Along every one of those roads are farms. Some will water your horse, hide your load in the haymow, and take a jar for their trouble. Some will run straight to the sheriff to buy themselves a little favor. And some were friendly last month, but the wife has since been to a temperance meeting in Concord and come home with a pamphlet and a look in her eye. A runner had no sure way of telling one from another in the dark, so we invented one, out of the only thing a Yankee trusts more than his own mother, and that's money.
♦ Leather pouch untied, coins spilling onto a wooden table
Wilkins: The left pocket first, the stamped cents. You know I strike coppers at my anvil with my own punch, G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. Half of Merrimack County has carried one. But a Wilkins cent in a runner's pouch wasn't spending money. It was a calling card. A runner reached a buyer's back door in Concord, at a livery stable, behind a harness shop, or in the cellar of a so-called temperance hotel, and the buyer would say, Got change for a Wilkins? The runner dropped a stamped cent in his palm. The buyer ran his thumb over the stamp in the dark, and if it was true, the door opened.
Wilkins: Here's a secret I'll tell you since we're all friends and none of you can read. My punch has a flaw in it, and I filed it there on purpose. The period after the N in N.H. sits a hair high, like a wart on a parson's lip. Any fool with a brass punch can cut G. G. WILKINS. He won't know about the wart. My buyers felt for that wart the way a bridegroom feels for his wallet on his wedding night, nervous and certain it's there.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: There. Fresh one, still warm. You can hear the copper give. It's a sound like a little bell with a head cold.
Wilkins: Now the middle pocket, the paper. When Mr. Lincoln's men passed the Revenue Act of 1862, they taxed everything from liquor to lawsuits. There was also a stamp duty on all manner of documents. A receipt for any sum over twenty dollars had to carry a two-cent revenue stamp, a little engraved square of paper licked and stuck down. The government meant it as a tax. We took it as a gift. A receipt with a proper revenue stamp looks like the most honest thing in the world, as official as a death certificate and twice as boring.
Wilkins: So a runner carried a receipt, folded in quarters, that agreed with his cover story. Received of Mr. So-and-So, twenty-two dollars for nine barrels of cider vinegar, delivered to Concord. Twenty-two dollars, mind you, so it needs the stamp, and the stamp makes it gospel. If a deputy stopped the wagon, the runner looked bored, handed over the paper, and let the man read the barrels into vinegar.
Wilkins: Deputy Thaddeus Grout of Chichester stopped one of my boys on a February night and demanded his papers. Thaddeus Grout couldn't read his own name if you carved it on his tombstone and stood him in front of it. He held the receipt upside down, studied it like Scripture, moved his lips, and pronounced it in good order. That's the only time that man ever approved anything right side up. My boy thanked him, tipped his hat, and drove off with nine barrels of vinegar that would've made a Baptist sing in Latin.
Wilkins: The third pocket, the notched coppers, was the cleverest. The safe-house system on the Concord roads worked like this. Every friendly farm had a spot on its stone wall near the road, a particular capstone with a hollow under it, maybe the third stone past the gatepost, or the one with the lichen shaped like a cow. Under that stone, the farmer left a copper cent. On a moonless night, a runner hopped down, felt under the stone, and read the coin with his thumb, like a banker counting in his sleep.
Wilkins: The code went like this. One notch filed in the rim right at Lady Liberty's chin meant come in, the barn is open, the cider's hard, and the dog's tied. A notch at the back of her head meant the law's been by today, so keep driving and don't look at the house. Two notches meant there's a deputy in the parlor at this very minute, drinking my cider and bouncing my baby on his knee, so for God's sake don't stop. And a rim filed smooth all the way round meant the house has gone temperance, so forget we ever met and pray for us.
Wilkins: The farmer never had to stand at his gate waving a lantern for the whole county to see. He never had to write a word that a sheriff could hold up in court. A notched penny under a rock is just a penny under a rock. A magistrate can't hang a man for being careless with his change, though Lord knows they've tried to hang men for less.
Wilkins: There were troubles. The old cents were thick and took a file well. Then Congress, in the Coinage Act of 1864, made the new cent of thin bronze. The new bronze cent is so thin that notching it is like flirting with a Shaker: you can try, but you won't leave much of a mark. That same act gave us the two-cent piece, the first coin of this Republic to carry the words IN GOD WE TRUST. I've always found it touching that the government put its trust in God on the very coin it uses to collect the tax. Somebody up there is hedging his bets.
