The Widow Pettingill's Cider That Wasn't Cider
Dr. G. G. Wilkins tells how the Widow Hepzibah Pettingill's 'harvest cider' turned the Pittsfield meeting-house supper into a scandal. Reverend Thorne asked for thirds, the deacon ended up in the bean pot, and Barnaby ate forty pounds of fermented pomace and threw it up all over a county assessor. Retired revenue officer Captain Donald Vance tells new stories about freeze-jacked cider on a barn roof, a spiked temperance punch bowl, fake 'boiled cider' crocks and a barn-raising switchel that wasn't switchel. Wilkins also explains apple brandy, pectin and methanol, and honest cuts, then answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller's question about hickory ashes and red oak shavings and debunks 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! Settle that hairy carcass down. Settle, I say! You've had your supper and half of mine, and if you rattle that chain one more time I will pull your back molar with my bare hand and string it on my watch fob. Lie down. Good. Good bear. Rotten bear, but a good one.
♦ Barnaby lets out a long, sulking groan; the chain slumps into the dirt
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth, swelling then settling under the voice
Wilkins: Good evening, neighbors, sinners, and the handful of you who are both. This is Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, coming to you from the log walls of Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, in Pittsfield, Merrimack County, New Hampshire. I am your host, your tooth-puller, your blacksmith, and when the moon is right, your confessor. The fire is low, the copper is clean, and the bear is sulking, so all's right with the world. Tonight I'm finally telling a story the good women of Pittsfield have begged me for eight years never to tell, which is all the reason I needed. Tonight's tale is the Widow Pettingill's Cider That Wasn't Cider.
♪ Theme fades to a single fiddle drone
Wilkins: Before we start, a word from the fellow who keeps the lamp oil burning in this fort.
Announcer: A quick word, friends! Real craftsmen don't skimp on their metal. The Flame-Flow Still, U.S. Patent 10,561,960, is hand-built from heavy, pure copper. See it at moonshinestill.com, that's moonshinestill.com!
♪ Fiddle sting
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
The Apple, The Press, And The Lie Of The Word Cider
Wilkins: To understand the Widow's sin you have to understand the apple, and to understand the apple you have to forget everything your grandmother told you about pie. The apple trees of old New England were not planted for eating. Most of them grew straight from seed, and an apple grown from seed is a gamble. Plant a seed from a sweet Baldwin and you'll get a tree whose fruit is sour enough to turn a cat inside out. Our grandfathers knew it, and they didn't care, because they weren't after eating. They were after drinking.
♦ A heavy wooden screw press creaks; juice spatters into a wooden pail
Wilkins: Cider was the table drink of this country, man, woman, and child. Water out of a town well near the privy and the tannery would kill you slower than a Concord lawyer but just as surely. Cider, now, cider was safe. Old John Adams himself wrote that he took a tankard of hard cider in the morning, and he went on to sign the Declaration, so I'd say it didn't do him lasting harm. That fellow Chapman, Johnny Appleseed they called him, walked the western country planting seedling nurseries, and if you think every one of those orchards went to pie, you're welcome to my book of bridges for sale.
Wilkins: Here's how it goes. You press your apples and catch the sweet juice. Sweet cider, fresh off the press, is a child's drink, cloudy and honest. Leave it in an open cask with a rag over the bung, and the wild yeast living on the apple skins gets to work. In a few weeks you've got hard cider, about five to seven parts in a hundred, roughly as strong as a good stout ale. A farmer can drink it at haying and still find his own barn.
♦ Wilkins taps a wooden cask; a hollow, sloshing knock
Wilkins: But a Yankee is never satisfied. Give a Yankee a good thing and he'll find a way to make it worse and stronger. The first way is jacking. Set your barrel of hard cider out in a New Hampshire January, and the water freezes out of it into ice. In the middle of that barrel, a little pool of strong, dark liquor stays liquid, because alcohol is a stubborn thing that won't freeze in any honest weather. Bore in with an auger, draw off that heart, and you've got applejack.
