Pot Still Arithmetic: Figuring Yield, Fuel, and Profit on a Forty-Gallon Run
Dr. Wilkins takes a slate and chalk to one week's work at Fort Wilkins. He follows eight bushels of grain and three-quarters of a cord of wood through four stripping runs and a forty-gallon spirit run to about fifteen proof gallons, then sets the price he gets against Mr. Lincoln's $2.00-a-proof-gallon tax to show why a small still-keeper's margin was thin and one bad week could wipe out a season. Retired revenue officer Captain Donald Vance explains how he caught still-keepers with arithmetic, and Wilkins answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, NC, about hickory ashes and red oak shavings in the thump keg before striking his anvil to knock down the blue flame myth.
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Full episode transcript
♦ Audible wax cylinder surface crackle, slow drip of clear distillate into a glass jar
♦ Barnaby the black bear grunting and chain clinking outside log cabin window
Wilkins: Barnaby! Barnaby, settle your four hundred pounds of fleas and bad intentions down on that dirt. That is the third time tonight you have rattled the chain at my window. You will get your supper when the run is done and the arithmetic is done, and not one minute before. Lie down, I said. Look at him. He is chewing on the chain again. He thinks if he chews it long enough it will turn into a pork chop. That is the same theory the Treasury has about my pocketbook.
♦ Bear grumbles, a heavy body drops onto packed earth, chain settles
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth, swelling, then easing under
Wilkins: Good evening, neighbors, and welcome 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, and the only man in this county who has been arrested twice and kept his sense of humor both times. Tonight we are doing sums. I have a slate, a stub of chalk, and a jar at my elbow for when the numbers turn ugly, and they will. Our topic is Pot Still Arithmetic: figuring yield, fuel, and profit on a forty-gallon run. By the end of the hour you will know why a still-keeper in these hills lives one sour tub away from eating his own boots.
♪ Theme fades out
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♦ Wax cylinder crackle; chalk squeaks on slate
Wilkins: Segment one. History, and the cold arithmetic of the government's slice. Before we count a single bushel, you have to know how the tax man counted, because he did not count gallons the way your wife counts them. He counted proof gallons. A proof gallon is one gallon of spirit at one hundred proof, which is half alcohol and half water by volume. Run your spirit stronger and every wine gallon counts as more than one proof gallon. Water it down and it counts as less. The proof gallon is the only place in the federal government where anybody has asked for proof of anything.
Wilkins: Now, the rate. When Mr. Lincoln's men first laid the tax on in the summer of 1862, it was twenty cents a proof gallon. Twenty cents! A man could grumble about it and still pay it with a straight face. Then the war got hungrier. In March of 1864 they raised it to sixty cents. In July of 1864 it went to a dollar and a half. And on the first day of January, 1865, the very year we are sitting in, it went to two dollars a proof gallon. In three years it went up tenfold. My teeth-pulling fees have not gone up tenfold since the Mexican War, and I pull harder than Congress does.
♦ Jar uncorked, a swallow, a satisfied grunt
Wilkins: Here is the part that makes my molars ache. Every time Congress argued about the next raise, they refused to tax whiskey already distilled and sitting in the warehouse. So what did the big Western distillers do? They ran their stills night and day before every increase, filled every barrel and every barn, and when the new rate came in, the price of whiskey jumped and their old untaxed stock was suddenly worth a fortune. Congress let the big men fill their warehouses before every raise, which is like announcing the hanging a week ahead and being surprised when the condemned man has left for Canada. Meanwhile, the little fellow up the Suncook with one forty-gallon pot gets no such favor. He makes his whiskey this week, at this week's tax, and sells it at a price set by men in Cincinnati who never smelled a New Hampshire swamp.
Wilkins: So let us do the sums, and start where every honest sum starts: with the grain. A bushel of shelled corn is fifty-six pounds by the scale. Mind that, because there are two kinds of bushel in this world: the struck bushel, leveled off flat with a strike stick, and the heaped bushel, piled up in a cone like a fat man's belly. A grain dealer who buys heaped and sells struck has a profit that never shows on any ledger.
