Hair of the Dog, Literally: 1860s Hangover Cures
Dr. Alchemist G. G. Wilkins covers the cures a Suncook Valley man tried the morning after a frolic, from sensible haymaker's switchel to raw eggs, river plunges and the mercury purge he refuses to give anyone. He tries several of them on willing Pittsfield volunteers, and one test of a literal hair of the bear ends badly for everyone except Barnaby. Master coppersmith Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister tells three new stories: a brazed seam botched by a hungover journeyman, a barn raising poisoned by switchel kept in a bare copper kettle, and the cure his grandfather sold for a penny. Wilkins also answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller's voicemail about hickory ashes and red oak shavings in the thump keg, and debunks the blue flame test at his anvil.
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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! Hush your gob, you moth-eaten horsehair sofa. Yes, I hear you. You got into the slop bucket behind the still-house again, and now your head feels like the inside of a church bell on Easter morning. Welcome to the human condition, bear. Lie down in the ferns and suffer like a Christian.
♦ Long, mournful bear groan, chain dragging, a heavy body flopping into dry leaves
Wilkins: There he goes, four hundred pounds of regret. I have seen the same face on a Concord legislator the morning after Election Day.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth, swelling then settling under
Wilkins: Good evening, neighbors, sinners, and whoever is reading this to a deaf grandmother by lamplight. 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, tooth-puller, blacksmith, inventor, twice-arrested scoundrel, and tonight a doctor of the morning after.
Wilkins: Our topic is Hair of the Dog, Literally: 1860s Hangover Cures. We go from the sensible to the cruel, and I tested every one I would allow on willing volunteers from this valley. Willing is a strong word. They were willing the night before, and I hold a man to what he says the night before.
Wilkins: But first, a quick word from the folks who keep this fort's lamp oil paid for.
♪ Brief bright banjo sting
Announcer: Friends! Looking for the finest copper in the republic? Then see the Flame-Flow Still, protected by United States Patent 10,561,960, handcrafted from pure, heavy-gauge copper by Moonshine Stills. See it at moonshinestill.com, where the copper shines and the craftsmanship sings!
♪ Sting resolves
Wilkins: Thank you, Announcer. He drinks nothing but sarsaparilla and has never had a hangover in his life, which is why he talks like that.
♪ Fiddle transition, a slow sorrowful waltz turned comic
Wilkins: SEGMENT ONE. Where the Cure Came From, and Why It Never Worked.
Wilkins: Let us begin with the phrase. Hair of the dog. Every barfly from Portsmouth to Keene says it, and not one in fifty knows it was once a real cure for a real dog bite. If a cur bit you, the old wives said to pluck a hair from that same cur and lay it on the wound, or bind it there with a rag. Like cures like. You can picture the second half of that treatment: a man with a bleeding calf chasing the dog that bit him for a souvenir. He usually got bitten a second time, and had two wounds and a hair.
Wilkins: The drinking sense is old as well. John Heywood printed it in his book of English proverbs back in 1546: a fellow begging for a hair of the dog that bit him last night. So for over three hundred years Englishmen and Yankees have woken up in the hay and decided the cure for a poison is more of the same poison. It is the most popular bad idea in Christendom, after marriage and the federal government.
Wilkins: The Romans were no wiser. Pliny the Elder, a learned man who died walking toward a volcano to get a better look, which tells you how far you should trust his judgment, wrote that raw owl's eggs would cure drunkenness. Owl's eggs! Have you ever tried to rob an owl? I have. In 1849, up a hemlock behind the Berry farm, on a dare, three sheets to the wind. The owl took a piece of my scalp the size of a silver half-dime, and I still have the bald patch. I never got the egg. In the morning my head hurt worse from the owl than from the whiskey.
Wilkins: Here in New England our grandfathers had a name for the morning drink. They called it an antifogmatic. A dram before breakfast to keep off the fog and the damp. Now, in New Hampshire, that means a man may drink before breakfast every day of the year except the four with no fog, and on those four he drinks to celebrate the weather. My grandfather took his antifogmatic at six, his eleven o'clock bitters at eleven, and his reasons all afternoon.
Wilkins: So let me speak plainly as a man of medicine, the kind who pulls teeth with his boot braced on the patient's chest. A morning dram does not cure anything. It puts the bill off. Part of your misery is the body settling its accounts as the spirit leaves your blood. Pour more in and you have not paid the debt, you have taken out a second note at a worse rate. By noon you owe double, and by Thursday the whole Suncook Valley knows your wife's opinion of you.
