Why Copper and Not Iron: A Distiller's Argument
Dr. Alchemist G. G. Wilkins argues that copper beats iron in a still. He covers how each metal carries heat, iron-gall ink, New England's iron potash kettles, the 1723 Massachusetts law against lead still parts, and Paul Revere's copper mill, and he tells how a tinker sold him an iron pot dressed up as copper and what Barnaby did to the man. Retired revenue officer Captain Donald Vance tells four new stories: a still that ran ink-black, a coppersmith who could name a pot's maker from its hammer marks, a family sickened by a lead-soldered worm, and the night he ordered his own reflection to surrender. In Segment 4 Wilkins answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, NC: hickory ash is potash and can bind some sour acids, but it cannot remove methanol. He also debunks the old saying 'lead burns red and makes you dead.'
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Full episode transcript
♦ Audible wax cylinder surface crackle, slow drip of clear distillate into a glass jar
♦ Barnaby the black bear grunting and chain clinking outside log cabin window
Wilkins: Barnaby! Settle down, you great hairy sack of grievances. That jar is not for you. Last spring you got your snout into the low wines and sat on the woodpile weeping like a Whig after an election. Lie DOWN, sir.
♦ Chain rattles, a heavy thump of four hundred pounds hitting the dirt, a long put-upon bear sigh
Wilkins: Thank you. He's sulking now. He sulks the way a deacon prays, loud enough for the whole valley to hear.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth
Wilkins: Good evening, neighbors, sinners, and the occasional Treasury spy pressing his ear to the chinking. This is 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'm your host, Dr. George G. Wilkins: dentist, blacksmith, inventor, and the man your mother warned you about after she'd sampled my blackstrap.
Wilkins: Tonight we're settling an argument older than the Republic, one I've had in every tavern from Epsom to Gilmanton Iron Works, where the name alone ought to tell you the locals have been misled. Why copper and not iron? Why does every honest still in New England shine like a new penny, when iron is cheaper, harder, and lying in heaps behind every forge in the county? I'll tell you about heat, about taste, about the lead solder that's quietly killing fools, and about the coppersmiths, who I say are the best chemists this country never bothered to thank.
Wilkins: But first, a quick word from the fellow who pays for my lamp oil.
♪ Brief bright banjo flourish
Announcer: Friends! Before the Doctor gets going, remember the Flame-Flow Still, protected under United States Patent 10,561,960 and hammered out of heavy-gauge pure electrolytic copper. See it gleam at moonshinestill.com, or at the Fort Wilkins Showroom on Route 28!
♪ Flourish ends
♪ Fiddle sting, low and mournful
Wilkins: Segment one: the history of copper and iron. Pull up a stump.
Wilkins: Start with the plain facts of the fire. Copper carries heat near five times faster than iron. Hold a copper rod and an iron rod in the same forge and the copper will burn your fingers while the iron is still thinking it over. In a still, that means even heat. Your fire goes into the bottom of a copper pot and spreads out the way gossip spreads through a Pittsfield sewing circle: quick, even, and everywhere at once.
Wilkins: Iron hoards its heat in one spot, like a miser hoards his coin. You get a hot place right over the coals, the mash sticks there and scorches, and the scorch rides up the vapor and into your jar. Then you're drinking something that tastes like a church social that burned down with the beans still on the stove.
Wilkins: Second, the acid. Your fermented wash is sour, neighbors. It's sharp, like a widow's opinion of her late husband. That acid eats raw iron. It rusts the inside of your kettle, and the rust goes into the run along with a taste like licking a wagon tire in February. Iron is the Baptist of metals: it's fine for a fence, but it goes sour the minute you put spirit in it.
Wilkins: Third, and here's a chemistry lesson every schoolchild has at the end of his pen: iron and oak are enemies. Iron meets tannin, which is the bitter part of oak bark and oak galls, and they turn blue-black together. That's iron-gall ink, the ink Mr. Lincoln signed his proclamations with. So if a man runs his spirit through iron and then keeps it on oak, he isn't making whiskey. He's making stationery.