Wilkins: The same year, Congress outlawed the private tokens merchants had been striking since '62. Tens of millions of those little penny-sized pieces were rattling around the country, stamped with the names of grocers and saloonkeepers and patent-pill men, because the Treasury couldn't keep a cent in circulation. So Congress outlawed private pennies in '64, which made Washington the only outfit in America permitted to print worthless money. My counterstamps were struck on honest government copper, I'll have you know, so they couldn't hang me for that one either. They had to settle for the whiskey.
Wilkins: One more story from the third pocket. A runner from Barnstead, whom I'll call Hosea because that was his name, lost his file one night. He thought he'd be clever and notch his coppers with his teeth. He bit down on a good thick 1851 large cent like a hound on a hambone. What he notched was his own left incisor, cracked clean down to the gum. He walked into my shop holding his jaw and dripping, and I pulled what was left of that tooth with the forceps in one long pull. He hollered so loud Barnaby hollered back, and I swear the bear did it out of sympathy. Then I charged him eleven notched cents, so he paid in the very currency that ruined him.
♦ Barnaby grunts from outside the window
Wilkins: Yes, Barnaby, I know. You're coming up next.
♪ Short fiddle sting, wax crackle
SEGMENT 2: THE COUNTERFEIT CENT AND THE BEAR WHO KNEW METAL
Wilkins: Now, if a stamped cent could open a buyer's door, sooner or later some lawman would try to forge one. It happened in December of '64. Deputy Abner Pease, a long, damp, yellow-whiskered fellow with a face like a boiled turnip somebody had sat on, decided he'd catch Wilkins the clever way. He had a tinsmith in Concord cut him a punch reading G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. He struck it on a brass token, some saloon token from Manchester. He put on a farmer's frock, smeared his boots with cow manure for authenticity, and came up my dooryard after dark pretending to be a runner come to buy.
Wilkins: He knocked on the still-house door and said, Got change for a Wilkins? Bold as you please. Well, I hadn't even come to the door yet. Barnaby got there first.
Wilkins: Understand, that bear has smelled my anvil every day of his life. My copper carries the stink of the forge, coal smoke, and the hands of honest drinkers. Brass smells different, sharp and sour, like a church bell that's been licked by a liar. Pease had that brass token in his fist, and Barnaby's nose came up off the snow like a hunting dog's. He gave one huff, and that was all the warning Pease got.
♦ Chain snaps taut, a roar, wool tearing
Wilkins: The chain lets him reach exactly to the third flagstone of the path, and Pease was standing on the fourth. Barnaby reached him anyway. He hooked one claw in the tail of that frock coat, and you could hear the wool tear like a bedsheet torn for bandages, five long strips. Pease spun round to run. His suspenders let go, both buttons together, pop pop, and his trousers fell to his knees. His legs tangled, and down he went face first in the snow. Barnaby walked up and sat on him.
Wilkins: He didn't bite him. Bears are particular about what they eat, and Barnaby has never been hungry enough for a deputy. He just sat on him, four hundred pounds of bear on the small of one county man's back, like a hen sitting on an egg she's not sure about. I came out with the lantern, and all I could see of Abner Pease was two bare white buttocks shining in the moonlight like a pair of fresh-pulled molars, one boot, and a hand stuck out of the snow holding a brass cent.
Wilkins: You could hear his ribs. Not breaking, mind, but complaining, creaking like a cider press with the screw turned down. Every time Barnaby breathed out, Pease squeaked, a little thin whistle, the way a teakettle sounds just before it can't hold its temper. Barnaby leaned down and licked the back of his neck, slow and thorough, from collar to ear. I believe it was a kindness. Pease didn't take it that way. He used words I've only heard before from a man getting a wisdom tooth out without spirits.
Wilkins: I took the brass cent out of his fingers and held it to the lantern. No wart after the N. A forgery, and a bad one. I said, Abner, you tried to pass counterfeit Wilkins money on Wilkins property, in front of a Wilkins bear, and that's three crimes in one breath. He said, Get it off me, George. I said, Get what off you, Abner? You came to buy. Barnaby's the clerk.