Wilkins: Which brings me to a certain grain dealer out of Concord, whose name I will not say on account of his grandchildren, who are decent people and buy their teeth from me. Last October this gentleman drove his wagon up Route 28 to sell me eight bushels for the week's mash. He measured with his own basket. I have been pulling teeth for twenty years and I know when something is hollow. That basket rang wrong. It had a false bottom, a good two inches of pine board laid in where corn ought to be. I paid him for seven bushels and told him why. He called me a cheating tooth-butcher, which is fair, and a son of a Vermont sow, which was not, because my mother was from Epsom. Then he made his real mistake. He walked around the side of the still-house to piss on my woodpile in protest, and he walked straight into the circle of Barnaby's chain.
♦ A low bear growl, chain snapping taut
Wilkins: Neighbors, Barnaby does not run at a man. He arrives. One moment there is a grain dealer with his trousers half open, and the next there is a black mountain of bear with that man's coat-tail in his teeth, shaking him like a terrier shakes a barn rat. The sound was a wet sail tearing in a gale, with a high whistle over it, which was the grain dealer. The corn he had hidden in his coat pockets, and he had a fair amount, sprayed out over the dooryard like hail. Barnaby dropped him to lick it up, and the man came out of his own coat like a snake out of its skin and ran for the wagon. He left one boot, half his coat, his hat, and a piece of the top of his left ear, which Barnaby had snagged on a tooth and did not see fit to return. The basket had a false bottom, and by the time Barnaby was through with him, so did the grain dealer. That man walked to Concord with one boot, half a coat, and a whole new respect for the honest measurement of corn. I sent the ear-tip back to him in a pill box with my card. I am not a savage.
♦ Wilkins chuckles; chalk squeaks
Wilkins: So, the slate. One week's grain at Fort Wilkins: six bushels of cracked corn at a dollar and sixty cents, nine dollars and sixty cents. One bushel of rye at a dollar fifty. One bushel of barley malt, which does the converting, at two dollars. Eight bushels, four hundred and forty-eight pounds, thirteen dollars and ten cents. Write it down. Then the fuel. My arch, that is the brick furnace the pot sits on, leaks heat like a sieve, and between cooking the mash and five runs of the still, it eats three-quarters of a cord of hardwood a week. Good split maple and beech goes five dollars a cord delivered in this valley, so that is three dollars and seventy-five cents. Then jugs, corks, yeast, a new strainer cloth, and a quart of lamp oil to see by, two dollars and fifteen. My total cost for the week is nineteen dollars even, and that is before I pay myself a penny for six days of sweat, smoke, and listening to that bear snore.
Wilkins: Hold that number. Nineteen dollars. We will come back to it with the Captain, who has done this arithmetic from the other side of the law.
♪ Short banjo turnaround sting
♦ Wax cylinder crackle; heavy door creaks, boots on plank floor
Wilkins: Segment two, legends and outlaws, and the outlaws tonight are the men who could count. My guest sat on the wrong side of my door for a good many years, and I mean that as a compliment. He is a retired revenue officer out of Manchester, a man who hunted copper through these hills and the hills across the river, and now spends his old age sitting in a moonshiner's log fort drinking the evidence. Captain Donald Vance, welcome to Fort Wilkins.
Captain: Thank you, Doctor. I came in the front door this time, which is a novelty. Usually I came through the back, with a warrant in one hand and my hat in the other, ready to duck.
Wilkins: Did you see Barnaby on the way in?
Captain: I saw him. He saw me. We came to an understanding. I keep to the path, and he keeps my leg attached to my body.
Wilkins: That is the only treaty in Merrimack County that has never been broken. A bear is the only watchman in New Hampshire who works for meat scraps and has never once asked for a raise or a pension. Now, Captain, tonight's sermon is arithmetic. I have told my listeners my costs. What I want to know is how a revenue man used arithmetic to catch a still-keeper.