Wilkins: What actually helps? Spirit makes a man pass water like a mill race in April. That is why you wake up dry as a church sermon with a skull full of hornets. So water helps. Rest helps. Plain food helps. Time helps most, and time cannot be bottled, and I have tried. Now, for science and for the amusement of my neighbors, here is what I tested.
♦ Wax cylinder crackle intensifies briefly, a cork pulled from a jug
Wilkins: Trial the first, the sensible one: switchel. Haymaker's punch. Every New England farmwife knows it. Spring water, a good glug of cider vinegar, grated ginger root, and molasses or maple sugar to make it go down. Haying crews drink it by the bucket in July. My volunteer was Amos Tuttle, cooper, who the night before had drunk enough at the Pittsfield muster to float a gundalow. He came to me green as a frog's belly. I gave him a quart of cold switchel, a slab of brown bread, and a pile of straw in the shade by the woodshed. By three in the afternoon he was cursing my name in complete sentences, which in Amos is the picture of health. Verdict: it works about as well as water, sugar and a nap can work, which is to say honestly.
Wilkins: Trial the second, the slimy one. The tavern men down in Concord swear by a raw egg cracked into a glass with vinegar, black pepper, and a dash of that Worcestershire sauce the Lea and Perrins people have shipped from England since about 1837. You swallow the yolk whole without breaking it, like a sword-swallower at the fair. Amos agreed, Lord bless his empty head. He tipped it back and the yolk slid down his gullet like a frog going down a well. For a moment there was peace in the valley. Then his eyes went wide as dinner plates, his cheeks puffed like a bellows, and that egg came back up whole, like a hen laying in reverse. It landed on my boot still round, still yellow, and still warm, and I swear it looked offended. Barnaby ate it off the boot. Verdict: nourishing for bears.
♦ Bear grunt of satisfaction, chain clink
Wilkins: You remember, do you, Barnaby. He remembers.
Wilkins: Trial the third, the cruel one: the cold plunge. Old lumbermen swear a man dunked in cold water forgets his head. So in October I marched the Drake boys, Elias and Josiah, down to the mill pond above the dam on the Suncook. They had spent the night before at a husking bee, where the custom is that finding a red ear lets you kiss the girl of your choosing. Elias found nine red ears, which is not possible unless he brought his own, and he spent the night being slapped by the girls of his choosing. They went into the pond to the necks. The noise Josiah made was the noise a hog makes when it learns what the smokehouse is for. Elias came out blue from the collar down, with his parts shrunk so small his own mother would not have known him, and his teeth chattering so hard he chipped a molar, which I pulled for him at half price. Did it cure the hangover? Indeed it did. No man ever had a hangover and pneumonia at once, because the pneumonia takes all his attention. Do not try it. Men have stopped their hearts in cold water, sober or drunk.
Wilkins: Now here is a cure I would not test, and I want every listener to mark it. Calomel. Mercurous chloride. Some country doctors still give it as a purge for every complaint from a bellyache to a broken heart, and some give it to a man the morning after to clear his bowels. It clears them, all right, along with his teeth, his gums and sometimes his life, because calomel is mercury. I have pulled black, loose teeth out of men who took the blue mass and calomel for years. They came out like fence posts from a bog. The Union Surgeon General himself, William Hammond, struck calomel and tartar emetic off the army supply table in 1863. The old doctors were so furious that it helped get him court-martialed and thrown out. They hanged the man who was right. Tartar emetic is no better. It is antimony, a poison, given to make a man vomit, and it can vomit his soul right out of him. I am a tooth-puller, not a poisoner. When I want a man to lose his teeth, I use forceps, not mercury.
Wilkins: There is one gentle old remedy I will allow: white willow bark, chewed or steeped as a tea. The Indians of this country and the herb-wives of England both used it for aches and fevers. There is something in it the learned men call salicin, and it eases a sore head for some folks. It is bitter as a widow at a will reading, and too much of it upsets the stomach, so take a little and mind it.
Wilkins: And now, trial the last. The one that gives tonight's broadcast its name. Hair of the dog, literally.