Wilkins: And New Hampshire knows iron kettles. Fifty or sixty years ago every farm from here to the Connecticut River was burning stumps, leaching the ashes, and boiling the lye down in great cast-iron potash kettles to sell potash to the soap-boilers and glassmen. A good number of those farmers looked at that big iron belly and thought, I could cook something merrier in there. They did, and what came out was dark, harsh, and metallic. A man who distills in an iron kettle wants his whiskey to taste like a horseshoe, and he's welcome to it, but I'll sell him the horseshoe cheaper.
Wilkins: Now, lead. Lead is the devil's own solder, and it's an old story. Back in 1723 the Massachusetts colony passed a law forbidding lead heads and lead worms in stills. The Boston rum men had been running spirit through lead pipe, and drinkers were doubling over with what they called the dry gripes: belly cramps that would make a mule pray, constipation like a corked cannon, and wrists that went limp so a man couldn't lift his own hand. Old Ben Franklin wrote about it in a letter of 1786. He remembered the New England complaints about the dry bellyache from leaded stills, and he warned that lead does its murder quietly.
Wilkins: Across the water it was the same. The farmers of Devon, in England, had a sickness called the Devonshire colic, and they blamed the cider. In 1767 a physician named George Baker proved it wasn't the cider. It was the lead in their presses and fittings. The apple was innocent. The plumbing was the murderer. Mark that, because I'll come back to it.
Wilkins: So who worked all this out before any professor in a waistcoat? The coppersmiths. A coppersmith knows things nobody ever wrote down for him. He knows copper hardens as he hammers it, and that if he heats it red and quenches it in the water tub, it goes soft again, the opposite of steel, which goes hard in the quench. He anneals and hammers, anneals and hammers, a hundred times over one pot. Copper takes a beating, softens with a little water, and comes back for more, which is more than I can say for any husband in Barnstead.
Wilkins: The most famous coppersmith in New England was Mr. Paul Revere. You know him for the midnight ride, but his real trade was metal. In 1801 he opened a copper-rolling mill at Canton, Massachusetts, and his sheet copper went onto the bottom of the frigate Constitution and the dome of the State House in Boston. Old Ironsides, they call her, and she wore Revere's copper under her waterline. Iron gets the name and copper does the work. That's the whole history of my trade in one sentence.
Wilkins: A coppersmith knows more chemistry than a Harvard professor and gets paid in turnips. The professor gets paid in Latin and still complains.
♦ Barnaby grunts outside, chain clinks
Wilkins: Barnaby agrees. Barnaby has never been to Harvard either.
♪ Rollicking fiddle transition
Wilkins: Segment two: legends, rascals, and runners. And I have a fresh one from right here at the Fort, a lesson in iron and treachery.
Wilkins: Two autumns back a tinker came up the Turnpike from Lowell way, a skinny, wet-lipped article named Absalom Crouch, with a wagon that rattled like a Methodist's conscience. He had a pot on the back, a good fat pot, shining copper-red in the September sun, and he offered it to me at half the honest price. Half! When a Lowell man offers you half price, neighbors, you count your fingers after you shake his hand.
Wilkins: I paid him, God forgive me. He left, and that evening I took my dental scaler, the little hooked pick I use for scraping tartar off a selectman's teeth, and I gave the inside of that pot a scrape. The red came off in a curl as thin as an onion skin, and under it was grey, hungry iron.
Wilkins: Now, I know that trick. You take an iron pot and dip it in a bath of blue vitriol, copper sulfate to you fancy folk. The copper in the solution plates onto the iron in a skin no thicker than a lie. It looks like copper and rings almost like copper, until the first sour wash eats through the skin and you're distilling in a rust bucket.
Wilkins: Well. Crouch, being greedy as well as crooked, decided he'd come back that night and steal the pot again to sell to some other fool in Chichester. He crept up behind the still-house at two in the morning, and he didn't know about Barnaby.