Wilkins: Mark this, because it's the hinge the whole story swings on. Jacking throws nothing away. Every foul thing that was in that cider is still in the jack, only crowded closer together. The bad spirits that a still-man would cut off and pour on the ground are sitting right there in your cup, and they'll take payment from the inside of your skull come morning. Freeze-jacked cider is the only liquor that collects its fee in advance and then bills you again in the morning.
Wilkins: The second way is the copper still. Run that hard cider through a pot and you get apple brandy, cider brandy, the drink our grandfathers called by a dozen names. And here's where the government sticks its long thin nose in. Under Mr. Lincoln's excise, apple brandy is distilled spirit, taxed at the barrel like any whiskey. Hard cider is a different animal in the eyes of the law. So you can see why a clever country woman might start calling her brandy cider. A word costs nothing, and the tax costs a great deal.
♦ A distant church bell, two slow strokes
Wilkins: Then came the temperance men. Starting in the eighteen-forties, the Washingtonians and the Sons of Temperance went county to county asking men to sign the pledge, and some of our neighbors grew so righteous I heard of men taking an axe to their own grandfathers' orchards. That's a crime against the apple, and the apple never did a thing to them. But here's the joke the temperance folk never caught on to: the church supper. Every congregation in New England still poured cider at harvest supper, because cider was cider, and cider was innocent. Who'd question a widow carrying a crock of cider into the vestry?
Wilkins: Which brings us to the Widow Hepzibah Pettingill.
♪ A sly, slow banjo vamp
♦ Wax crackle
The Harvest Supper Scandal, Barnaby'S Bellyful, And Captain Donald Vance
Wilkins: The Widow Pettingill lived out on the Barnstead road with eleven acres of orchard, a barn, a cellar, and a late husband named Josiah. Josiah went to his reward in the winter of 'fifty-seven, kicked by his own ox, which the town agreed showed rare judgment in the ox. Josiah left her three things: a cellar full of barrels, a little copper pot he'd bought off a tinker from Gilmanton, and the firmest fruit in Pittsfield. I'm speaking of apples, you understand. I'm speaking only of apples, though half the bachelors in Merrimack County went to church that autumn for no reason the Lord would recognize.
Wilkins: It was the harvest supper of 'fifty-eight, in the vestry of the meeting house. Long tables, baked beans, brown bread, a ham the size of a deacon, and seventeen pies, of which I ate four, God forgive me. And the Widow came through the door with two big stoneware jugs on her hips, set them on the end of the table, and said, sweet as a hymn, 'A little of Josiah's cider, in his memory.'
♦ Clatter of tin cups, murmuring crowd, a fork scraping a plate
Wilkins: Now, I was handed a cup, and I'm a professional. I put my nose to it, and my nose knew in an instant it wasn't cider. It was apple brandy, run through Josiah's little copper pot, cut back with sweet cider to give it color and innocence, and then, I'd have bet my anvil on it, strengthened with a jug of freeze-jacked cider off the north side of her barn. It smelled like Eden and it hit like Cain. Calling that jug cider is like calling Barnaby a lap dog: true in some original sense, but you'd never put either one in your lap.
Wilkins: I'll confess I said nothing, because I'm a man of commerce and I wanted to see what would happen. And what happened was the Reverend Ezekiel Thorne.
♪ A pious, wobbly parlor organ chord
Wilkins: Reverend Thorne was a long dry stick of a man with a voice like a rusty gate and a nose you could have used to split kindling. He'd preached against strong drink every third Sunday for eleven years. He took a cup of the Widow's cider, smacked his lips, and said, 'Mrs. Pettingill, this is a remarkable vintage of the apple.' He asked for seconds like a Christian. He asked for thirds like a sailor. By the fourth he was asking like a man who'd stopped believing in the Book of Revelation because he figured he was living it.
