Heads, Hearts and Tails: The Cuts of a Run
Dr. G. G. Wilkins explains the cuts of a run (foreshots, heads, hearts and tails) in plain words that work for a hay-pitching farmhand and a Concord banker alike, using the jar-by-jar method, the Revenue gauger's hydrometer, and a good deal of abuse aimed at sheriffs and at himself. Wilkesboro runner Junior Vance tells new stories about a moonshiner who sold his heads as harness liniment and a buyer who kept every jar of bad liquor on a shelf of shame. In the call-in segment Wilkins answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller's question about hickory ashes and red oak shavings, and then knocks down the blue-flame test.
▶ Listen in the Radio Moonshine app
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 your hairy carcass down. You have had your breakfast, half of mine, and a fair piece of the woodpile. Lie down before I sell you to a Boston furrier for a carriage robe.
♦ Bear grunt, chain drops into dirt
Wilkins: There. Sulking. Four hundred pounds of grudge.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth
Wilkins: Good evening, you sinners, saints, and unpaid creditors. 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, New Hampshire. I am your host: dentist, blacksmith, inventor, and twice-arrested public nuisance. And I am the only man in Merrimack County arrested twice and still owed an apology by the jail cat.
Wilkins: Tonight we take up the most important question in the whole art of the still: where to cut. Heads, hearts and tails. I mean to explain it so plain that a farmhand with manure on his boots and a banker with manure in his soul will both walk out knowing it.
Wilkins: One word first. Making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of these United States, and everything said on this program is for history and education only. Now that the lawyers have stopped crying, a word from our sponsor.
♪ Brief banjo sting
Announcer: A quick word, friends! Is your still leaking vapor at every joint? Get heavy-duty Tri-Clamp ferrules and gaskets from Moonshine Stills, only thirty-four dollars and ninety-five cents. Shop hardware at moonshinestill.com!
♪ Fiddle flourish fades
♪ Slow fiddle air, low under voice
Wilkins: SEGMENT ONE. Why a run must be cut at all.
Wilkins: Here is the first truth, and the farmhand should write it on the barn door. Liquor does not come off a still as one thing. It comes off in a procession, like a funeral in Pittsfield: the loud, useless fellows first, then the decent family in the middle, then the drunk uncles staggering behind.
Wilkins: The reason, for the banker, is that the wash in the pot holds a mess of different spirits and oils, and each one boils at its own heat. The light, sharp stuff climbs out early. The good spirit comes in the middle. The heavy oils drag along at the end. So the distiller does not catch one liquor. He catches a parade, and he has to decide who gets a seat at the table.
Wilkins: The very first drops are the foreshots. Throw them away, every time. They carry methanol, which is wood spirit, the stuff that blinds a man and can kill him. The foreshots are like a deputy at a church supper: first in line, loudest in the room, and nobody wants them there.
Wilkins: After the foreshots come the heads. They smell sharp, like a varnish pot or a fresh-painted sleigh. That is acetaldehyde and ethyl acetate and their cousins, the harsh volatile stuff that splits your skull the next morning. The heads get discarded too, never drunk. A man who keeps his heads is like a man who marries his wife's cousin to save on the wedding: he saves a little up front and pays for it the rest of his natural life.
Wilkins: Then come the hearts. Clean, sweet, smooth: the middle of the run and the only part a respectable maker keeps. Hearts are the only honest part of a run, which makes them the only honest thing ever produced on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, myself included.
Wilkins: Last come the tails. As the run winds down, the heavy fusel oils come over and the liquor turns greasy on the tongue and smells like wet cardboard. Tails taste like a wet sheepdog that has been reading Methodist tracts. Set them aside or run them through again with the next batch, but do not pour them into the good jar.
Wilkins: Now, how does a man know where one ends and the next begins? Here is the old trick, and it is the heart of tonight's sermon. You do not catch the run in one big crock. You catch it in many small jars, numbered in a row. Then when the run is done and your nose has rested, you walk the line and judge each jar on its own. I keep my jars in a row like a Concord banker keeps his ledgers, except my jars balance.
Wilkins: A distiller who cuts by the clock instead of the nose is like a dentist who pulls teeth by the calendar: somebody loses the wrong molar. And I have seen both.
Wilkins: The Revenue men have their own way of judging spirits. The gauger carries a hydrometer, a little weighted glass float. Drop it in and it rides high or low depending on how much alcohol is in the liquid. The British made the Sikes hydrometer their official excise instrument back in 1816, and our federal gaugers swear by their own glass bobs now that Mr. Lincoln's tax men are poking into every barn. The Revenue gauger's hydrometer floats higher than his morals, and that is a low bar for a glass bob.
♦ Bear grunt, chain rattles
Wilkins: Barnaby objects to the word 'bar.' He has his reasons. Barnaby got into the heads bucket once, out of the discard pile behind the still-house. He spent the afternoon apologizing to a stump, then tried to court a rain barrel, and come evening he was lying on his back with all four paws in the air, moaning like a Presbyterian at a dance. That is what heads do, friends, and he only licked the rim.