Captain: Doctor, half my career was arithmetic and the other half was wet boots. A still can hide behind a ledge or under a barn floor, but it cannot hide its appetite. It has to eat grain and it has to eat wood, and grain and wood leave tracks on paper and on the land.
Wilkins: Give us one.
Captain: There was a widow in Hooksett, a fine stout woman who made the best mince pie I ever ate, and I ate a good deal of it, in the line of duty. In the dog days of one July I rode past her place three times in a week, and every time her woodpile was shorter. Now, a kitchen stove in July wants a few armloads a week. That woman burned the better part of a cord in seven days of heat that would wilt a fence post. I sat on a stone wall with a pencil and figured it. No woman bakes that many pies, not even for a Grange supper. I found the still in her root cellar, with a flue cut up through the chimney, slick as you like.
Wilkins: Captain, if you could smell a still from the smoke, you would have made a fine husband for any woman who burns her biscuits.
Captain: My wife would agree, though she would tell you I am better at finding fires than putting them out.
Wilkins: What did you do with the widow?
Captain: I wrote her up, she paid her fine in coin, and she sent me a mince pie every Christmas for eleven years with a note that read only, 'For the gentleman who counts wood.' I never knew whether to eat them or have them tested.
♦ Both men laugh; jar clinks
Wilkins: Here is the grain side of it. I buy eight bushels a week. Did a man ever get caught by his grain dealer's book?
Captain: More men were hanged by a store ledger than by any rope. There was a grain store in Manchester near the canal, an honest house, and the clerk kept a beautiful book in a copperplate hand. I was looking through it on another matter when I saw a farmer buying sixty bushels of corn a month. Sixty! And in the margin, where the clerk wrote what it was for, the man had told him: 'feed for two hogs.'
Wilkins: Two hogs!
Captain: Two hogs, Doctor. I drove out to his place. The two hogs were thin as fence rails. You could have read the newspaper through their ribs. The still, on the other hand, was fat as a deacon after a church supper, a good sixty-gallon pot, and it was clean. Good copper, tight seams, a man who knew his work. I respected that copper even while I took it.
Wilkins: The Captain says those two hogs were thin as fence rails; I say any hog that eats sixty bushels a month and stays thin was taking the corn in liquid form.
Captain: That is very nearly what the farmer said in court. The magistrate did not laugh. I did, a little, into my sleeve.
Wilkins: Now, Captain, you carried a gauging rod. Tell the folks what that is.
Captain: A gauging rod is a long marked rule a revenue gauger runs into a barrel or vat, slantwise through the bung, and by the marks and the tables he figures the gallons inside. It is honest geometry, and a sly man will try to cheat geometry. Up in the Pemigewasset valley there was a fellow who had a forty-gallon barrel that always gauged at about twenty. Every time. I measured it four times and got twenty-one, nineteen, twenty, twenty. The man was as calm as a pond.
Wilkins: But you smelled a rat.
Captain: I heard one. I rapped my knuckles down the staves from top to bottom, the way you would sound a melon. The top half rang one note and the bottom half another. He had built a little keg inside the big barrel, fixed to the side, so my rod went down beside it and read short. The little keg held the extra twenty gallons, untaxed and smiling. I said to him, 'Friend, your barrel sings in harmony, and the government only pays for the melody.'
Wilkins: Ha! Captain, you have the ear of a tooth-puller. I can tell a cracked molar by the sound of the tap. Same art. And while we are on figures, did you ever catch a man whose own arithmetic was worse than yours?
Captain: Doctor, I will tell you about the saddest clever man I ever arrested. He was in Goffstown. He kept all his accounts, grain, wood, jugs, sales, in the margins of a farmer's almanac, squeezed in beside the phases of the moon. When I seized the almanac and sat down at his kitchen table to tally it, I found that in his multiplication he had been carrying the wrong figure every week since April. He thought he was clearing twenty dollars a week. He was clearing about six. He had been working for nothing all summer and thinking himself rich.