Wilkins: I let Barnaby keep him till sunup, which I thought was merciful, since I could've let him keep him till spring. I brought Pease a blanket and a cup of hot cider, no spirits in it, for I'll not have the county say I bribed a deputy while he was lying down. Barnaby ate his bootlaces, the boot, and the manure he'd smeared on it, God help that animal's insides. At dawn I gave Barnaby a pail of molasses, and he got off Pease the way a fat man gets out of a pew, groaning and in no hurry. Pease went home down the turnpike in a torn frock, one boot, and his trousers in his hand, and every milk wagon from here to Epsom saw him. Deputy Pease spent the whole night under four hundred pounds of bear and came out flatter than his own arguments.
Wilkins: So understand this: Barnaby has better judgment of metal than the Concord assayer, and he works for molasses.
♦ Barnaby grunts contentedly, chain clinks
Wilkins: Now, my guest tonight has carried his share of strange tokens on dark roads. He comes to us from far down south, from the Brushy Mountains of North Carolina, out of Wilkes County. He drives a gasoline carriage faster than any Concord coach ever ran, and he doesn't believe in brakes on Sundays. Please welcome Junior Vance. Junior, sit down, mind the bear, and don't put your hand near that window unless you've finished with it.
Junior: Doc, I've been run off by dogs, deputies, and a Primitive Baptist woman with a hoe, but I ain't never been introduced to a bear before supper. Pleasure to be here.
Wilkins: Pleasure's all mine. Now, I've been talking all night about pouches and passwords. Did you carry anything like a calling card when you made your deliveries down to Charlotte?
Junior: I did, and it wasn't no penny neither. Down home everything's bigger except the money. My buyer in Charlotte was a fella everybody called Shorty, six foot four, and you know how that goes. He worked out of the back of a feed and seed store, and he wouldn't open the back door to God Almighty unless God held up the right dime. So I carried a silver dime with a hole drilled square through Liberty's ear, threaded on a rawhide bootlace, and tied round my ankle.
Wilkins: Round your ankle? Not your neck?
Junior: The law checks your neck, Doc. They check your pockets, your hat, under the seat. In all my days, I never had a deputy pull off my sock. A man's foot is the last private place in North Carolina.
Wilkins: Speaking as a dentist, a man's mouth is the last private place, and I've been paid to invade it for twenty years.
Junior: Well, you can keep that line of work. So I'd pull up behind Shorty's at two in the morning, untie the dime, and hold it up to a little slot he'd cut in the door, right at eye level. He'd look through, see that hole through the ear, and pull the bolt. Fine system. Worked two years.
Wilkins: And then?
Junior: Then I forded a creek up near Moravian Falls with the water higher than I'd figured. Water came up through the floorboards, I'm wet to the knee, cussing, and somewhere in that creek my bootlace came untied and the dime went off downstream to start a new life. I get to Charlotte, knock, and Shorty looks through the slot and says, Where's the dime? I said, Shorty, it's me, you've known me since I was knee-high. And he says, a lot of fellas are knee-high. Prove it.
Wilkins: A fair point, the world being full of short liars.
Junior: So he says, What's my mule's name? Now I'd known Shorty ten years and never seen him with a mule. I'm standing there sweating with forty gallons in the back and the sky starting to go gray. I figure it's a trick, so I just tell the truth: Shorty, you ain't got a mule. And the bolt slides back, quick as you please. That was the backup password, see. He'd sold that mule in '52. Only a real friend would know he didn't have one, and a deputy would make up a name every time.
Wilkins: That's the best password I ever heard, because you can't torture it out of a man. There's nothing to tell. I'm going to steal it. Barnaby, what's your mule's name?
♦ Barnaby grunts
Wilkins: Correct. He hasn't got one either. He ate it.
Junior: Lord have mercy.
Wilkins: Now, we used notched coppers under a capstone to tell a runner whether a farm was safe. How did you know which houses to pass by on the road?
Junior: Clotheslines, Doc. Every farm wife in Wilkes County had a clothesline in the side yard, and the law never once looked at one. The Pruitt place, about halfway down the mountain, was my signal house. If the sheriff's men were in the hollow, Mrs. Pruitt hung her husband's red flannel union suit on the line, arms out like he was hollering. A red union suit on the line meant don't stop, don't slow down, and don't wave, because the law's in the hollow. A white sheet meant come on in, there's biscuits.