♦ Wax crackle, a low rising bear growl
Wilkins: I woke up to a noise like somebody tearing a wet bedsheet in half, then a scream so high the hens laid out of season. I came out with a lantern and there was Absalom Crouch on his belly in the mud, with Barnaby's jaws locked on the seat of his breeches and Barnaby shaking him the way a terrier shakes a rat. Back and forth, back and forth, Crouch's head knocking on the chopping block every pass, thock, thock, thock, like a woodpecker with a grudge.
Wilkins: The breeches gave first. Wool and linen and a twist of chewing tobacco from the back pocket all went down the bear, and Barnaby swallowed the lot and looked as satisfied as a parson at a funeral supper. But on the way off, one claw caught Crouch's calf and opened it from the knee to the boot-top like a pea pod. Clean, white, and then not so white. He bled into my woodchips something terrible and called on the Lord, the Virgin, and his mother, in that order, with his mother getting the most feeling.
Wilkins: I'm a professional man, so I dragged him into the shop, poured him a cup of the bad stuff, and stitched that calf shut with horse-hair and a curved needle I'd ground down from a fish-hook. Eleven stitches. While he was screaming at the eighth, I saw a black molar hanging in his head like a rotten apple in October, so I took my forceps and had it out in one pull. I charged him extra for that, which I call the efficiency of the frontier professional.
Wilkins: Then I took his money back out of his own wagon, every cent, and sent him down the Turnpike toward Barnstead in his shirt-tail, his hinder parts flashing in the moonlight like a lighthouse in fog.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: And I took one of the copper cents from that refund, laid it on the anvil, and struck it with my punch, G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., then nailed it to that iron pot, which still hangs on my barn as a warning to tinkers. It's the only honest copper the thing ever had on it.
♦ Barnaby belches, long and wet
Wilkins: He still remembers the tobacco.
Wilkins: Now, I promised you a guest. I've been arrested twice by the Merrimack County sheriff, and I've never had a revenue man in my parlor who wasn't either searching it or drinking in it. Tonight I have one who did a little of both for a long career across the Granite and Green Mountains, and somehow I like him. Please welcome Captain Donald Vance.
♦ Heavy boots on plank floor, chair creaks under a big man
Captain: Evening, Doctor. Your bear watched me come up the path the way a Concord banker watches a stranger near his vault.
Wilkins: He's measuring you, Captain. He does it for all government men. Tell me, since we're on copper and iron tonight, what's the worst iron still you ever came across?
Captain: That would be the Inkwell, up in Grafton County. I kept hearing about whiskey that ran black, not brown like an aged spirit, but black as a stovepipe. Nobody would tell me where it came from. Then I stopped at a district schoolhouse to water my horse, and the whole room smelled like a tavern on Saturday night.
Wilkins: The scholars?
Captain: The inkwells. Every little pot on every desk. The schoolmaster, a thin fellow with a great deal of Latin and very little salary, had been buying the black run cheap and pouring it in for ink. It wrote fine, too. The copybooks smelled of whiskey, and I'd bet the children did after a long afternoon of penmanship.
Wilkins: A schoolmaster who fills inkwells with whiskey turns out the best-behaved, worst-spelled scholars in Grafton County.
Captain: You've said it, Doctor. I followed the schoolmaster to a farm and found an old cast-iron potash kettle, the kind his grandfather boiled lye in, with oak chips thrown into the run for color. Iron and oak together. He'd made ink by accident and whiskey by intention, and the ink was the better product.
Wilkins: Did you take him in?
Captain: I took the kettle, and I told him if he wanted to be in the ink trade he should apply to a stationer. The schoolmaster I let be. A man paid in turnips and Latin has suffered enough.
Wilkins: Ha! Now, you know how I feel about coppersmiths. Did you ever meet one who could outthink you?
Captain: Every one of them, Doctor. But the best was an old smith over in Lisbon, white beard down to his apron, hands like two burnt hams. We'd seized three pots that season and couldn't prove who'd made them. I carried them to his shop in a wagon, half expecting him to lie to me. He ran his thumb over the hammer marks, slow, like a blind man reading a face, and said: that one's from Littleton, that one's a Vermont man, he always hits too hard on the left. Then he got to the third pot, turned it over, went quiet, and laughed so hard he had to sit down on his quench tub.