Wilkins: A man who keeps his accounts in an almanac will know when the frost is coming but never when the sheriff is.
Captain: I corrected his sums for him, right there with my pencil, and showed him the true figure. Then I wrote the citation. And do you know, he shook my hand and thanked me. He said, 'Captain, nobody ever took the trouble to show me where I went wrong.'
Wilkins: That distiller thanked the Captain for correcting his sums, which is the first time in history a man has been grateful to learn exactly how much he was fined for. Captain, you have heard my nineteen dollars of cost. What does a small man clear, by your reckoning, if he runs honest copper and sells honest spirit?
Captain: In my experience, Doctor, a careful man with one small pot might clear what a good mechanic earns, a little more in a fine week, and in a bad week he would have done better hiring out to dig ditches. The big men in the cities did the profiting. The little men did the risking. I always thought that was the real crime, and it was not in my warrant.
Wilkins: Spoken like a man who has had my spirit and lived. Stay with us, Captain. After this word from our sponsor I am going to finish the slate, and I want you to check my figures like you checked that Goffstown almanac.
Captain: I have my pencil sharpened, Doctor.
♪ Brisk fiddle reel rises for the break
Announcer: Step right up, neighbors, step right up! Has your still ever hissed at you? That hiss is money going up the flue, flavor escaping into the rafters, and danger crawling across your floor! The old-timers pasted their joints with flour and rye meal and slapped on slipping hose bands, and they lost their spirit to every gust and wobble. No more! Moonshine Stills brings you Heavy-Duty Sanitary Tri-Clamp Ferrules and Gaskets: heavy-gauge ferrules, food-grade PTFE gaskets, and quick-release stainless wing clamps. Precision 304 stainless and copper hybrid fittings that mate with your heavy-gauge pure electrolytic copper! Every one pressure-tested and precision-milled for lifetime airtight reliability. Snap it on, spin the wing, sealed tight, no paste, no leaks, no fuss! All for just $34.95! See them with your own eyes at the showroom at Fort Wilkins on Route 28 in Pittsfield, New Hampshire, or order today at moonshinestill.com/products/tri-clamp-fittings. Once more, friends, so you write it on your cuff: Shop Hardware at moonshinestill.com, that's https://moonshinestill.com/products/tri-clamp-fittings. Seal it right, seal it tight, seal it once for life!
♪ Reel flourishes and ends
♦ Wax cylinder crackle; fire crackling in an arch; drip into jar
Wilkins: Segment three: copper and the craft, the alchemy of the forty-gallon run. Now I will walk you through the week as it really goes at Fort Wilkins, number by number. First, my notice, and I say it plainly: making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of the United States, and this broadcast is for history and learning only. Now, to the copper.
Wilkins: Day one, the mash. Six bushels of cracked corn go into the cooking tubs with clean water from the spring, about forty-five gallons to a tub, four tubs. I bring it up hot and cook it until the corn goes soft and sticky as a Sunday pudding. The starch in that corn is locked up tight, and yeast cannot eat starch any more than Barnaby can eat a church pew. So I let the cook cool down to about a hundred and fifty degrees by the thermometer, and in goes the ground barley malt and the rye. The malt carries a thing the French chemists Payen and Persoz named diastase, back in '33, which cuts that starch into sugar. Stir it, cover it, let it rest a couple of hours, and you will taste it turn sweet on your finger. Too hot and you cook the diastase dead. Too cool and it dawdles like a deputy on his way to work.