♦ Barnaby's chain goes taut, low warning rumble
Wilkins: Ezra Pease, a tanner by trade and a fool by vocation, heard the saying and decided that if dog hair worked, bear hair must work four hundred pounds better. He woke up behind my woodpile after a frolic, still drunk enough to be brave and sober enough to remember where the bear was. He crept up on Barnaby with his little sewing scissors to snip a lock for his tea. I was at the window. I could have shouted. I did not. In the name of science, and because Ezra owed me three dollars for a bicuspid.
Wilkins: He got one snip. One. Barnaby woke up the way a stick of dynamite wakes up. He swung one paw, and I heard it before I saw it, a sound like a wet sack of grain hitting a barn floor. Ezra flew backwards eight feet into the leaf pile, and his breeches stayed behind on Barnaby's claws, torn clean off from waist to knee. His shirttail flapped like a flag of surrender over a field that had plainly already surrendered. Barnaby sat down on the breeches and began to eat the pocket, because there was a biscuit in it. Ezra lay there holding up his bit of bear hair, shouting that the cure worked, his head was clear as a bell. Of course it was clear. Fright is the only true hangover cure, and it comes in only one size. Hair of the dog, literally, became hair of the bear, and hair of the bear became Ezra's hair on the bear, which is the wrong direction entirely. He found a curl of his own scalp hair in Barnaby's fur a week later.
♦ Bear grunts, a rough snort, chain clinking
Wilkins: Barnaby does not lend his hair, his ham bone or his good opinion, and he charges interest on all three.
♪ Banjo roll transition into a galloping reel
Wilkins: SEGMENT TWO. Runners, Rogues, and the Mornings After.
Wilkins: Here is something the history books leave out: half the famous scrapes in the spirit trade happened before noon, when the men involved felt like death in a frock coat. Down in Barnstead they still tell of a runner, I will call him Harlan because his widow still bakes for the church supper, who drove a wagonload of jugs under hay into Concord the morning after his own birthday frolic. He was so poorly that he pulled up at the wrong hitching post and asked the man on the steps for a dipper of water. The man on the steps was the assistant assessor of Internal Revenue. He gave Harlan the water, and then he gave him a receipt for the wagon, the jugs, the hay and the horse. Harlan said it was the most expensive drink of water in the history of the Granite State.
Wilkins: As for me, you know the sheriff of Merrimack County has come calling on this fort twice, and I have told you about the second visit before. Let me tell you only this about the morning of the first. I was poorly myself, having tested a run of rye on my own person the night before for quality. I was counterstamping coppers at the anvil, as is my habit, with my punch that reads G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin, ringing sharp
Wilkins: That morning, with my eyes swimming like a pair of tadpoles in a rain barrel, I set the punch in upside down and wrong way round and struck forty coppers before I noticed. The deputy came in and took one as evidence of my character. It read like a curse in Welsh. He showed it to the magistrate, and the magistrate held it up to a mirror and said, at least the man signs his crimes. I have never set a punch hungover since.
Wilkins: Now, to talk about mornings after and the hands that must work through them, I have here at the fort a man who hammers copper the way a preacher hammers sin, only with better results. From the Fort Wilkins foundry, Silas McAllister, called Hacksaw. Silas, welcome to the broadcast.
♦ Chair scraping on plank floor, a heavy leather apron creaking
Silas: Evening, Doctor. Evening, folks. I'll say up front, I don't drink much. A coppersmith who drinks much ends up with a pot that leaks and a thumb shaped like a turnip.
Wilkins: That is the soberest introduction ever given in this fort. Most guests come in smelling like a cider mill on fire. Now Silas, your trade and a hangover do not mix, I take it.
Silas: They do not. My father had one rule in the shop, painted on a board over the brazing hearth: no man touches the hearth the morning after a frolic. And there's a story behind that board.
Wilkins: There always is. Out with it.
Silas: My father had a journeyman, a good hand on a sober day, steady as a millstone. One October he went to a husking frolic out on the Pittsfield road and came in the next morning with eyes like two holes burned in a blanket. Father was off delivering a kettle. This fellow decided to finish a swan-neck seam on a new pot on his own, to look keen. His hands were shaking so badly that the spelter went on in lumps and pockmarks. He left a pinhole along that seam no bigger than a pin's head.
Wilkins: And a pinhole in a still is a doorway for the devil.