♦ Crowd laughter, a cup slammed down on a board table
Wilkins: By the pie course, the Reverend had loosened his collar, his waistcoat, and his doctrine. He stood on a bench and announced that Jesus turned water into wine at Cana and that the Widow Pettingill had turned cider into something finer, and he'd preach it so Sunday. Deacon Philbrick, a fat, God-fearing pickle of a man, got up to stop him, took two steps, and went down headfirst into the bean pot. He came up glazed like a molasses baptism, a bean in each nostril and salt pork stuck behind one ear like a pencil. He licked his own cheek and said, 'Them's good beans,' and sat down in the pie.
Wilkins: The choir got hold of the second jug. They stood to sing Old Hundred and sang it in three keys at once, which is two more than the Lord asked for and one more than the organ could forgive. The alto, Mrs. Tuttle, sang the whole last verse to the sheriff's wife, who was crying into a rhubarb pie and calling it the best day of her marriage, which tells you plenty about the sheriff.
♦ Discordant, drunken choir fragment of a hymn, collapsing into hiccups
Wilkins: And here's where it turns grim. Monday morning, half of Pittsfield woke up with the apple palsy. Those are my own words for it, and they're the right ones. Pounding heads like a smith was working iron behind their eyes, sour stomachs, hands shaking so hard the mill girls couldn't thread a bobbin. The Reverend didn't get out of bed until Tuesday, and when he finally preached on Sunday, it was on the wages of sin, and he looked like he'd been paid in full. That was the jacked cider talking, friends. All the stuff the still would've thrown away, crowded into a cup and poured down a minister.
Wilkins: Naturally the sheriff came to me first. He always does. Fort Wilkins is the first place any lawman in Merrimack County rides when a man's liver gets surprised. I showed him my copper, clean as a bride's teeth, and my cuts, all honest, and I told him, 'Sheriff, my spirit doesn't give a man the palsy. Mine gives a man opinions.' He went off scratching his head, and I rode out to the Barnstead road to have a word with the Widow.
♦ Horse hooves on a dirt road, a wagon rattling
Wilkins: I found her in the barn, sleeves rolled, pressing apples with forearms like a ship's carpenter. A woman who can press her own apples, keep her own still, and lie to a minister with a straight face is wasted on widowhood. She ought to be in the Senate. I told her plain: 'Hepzibah, you near killed the Congregational Church with that jacked cider. You're keeping every foul drop. If you're going to do it, do it right, and throw away your heads.' She looked at me a long while and said, 'Doctor, you'd better show me, then.' So I did, all that winter, and that's a story for after the break. In payment she gave me a cartload of pomace, the mashed pulp left in the press, sour and working and buzzing with yellow jackets, for my hogs.
♦ Barnaby grunts outside, as though he remembers
Wilkins: Yes, Barnaby, you remember, you villain. I parked that cart beside the still-house and went in to my supper. Barnaby leaned to the end of his chain, hooked the tailboard with one claw, and pulled the whole load down on top of himself like a warm sour snowbank. He ate forty pounds of fermented apple pulp, seeds, stems, wasps and all. When I came out he was flat on his back with his belly in the air, humming. I swear on my forceps that bear was humming.
Wilkins: And who comes up the turnpike that very hour but the county assessor, a little ferret named Crockett, with a ledger under his arm, here to count my barrels. He stepped too near the chain. Barnaby rolled over, got a paw around his ankle the way you'd pick up a dropped biscuit, pulled him in close, looked him dead in the face, and heaved. One great hot sour avalanche of every warm pound of that pomace, half-worked and steaming, came out of Barnaby and landed on that assessor. Pomace in his collar, pomace in his boots, pomace in places a man doesn't mention to his wife. The sound was like a cow stepping into a flooded cellar. The wasps came out of it still alive and mad as hornets about the trip. Crockett ran down Route 28 dripping, his ledger glued shut with apple, and he found a little more of it in his watch case on Thursday. He never did count my barrels. I'll grant you, though, he had a fine apple smell to him until Christmas.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Oh, and the Widow. When she paid me for the lessons, I paid her change in a copper cent fresh from my anvil, stamped G. G. WILKINS / PITTSFIELD N.H., and she put that very cent in the collection plate on Sunday. So the Lord now holds a note signed G. G. Wilkins, and I expect He'll be slower to call it in than the bank.
