Water Is Half the Whiskey
Dr. G. G. Wilkins makes the case for cold granite spring water over the mill-fouled Suncook River, covering John Snow's cholera pump, Kentucky limestone, iron-and-oak ink, Epsom salts, and how water serves in the mash, the condenser and the proofing jug. Master coppersmith Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister brings four new stories: his father's kettle-crust test for reading water, a copper pot blackened by a sulfur spring in Gilmanton, a Barnstead man he refused to serve until he ripped out his lead water pipe, and the Catamount spring that kept a cooling worm cold all through a heat wave. In Segment 4 Wilkins answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, NC: hickory ash is really lye and red oak shavings are a fake barrel. He also strikes coins on his anvil while knocking down the myths that clear water is clean water and that a spring running north is purer.
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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! Get your snout out of the spring bucket. That water is for the whiskey, not for rinsing your whiskers after you have been in the Hendersons' compost again. Settle down, you four-hundred-pound sack of bad decisions, or I will sell you to a Concord furrier and wear you to church.
♦ Barnaby grunts once, low and offended; chain drags across frozen gravel
Wilkins: There. He is sulking. A bear sulks with his whole backside, friends, and it is a monumental sight.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth, swelling, then settling under
Wilkins: Good evening, neighbors, sinners, and revenue men listening in through the knotholes. This is Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, dentist, blacksmith, inventor, and practicing alchemist, broadcasting from the log fortress of Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, in Pittsfield, Merrimack County, New Hampshire. Tonight's sermon is one my grandfather preached and I have never improved on: Water Is Half the Whiskey. Granite springs against river water, and why Pittsfield won that argument hands down, feet up, and with the other side's trousers around their ankles.
♪ Theme fades out with a final fiddle scrape
Announcer: A quick word, friends! Before the doctor pours, take note that the Flame-Flow still, under United States Patent 10,561,960, is hand-built from heavy-gauge pure copper and waiting for you at moonshinestill.com. That is moonshinestill.com, ladies and gentlemen!
♦ Wax crackle; a log shifts in the stove
♪ Short fiddle sting, segment marker
Wilkins: Segment the first. History, and I mean the wet kind.
Wilkins: Every greenhorn who comes up the turnpike with a mule and an ambition asks me about corn, rye, apples and sugar. Nobody asks about water. Yet put your jar on the scale and half of it, and on the hearts of a run a good deal more than half by the time it is proofed for drinking, is plain water. Grain is the body of your whiskey, fire is the temper, copper is the conscience, and water is the blood. Bad blood makes a sick man, no matter how handsome his face.
Wilkins: Here in the Suncook Valley a distiller had two choices. He could drag a bucket up from the Suncook River, which runs right through Pittsfield village, or he could go uphill to the granite springs that bubble out of the ledges around Catamount Mountain, cold as a widow's welcome.
Wilkins: Consider the river. The Suncook rises in the lakes up in Barnstead and Gilmanton and comes down past farms, sawmills, the tannery, the privies of every God-fearing household on its banks, and the cotton mill here in our own village. Everything Barnstead does in the Suncook, Pittsfield drinks on Tuesday and Epsom drinks the Tuesday after, and Epsom has never once thanked us.
♦ Barnaby huffs outside the window
Wilkins: Barnaby agrees. Barnaby fished the Suncook below the tannery one spring and came back smelling like a boot that had been to a funeral. Hemlock bark tannin, hide scrapings, lime from the hair pits. That water would curdle a Baptist.
Wilkins: You will say the river looks clear on a bright day. So did the water at the Broad Street pump in London in 1854, and it was killing Londoners by the hundred with cholera. A physician named John Snow sat down with a map and a stack of death records and found the dead clustered round that one pump like flies on a dropped pie. He had the parish take the handle off and the dying slackened. Clear water hides its sins like a deacon at a barn dance: perfectly still on top and a terrible business underneath.
Wilkins: Now the granite spring. Our New Hampshire bedrock is granite, hard and close-grained. Water that soaks down through the hills and comes out of a ledge spring has been strained through sand and gravel for a long while, and it carries very little dissolved mineral. Soft water, we call it. Here is something a blacksmith knows that a parson does not. A deep spring keeps near the same temperature summer and winter, about the average warmth of the whole year in that place. For us that is somewhere in the forties. In January it steams like a horse's flank, and in August it will make your teeth ache, and I would know, having pulled most of the aching teeth in this county.