Wilkins: Simple and handsome. A man's underclothes, a public warning. In Pittsfield we'd call that patriotic.
Junior: Worked fine, too, till one Monday. I come round the bend at midnight with a full load, and there's that red union suit flapping in the moonlight like the devil's own flag. I mash the gas, keep going straight past, and take the long road round by Wilkesboro and back up, forty miles out of my way on bad gravel. Lost the whole night. Got to Charlotte too late to make the drop, and I had to sit on it in a barn all day sweating.
Wilkins: The law was in the hollow, then?
Junior: No sir. Mr. Pruitt had come down with a bad stomach the night before. Some barbecue that had sat out a day too long. He'd put that union suit through more trouble than a Confederate flag at Appomattox, and Mrs. Pruitt washed it and hung it out because it was Monday, and Monday was washday. Nobody told her the underwear was on duty.
Wilkins: Junior, you lost a whole night's run on account of one man's digestion, which is the most expensive bellyache since Pharaoh's. Your trouble was the same as ours with the notched penny. A signal's only good if everybody agrees that's all it is. A penny under a rock has no other use. A union suit on a washline has one other use every Monday of the year.
Junior: That's right. After that, we changed it to a washtub turned upside down on the fence post. Nobody turns a washtub upside down on a fence post unless they mean something by it.
Wilkins: Now tell me about paper. My boys carried receipts with a revenue stamp to back up a cover story. Did you have anything like that?
Junior: Oh, I had a receipt. That receipt cost me more than any ticket I ever got. Here's the thing. When you've got forty or fifty gallons in the back of a coupe, the back end sits low, real low, like a hound dog dragging its hindquarters across the rug. Any deputy with one eye can see you're carrying something heavy. So I got the fella at the feed store to write me out a receipt: four hundred pounds of laying mash, paid in full, his stamp and everything. If I got stopped, I'd say, Feed for my aunt's chickens, Officer, and hand him the receipt.
Wilkins: That's a sound cover. Hens eat like Methodists at a funeral.
Junior: Sound as a dollar, till I got stopped outside Statesville by a deputy named Hollis. Hollis takes the receipt, reads it careful, and nods. He says, Laying mash. And I say yes sir, for my aunt's hens. And he says, You know, my wife's been after me for laying mash all week, and the feed store in town's been out since Tuesday. I'll take a hundred pounds off you at cost.
Wilkins: Oh no.
Junior: Oh yes. Now I ain't got a single pound of laying mash in that car. What I've got would lay a deputy flat, but it won't make a hen lay nothing. So I tell him, Deputy, my aunt's real particular, she counts every sack. And he says, Then you and me will go to the feed store together in the morning, and you can buy me my hundred pounds and I'll pay you back. And he followed me, Doc. Rode behind me the whole way, slow, polite as Sunday, all the way to the feed store. I had to walk in there with forty gallons of liquor sitting in the parking lot and buy four hundred pounds of laying mash with my own money, so my story would come out true. He took his hundred, paid me two dollars and ten cents, and thanked me. I drove the other three hundred pounds of chicken feed and forty gallons of whiskey to Charlotte with the back end dragging sparks.
Wilkins: So you made your delivery at a loss and became a feed merchant by accident.
Junior: Shorty didn't want no laying mash. I fed it to my aunt's chickens for a year. Best-laying hens in Wilkes County. They ate better than I did that whole season.
Wilkins: I love it. A receipt is a lie written down where it can be checked. You had a lawman with a real need for chicken feed, and that's the most dangerous animal in the woods. More dangerous than a bear, I'd say, and I'm married to one. I mean the bear, not my wife. Write that down if you're a deputy.
Junior: I'm fixing to forget I heard it.
Wilkins: One more before I let you go. Our farmers notched pennies to say whether a house was safe. Did a penny ever tell you anything?
Junior: Yes sir, and this one's a little sad. There was a deputy up in our county, I won't say his name, that was on the take. He wasn't greedy, he took a little every month, regular as a preacher's sermon. The arrangement was he kept a penny on the dashboard of his car with a nick filed out of the edge. If you came up on his car parked at a crossroads at night and that nicked penny was sitting up on the dash, you knew it was him, and he'd been paid, so you just drove on by. He'd lift two fingers off the wheel at you like a farmer saying good evening.