♪ Banjo flourish
Wilkins: Now, I've got a man in the guest chair tonight who's poked his nose into more cider barrels than any living soul on the federal side, and every time he still came out with his eyebrows. A retired revenue officer, a deep voice, and the only lawman I ever let past Barnaby without a ham bone. Captain Donald Vance, welcome to Fort Wilkins.
Captain: Thank you, Doctor. I stepped over your bear's chain very carefully, and he looked at me like a man pricing a side of beef.
Wilkins: He was. He prices everyone. Captain, you heard the tale. Was the Widow Pettingill the only one in New England passing off jack as cider?
Captain: Doctor, if every widow who did it were laid end to end, they'd reach from Portsmouth to Burlington, and every one of them would deny it. Cider was the great disguise. A barrel of cider never made a revenue man look twice. Many a time I wished it had.
Wilkins: Tell us one.
Captain: There was a farm outside Lebanon, up on the Connecticut. January, bitter cold, the kind of cold that cracks your mustache. I'm riding by, and I see six cider barrels lined up on the ridge of a barn roof, staring at the sky like a jury.
Wilkins: On the roof?
Captain: On the roof, Doctor. He'd hauled them up with a block and tackle so the wind would freeze them faster. Hanging off the eaves on a string was a brace and bit, so he could climb up, bore into the heart of the barrel, and draw off the jack without going to the trouble of bringing it down. I climbed his ladder, rapped a barrel, and it rang like a church bell with an iron plug in the middle.
Wilkins: What did you do?
Captain: I poured out the jack. The farmer stood there in the snow and wept. I told him, 'Son, that's not liquor, that's a headache in a barrel. Everything you ought to throw away is still in there.' Then I let him keep his sweet cider in the cellar, and I told him to give it to his children and his hogs. He thanked me in the spring. Said his wife had stopped hitting him with the bed warmer.
Wilkins: [laughing] The bed warmer! That's an honest New Hampshire marriage. Now, Captain, I've heard there was a temperance supper.
Captain: There was, God help me. Woodstock, Vermont. The Sons of Temperance were holding a pledge-signing supper in the town hall, and the society's own treasurer was a little round man with a pink face who carried the punch bowl in himself, so proud of it. Lemon, maple, spring water, so he said.
Wilkins: Oh, no.
Captain: Oh, yes. I didn't need to taste it, Doctor. I just read the pledge book. The first names on the page were lovely copperplate, fine as a bank note. Halfway down the letters got tall and leaning. Further down they got large and confident, and one man signed twice. The last signature on the page was a big X with a little pig drawn beside it, and the pig was smiling.
Wilkins: [wheezing] A smiling pig!
Captain: I took the treasurer aside and asked him what he'd put in the bowl. He looked me right in the eye and said, 'Captain, I believe in temperance with all my heart. I only wanted the gentlemen to know what they were giving up.'
Wilkins: There's the most honest hypocrite in Vermont. He believes in sobriety. He just believes in it for other people.
Captain: I made him sign the pledge again in front of the whole hall. His hand was steady as a stone. He was the only sober man in the room.
Wilkins: Captain, you're a hard man. Tell me about the peddler.
Captain: There was a tin peddler working the hill farms with a wagon of pans and buttons, and twelve stoneware crocks with a neat paper label on each: Boiled Cider, for Mince Pie. Now, Doctor, you know boiled cider.
Wilkins: I do. Sweet cider boiled down on the stove till it's thick and dark and tart, about like molasses. My mother put it in every mince pie she ever made, and it hasn't a lick of liquor in it.
Captain: Just so. Thick as molasses. So I asked to buy one for my wife's pie, and I tipped a crock to look, and it poured out like spring water. Clear, and quick, and smelling like an orchard on fire. The peddler said, 'It's a thin year for boiled cider, Captain.' I said, 'Friend, it's a thick year for nonsense.'