Silas: Just so. They did a test run on the pot that afternoon, with water and a little low wine to check it. The vapor came out of that pinhole thin as a hair, and spirit vapor is heavy. It doesn't go up like smoke, it creeps along low. It crept right down to the firebox and lit with a whump. A blue sheet of flame ran up the side of the pot and into the rafters. They threw wet sacks on it and saved the shed, but the rafters are still black. The journeyman's eyebrows didn't come back until Christmas. He looked like a peeled egg with a worried expression.
Wilkins: Ha! A peeled egg. Now, listeners, mark what Silas said, because it is the truest thing said in this fort all week. Spirit vapor burns, and it creeps. A leaking joint near an open flame will burn your building down around your ears. A hungover man with a brazing torch is like a Congregationalist at a dance: willing, but nobody near him is safe.
Silas: Father put up the board the next day and never had another fire. He said a shaking hand can't fill a seam. And a man who can't hold his drink shouldn't hold a torch.
Wilkins: Now, I tested switchel tonight on Amos Tuttle, and it served him well. But you have a switchel story that is the opposite of a cure, I hear.
Silas: I do, and it's a metal story, which is why I tell it. My grandfather was at a barn raising in Barnstead. Hot day, forty men on the frame. A traveling tinker came by to be neighborly, carrying switchel for the crew, vinegar, ginger, molasses, the usual. But he'd mixed it in a big copper kettle with no tin lining inside, bare red copper, and left it in the sun all morning while the men raised the first bents.
Wilkins: Oh, Lord. I see where this goes, and it goes over the side of a barn.
Silas: Vinegar eats bare copper, Doctor. Any sour drink does: cider, vinegar, switchel. It takes the copper right into the drink. By noon the crew had drunk the kettle dry, and by one o'clock half of them were green-faced and heaving off the ridgepole like gargoyles on a French church. One fellow was hanging onto a rafter, cramping and sick, shouting for his mother. Another one was sick straight down the back of the tinker's neck while the tinker stood below wondering what had gone wrong.
Wilkins: Justice, delivered from on high.
Silas: That's why good copper cookware gets a lining of tin, and why my grandfather tinned that kettle himself, for free, before the women of Barnstead would let it within a mile of the next raising. Copper is a wonderful metal for vapor, Doctor, but you don't store sour drink in it. That's the lesson.
Wilkins: That tinker's switchel turned the barn crew so green that Barnstead mistook them for a Vermont delegation. Listeners, Silas speaks gospel: no vinegar, cider or switchel kept standing in bare copper. Now Silas, my friend, I hear your grandfather had a hangover cure of his own, and that he charged for it.
Silas: He did. A penny a head. When the taverns let out on a Saturday and the men came stumbling past his shop on Sunday morning holding their skulls, he'd stand in the door and offer them a cure for a penny. And the cure was this: you sat on a three-legged stool, you held a big copper pot between your knees, and he planished it.
Wilkins: Planished it! For the folks at home, that means he went over the whole pot with a polished hammer, tapping out every lump, thousands of little blows.
Silas: Thousands, Doctor, and every one rings. A copper pot held between your knees is a church bell you're wearing. The first blow makes a man's eyes cross. By the fiftieth he's begging. By the two hundredth he's promising the Lord things. Grandfather never let one go until the pot was done. He said a cure you quit halfway is no cure at all.
Wilkins: Did it work?
Silas: Well, there was a man from Loudon who took the cure one Sunday and swore off strong drink for eleven years. My grandfather said that for the whole eleven years, any time a church bell rang in the valley, the man ducked behind the nearest stone wall with his hands over his ears. They had to ring the Loudon bell soft at his wedding.
Wilkins: Ha! The only temperance sermon in Merrimack County that cost a penny and actually worked. Silas, I may set up a stool by the anvil on Sunday mornings and put you out of work.
Silas: You'd have no customers, Doctor. They'd hear your mouth before your hammer.
Wilkins: Now that is a roast, ladies and gentlemen, from a man who claims to be measured and plain-spoken. Silas McAllister, the Hacksaw, of the Fort Wilkins foundry. Stay by the fire, my friend, I want your eyes on the copper talk to come.
Silas: I'll be right here, Doctor.
♪ Bright brass band flourish with a jangling tambourine, patent-medicine wagon style
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♪ Flourish ends on a cymbal crash
Wilkins: The Announcer, ladies and gentlemen. That man could sell a hat to a headless horseman and make him come back for a second one.
♪ Low, mysterious fiddle drone, with the faint tinkle of glass
Wilkins: SEGMENT THREE. Copper and the Craft: How a Hangover Is Made in the Still.