Wilkins: Mind you, I am an honest man about everything but taxes, so I will give the Kentuckians their due. Their water runs over limestone. It picks up lime, calcium, which the yeast and the mash are fond of, and limestone country is mighty poor in iron. That is a gift to a whiskey man. Kentucky has limestone and fine horses. We have granite and stubborn men, and only one of those ever won a horse race.
Wilkins: Why does iron matter? Ask any clerk with ink on his cuffs. Common writing ink is iron salts mixed with oak gall, and oak gall is tannin. Put iron-heavy water together with oak, whether that is a barrel, a stave or a handful of chips, and you are brewing ink. I once tasted a jar from a fellow in Northwood whose well ran red with iron, aged in a new oak keg. It was blue-black as a parson's Sunday coat and tasted like licking a cannon. Iron water and oak make ink, which is why the worst whiskey in Merrimack County could still be used to sign your will, and probably should be.
Wilkins: One more piece of geography for the scholars. Our downstream neighbor Epsom is named for Epsom in Surrey, England, which had a mineral spring so loaded with bitter salts that the English bottled the residue and sold it as a purgative. Epsom salts. I will not proof my whiskey with the waters of Epsom. I have seen what Epsom salts do to a Christian, and it is no way to end a Sunday.
♦ Wax crackle; a cup set down on a plank table
Wilkins: So that is the history. The old distillers of New England, the cider-brandy men of the last century and the rum men of the coast, went to wherever the water was cold, soft and steady. In this valley that meant a granite spring, and that is why Fort Wilkins sits where it sits.
♪ Banjo roll, segment transition
Wilkins: Segment the second. Legends, outlaws, and a spring defended with teeth.
Wilkins: Now a tale, and I swear it on my anvil. Two summers back, with the war tax still sitting on every gallon in the Union like a fat aunt on a settee, a revenue man came up the turnpike. Neat little fellow in a linen duster, with a notebook and a glass vial. He did not come for the still. He was cleverer than that, or thought so. He reasoned that a man's spring tells you where his still-house is, so he would follow the water, taste it, and swear in court that it was the same water as in my jars.
Wilkins: So this pocket-sized Pinkerton creeps round the back of my woodpile, finds the spring box, and goes down on his knees to fill his vial. He was leaning so far over that his duster tail rode up over his shoulders and the seat of his trousers was pointed due north at the stars like a little gray moon.
♦ Barnaby grunts, rising in pitch
Wilkins: Now Barnaby's chain, by an oversight I have never regretted, reaches exactly to the lip of that spring box. Barnaby considers that spring his. He drinks from it and wallows in the runoff, and he takes a personal interest in any stranger who kneels at it. He came round the woodpile at that slow, rolling walk a bear uses when he has already made up his mind.
Wilkins: The revenue man never saw him. What he heard was a sound I can only describe as a wet leather bellows breathing on his backside. He turned his head halfway, and Barnaby opened his mouth, which is a cavern I have personally inspected as a dentist and would not enter for a thousand dollars in gold, and closed it on the seat of those trousers and a fair portion of what was in them.
♦ Fabric tearing, a high human yelp, chain snapping taut
Wilkins: The sound of that cloth going was like a sail splitting in a gale. The man went straight forward into the spring box, head and shoulders, vial and all. Barnaby baptized him from behind, total immersion, with a sermon in the form of teeth. When he came up he was blowing cold spring water out of both nostrils and screaming in a key I have only heard from a pig at slaughter and once from a Concord tenor.
Wilkins: He ran down the turnpike with his duster flapping and his left buttock showing to the Suncook Valley a full set of bear's incisors in a half-moon, beautifully regular. As a dentist I admired the bite. Barnaby kept the trouser seat and wore it around his chain for a week like a war trophy. The vial I found in the spring box, full, corked, and labeled 'Wilkins Water, Evidence.' I drank it. Finest evidence ever gathered in Merrimack County.
♦ Wilkins chuckling; Barnaby snorts
Wilkins: He did go to a doctor in Concord. The doctor dressed the wound, charged him two dollars, and asked whether he wanted the scar recorded for his pension. Barnaby drinks straight from the spring, and so far he is the only member of this establishment never once poisoned by a river.
