Corn, Rye or Apple? The Mash Bill Brawl
Dr. G. G. Wilkins sets New Hampshire's three great mash makings against each other: flint corn, thin-soil rye and the seedling orchard apple. He covers what each one cost a Granite State farmer to grow, how each one ferments and what each one tastes like out of the worm, and he tells the tall tale of his first arrest, when Barnaby got drunk on fermented windfall apples and laid a deputy out flat. Master coppersmith Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister comes on to talk about rye mash that foams up and pukes through the still, scorched corn you have to chisel out, and what sour apple wash does to copper. In the last segment Wilkins answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, about hickory ash and red oak in the thump keg, and he puts the old blue-flame test to rest.
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Full episode transcript
♦ Audible wax cylinder surface crackle, slow drip of clear distillate into a glass jar
♦ Barnaby the black bear grunting and chain clinking outside log cabin window
Wilkins: Barnaby. Barnaby! Settle your hairy carcass down. That's mash on the wind, you great sack of fleas, not supper. You've had your bucket. He smells corn cooking and figures it's Thanksgiving, and he's half right, because it's Thanksgiving for somebody and a funeral for the corn. Lie down, I say, before I sell you to a Concord furrier for a lap robe and a deputy's wife sits on you all winter.
♦ Bear huffs, chain drags across frozen dooryard dirt, a heavy thump as he lies down
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth, swells and fades under
Wilkins: Good evening, neighbors, sinners, and you poor lost souls in the next county. Welcome to Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, broadcasting from the log walls of Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, in Pittsfield, New Hampshire. I am your host, your tooth-puller, your blacksmith, and on a cold enough night your confessor. Tonight we hold a prize fight in three corners. In one corner, Indian corn, sweet and fat. In another, rye, lean and peppery, grown on rocks. And in the third, the apple, the sweet-smelling tart of every New England dooryard. Corn, Rye or Apple? The Mash Bill Brawl. Here's how I see it: corn is the farmer's wife, rye is the widow down the road, and apple is the tavern girl who smells sweet, and all three will give you a headache in the morning if you treat them wrong. But first, a quick word.
♪ Brief bright banjo sting
Announcer: A quick word, friends! Handcrafted of heavy-gauge pure electrolytic copper, the Flame-Flow Still, United States Patent 10,561,960, is the flagship of Moonshine Stills. See it at the Fort Wilkins showroom on Route 28, or order at moonshinestill.com. That's moonshinestill.com!
♪ Sting resolves into a low fiddle drone
Wilkins: Thank you, sir. Now, before any of you write me letters, let it be said plain: making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of these United States, and everything on this program is for history and education only. I've been arrested twice myself, so believe me that the law means it.
♪ Fiddle drone fades out
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, a log shifts in the stove
Wilkins: Segment the first. What did New Hampshire grow, and what did it taste like in the jar?
Wilkins: Start with corn, because the Indians started with it before any of us were here to argue. New England corn is flint corn, the old eight-row kind. Hard, glassy kernels, red and yellow and some near black, and it'll ripen in a short summer that would kill a Virginia dent corn before August. It grinds into a meal that makes a fine johnnycake. In the mash tub it makes a sweet, round, buttery spirit, like warm bread with a little honey on it. But that kernel is hard as a deacon's heart. You can't just soak it and hope. You have to cook it in near-boiling water until the starch bursts and turns to paste, or the yeast will sit there starving in a sea of food.
Wilkins: Then rye. Rye grows where nothing else will, like a Merrimack County deputy's whiskers, and it's about as pleasant to chew. Wheat sulks on our thin, cold, acid hillsides, but rye shrugs and grows anyhow. Go up past Catamount Mountain and look at those stony hill farms in Barnstead and Gilmanton. Rye was their bread grain. Rye-and-Injun bread, half rye and half corn meal, was what a hill farmer's children ate till they were too tough to complain. In the jar rye gives you pepper, clove, a bite of dry hay, and a finish that kicks you in the back of the throat like a mule that's been waiting all day to do it.
Wilkins: Now look south and west to Pennsylvania. Out past the mountains in '94, before my time, the rye farmers of the Monongahela turned their grain into whiskey because a mule can carry six times the worth in a jug that he can in a sack, and the mule complains less about the jug. Then Mr. Hamilton put an excise on their spirits, and those farmers tarred a revenue man or two and raised such a ruckus that President Washington marched an army out to settle it. We call it the Whiskey Rebellion. Let it be a lesson to the Treasury: tax a man's rye and he'll take it personal.