Wilkins: A deputy who takes a nicked penny is a man whose conscience has already been filed smooth at the rim. Go on.
Junior: So one night I come round the curve by the church, and there's his car at the crossroads, nicked penny shining in my headlights. I slow right down to a crawl, roll down the window, and give him a wave and holler, Evening! And that man in the driver's seat ain't him. It's a brand-new boy, just sworn in, borrowed the car while his was in the shop, and he didn't know what that penny on the dash was. All he knew was some fella with a car sitting low as a snake's belly just slowed down and hollered howdy at him at two o'clock in the morning.
Wilkins: And then you ran.
Junior: Then I ran. Eleven miles of switchback, gravel flying, that new boy right on me the whole way, till I cut through Ernest Hagaman's cornfield and lost him in the tassels. I come home with half that field's corn in my radiator grille. Next morning I put a pint and a five-dollar bill on Ernest's porch for the corn.
Wilkins: So what did you take away from it?
Junior: That a penny's only as honest as the hand that put it there. The penny didn't lie, Doc. It just didn't know who was sitting behind it.
Wilkins: Junior, that's the truest thing said in this fort all year, and a bear says a good many true things around here. I'm going to stamp a cent for you to remember us by.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: There it is. G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., with the wart after the N. If you ever come north and knock on a Concord back door, hold this up to the slot, and tell them you've got no mule.
Junior: I'll carry it round my ankle, Doc. Thank you kindly.
Wilkins: Junior Vance of Wilkes County, North Carolina, everybody. Mind the bear on the way out. Walk on the left side of the path. The right side is closer to the chain.
♦ Footsteps on plank floor, a door creaks, distant bear grunt, quick hurried steps
♪ Banjo bridge, upbeat and bright
AD BREAK
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♪ Banjo flourish, final fiddle chord
SEGMENT 3: COPPER AND THE CRAFT, OR WHY YOU DON'T BUILD A STILL OUT OF YOUR POUCH
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, the steady drip into the jar resumes
Wilkins: Back in the still-house. While we've had coins on the table all night, I want to clear up one piece of foolishness before some genius in Barnstead tries it. Every few years some fellow says, If copper is the right metal for a still, why don't I melt down a sack of pennies and hammer myself a pot? Pennies are copper, ain't they? No. They're not, or not enough of them.
Wilkins: The new bronze cent is mostly copper with tin and zinc mixed in. Tokens and buttons and cheap trinkets are often brass, which is copper and zinc and whatever else the foundryman swept off his floor that morning, sometimes lead. Zinc and lead have no business near hot spirit vapor. And lead solder in a seam is how men poison their customers and their own livers. You build a still from pure copper, joined with silver solder or a proper mechanical union, or you don't build it. That's why I buy sheet copper refined pure, and I'll pay the difference cheerfully, because I'd rather be poor than famous at a coroner's inquest.
Wilkins: Now, why copper at all? Two reasons, one plain and one alchemical. The plain reason is that copper carries heat better than nearly any metal a smith can afford. It warms even, so you don't get a scorched spot in the bottom of your pot. It's soft enough to raise with a hammer and rivet tight. The alchemical reason is the better one. Spirit vapor rising off a fermented mash carries sulfur with it, the stink of rotten eggs and a cabbage gone bad in the root cellar. When that vapor touches bright copper, the sulfur grabs onto the metal and stays behind as a dark film. The spirit goes on up the neck without it. Copper catches the sulfur the way Barnaby catches deputies, and lets the honest traffic go by.
Wilkins: That means the copper has to be bright to do its work. After a run, I give mine a wash of vinegar and a handful of salt, or another mild acid, and scrub till it shines pink. Then I rinse it, and I mean rinse, with plenty of clean water, till there's no vinegar left in the seams. A dull, crusted pot is a pot that has quit working and is only drawing wages.
Wilkins: Now, the cuts. These are the most important minutes in the whole art, so listen even if you're a deputy, because you'll want to know what you're confiscating. Mind you, making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is illegal in the United States, and everything on this program is for history and education. I tell you this the way I'd show a medical student a jawbone: so you know what's inside, and what can kill a man.
Wilkins: Step one. You don't distill corn or sugar. You distill a wash, a mash that's already fermented out with yeast for a good many days, till it's quit bubbling and tastes sour and a little sharp. That wash goes into the pot, never more than about three-quarters full, so it has room to boil without frothing up into the neck.