♪ Banjo transition
Wilkins: SEGMENT TWO. Legends, outlaws, and the men who knew the cut.
Wilkins: I learned the importance of the cut the hard way. The Merrimack sheriff once sniffed my tails jar during a raid and called it the finest whiskey in the county, which told me all I needed to know about the sheriff's nose and his wages. He took the tails as evidence. I let him. Let the county drink its own punishment.
Wilkins: Tonight I have a guest from far down the mountains, a man of the Brushy hills in North Carolina, as quick a hand on a mountain road as ever lived. Junior Vance, welcome to Fort Wilkins.
Junior: Thank you, Doc. Mighty kind. I had to step around that bear of yours on the way in, and he looked at me like I was the second course.
Wilkins: You were. The first course was the parson. Junior, tell these folks: down your way, did a hauling man care about cuts?
Junior: Care? Doc, a hauler's reputation rides in the back of the load. You carry bad liquor once and every buyer from the hills to Charlotte knows your name by Sunday. I could tell a careless maker by the cork. Pull it, take one sniff, and if it smelled like my aunt's nail varnish I put it right back.
Wilkins: Your aunt varnished her nails? Down south they paint everything but the barn.
Junior: Doc, she'd have painted the barn if it held still. But I mean it. One time a fella had a whole load jarred up and ready. I pulled a cork and near lost my eyebrows. I said, 'You made your cuts on this?' And he hung his head and said he'd poured the whole run into one tub, start to finish, to save on jars. Foreshots, heads, hearts, tails, all married together like a bad family reunion. I told him I don't haul poison, and I drove off empty.
Wilkins: Drove off empty. That is a man with principles, or a man with a bad back.
Junior: Little of both. Now there was another old maker up in the Brushies, sharp old cuss, didn't throw his heads out. He bottled them separate and sold them as 'harness liniment' for mules. Rubbed on sore shoulders, sore hocks. Well, one day a customer had a toothache and figured liniment's liniment, and he drank a good swallow.
Wilkins: Ah. My professional territory.
Junior: He came running down the road hollering that he'd gone blind in one eye. Turned out he'd mostly scared himself and squeezed that eye shut for a day and a half. But the toothache wasn't cured, he couldn't sit a mule, and that old maker quit the liniment trade the same week. Heads ain't for drinking, Doc, not even by a fool with a sore jaw.
Wilkins: Junior, that is the truest dental advice ever given on this program, and I have been giving bad dental advice for twenty years. A man with a bad tooth needs forceps and a sensible friend, not a swig of varnish.
Junior: Now let me tell you about the shelf of shame.
Wilkins: My favorite piece of furniture. Go on.
Junior: There was a buyer down at a filling stop outside Charlotte. Every time somebody sold him a bad jar, heads-sick or tail-greasy, he didn't pour it out. He put it on a shelf behind the counter, and he painted the seller's name right on the lid in red. Big letters. Every man who came in could read who'd done him wrong.
Wilkins: Ha! A gallery of sinners. Better than the church does it.
Junior: Makers drove forty miles to beg him to take their names down. He'd say, 'Bring me ten good jars and I'll take down one bad one.' Cleaned up half the county's liquor that way. Never needed a sheriff.
Wilkins: That man understood the free market better than the Treasury. And the old women, Junior? I have found the women of any hill country to be the finest judges of spirit, on account of them having to live with the men who drink it.
Junior: Doc, my granny was the sternest judge in three counties. She wouldn't buy a drop from any man unless he showed her his row of little numbered jars from the run. She said a man who caught everything in one big bucket was hiding something, same as a man who wears a coat in July.
Wilkins: Your granny and I would have gotten along famously, or killed each other. Junior Vance, thank you, sir. Mind the bear on your way out. He likes you.
Junior: That's what worries me, Doc.
♦ Bear grunt, low and interested
♪ Fiddle reel, quick and bright
♪ Brass band flourish, patent-medicine wagon style
Announcer: Step right up, ladies and gentlemen, step right up! Has your still ever hissed at you like a scalded cat? Have you smeared flour paste on a joint and prayed? Have you watched a slipping hose clamp creep, creep, creep loose while precious vapor whistled away? Friend, a leak is wasted spirit, and a leak near an open fire is a still-house waiting to burn!
Announcer: Throw out the paste! Throw out the prayers! Moonshine Stills brings you Heavy-Duty Sanitary Tri-Clamp Ferrules and Gaskets: precision 304 stainless and copper hybrid fittings, built to marry your heavy-gauge pure electrolytic copper with a seal that does not quit!
Announcer: You get heavy-gauge Tri-Clamp sanitary ferrules, food-grade PTFE gaskets, and quick-release stainless wing clamps that snap tight by hand. No tools, no fuss, no flour! Every piece is pressure-tested and precision-milled for a lifetime of airtight reliability. A tight joint means steady vapor and no wasted run!