Wilkins: And then the apple, the fair maiden of New England. Here's a thing most folks don't know. An apple doesn't grow true from its seed. Plant the seed of a fine sweet eating apple and you'll most likely get some little crabbed knot of a thing so sour it'll pucker a man's mouth until he can whistle in two keys, and that's just the good ones. Old-timers called them spitters. So nearly every orchard planted from seed was a cider orchard, not a pie orchard. You've heard of John Chapman, Johnny Appleseed, who died back in '45 out in the Indiana country after a lifetime of planting seedling trees across the Ohio. He went down in the storybooks as a saint for planting apple trees, but I'd wager the cider had more to do with his popularity than the pie.
Wilkins: In New Hampshire hard cider was the table drink. Farm families had it at breakfast, at noon dinner in the hayfield, and at supper. A barrel in the cellar was as ordinary as a barrel of salt pork. Run that cider through a still and you have apple brandy, cider brandy, apple jack. Down in New Jersey the Laird family has been making it since 1780 and calls itself the oldest licensed distillery in the country. Good apple brandy tastes like an October afternoon, baked fruit and cinnamon and a little leaf smoke.
Wilkins: Now here's the real brawl, and it isn't about taste, it's about money and work. Corn and rye are starch, and starch is locked up. To get at the sugar you need malt, grain that's been sprouted and dried, usually barley. Its enzymes take the cooked starch apart into sugar. So a grain man has to grow it, thresh it, grind it, cook it, malt it, mash it, and ferment it. An apple man shakes a tree, grinds the fruit in his mill, presses the pomace through straw in a cider press, and the juice is already sugar. It ferments on its own wild yeast in a week or two. Lazy, you say? I say clever. But the apple has a knife hid in its apron, and I'll show you that blade in the third segment, because that's where the danger lives.
♪ Fiddle bridge, minor key, a little wicked
♦ Barnaby grunts and scratches his back against the log wall
Wilkins: Segment the second. Legends, outlaws, and one drunk bear.
Wilkins: You've asked me how my first arrest by the Merrimack County sheriff came about. I've told you of the second one, and I won't tell it again, but the first one is worth a jar. It was cider season, mid-October. The windfall apples under my old trees had been lying in the wet for two weeks, and any of you who keep orchards know what that means. They fermented right there on the ground. And Barnaby, God love his greedy gullet, had eaten about a bushel and a half of fermented windfalls the night before. A bear drunk on apples is a sight. He walks like a Concord legislator coming home from the Eagle Hotel, all dignity in the shoulders and none in the feet.
Wilkins: That morning a deputy came up the turnpike. I'll call him Deputy Throop, for that's near enough and his mother has suffered enough. He had a warrant in one hand and a ham sandwich in the other, and a smart man would have kept only one of those. Barnaby sniffed that ham from forty rods. Now a drunk bear isn't a mean bear, he's a loving one, and that's worse. He reached the end of his chain, which, to my eternal shame, I had lengthened the week before so he could reach the woodpile. He took Throop round the middle like a long-lost cousin, and the two of them went down in the pomace heap together.
♦ Wilkins slaps the table, wheezing laughter
Wilkins: You have never heard a noise like it. Throop squealed like a shoat at the gate, and Barnaby was groaning with a kind of happy belly-rumble, licking cider and mustard off the man's face, his ears, inside his collar, every place a tongue the size of a shoe-sole could get to. Then Barnaby found the sandwich had gone into Throop's coat pocket, so he took the coat off him. Then he found the ham smell went down into the trousers, and I'll swear on my anvil he got those trousers off without unbuttoning one button. He shredded them like a woman tearing rags for a braided rug. Then he got hold of Throop's boot and chewed it, and when I finally drove him off with a hot poker and a jug of molasses, the deputy had lost the heel of that boot and the little toe that was standing in it. Barnaby spat that toe into my rain barrel like a cherry pit. I fished it out myself. It was white as a parsnip and stiff as a pencil.
Wilkins: Now don't think me a savage. I sat Throop on my operating chair, washed that foot clean, dressed it, and while he was too scared to object I pulled his last two bad molars free of charge, so he's the only lawman in New Hampshire who ever got anything honest out of an arrest. He arrested me anyhow, mind you, in his drawers, with a bandaged foot and a bloody mouth. The magistrate laughed so hard at the telling that he near choked on his snuff. Barnaby drunk on windfall apples is the only creature in Merrimack County that ever got a pardon without paying a lawyer.