Wilkins: His own work.
Captain: His own work, Doctor. He'd sold it twelve years before to a deacon of the Congregational church. He told me a coppersmith's hammer is his handwriting, and a man can no more disguise it than he can disguise his own snoring.
Wilkins: That's what I've been saying. These men read metal like a lawyer reads a will, and nobody ever gave them a diploma. Captain, you've seen lead in a still. Tell the people plainly what it does.
Captain: Plainly, then, and it isn't funny. Up in the Androscoggin country I came on a family, the old man, his wife, and two grown sons, all of them grey in the face. The old man couldn't lift his hands at the wrist. They hung down like wet mittens. The wife had cramps that bent her double. They thought it was a curse, or bad water, or the Lord's judgment on the whole household.
Wilkins: And it was the worm.
Captain: It was the worm. The copper coil had sprung a leak the winter before, and a peddler patched every seam with soft grey solder, lead and tin, cheap and quick. Every hot run carried a little of that lead into their jars. I wasn't there to arrest anybody that day. I had the joints cut out, carried the worm to a proper coppersmith, and had it hard-soldered with silver the way it should have been done. I told them to throw out every jar they had and drink none of it.
Wilkins: A soft-soldered worm is like a Concord alderman, Captain. It holds up fine until it's warm, and then it leaks poison into everything it touches.
Captain: That's harsher than I'd say it, but no less true. Some months later I got a letter in a shaky hand. The old man said he'd buttoned his own coat that morning for the first time in a year. I keep that letter yet.
Wilkins: That's the side of your trade nobody sings about. Now give us something to laugh at before I get sentimental and Barnaby loses respect for me.
Captain: All right. One evening in the Green Mountains, at dusk, I crept up on a still-house. The light was going and I saw a big, broad figure crouched by the fire, glowing orange, staring right back at me. I drew my pistol and roared, in the name of the United States Treasury, show me your hands! It didn't move. I said it again louder. It didn't move. So I stepped closer, and there I was, my own face, mustache and all, staring out of a copper pot the owner had polished bright as a looking-glass.
Wilkins: You ordered your own reflection to surrender!
Captain: And it refused, Doctor. The owner was up in a hemlock with a jug, watching. He laughed until he fell out of the tree, and he walked over and held out his wrists. He said any man who'd threaten a pot deserved at least one arrest that evening.
Wilkins: You're the only revenue man in history to order a cooking pot to surrender and be ignored by it. Captain Donald Vance, you're welcome at Fort Wilkins any time you come unarmed and thirsty.
Captain: I'll come unarmed, Doctor. As for thirsty, I'm a federal officer, and I decline to answer.
♦ Laughter, chair scrape, Barnaby huffs
♪ Brassy patent-medicine wagon fanfare with a thumping bass drum
Announcer: Step right up, ladies and gentlemen, farmers and philosophers! You've just heard the Doctor prove it: iron rusts, iron scorches, and iron turns your fine work into schoolhouse ink! Do you want ink, friends, or do you want PURITY?
Announcer: If you appreciate authentic 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 same bright, honest metal the Doctor's been preaching about all evening, with precision CNC-machined brass unions in place of any doubtful patchwork.
Announcer: The Flame-Flow is designed to maximize convective circulation, so the heat rolls evenly through the pot like a summer tide up the Suncook, and it delivers unmatched purity for essential oils, herbal tinctures, and traditional distillation demonstrations! Hand-crafted pure copper for eight hundred ninety-nine dollars, friends. That's $899.00 for a showpiece that shines on your bench and works as handsome as it looks!
Announcer: So don't wait! Go to moonshinestill.com, that's moonshinestill.com/products/flame-flow-copper-still, and order your Flame-Flow setup direct! Or come stand in the copper glow yourself at the Fort Wilkins Showroom on Route 28 in Pittsfield, New Hampshire. One more time, so it sticks like pine pitch: moonshinestill.com! The Flame-Flow Still from Moonshine Stills!