Wilkins: Step two. Bring it up gentle. Low fire, always a low fire. A still in a hurry is a still that boils over, sprays mash into your worm, and plugs the line. A plugged line builds pressure, and a pot under pressure is a bomb with a handle. A still is never sealed tight and never left alone while it runs. Ever. Every vapor joint is kept tight with flour paste or a proper fitting, and the fire is kept well away from any place vapor might leak out. Alcohol vapor is heavier than air and creeps along the floor looking for a flame like a deputy looking for a bribe.
Wilkins: Step three, the foreshots. The first spirit to come off the worm is the lightest stuff in the pot, and it's poison. Methanol boils at about a hundred forty-eight degrees on the Fahrenheit scale, a good bit lower than honest ethanol at about a hundred seventy-three. So the methanol and the other light, nasty spirits rush out first. My rule for a small pot is to throw away at least a little more than a gill for every five gallons of wash, and more if I've any doubt. I pour it out on the woodpile or burn it in a lamp. I never drink it, never give it away, never use it to rinse a tooth socket, and never let a fool talk me into keeping it because it's strong. It's strong the way a rattlesnake is strong.
Wilkins: Step four, the heads. After the foreshots come the heads, still harsh, smelling like a varnish pot or a glue pot left on the stove. Heads that smell like a varnish pot belong in the varnish pot, not in a Christian's mouth. I catch them in small jars, one after another, and smell each one. When the varnish smell fades and the spirit turns clean and sweet, smelling of grain or fruit, I've reached the hearts.
Wilkins: Step five, the hearts. That's the good stuff, the reason for the whole sinful business. Clean, sweet, warm going down. Keep catching in small jars and keep smelling. Small jars let a man change his mind.
Wilkins: Step six, the tails. Toward the end, the spirit gets weaker, cloudy, and oily. It smells like wet dog and old dishwater. It leaves a slick on your fingers. That's the tails. Set them aside, and they can go back into the next run to be redistilled. The tails aren't poison like the heads, but they taste like a bad marriage.
Wilkins: Step seven. Put out the fire, let the pot cool before you open it, clean the copper bright, and be thankful you still have your eyebrows.
Wilkins: Now there's the craft. Remember, the copper does its share and the cuts do the rest. Everything else is talk, and we're about to hear some.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
♪ Fiddle sting
SEGMENT 4: THE CALL-IN TAPE, THE THUMP KEG ASHES, AND THE BLUE FLAME LIE
Wilkins: Now to the mailbag, or rather the talking-tube. We've had a message recorded on the wax by a listener far down south. Let's hear it.
♦ Wax cylinder crackle intensifies, a hiss, then a faint far-off voice
Cletus: Alchemist, this is Cletus Rabbit Miller from Wilkesboro, North Carolina. My uncle swears old-timers used to throw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads. Is there any truth to that, or was he just making swamp medicine?
♦ Cylinder clicks off, crackle fades
Wilkins: Rabbit! Cletus Rabbit Miller of Wilkesboro! Neighbor to our guest Junior tonight. I hope you two share a fence line and a jar of something. Your uncle isn't the first man to swear by that trick, and he won't be the last, God love him. Let me tell you what he's really doing when he throws hickory ash in a thump keg.
Wilkins: Hardwood ash, and hickory makes the best of it, is mostly potash. Every farm wife in New England knows what happens if you steep ashes in water in a barrel with straw in the bottom. You get lye. Lye makes soap and hominy, and it makes a mess when it meets anything greasy. A fermented mash has oils from the grain in it. Pour hot ash into a thump keg full of hot low wines, and you've started a soap kettle in the middle of your still. It foams, Rabbit. It foams up like a Methodist revival, climbs the line, and spits soapy froth into the worm. If it plugs the worm, you've built up pressure in the doubler, and pressure in a hot copper pot is how men lose their beards and their roofs in the same afternoon. Rabbit, put hickory ash in a thump keg and you've made a soap that will wash nothing but your reputation down the worm.
Wilkins: As for the heads, the ash doesn't touch them. Methanol and the other harsh light spirits boil early because they're light, and they'll boil just as early with ash in the keg or a hymnbook in the keg. The only way to get them out is to catch them in jars and throw them out, the foreshots and the heads, the way I just told you. A thump keg gives the spirit a second boil on its way through, and makes it stronger. It doesn't make it honest.