Wilkins: Now I put on my alchemist's hat, which is the same as my blacksmith's hat with more burn holes in it. Remember, everything here is history and education. Making distilled spirits to drink without a federal permit is against United States law, and the Treasury has no sense of humor. But it is worth knowing how the old makers worked, because half of the worst mornings in this valley were made at the still, not at the tavern.
Wilkins: Start with the mash. The old Suncook Valley way for a corn mash ran like this: cracked corn into the kettle with clean water, roughly a pound of corn to every half-gallon of water. Bring it up hot and stir it like a widow stirring gossip so it does not scorch on the bottom, until it thickens to a porridge. Many makers stirred in a measure of malted barley once it cooled enough to hold a finger in, because the malt turns the starch to sugar. Let it cool to blood-warm, then pitch in your yeast. Into the fermenting tubs it goes, covered with a cloth, in a warm room with good air moving, because fermenting mash breathes out gas that can smother a man in a closed pit or cellar. In some days it quits bubbling and you have what we call the wash, or the beer, a sour drink of a few parts in a hundred spirit. Strain it off the grain into the pot.
Wilkins: Now the run. The fire goes under the pot, and here is the first commandment of this fort: the fire is low and steady. Not a roaring blaze. A slow run is a clean run, and a roaring fire pushes everything over in one muddy rush, and a hot fire next to a leaking joint is how Silas's father's rafters got painted black. Check every seam before you light. Keep water and sacks close. Keep the still-house aired.
Silas: And no lead anywhere in it, Doctor, no lead solder, no salvaged junk metal. Proper copper, proper joints.
Wilkins: Amen. Now the cuts, which is where the hangover is truly made or saved. The first spirit to drip from the worm is the foreshots, and it is pure trouble. It carries methanol, the wood alcohol, which blinds and kills. The old makers threw out the first good cupful or more from every few gallons of wash in the pot, and the careful ones threw out more than that. Never drink it, never save it for your brother-in-law, never use it to rinse a sore tooth. It goes on the ground or in the lamp.
Wilkins: After the foreshots come the heads. They smell sharp, like glazier's varnish or pear drops, and they burn the nose. In the heads rides a nasty fellow called acetaldehyde. And here is a strange piece of alchemy for you: that same acetaldehyde is what your own liver makes out of spirit after you drink it. It is one of the devils behind your morning misery. So a maker who keeps his heads in the jar is handing you tomorrow's headache tonight, already brewed. Heads go into a separate jar, out of the drinking spirit.
Wilkins: Then come the hearts. Sweet, clean, smooth on the nose. This is what the honest maker keeps. You collect in small jars, one after another, and you nose each one, so you can tell exactly where the heads stop and the hearts begin, and where the hearts give out.
Wilkins: Because last come the tails. The spirit goes thin and oily, it clouds when you add water, and it smells like wet cardboard and wet dog. Those are the fusel oils, heavy alcohols, and spirit loaded with them is famous for a skull-splitting morning. So, friends, if you want the true hair of the dog, it is sitting right there in the bottom of your jar, smelling like a spaniel come in from the rain, and you deserve every whisker of it. Tails go aside. Some makers put them back in the next run.
Wilkins: So, Silas, where does the copper come in?
Silas: Copper takes the sulfur stink out of the vapor, Doctor. Rotten egg, boiled cabbage. The vapor touches bright copper and the sulfur stays behind on the metal. But only if the copper's clean. Scrub it after every run. And if you see green crust, that crust stays out of the spirit.
Wilkins: Clean copper, low fire, honest cuts. That is the only hangover cure that works, and you take it the day before. Every other cure on tonight's program is a man trying to pull a tooth after he has already swallowed it.
♪ Fiddle drone resolves into a jaunty banjo pluck
Wilkins: SEGMENT FOUR. Myths, Slang, and a Voice from Carolina.
Wilkins: We have a message on the call-in line, which is a fine new arrangement involving a tin horn, a long wire, and a boy named Hezekiah who writes very fast. Here it is now, from Cletus Miller, called Rabbit, of Wilkesboro, North Carolina. Roll the tape.
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, a hiss, a faint click
Wilkins: Here is Rabbit's question, in his own words: 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?