Wilkins: And listen. A real bear on real fermented fruit is no joke at all. They do get drunk, and a drunk bear has no more sense than a drunk man and four hundred pounds more to throw. Barnaby is a Suncook Valley tall tale. Don't you go feeding bears.
Wilkins: Now to my guest, who has spent more hours inside a copper pot than Barnaby has inside a honey tree. Hammering away at the Fort Wilkins foundry every day God sends, here's the coppersmith himself, Silas Hacksaw McAllister. Silas, sit down. Mind the chair, it's the one I pull teeth in, and it remembers.
Silas: Evening, Doctor. I'll stand a minute, if it's all the same. That chair's got a look to it.
Wilkins: It's the look of a hundred and twelve men who all swore they weren't afraid. Now Silas, settle the question. Corn, rye, or apple. Which one hates a coppersmith the most?
Silas: Rye, Doctor. Rye hates a coppersmith, and rye hates the man who owns the pot. I learned that as a boy of fourteen, apprenticed and sweeping filings. There was a farmer up in Gilmanton, a stubborn man, who filled his pot to the brim with rye mash because he didn't want to make two runs. Then he built a fire under it like he was firing a locomotive.
Wilkins: Oh, I know what's coming. Go on.
Silas: Rye mash is gummy. It's thick as wallpaper paste, and when it heats it foams. That foam came up out of the pot, up through the cap, into the neck, and right down through the worm. Out the end of the worm, where his jug was waiting for spirit, came hot gray porridge. It spat and bubbled on the floor like something out of a sick cow. The bottom of the pot scorched in the meantime, and the pressure, well, it blew a seam. He had nothing. No spirit, no pot, and a floor he had to shovel. I've hammered my helmets taller ever since, and I tell every man who buys from me: fill your pot short with rye, keep your fire gentle, and stir it.
Wilkins: A rye mash in a full pot is like a preacher's son at a husking bee, Silas. It'll climb anything and come out the far end a mess.
Silas: That's about the size of it.
Wilkins: Now corn. Corn's gentle, isn't it? Corn's the farmer's wife.
Silas: Corn's gentle till she isn't. Corn starch settles. You leave it on the bottom of a kettle over a direct fire without stirring, and it cooks to the copper like tar on a road. I got called out to a neighbor's farm one spring, he'd let a corn mash settle while he went to see about a calving. I spent the better part of a day with a cold chisel and a mallet, tapping, tapping, cutting that crust out, and when it finally let go it came away in one piece. Black disk, near the size of a cart wheel hub, and when it hit the floor it rang like a bell. Clear tone. The man nailed it over his still-house door as a warning to himself.
Wilkins: Scorched corn smells like a tannery burned down with the tanner still inside, and tastes worse. You can't run it out of the spirit, either. That burnt taste rides the vapor right into the jar.
Silas: It does. You can smell it in the hearts. No cut will save a scorched pot.
Wilkins: And the apple, Silas. The sweet girl.
Silas: Apple's sour, Doctor. Sour as vinegar, near enough, by the time she's done working. There was an orchard man over in Barnstead, he bought a new pot from me, beautiful thing, and he filled it with apple wash, and then his uncle died. So he went to the funeral, and his cousin married the week after, and he went to the wedding. Nine days that sour wash sat in the copper. He came back and opened the lid and the inside of that pot was furred over green, like moss on the north side of a stone wall.
Wilkins: An apple wash left nine days in copper grows a green beard fuller than a Congressman's and twice as poisonous.
Silas: That green's verdigris, and you don't want it in anybody's mouth. The acid in the fruit eats at the copper while it sits. I scoured that pot bright with wet sand and a rag and a great deal of language. The lesson is: you run your apple wash when it's ready and you rinse the pot that same night. Copper's a friend, but you don't leave a friend standing in vinegar.
Wilkins: Now, Silas, I've heard you claim you can tell which mash is in a pot without lifting the lid. That's a tall claim in a valley full of tall claims.
Silas: Put your ear to the pot wall, Doctor, a little ways off the fire. Corn simmers. Low and steady, like a contented hen on the nest. Rye grumbles. It pops and spits and grumbles like an old man at a town meeting who's been told the road tax is going up. Apple hisses, fine and quick, almost a whisper, because the wash is thin and there's no grain in it to thicken the boil. I've won three suppers off men who didn't believe me.