Wilkins: Now, nobody understands what water does to metal better than the man who hammers the metal. He is a third-generation coppersmith, he has been sitting in my good chair this whole time drinking my coffee, and his hands look like two hams that lost a fistfight with a forge. Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister. Welcome to Fort Wilkins.
Silas: Evening, Doctor. Your coffee is about what I expected.
Wilkins: It is spring water and chicory, Silas. If it tastes poor, blame the chicory, for the water is above reproach.
Silas: The water is the only honest thing in the cup.
Wilkins: Ha! Silas, you have come with stories about water. When did you first learn it mattered to a coppersmith?
Silas: Sitting at my father's elbow. Before he would quote a man a price on a pot, he would ask for a jug of whatever water that man meant to use. Then he set the jug in a little iron kettle on the back of the forge and boiled it dry. Every drop.
Wilkins: Boiled it dry, did he? That is a waste of good water and a whole afternoon.
Silas: Not a waste. Whatever the water carried stays behind on the kettle bottom when the water's gone. A chalky white crust meant lime. Hard water, which leaves scale in your pot. A rust-red ring meant iron, and he would shake his head and say that man's whiskey would come out looking like stove blacking. And if the bottom came up near bare, with only a faint film, he would grin and say, granite spring. Soft water. That man would get a good price, because his pot was going to last.
Wilkins: Silas's father could read a kettle crust the way a Boston gypsy reads tea leaves, except his predictions came true. Did the water ever ruin a pot of yours outright?
Silas: One. A fellow up in Gilmanton. I built him a fine copper pot, sixty gallons, all riveted and silver-soldered, and he took it home proud as a new father. Six weeks later he hauled it back in an ox cart and swore I had sold him bad copper. I looked inside and the whole belly had gone black. Not the green you get when a man forgets to rinse, but a dull black like the inside of a chimney.
Wilkins: Sulfide.
Silas: Yes, sir. I asked where his water came from and he said there was a lovely spring behind his barn, never froze, his grandmother swore by it for her rheumatism. I rode up there. You could smell it from the road. Rotten eggs. Sulfur spring. That is hydrogen sulfide coming up out of the ground, and copper takes sulfur to itself greedily and goes black doing it. His pot was giving its whole life to that spring.
Wilkins: Smelled like Satan's breakfast, I imagine.
Silas: Satan's breakfast, and dinner, and what came after. I told him he could keep the spring for his grandmother's rheumatism and get his still water from a granite seep a quarter mile up the hill. He grumbled but he did it. I scoured the pot with sand and vinegar, and two months later it ran as bright as the day it left my bench.
Wilkins: You also have a reputation, Silas, for turning away customers. A coppersmith turning away money is a rarer creature in New Hampshire than an honest assessor.
Silas: Only once that I am proud of. A Barnstead man came to me wanting a whole rig: pot, cap, arm and worm. He was a river man and liked the Suncook water because it was handy, and he showed me how he got it to his still-house. He had laid a run of lead pipe from the bank, about a hundred feet of it, because lead bends easy and doesn't rust.
Wilkins: Lead pipe. Lord preserve us.
Silas: I told him I would not build him so much as a cap until that pipe was out of the ground. He laughed at me. Said the Romans used lead pipe. I said yes, and look what happened to the Romans. Lead goes into water, Doctor, worst of all into soft water or sour water that stands in the pipe overnight. Then it goes into the man, a little at a time, and it never leaves him. First his belly aches, then his hands shake, then his wits wander off and don't come back.
Wilkins: I have seen the lead line on the gums of house painters. A blue-gray edge along the teeth. It is a terrible thing in a man's mouth.
Silas: So I sat on his stone wall and smoked my pipe while he dug up all hundred feet. I would not leave until I saw the last length on the cart. He put in a wooden trough instead, and I built his still that autumn. He came by last winter and gave me a jar and said his wife told him he had stopped being so peevish.
Wilkins: The lead was making him peevish?
Silas: Either that or the jar was making her more forgiving. I did not inquire.
Wilkins: Ha! Tell them the Catamount story, Silas. The heat wave.