♦ Click, crackle fades
Wilkins: Rabbit! Greetings to Wilkesboro, to the Yadkin River, and to every uncle in Carolina who ever stood over a thump keg with his sleeves rolled up and his theories rolled out. Rabbit, I will give your uncle his due. He is not entirely a liar. He is a liar with a pedigree.
Wilkins: Take the hickory ashes first. Wood ash is no idle dirt. Pour water through it in a hopper and what drips out is lye, the potash that makes soap and takes the hide off your fingers. Here in New England we used to burn whole forests for it. Potash was one of our chief exports back when your grandpappy was courting, and the first patent the United States ever granted, in 1790, went to a man named Samuel Hopkins for a better way to make potash and pearl ash. So ash is a strong, caustic chemical, and I understand why a man would think it must scrub something. But ash in a thump keg does nothing about the bad heads. The volatile poison is in the vapor and boils right on over. Your uncle's ash bucket makes the finest lye soap in Carolina, and the soap is the only thing in the whole affair that comes out cleaner.
Wilkins: Now the red oak shavings. Those do something, Rabbit, and here is what. Oak in hot spirit gives up its tannins and its color, so raw spirit comes out tinted and tasting a bit like it sat in a barrel for a season. It is flavoring, not cleaning. Red oak shavings in a keg are like a powdered wig on a hog: the hog looks very distinguished, but it is the same hog underneath. The bad heads are still in there wearing the wig. The only way to clean out bad heads is to cut them out with your own nose and your own jars, and throw them away. Your uncle was making swamp medicine, Rabbit, but good swamp medicine, the kind with a story attached. Give him a hug from Fort Wilkins and tell him the Alchemist says to keep the ash for the laundry.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: That one is for you, Rabbit. A copper large cent stamped G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., set aside in the jar with your name on it, stamped right side up this time.
Wilkins: Now, since we are in the myth-busting trade tonight, let me break one more old wives' tale over my anvil: the blue flame test. Men all over this valley pour a spoonful of spirit, set a match to it, and pronounce it safe if it burns blue. And they have a rhyme: lead burns red and makes you dead. Friends, it is hogwash in a Sunday hat. Good spirit burns blue, and methanol, the wood alcohol that blinds you, burns pale blue too, nearly invisible in daylight. So the spoon cannot tell you the good from the deadly. And the red flame saying is no reliable test for lead. A man can watch a fine blue flame and drink himself blind the same evening.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin, twice
Wilkins: Testing spirit by the color of its flame is like judging a sheriff by the shine of his boots. It tells you he owns polish, and nothing about his soul. The only honest test is honest cuts, made by an honest nose, in clean copper.
Silas: And honest metal, Doctor. No lead in the joints means no lead to test for.
Wilkins: The Hacksaw has the last word, which he will charge me for. And one more piece of slang for the road. In the Suncook Valley, a man with a hangover is said to be wearing the bear. As in, how is Ezra this morning? Oh, he's wearing the bear. After what happened behind my woodpile, the saying is more literal than it used to be.
♦ Bear grunt, indignant, chain rattle
♪ Banjo picks up, bright
Announcer: A quick word, friends! The Flame-Flow Still, United States Patent 10,561,960, is pure heavy-gauge copper, handcrafted and built to last. See it at the Fort Wilkins showroom on Route 28 or order at moonshinestill.com. That's moonshinestill.com!
♪ Parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme returns, slow and warm
Wilkins: That is our broadcast, neighbors. If tonight has taught you anything, I hope it is that the cure for the morning is found the night before, in the jar you did not drink and the heads you threw away. And if you want to learn the old craft right, from mash to cuts to clean copper, as history and education, enroll in the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. I teach it myself, with forceps close at hand and Barnaby supervising from the window. You will learn the copper, the fire, the cuts, and the law, and you will leave with all ten fingers and both eyebrows, which is more than Silas's father's journeyman could say.
Wilkins: My thanks to Silas McAllister, the Hacksaw, for his stories and his insults, both well-made. To Rabbit Miller down in Wilkesboro. To Amos Tuttle, the Drake boys, and Ezra Pease, the bravest fools who ever volunteered for science in Merrimack County. Ezra, your breeches are still on the chain, if you want to come collect them. And remember, folks: a hangover is the Lord's own revenue collection, and unlike Washington, He does not accept a jar of cordial in place of payment.
Wilkins: Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.
♦ Bear grunt and final drip into jar
♪ Theme fades out under wax cylinder crackle