Wilkins: [slapping the table] Thick year for nonsense! I'm stealing that.
Captain: You may. I also found he'd soldered those crock lids with lead, and that's what made me truly angry. A man can fool me about pie. He doesn't get to poison a farmer's wife. I broke every crock against his own wheel.
Wilkins: Amen. Lead has no place near anything a person swallows. Captain, one more, and then the patent-medicine man will chase us both off the cylinder.
Captain: A barn raising in Bradford, Vermont. Forty men, a hot June noon, and a girl comes around with a pail and a dipper of switchel. Water, vinegar, ginger, a little molasses, the haymaker's punch. Good honest drink to keep a man on a beam.
Wilkins: Except.
Captain: Except somebody's uncle had swapped the pail for one that was three parts apple brandy. I took one sip, and I knew. I looked up, and there were thirty men on the frame swinging mallets with great joy and no accuracy. I hollered them all down before anybody fell. But they'd already set the ridgepole.
Wilkins: And?
Captain: And it went up crooked, Doctor. That barn has leaned east ever since. Sound as a bell, but it leans east.
Wilkins: Like a deacon reaching for the collection plate. Captain Donald Vance, you've told the truth tonight, which is unheard of on this program. Don't go anywhere. Barnaby's looking at you like the dessert course.
Captain: I'll keep to this side of the stove, Doctor.
♪ Fiddle and banjo bridge, quick and bright
♦ Wax crackle
Ad Break
♪ A jaunty brass-band patent-medicine march
Announcer: Ladies and gentlemen! Friends of the forge and the fire! Do you know what poor metal does to good work? Thin copper scorches. Salvaged junk can poison. And a cheap pot will betray you just when the run matters most! But there's an answer, friends, a gleaming one! The Flame-Flow Still, the flagship of Moonshine Stills, protected under United States Patent 10,561,960! It's built from heavy, high-purity electrolytic copper, the metal at its very finest, and joined with precision-machined brass unions that hold tight and true. The Flame-Flow is designed to maximize convective circulation, so your heat moves evenly and your work comes out pure, for essential oils, herbal tinctures, and traditional distillation demonstrations. If you love honest American craftsmanship, look no further! It's all yours for $899.00. See it with your own eyes at the showroom at Fort Wilkins, on Route 28 in Pittsfield, New Hampshire, or order direct at moonshinestill.com/products/flame-flow-copper-still! Once more for the folks in the back: moonshinestill.com/products/flame-flow-copper-still. The Flame-Flow Still. Heavy copper, honest work!
♪ March ends with a cymbal crash
♦ Wax crackle
Copper And The Craft, Apple Brandy Done Honest
Wilkins: Now, I promised you what I taught the Widow Pettingill that winter, and I'm a man of my word when there's no sheriff in the room. First, the plain law, so nobody can say I didn't warn you: making distilled spirits to drink without a federal permit is illegal under the laws of these United States, and all I'm telling you is history and instruction, for education only. Captain Vance is nodding, so I said it right.
Captain: You said it right, Doctor.
Wilkins: The first lesson is the apple. Pick ripe, sound fruit and pick out the rot. One rotten apple won't spoil the barrel, whatever your mother said, but ten of them will make your brandy smell like a cellar floor. Grind or crush the apples, press out the juice, and run it into a clean cask. Don't use a cask that ever held pickles, fish, or a dead squirrel. I've seen all three.
Wilkins: The second lesson is the working. Leave the bung loose with a cloth over it so the gas can get out and the flies can't get in. Keep the cask somewhere snug, a warm cellar or the back room by the chimney, because the yeast loafs in the cold like a deputy on payday. In two or three weeks, or a bit longer in a cold autumn, the bubbling slows and stops and your sweet cider has gone hard, five to seven parts in a hundred. That's your wash, your charge for the still.