Wilkins: Then you wait for the mash to cool to blood-warm, about where it feels neither hot nor cold on the inside of your wrist, and only then do you pitch in your yeast. There is a Frenchman named Pasteur who has been telling the world these past few years that yeast is a living thing, a little beast that eats sugar and gives off spirit and gas. I believe him. I have watched those tubs heave and bubble for three to five days like a fat man after beans. Keep them covered from flies and keep the still-house aired out, for the gas they breathe will not keep a man alive. Leave a tub open too long in a warm week and other little beasts move in, the mother of vinegar, and they turn your spirit into sour wash. A soured tub of mash smells like a wet dog that fell in a pickle barrel and died thinking of cabbage. And that is thirteen dollars of grain poured on the manure pile.
Wilkins: When the tubs fall quiet, I have about a hundred and sixty gallons of wash, and if the week was kind it runs about seven and a half parts alcohol in a hundred. Do the sums: a hundred and sixty times seven and a half in a hundred is twelve gallons of pure spirit, hiding in all that sour soup. Twelve gallons. That is all eight bushels gave me, and we have not lost a drop yet. We are about to lose plenty.
♦ Chalk squeaks
Wilkins: Day four and five, the stripping runs. I strain the wash off the grain through a cloth, because thick mash sitting on a direct fire will stick to the bottom of the pot and scorch, and once you have scorched a run, every drop tastes like the inside of a burnt chimney. Forty gallons of strained wash to a charge, four charges, four runs, and I run them fast to strip out the spirit. What comes out is called low wines, weak, cloudy, about a quarter to a third spirit. Low wines are like a Concord politician's speech: twice as long as needed, weak in the middle, and good for nothing until you run them through again. Four stripping runs give me about forty gallons of low wines at near twenty-eight parts in a hundred, which is about eleven gallons of pure spirit. Most of a gallon stayed behind in the spent wash and went up as vapor I could not catch.
Wilkins: Day six is the forty-gallon run, the spirit run, and this is where you earn the name of distiller. Forty gallons of low wines go back in the copper pot, and this time I bring her up slow. Now listen carefully, because this is the part that keeps people alive. Methanol, the wood spirit that blinds a man and kills him, boils at about a hundred and forty-eight degrees. Good grain spirit boils at about a hundred and seventy-three. Water boils at two hundred and twelve. So the poison comes first, in the early running. The first quart or more that drips from the worm, the foreshots, I throw away. Every drop. I told my apprentice the foreshots are not for drinking, not for selling, and not for paying the parson; pour them on the ground and let the worms go blind instead of the neighbors. Then come the heads, the next couple of gallons, smelling of varnish pot and shoemaker's glue, sharp enough to make your eyes water. Those go too. Then, sweet as a June morning, the hearts come in, clean, warm, smelling of corn and bread. I catch hearts in clean jars, one at a time, smelling and tasting each with a dab on the back of the hand, until the spirit starts to turn flat and oily, smelling of wet dog and old dishwater. Those are the tails, and I save them as feints for next week's spirit run, which gets back a little of what I lose.
Wilkins: Now the copper. All week long that good copper is doing quiet work. Yeast that gets hot or hungry gives off sulfur stink, and the grain's own goodness adds more. The copper does most of its work up in the helmet and down the worm, where the vapor brushes against bright metal, so a still-keeper keeps those parts the cleanest of all. Copper also takes the heat like a good wife takes a joke, evenly and without complaint.
Wilkins: And fire. Alcohol vapor is heavier than air. A drip from a loose joint, or a jar left near the arch, will send vapor creeping along the floor like a draft, low and quiet, all the way to the firebox, and then the whole still-house goes up with you in it. Alcohol vapor crawls along the floor to the fire like a deputy crawling toward a free supper: slow, quiet, and fatal to everyone if it gets there. Keep the outlet of the worm and your collecting jars well away from the flame, keep your joints tight, keep the fire low, and never leave a running still alone, not even to see why the bear is growling.
♦ Bear grunts in the distance
Wilkins: That was not an invitation, Barnaby.