♪ Fanfare crashes to a close with a cymbal
♪ Slow, warm fiddle under crackle
Wilkins: Segment three: copper and the craft. Let me walk you through the whole thing, mash to jar, and show you where copper earns its keep at every step. First the lawyer's piece, which I say with a straight face: making distilled spirits for drinking without a permit is against the law of these United States, and this program is history and education only. Barnaby is my witness, and he's notoriously hard to cross-examine.
Wilkins: Step one is the mash. Take cracked corn, cook it in water till it goes thick as porridge, and stir in a portion of malted grain, rye or barley, while it's warm. The malt turns the starch to sugar. Cool it to blood warm, add your yeast, and let it work in a warm, airy room for some days. It foams, it bubbles, and it breathes out a gas that will smother a man in a closed cellar, so keep a door open. When it's done you have a sour, weak beer we call the wash. That sourness is why your vessel must be copper. Iron would be dissolving into it before you ever lit the fire.
Wilkins: Step two is the still. The pot is copper, hammered and annealed, with the seams riveted and hard-soldered with silver or brass spelter, and I mean hard-soldered. Soft lead solder melts low and leaches into your spirit, and you heard the Captain on what that does to a man's wrists. On top of the pot sits the cap, or helmet, then the arm that carries vapor over, then the worm. That's a long copper coil sitting in a barrel of cold running water.
Wilkins: Now, a word on my worm. My worm is long, well-coiled, and copper clean through, and any widow in Merrimack County who doubts it is welcome to come inspect it in daylight with a chaperone.
♦ Barnaby grunts disapprovingly
Wilkins: Even the bear thinks that was low. Moving on.
Wilkins: Step three is the alchemy, the part the coppersmiths knew in their hands before the chemists knew it in their books. Every wash gives off sulfur stink, rotten eggs and boiled cabbage, from the yeast and the grain. When that vapor rolls across bright copper, the sulfur grabs the copper and stays behind as a black sulphuret, a crust on the inside of the cap and the worm. The stink stays in the still instead of going into your jar. Iron won't do that. Iron gives you the stink and the rust together, and charges you nothing extra for either.
Wilkins: That's why a careful man cleans his copper after every run. Rinse it hot, scrub off the black crust and any green verdigris with vinegar and salt, then rinse it again with plenty of clean water so no acid or flakes are left behind. Never let green crust fall into a run. Bright copper works. Crusted copper only looks expensive.
Wilkins: Step four is the fire and the cuts, and this is where men die, so listen. Charge your pot no more than three parts full. Bring it up slow on a low, steady fire, and never walk away from it. Keep the worm barrel cold. If your water warms, vapor comes out the end uncondensed, and that vapor is as eager to burn as a Concord lawyer is to bill. One spark from the firebox and your still-house is a bonfire with you inside.
Wilkins: The first drops are the foreshots. They're sharp and solvent-smelling, and they carry the methyl spirit, the wood alcohol, which blinds and kills. Throw them out, every drop. Don't drink them, don't rub them on a sore tooth, don't sell them to a neighbor you dislike. After the foreshots come the heads, still harsh, still carrying that poison and a smell like varnish and nail polish. Throw them out too, or keep them for nothing but cleaning. Then come the hearts, sweet and clean. That's the reason for the whole night's labor. Last come the tails, oily and wet-dog smelling, with a taste like a tavern floor. Set them aside to run again with the next batch.
Wilkins: You make the cuts by smell, by taste on a drop rubbed between the palms, and by catching the run in many small jars instead of one big crock, so a mistake stays in one jar and doesn't spoil the whole run. No ash, no herb, no charm, and no prayer in Latin will take poison out of a run. Only the cuts will, made honestly, every time.
♪ Banjo picks up a jaunty tune
Wilkins: Segment four: myths, slang, and the listener mailbag. We've got a talking-machine recording all the way from North Carolina. Crank it up.
♦ Phonograph crank winding, needle drop, scratchy playback hiss
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?