♦ Liquid poured from a cask into a copper pot, ringing hollow then deepening
Wilkins: The third lesson is the reason apple is a different beast from corn, so lean in. The apple is full of pectin. That's the stuff that makes your grandmother's jelly set. When the cider ferments, that pectin breaks down and gives off wood spirit, which the learned men call methanol. Methanol blinds, and in enough measure it kills. A fruit charge carries more of it than a grain mash, so a cider man has to be more generous at the head of the run than a corn man. That was the Widow's whole sin. With jacked cider she kept every drop of the poison, and with her brandy she was too stingy with her cuts. A thrifty woman makes a dangerous distiller.
Wilkins: The fourth lesson is the copper. Fill your pot no more than two-thirds full so it doesn't foam up and puke into the arm. Make every joint tight, with flour paste or a proper union, and never lead solder, never. Light a low, patient fire. While the vapor climbs through that copper, the copper takes hold of the sulfur in it, the rotten-egg stink, and keeps it, and that's why a copper still runs sweeter. Clean the copper after every run so the bright metal stays working.
Wilkins: Many a careful man runs it twice. The first run strips the cider down to low wines, cloudy and middling strong. The second, the spirit run, he takes slow, and that's where the cuts get made.
♦ Slow drip of clear distillate into a glass jar, steady
Wilkins: Listen to that drip. That's where the cuts get made. The first trickle is the foreshots, sharp and nasty, smelling like a cobbler's cement pot. Throw it away. Not into the cat's bowl, not into the liniment, onto the ground. For every ten gallons of cider charged I throw away no less than a good half-pint, and I'll throw a full pint if the apples were ripe and the fruit was heavy, because I'm fond of my eyesight. Then come the heads, still harsh, smelling of glue and lamp spirit, burning the nose. Set them aside. Don't drink them. Don't serve them to a minister, however much he deserves it.
Wilkins: Then, friends, the hearts. The smell turns round and soft and smells like the whole orchard in October, apple blossom and baked apple and a little spice. That's the brandy, smooth on the tongue. Keep your jars small and keep them in order, number one, two, three, so you can smell each one and pick your cut with your nose instead of your greed. Last come the tails. The spirit goes oily and flat and smells of wet cardboard and dog. Set those aside too.
Wilkins: And now the fire, because I've buried two men who didn't respect it. Alcohol vapor burns. A leaking joint with a flame under it will light that still-house up like the Fourth of July, and you along with it. Keep the fire low, keep the joints tight, keep the spirit jar away from the flame, and keep a bucket of sand by the door. The Widow Pettingill learned it all. Her brandy was never cider again, and she stopped pretending it was. She sold a little to the sick and a little to the sad, and she never gave another man the palsy. Reverend Thorne still wanted thirds, but now she made him pay for them.
Captain: Doctor, if every man I ever arrested had listened to that sermon, I'd have retired a good deal earlier and ten pounds lighter.
Wilkins: [laughing] Captain, that's the kindest thing a revenue man ever said to me, and my bear is jealous.
♦ Barnaby grunts, offended
♪ Short fiddle bridge
♦ Wax crackle
The Call-In Line, Hickory Ashes, Red Oak, And The Blue Flame
Wilkins: Now to the call-in line. The talking-machine at the telegraph office caught a message for me all the way from Wilkesboro, North Carolina, where they understand corn and copper the way a Pittsfield man understands rocks and complaining. Play it, boy.