Wilkins: Now the tally. From forty gallons of low wines, holding about eleven gallons of pure spirit, I keep in my hearts about seven and six-tenths gallons of pure spirit, running near a hundred and fifteen proof, about thirteen jars' worth. I cut that down with spring water to a hundred proof, and I have fifteen proof gallons and change. Fifteen gallons out of eight bushels: I have pulled more out of a single molar with less sweat. That is under two proof gallons to the bushel. A great distillery with steam and big column stills gets a good deal more. A man in a log shack with a forty-gallon pot gets what he gets, and he throws away his foreshots and heads like a Christian, because the alternative is a funeral.
Wilkins: Now the money. Fifteen gallons. Ten go to tavern keepers along the turnpike at two dollars and a half, twenty-five dollars. Five go by the jug to private gentlemen with sore teeth at three dollars and twenty cents, sixteen dollars. Forty-one dollars in. Less nineteen dollars out. Twenty-two dollars clear. Captain, check me.
Captain: Twenty-two it is, Doctor. Now put in the tax.
Wilkins: Fifteen proof gallons at two dollars a proof gallon is thirty dollars. Forty-one in, less nineteen of cost, less thirty to Washington, and I am eight dollars in the hole. Mr. Lincoln's tax would have cost me thirty dollars on fifteen gallons, which means a legal distiller in this valley pays the government for the privilege of losing eight dollars a week, and that is before his license fees and bonds.
Captain: And that, Doctor, is why so few small men stayed legal. I won't pretend otherwise. The arithmetic was against them before I ever knocked on a door.
Wilkins: A man figuring his yield on a pot still learns the first law of alchemy: lead goes in, gold comes out, and the Treasury takes the gold. Now look at what my twenty-two dollars buys. A hand at the cotton mill down by the Suncook dam draws a dollar and a quarter a day, seven and a half a week, and nobody chains a bear outside his loom. So I clear three times a mill hand. Hooray for Wilkins! Except I run perhaps twenty weeks in a season, and a still-house season is not twenty good weeks. Captain, tell me what goes wrong.
Captain: Soured tubs. A scorched run. A cracked worm. A raid.
Wilkins: Just so. Two soured weeks, and I have spent nineteen dollars each and sold nothing, and I have missed forty-one dollars of sales each time. That is better than a hundred and twenty dollars swung against me. One scorched run, and fifteen gallons of spirit nobody will pay full price for. And one visit from the sheriff, and my still, sixty pounds of hand-hammered copper worth forty-five dollars, goes off on a wagon along with my worm, my jugs, and the week's run, and there is a fine on top. Twenty weeks at twenty-two dollars is four hundred and forty on paper. Take out two sour weeks, a scorch, and one raid, and I have cleared about what that mill hand cleared, with a great deal more smoke in my lungs. Ten bad weeks out of twenty and a still-keeper is poorer than a church mouse that has taken up gambling. That is pot still arithmetic, neighbors. The margin is thinner than a mill girl's ration of butter, and one bad week can eat a whole season.
Captain: I'll say this for you, Doctor. Your arithmetic is sounder than half the clerks in Concord.
Wilkins: Captain, I will have that carved on my headstone, just below 'Arrested Twice.' Thank you for coming up Route 28, and mind the bear on the way out.
Captain: I'll keep to the path. Good night, Doctor.
♦ Boots on planks, door creaks shut; a low growl, then silence
♪ Gentle banjo interlude
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Wilkins: Segment four. Myths, slang, and a letter. We have a wax-cylinder letter that came up on the Concord stage from a long way south, Wilkesboro, North Carolina, Wilkes County. That is a name that means something to any man who has ever hidden a pot in a laurel thicket. Let us crank it up and hear him.
♦ Phonograph crank, hiss and crackle of a distant recording
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?