Silas: That July a few summers back, when it stayed hot enough to fry an egg on a church step for two weeks running. I had a customer who wanted to see whether spring water cooling truly mattered or whether it was only us old men talking. So we set up a test. One worm, the copper coil the vapor runs through to turn back into liquid, sat in a plank trough fed by a spring running right out of the ledge on the flank of Catamount. The other was a twin worm, same copper, same turns, in a barrel of water dipped out of the river down in the valley.
Wilkins: And?
Silas: The spring water came off the worm nearly as cold as it went in. You could put your hand in the outflow and it still bit you. The spirit ran out cool and steady and you could smell clean grain on it. The river barrel was warm as dishwater by noon, and the worm in it was not cooling the vapor fully. You could smell spirit in the air around that barrel, sharp, the way a tavern smells. That is your whiskey going off into the sky as vapor, and it is dangerous besides, because vapor near a fire is how still-houses burn down.
Wilkins: So the river man is paying for his corn and then sending half of it to heaven, which is about the only way a river man gets anything to heaven.
Silas: He was out a good share of his run and could have burned his barn down too. Cold spring water in the trough is the cheapest insurance a man can buy.
Wilkins: Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister, you are a gentleman and a craftsman. Stay in that chair, there is more coffee, and I am lying about that.
Silas: I expected nothing less.
♦ Laughter; chair creaks
♪ Brisk parlor piano vamp, patent-medicine show style
♦ Wax crackle; a showman's cane rapped twice on a wooden stage
Announcer: Ladies and gentlemen, farmers and philosophers, step right up and hear me plain! Have you ever wished you owned a piece of true American craftsmanship, hammered and fitted with the care of the old masters? Then look no further than Moonshine Stills, proud home of the Flame-Flow still, protected under United States Patent 10,561,960! Yes, a patent, friends, sealed and certified!
Announcer: The Flame-Flow is built from heavy-gauge, high-purity electrolytic copper. That is copper refined to the very peak of purity, with no lead and no trash metal in it, the bright, true copper that Dr. Wilkins and Mr. McAllister have been praising all evening! Its brass unions are machined to a precision that would make a Waltham watchmaker weep into his loupe, and they seal tight and honest. Its shape is engineered to keep the heat circulating evenly, round and round like a Saratoga waltz, giving unmatched purity for essential oils, herbal tinctures, and traditional distillation demonstrations!
Announcer: And the price? Not a thousand, not nine hundred and fifty, but eight hundred ninety-nine dollars for the flagship Flame-Flow still! Order direct at moonshinestill.com. The full address is moonshinestill.com, slash products, slash flame-flow-copper-still. Or if you would rather see the copper shine with your own eyes, come to the showroom at Fort Wilkins on Route 28 in Pittsfield, New Hampshire. Mind the bear!
Announcer: Once more for the folks in the back pew: go to moonshinestill.com and claim your Flame-Flow still today! Moonshinestill.com!
♦ Cane rap; Barnaby grunts in approval
♪ Piano vamp resolves with a flourish
♪ Low mountain fiddle drone, segment transition
Wilkins: Segment the third. Copper and the craft. We will follow the water through the whole run, from the first scald to the last splash in the proofing jug.
Wilkins: First, the ordinance of the house. 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. Now that I have satisfied the government, let us satisfy our curiosity.
Wilkins: Water does four jobs in a still-house. It makes the mash, it keeps the yeast happy, it cools the worm, and it proofs the finished spirit. Fail at any one and the whiskey suffers.
Wilkins: Job one, the mash. In the old manner you take your cracked corn, a bushel or so, and heat soft spring water in a kettle until it is too hot to hold your hand in. You stir the corn in slow so it does not ball up into dumplings, and keep stirring while it cooks, as the starch swells and the whole kettle goes thick as a Thanksgiving pudding. Then you let it cool down, and many hands add a portion of malted grain to turn that starch to sugar. Clean water matters here because whatever is in the water goes straight into the mash. A tannery taste in the river means a tannery taste in the corn.
Wilkins: Job two, the yeast. When your mash is cooled to about blood warm, you pitch your yeast. The Kentuckian's lime water helps the yeast along. Our soft granite water ferments perfectly well, but it gives the yeast less mineral, so a careful man keeps his fermenter warm and his mash well fed, and some old Yankees throw in a little of the last batch's spent mash to keep things lively. Keep the fermenting room aired out. The bubbling mash gives off a gas that will smother a man in a closed cellar before he knows to be afraid.