♦ Scratchy recorded cylinder, hiss and a faint pop
Cletus (recorded): 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, you've got good questions and a better nickname. I won't ask how you got it, because I've known men called Rabbit, and the story is always either about running or about family. Let's take your uncle one stick at a time.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: The hickory ashes first. Now, ash isn't nothing. Soak hardwood ash in water and you get lye. Every farmwife in New England leaches it through a barrel to make her soap, and your neighbors down south soak their corn in it to make hominy. So when your uncle's granddaddy threw ashes in the thump keg, he wasn't cleaning anything. He was making soap water and running his vapor through it. It turned his keg alkaline and gray and slippery, and maybe it knocked a little of the sour off the taste, but it didn't touch the wood spirit, not one drop. The bad heads are the first thing the still gives off, and you can't wash them out, filter them out, or pray them out. You can only catch them in a jar and pour them on the ground. Rabbit, your uncle's hickory ashes would make a fine bar of lye soap, so if the run comes out bad, at least the jar will be clean on the outside.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Now the red oak shavings, and here I'll give your uncle half a cup of credit. Oak does change a spirit. That's why good brandy and whiskey rest in oak casks. The wood gives it color, tannin, and a toasty, woody taste. So a handful of shavings in the doubler might well give his spirit a little color and bite, and he'd taste the difference and think he'd cured it. But changing the taste isn't cleaning. A spoonful of honey in poison doesn't make it medicine. Red oak shavings in a thump keg are like a new hat on a bad tooth: it looks better from across the road, and it still has to come out. And I'd sooner use white oak than red, since red oak is open-grained and leaky. That's why a cooper won't build a whiskey barrel from it.
Captain: Doctor, may I add one? I've walked into many a southern-style outfit up here run by men who learned from Carolina kin, and every one of them had a superstition in the keg. Ashes, shavings, a peach pit, a horseshoe. The ones I worried about weren't the ones with ashes. They were the ones with lead in the joints.
Wilkins: The Captain's right as rain, Rabbit. Worry about the metal and the cuts, not the trimmings. And since we're throwing out superstitions, let's throw one more on the fire.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: The blue flame. Every tavern know-it-all from here to Wilkesboro pours a spoonful, lights it, and says, 'Burns blue, it's good. Burns yellow or red, it's poison.' Friends, that's the worst kind of nonsense, because it sounds like science. Good spirit burns pale blue, and so does wood spirit, the methanol, because the two burn near alike. A spoonful of foreshots that'll make you blind can burn just as pretty a blue as the Widow's finest heart. And if there's lead in your spirit from a soldered joint, it can throw off the flame color, so a man reads it wrong and drinks the very thing that'll poison him. The blue flame test is like asking a horse thief if the horse is his. You get an answer, and the answer is worthless. The only test that counts is the one you make at the spout: an honest cut, a clean copper pot, and the foreshots on the ground.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, thank you for your question. I've stamped a cent with your name in my heart and G. G. WILKINS on the face of it. Give your uncle my respects and tell him to keep his ashes for soap day. Captain, any last word for Rabbit?
Captain: Son, your uncle sounds like a fine man and a terrible chemist. Love him for the first and correct him on the second.
Wilkins: Spoken like a grandfather and a lawman, both at once.
♪ Banjo walks in, gentle and slow
♦ Wax crackle
Sign-Off
Wilkins: That's the end of it, neighbors. My thanks to Captain Donald Vance for his stories, his good manners, and for not shooting my bear, a courtesy I don't always get from the federal government.
Captain: It was a pleasure, Doctor. The pie was better than the company, and the company was very good.
Wilkins: And here's the patent-medicine man one last time before I bar the door.
Announcer: One more quick word! The Flame-Flow Still, U.S. Patent 10,561,960, is made of heavy, pure copper for honest work. Order yours today at moonshinestill.com, that's moonshinestill.com!
Wilkins: Now, if tonight's lesson in cuts and copper whetted your appetite, I'll teach you the rest in the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. It covers the history, the metal, the mash, the cuts, the fire and the law, the whole craft from the apple to the jar, the honest way, with nobody blind and no minister on a bench. Ask about it at the fort, or the same way you found the Flame-Flow. And as for the Widow Hepzibah Pettingill, she lived to ninety-one, buried two more husbands, and outlived Reverend Thorne by eleven years. At his funeral supper she brought a jug, set it on the table, and said, 'Cider, in his memory.' Not a soul in that room touched it except the new minister, and nobody had the heart to tell him.
♦ Barnaby grumbles and settles, chain sliding through dirt
Wilkins: Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme returns, warm and fading
♦ Bear grunt and final drip into jar
♦ Wax cylinder crackle runs out to silence