♦ Recording clicks off
Wilkins: Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller, a fine Carolina question, and I will answer it the Yankee way, with an anvil. Let us take your uncle's two medicines one at a time.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: First, the red oak shavings. Ask any cooper in this county what red oak is good for, and he will tell you: firewood and slack barrels for dry goods, crackers and nails. You will never see a tight whiskey barrel of red oak, because red oak has open pores running the length of the grain. You could blow pipe smoke through a stick of it. White oak has its pores plugged up by nature, and that is why your whiskey sits in white oak. Red oak leaks like a gossip at a quilting bee: everything you pour in comes out the sides by Tuesday. Shavings of it in a hot thump keg will give you a puckery, woody tang and some color, and that is all.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Second, the hickory ashes. Up here, Rabbit, our grandfathers did not throw their ashes in the whiskey. They sold them. Half the towns in New Hampshire had an ashery where folks boiled wood ash down to potash and shipped it off by the barrel, because ash is full of potash, and potash run through with water makes lye. Lye is what your granny boils with fat to make soap. Put hickory ash in a hot thump keg and you are making lye water in your keg, and what comes over will taste soapy and harsh if any of it splashes through. Cletus, your uncle's hickory ashes would make a fine bar of soap, and if he drinks enough of that keg he will at least die clean behind the ears.
Wilkins: Now the serious part, Rabbit, and tell your uncle with love. The bad heads are bad because of what boils first. Methanol and the sharp stuff come off low and early in the run, ahead of the good spirit. A thump keg does not pick and choose; it passes the early vapor along with all the rest. The only cure for bad heads is the one I gave earlier: throw out the foreshots, throw out the heads, and keep only the hearts. No ash, no shaving, no prayer, and no bear will do it for you. The old-timers charged their thump kegs with some mash or low wines, not a woodpile. Your uncle was not wicked. He was hopeful, and hope has poured more bad liquor than any revenue man ever seized.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: And as long as I am at the anvil, let me knock down one more myth while the iron is hot: the blue flame. Every tavern loafer from here to Portsmouth will pour a spoonful of spirit on the bar, put a match to it, and if it burns blue he pronounces it good and safe, and if it burns yellow or red he says there is lead in it. Hogwash. Wood spirit, the methanol that blinds, burns with a pale blue flame too. A spoonful of poison will burn as pretty as a church candle. The color of the flame will not tell you about lead, nor about a bad cut, nor about anything except that there is enough alcohol in the spoon to catch. The blue flame is like a revenue man's smile: very pretty, and it tells you nothing about what is coming next. Safety is made at the still, by honest cuts and honest metal, not on the bar with a match.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin, ringing long
Wilkins: That last one is a coin for you, Cletus: a copper cent, stamped fresh, G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. I have struck so many coins on this anvil that my right arm is a full inch longer than my left, and my wife says it is the only part of me that ever grew. A loud hello to Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, and to his uncle, and to every Wilkes County still-hand listening in. Keep your ashes for soap, your red oak for the stove, and your foreshots on the ground.
♪ Banjo and fiddle return softly
Announcer: One more quick word, friends! Don't let a slipping clamp undo a week's honest arithmetic! Heavy-duty sanitary Tri-Clamp ferrules and gaskets at $34.95. Shop Hardware at moonshinestill.com, that's moonshinestill.com!
♦ Wax cylinder crackle; fire burning low
Wilkins: Well, neighbors, the chalk is a nub, the slate is full, and the jar is lower than my opinion of grain dealers. If tonight's sums set your head spinning and you want to learn the whole craft properly, the history, the copper, the mash, and above all the cuts, enroll in the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. I teach it the way I pull a tooth: straight, quick, and with nothing left behind that ought to come out. Bring a pencil. There will be arithmetic.
Wilkins: My thanks to Captain Donald Vance for coming up the turnpike with his pencil and his good sense, to Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller for writing from the Carolina hills, and to Barnaby, who has lain quiet a full ten minutes and is due for his supper.
♦ Bear grunts hopefully, chain clinks
Wilkins: Yes, now. You have earned it. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme swells and fades
♦ Bear grunt and final drip into jar
♦ Wax cylinder crackle runs out to silence