Announcer: All this for only thirty-four dollars and ninety-five cents! Visit moonshinestill.com/products/tri-clamp-fittings today, or see them gleaming with your own eyes at the showroom at Fort Wilkins on Route 28 in Pittsfield, New Hampshire, if you can get past the bear!
Announcer: Once more, friends: moonshinestill.com/products/tri-clamp-fittings. Shop hardware at moonshinestill.com, and never trust a flour paste again!
♪ Brass flourish ends
♪ Low banjo, thoughtful
Wilkins: SEGMENT THREE. Copper and the craft.
Wilkins: The cut is only as good as the run, and the run is only as good as the metal and the mash. Before any still is fired, the mash is fermented into a weak wash. The still does not make alcohol. It only gathers up what the yeast made and sorts it.
Wilkins: The copper of the pot does a quiet service along the way. It catches the sulfur stink, so what comes over is cleaner. Keep the copper clean and bright and it works for you. Let it go green and it works for nobody.
Wilkins: Now, the banker wants a ledger, so here it is. Column one: foreshots, the first trickle, which goes in the discard. Column two: heads, sharp and solvent-smelling, which also go in the discard. Column three: hearts, sweet and clean, which you keep. Column four: tails, oily and dull, which you set aside to run again. And the farmhand wants it plainer: the first is poison, the second is a headache, the third is the harvest, the fourth is the chaff.
Wilkins: Here is how an honest maker judges the jars. He waits until the run is finished and his nose has rested. He walks the row of numbered jars. He smells each one from the first jar to the last, noting where the varnish smell fades into clean grain or fruit, and where the clean smell turns to wet cardboard. He sets his cuts there and leaves himself a margin of safety on the heads side. When in doubt, throw it out. No jar is worth an eye.
Wilkins: And one more fire lesson. The vapor of a still will burn, and alcohol fumes creep low and far. Mind your joints, keep your fire under control, and never let an open flame near a leak. I have seen a still-house go up in Barnstead faster than a deacon leaves a tavern when his wife comes in. The man got out with his life and his trousers, but only one of them was in good condition.
♦ Distant bear grunt
Wilkins: My mother said I would never amount to anything, and I have proven her half right, which is better odds than most of my customers get from their heads jars.
♪ Banjo transition
Wilkins: SEGMENT FOUR. Myths, slang, and the call-in line. Let us play the tape.
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, click of a playback horn
Wilkins: This message came by way of the Wilkesboro post, from Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina. Rabbit says: '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?'
Wilkins: Rabbit, God bless you and God help your uncle. Here is the truth. Ash has real uses, and New Hampshire knows it better than anywhere. Our grandfathers burned whole forests of hardwood, soaked the ashes, boiled them down to potash, and shipped it off as one of this state's chief cash crops. Soak ashes in water and you get lye, and lye makes soap. So your uncle's people knew ash did something. They just guessed wrong about what.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Ash in the thump keg does not take out methanol. Not hickory, not maple, not the ashes of your uncle's love letters. The only cure for bad heads is to cut them off and throw them away. Rabbit, ashes in a thump keg do about as much good as a sermon in a hog pen: the hogs feel no cleaner and the preacher smells worse.
Wilkins: Now the red oak shavings. They will change the liquor: color it, give it tannin and a woody taste, as a barrel does over the years. That is flavor, not cleaning. Put oak in a bad run and you have a bad run that tastes like a fence post.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: And while the anvil is warm, let us kill another myth: the blue flame. Some fool lights a spoonful of liquor, sees a pretty blue flame, and declares it safe. Nonsense. Burning a spoonful tells you nothing about whether it will hurt you, and methanol itself burns with a pale blue flame you can hardly see. The blue-flame test tells you about as much about your liquor as a sheriff's oath tells you about his Saturday nights.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: There. Fresh-stamped: G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. Rabbit Miller of Wilkesboro, this penny is yours for the best question of the month. Tell your uncle he is a good man with a bad theory, which describes most uncles and every congressman.
♪ Fiddle sting
♪ Theme returns softly underneath
Announcer: A quick word before we part! Moonshine Stills Tri-Clamp ferrules and gaskets give you airtight joints for only thirty-four ninety-five. Find them at moonshinestill.com, or visit the Fort Wilkins showroom on Route 28!
Wilkins: Friends, if tonight's lesson set your mind turning, sign up for the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. You will learn the history, the copper, the law, and the honest cut, taught by a man who has made every mistake so you do not have to. Ask after it at Fort Wilkins.
Wilkins: Remember tonight's ledger: foreshots and heads in the discard, hearts in the jar, tails set aside. And respect the law, friends. Making spirits to drink without a federal permit is illegal, and this program is for history and education only.
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 into wax cylinder crackle