Wilkins: And who taught you to pick a rye at all?
Silas: My mother. At harvest she'd walk the rye field and chew one raw kernel off the head. If it tasted like pepper and the hayloft, she called it whiskey rye, and it went to the miller. If it tasted like nothing, she said it had no soul in it, and it went to the hogs. She was never wrong that I saw.
Wilkins: A woman who can judge whiskey by chewing a seed is wasted on a farm. She should've been running the Treasury. Silas, stay right where you are, because when we come back I want you and your hammer in the next segment. Friends, the coin of the realm beckons.
♪ Rollicking banjo breakdown, patent-medicine wagon flourish
♦ A tambourine shake and a crowd murmur, as if around a medicine-show wagon
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♪ Banjo flourish ends on a bright chord
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, Barnaby yawns loudly outside
Wilkins: Segment the third. Copper and the craft, or how the alchemist turns a mash into something holy. Silas, keep me honest.
Silas: That's a full-time position, Doctor.
Wilkins: It doesn't pay, either. Now, friends, here's the way of each mash as the old-timers did it, told for history's sake. First, corn. Take your cracked flint corn and stir it slowly into water near the boil, about a bushel's meal to every twelve or fifteen gallons of water, though every man has his own ratio and swears by it like scripture. Stir, and stir again. Cook it an hour or more until it's a thick, sweet-smelling porridge. Let it cool until you can just stand your finger in it, about a hundred and fifty on the Fahrenheit glass. Then stir in your malt, ground barley malt, a peck or two to the bushel. Within the hour that paste goes thin and sweet as the malt breaks the starch to sugar. Cool it further, down to blood-warm or under, about eighty, and pitch your yeast. Cover it loose, keep it warm, and let it work three to five days till it quiets and goes sour and still.
Silas: And keep the room aired, Doctor.
Wilkins: Silas is right as rain. Fermenting mash breathes out a gas that'll lay a man down in a closed cellar and never let him up. Air your room.
Wilkins: Rye, next. You do it the same way, only harder. Rye's sticky, and it'll balloon. Use more water, stir it with a paddle and a strong arm, and many a man mixes in some corn to thin the stickiness. A hill farmer's mash bill might be half rye, a third corn, and the rest malt. And when it goes in the pot, Silas, tell them.
Silas: Fill it two parts in three, no more. Gentle fire till it settles into a steady boil. Watch your worm. If the spirit coming out looks cloudy or thick, pull the fire back right then, before the whole pot comes over.
Wilkins: Apple, last. Grind your apples, press out the cider, let it ferment on its own yeast in a cool cellar until it's dry and hard. Then run it. Here's that knife hid in her apron I warned you of. Fruit has a substance in its flesh and peel called pectin, the stuff that makes your wife's jelly set. When fruit ferments, that pectin gives off more of the wood spirit, the methanol, than grain does. Ferment the mashed pulp and pomace along with the juice and you get more of it still. Methanol is the blinding spirit. It eats the eyes from the inside and puts men in the ground. So with apple you make a more generous heads cut than with grain, and you don't get greedy.
Wilkins: The cuts, then, step by step, the same for all three. When the pot first comes to life, the first runnings off the worm are the foreshots. Sharp, chemical, like a cobbler's glue pot. That's the worst of the wood spirit, and it gets thrown out, every drop, and never drunk. Some old fools use it to light the lamp. I say pour it on the ground far from the fire. Then come the heads, still harsh, smelling of nail varnish and a hangover. Those come out too, set aside, not drunk. Then the hearts, sweet, clean, smelling of the grain or the fruit itself. That's the spirit, the reason a man owns a pot at all. And last the tails, oily, wet dog, wet cardboard. Those go aside to run again with the next charge.
Silas: And copper does its work in there the whole time, Doctor, but copper doesn't make your cuts for you.
Wilkins: No, sir. Copper is a fine servant and a poor master. Now fire, friends. Alcohol vapor burns. Never leave a running still. Look every joint over for leaks before you light, keep your fire down and steady, keep a bucket of water and a bucket of sand by the door, and never bring an open lamp near the worm's end. I have seen a still-house go up like a hay barn, and the man inside it came out cooked worse than that corn crust. Silas, tell them what joints are made of in your shop.
Silas: Rivets and silver solder, Doctor, or tight brass fittings. Clean, pure copper sheet. Never scrap, never anything with a mystery in it.