♦ Needle lifts, hiss ends
Wilkins: Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina! Rabbit, your uncle is half right, which in North Carolina is a scholar and in New Hampshire is a selectman. Here's which half.
Wilkins: Hickory ash is potash, the same stuff New Hampshire boiled down in all those iron kettles I spoke of. Potash is alkaline, the opposite of sour. Put a little in the thump keg and it can grab some of the sharp, sour acids that ride along in the vapor, vinegar-sharp stuff, and hold them back as salts. So a man drinking the result might say it tastes softer, and he wouldn't be lying.
Wilkins: But that's all it does, Rabbit. The bad heads, the wood alcohol, don't care a fig for potash. They boil off early and come straight through ash or no ash. Your uncle's ash smooths the taste of the poison without taking out one drop of it. The only thing that clears bad heads is throwing out the foreshots and heads at the start of the run. There's no other way.
Wilkins: And use a light hand. My neighbor up toward Catamount Mountain, Deacon Ebenezer Tilton, a pious man with a nose like a turnip, heard the same tale and shoveled a whole bucket of ash into his keg. Ash and the oily tail-ends of a run make soap, neighbors, plain lye soap, same as your grandmother's kettle. His keg foamed up, the foam went over into the worm, and it came out the end like a mad dog at a temperance picnic, white lather pouring into his jars, over his boots, and halfway to the barn. To this day he calls it the Lord's lather.
Wilkins: As for the red oak shavings, they give tannin, color, and a woody flavor, the same as a barrel would given a year or two. Call it a barrel in a hurry. It's flavor, not medicine, and it cleans nothing. Mind you, put oak shavings in an iron keg and you've made the Captain's schoolhouse ink. Copper keg, oak shavings, fine. Iron keg, oak shavings, you'll be writing letters with it.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: That's one cent stamped for Rabbit Miller, G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., going into the mail sack for North Carolina. Rabbit, give your uncle my regards, and tell him to keep the ash for his soap and his garden.
Wilkins: Now one more myth while the anvil's warm. You'll hear it in every barroom from Portsmouth to the Notch: Lead burns red and makes you dead. A fellow pours a spoonful of spirit, sets it alight, and looks at the flame. Blue means it's true, red means lead. It's good rhyme and bad chemistry, like most of the hymns sung in Epsom.
Wilkins: Here's the truth. Enough dissolved lead to wreck your wrists and your belly won't show up plainly in a burning spoonful. And the deadly wood alcohol from the heads burns with a pale blue flame almost exactly like good spirit. So the spoon test can wave the very poisons it's meant to catch right through. A man who judges his spirit by the color of the flame is like a man who judges a wife by the color of her bonnet: pretty enough in the parlor, and fooled for life.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: The only test that counts is a still with no lead in it and cuts made honestly. Copper in the pot and the worm, silver or brass in the joints, foreshots and heads thrown out. Nothing else will protect you.
♪ Brief bright banjo flourish
Announcer: A quick word, friends! Why gamble on iron and lead when you can have the Flame-Flow Still, United States Patent 10,561,960, in pure heavy-gauge copper? Order at moonshinestill.com or visit the Fort Wilkins Showroom on Route 28 in Pittsfield!
♪ Flourish ends
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth, soft underneath
Wilkins: That's our evening, neighbors. Copper beats iron for heat, for taste, and for chemistry, and lead has no place anywhere near a man's still or his belly. Raise a glass, figuratively, to the coppersmiths, the hammer-scarred chemists nobody credited.
Wilkins: If you want to learn the craft from an old tooth-puller who's made every mistake twice and been arrested for two of them, enroll in the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. You'll learn copper, mash, fire, and above all honest cuts, the history and the science, taught with more patience than I show a deputy and less blood than I spill on a molar. My thanks to Captain Donald Vance for his stories and his good sense, and to Rabbit Miller down in Wilkesboro for his question.
♦ Barnaby grunts, chain clinks against the log wall
Wilkins: Yes, Barnaby, you too. You were very brave about the tobacco.
Wilkins: Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.
♦ Bear grunt and final drip into jar
♪ Theme swells and fades into wax cylinder crackle