Wilkins: Now the red oak shavings. There's a grain of truth there. Oak gives spirit color, tannin, and a woody, vanilla kind of taste, but it does that slowly, sitting in a barrel for months and years. A handful of shavings in a doubler, with spirit vapor bubbling past for an hour, is like tossing a fiddle into a snowbank and expecting music. Throw oak shavings in the doubler and wait for them to age your liquor, and you'll die of old age first, which at least cures the hangover. And red oak's a poor choice even for a barrel. It's open-grained and leaky, which is why coopers use white oak.
Wilkins: So tell your uncle this, Rabbit, with my respect. His medicine is mostly swamp. The ash is a superstition that does harm, the oak is a good idea in the wrong place, and the only cure for bad heads is a jar, a nose, and the sense to pour it out. And tell him an old dentist in New Hampshire is proud he's still asking questions. A man who asks questions about his still keeps his eyesight longer.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: That one's for you, Rabbit. A Wilkins cent, wart and all. It's going in tomorrow's mail sack bound for Wilkesboro.
Wilkins: Now, while we're shooting at superstitions, here's one I hear in every tavern from Pittsfield to Portsmouth: the blue flame test. A man pours a spoonful of spirit, puts a match to it, and says, If it burns blue, it's good; if it burns red, it's lead, and you're dead. He'll say it like it's Scripture, and he'll say it every time somebody pours one.
Wilkins: It's a lie. A charming one, with a rhyme, but a lie. A blue flame tells you that what's in the spoon will burn, and nothing more. Methanol, the very poison you were supposed to throw out with the foreshots, burns with a pale blue flame you can hardly see in daylight. So a man doing the blue flame test on a jar full of foreshots would see a lovely blue flame, nod wisely, drink, and go blind before he could finish the rhyme. A blue flame proves your spirit will burn, and so will a Merrimack County courthouse, and I wouldn't drink either one.
Wilkins: As for lead, a spoon flame isn't a reliable test for it. A pot soldered with lead can give you spirit that burns blue as the Virgin's robe and still poisons you slowly, a little at a time. The test for lead isn't in the spoon. It's in the still. Build it of pure copper with silver solder or proper joints, and there's no lead to test for.
Wilkins: There's a cousin of that myth too, the bead test. A man shakes a jar and judges the strength by how big the bubbles are and how long they hang. It'll tell a practiced man roughly how strong a spirit is, but the bead knows nothing about poison. A strong spirit full of heads beads beautiful.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: That's three coins tonight and three myths dead on my anvil. The blue flame, the bead, and the hickory ash. Bury them all in the same grave, and plant nothing over them.
♪ Banjo bridge
Announcer: Before we go, one more quick word! The Fort Wilkins Tabletop Alembic is pure electrolytic copper with hand-riveted handles, for floral waters and table-top demonstrations. Two hundred eighty-nine dollars at moonshinestill.com. Moonshinestill.com!
♪ Theme rises gently
SIGN-OFF
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, stove door creaks shut
Wilkins: Well, friends, that's our pouch emptied and the coins counted. Stamped cents to say who you are, a folded receipt to say why you're here, and a notched copper under a cold stone to say whether you ought to be here at all. A tax man counts your pennies, a deputy counts your jars, and Barnaby counts your fingers, and only Barnaby comes back with a different total.
Wilkins: My thanks to Junior Vance for coming all the way from the Brushy Mountains with his drilled dime, his red union suit, and his three hundred pounds of chicken feed. And a salute to Cletus Rabbit Miller of Wilkesboro, who'll soon have a Wilkins cent on his mantel, and whose uncle will soon have one less handful of ash in his doubler.
Wilkins: If tonight's talk of cuts and copper has you itching to learn the craft properly, the safe way, the honest way, with your eyebrows and your eyesight intact, then sign up for the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. I'll teach you the metal, the mash, the fire, and the cuts, from the first drop of foreshots to the last oily tail, all done within the law, with permits and paperwork the Treasury will stamp. Better men than you have learned it from me, and so have a great many worse ones.
Wilkins: Barnaby, say goodnight to the people.
♦ Barnaby grunts once, chain clinks
Wilkins: That's as polite as he gets. 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 to close, then fades into wax cylinder crackle