Wilkins: There you have it from the man with the hammer. Silas Hacksaw McAllister, thank you for your time, your stories, and for not sitting in my chair.
Silas: Next time, Doctor. Maybe.
♪ Fiddle reel, quick and cheeky
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, then the whir of a second cylinder being cranked on a phonograph
Wilkins: Segment the fourth. Myths, slang, and the mail. A cylinder came up by post from the far side of the late unpleasantness, all the way from North Carolina. Let's hear it.
♦ Thin, scratchy playback of a recorded voice
Caller (Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller, Wilkesboro, NC): 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?
♦ Cylinder playback clicks off
Wilkins: Cletus Rabbit Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina! A Tarheel writing to a Yankee less than a year since Appomattox. Rabbit, you're a braver man than half the Union cavalry. Let's take your uncle's two medicines one at a time, ash first.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: That's one coin struck, G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. And here's the first blow to the myth. Hickory ash is alkali, Rabbit. It's lye. Every farm wife in New England used to pour water through a hopper of hardwood ashes and boil down the brown drippings for soap, and in my grandfather's day the whole state sold potash out of its burned forests by the barrel. So your uncle is putting soap makings in his keg. Ash in your keg is lye for soap, and the only thing it'll clean is your hide, all the way down to the meat. It does not take out the wood spirit. Nothing tossed in the keg does that.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Second coin. Now red oak. Here's a coopering secret. Red oak is no good for a tight barrel. Its grain is open, all little tubes running end to end, and a red oak stave will leak liquor right through the wood. White oak has its pores plugged up natural, and that's why white oak makes whiskey barrels. Rabbit, red oak in a thump keg is like a red-haired deputy at a card table: he looks sturdy, he leaks everything, and he flavors the whole evening wrong. Oak shavings, red or white, will put some color and tannin and a bit of barrel taste in a spirit. That's flavoring, Rabbit. A painted fence isn't a mended fence.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Third coin, and the truth of it. The bad heads leave the pot at the start of the run, and the only cure is the man at the worm with a clean jar in one hand and a waste jar in the other, throwing away the foreshots and heads. That's the cure, and the only one. So your uncle wasn't just making swamp medicine, he was making swamp soap with a bit of barrel flavor. Give him my regards, give him a lecture, and Rabbit, thank you for writing a Yankee. Your cylinder goes on the mantel.
Wilkins: Now while my punch is warm, one more myth. The blue flame. You've all seen it at the tavern. A man pours a spoonful of liquor, sets a match to it, and if it burns blue he calls it safe, and if it burns yellow or red he says there's lead or poison in it. Hogwash. The blue flame tells you whether a thing burns, and so does my cabin, but I wouldn't drink my cabin. The deadly wood spirit, the methanol, burns with a clean pale blue flame you can hardly see in daylight. So that blue flame might be blessing the very poison that blinds you.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin, the coin skitters across the anvil
Wilkins: And while I'm at it, the bead. A man shakes the jar and looks at the bubbles, and if they sit there big and slow he calls it good liquor. The bead tells you roughly the strength, Rabbit, the proof, nothing more. It doesn't know a heart from a head. A man who judges liquor by the bead is like a man who judges a wife by her bonnet: he knows the size of it and nothing about her temper. My anvil has struck more honest coin than the Merrimack County treasury ever printed, and it never once asked me for a receipt. Same goes for an honest cut. It doesn't need the blue flame's permission.
♪ Banjo picks up gently
Announcer: Another quick word, friends! Pure, heavy-gauge electrolytic copper, the Flame-Flow Still, United States Patent 10,561,960. See it on Route 28 at the Fort Wilkins showroom in Pittsfield, or order it today at moonshinestill.com. Moonshinestill.com!
♪ Theme returns, banjo and fiddle, warm and slow
Wilkins: That's our brawl, friends. Corn the sweet wife, rye the peppery widow, and apple the sour tavern girl with a knife in her apron. Respect all three and they'll treat you kindly. If you'd like to learn the craft proper, the history, the metal, the mash, and above all the cuts, enroll in the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. I'll teach you everything I know except how to stay out of jail, because I never learned that one. Thanks to Silas Hacksaw McAllister for his hammer and his honesty, to Rabbit Miller down in Wilkesboro, and to Barnaby, who has slept through the entire evening like a magistrate during a sermon. Remember: making spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law, and this was all for history and learning.
Wilkins: Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.
♦ Bear grunt and final drip into jar
♦ Wax cylinder crackle fades to silence