Wilkins: Job three, the worm. Silas told you the Catamount story. Steady cold water in the trough means all your vapor turns back to liquid in the coil. Warm water means spirit escapes as vapor, and vapor floating near a fire is how a still-house becomes a funeral pyre. Keep your fire low and steady, keep every joint tight, and never let an open flame near a leak. You can always buy more corn, but you cannot buy back your eyebrows, your barn or your life.
Wilkins: Now while the spirit runs, the cuts, which are the holy writ. The first that comes off is the foreshots, then the heads. Those carry methanol and the sharp, solvent volatiles that smell like a varnish pot and give a man a blind headache, or worse, plain blindness. Every drop goes in the discard bucket. You do not drink it, you do not sell it, and you do not rinse your aching tooth with it. Then come the hearts, smooth and sweet, and that is your whiskey. Last come the tails, oily and heavy, smelling of wet dog. Set them aside to run again another day.
Wilkins: And here the copper earns its keep. If your water or your mash carries sulfur, the copper takes that stink to itself as it passes, and the spirit comes out sweeter for it. You saw what a sulfur spring did to Silas's Gilmanton pot. Use water that does not stink of sulfur to begin with, scour your copper after every run, and the metal will serve you thirty years.
Silas: Sand and vinegar, Doctor, then a clean water rinse. Never a scrap of lye on good copper.
Wilkins: Hear the master. Job four is proofing. Hearts come off the still strong, too strong to drink with any pleasure. You bring them down with water, and that last water goes in raw, with no cooking and no still to clean it after. That is where the granite spring wins the whole war. Use hard, limey water and your proofed spirit may cloud up with minerals. Leave tails in your hearts and the oils will turn the jar cloudy the moment water touches it. Clean hearts and clean soft water give you a jar clear as a February sky over Catamount.
Wilkins: Here is a curiosity for the scholars. Pour spirit and water together and the jar warms a little in your hand. Measure fifty quarts of spirit and fifty of water, mix them, and you will have less than a hundred quarts. The two liquids nestle together like courting cousins at a husking bee. Fifty quarts and fifty make less than a hundred, which is the only arithmetic the revenue office ever got right in my favor.
Wilkins: My own rule for proofing water is a spring that comes out of granite, tastes of nothing, smells of nothing, is cold enough to make your teeth hurt, and leaves no crust on Silas's father's kettle. My spring is so cold that a selectman fell in last February and came out honest, though it wore off by March.
♦ Water poured from a pitcher into a jar; a gentle swirl
♪ Banjo flourish, segment transition
Wilkins: Segment the fourth. Myths, slang, and the postbag. Tonight we have a call-in tape, recorded by the wonder of the talking-machine cylinder all the way from Wilkesboro, North Carolina. Roll it, Silas.
♦ Cylinder change crackle, a thin hiss, a distant voice
Cletus: Alchemist, my uncle swears old-timers used to throw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads. Is there any truth to that, or was he just making swamp medicine?
♦ Crackle ends
Wilkins: Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro! Welcome to Fort Wilkins, son. That is good Yadkin River country. You have fine water down there, and your uncle has fine imagination. Let us take his medicine apart with the tongs.
Wilkins: Start with hickory ash. Every farm wife in America knows what you get when you pour water through a barrel of wood ash: lye. Potash. She boils it with tallow and makes soap. Lye is alkaline and caustic, and it will take the skin off your knuckles. Put it in a thump keg and you have a hot, bubbling kettle of soapy liquor. It will knock down some of the sour, acid smell of a poor run, and that is why old-timers thought it worked. Their noses were fooled. It does not touch the methanol. Rabbit, hickory ash in your thump keg is soap in your whiskey. You will not be drunk, but you will be the cleanest man in Wilkes County from the inside out.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: That is one large cent stamped G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., for the first busted myth.
Wilkins: Now the red oak shavings. Here your uncle has stumbled near the truth and then fallen in the ditch. Oak has tannin and color, and a handful of shavings will turn raw white spirit the color of weak tea in a few days. Why did an old-timer do it? Because a buyer sees amber and thinks old whiskey, and pays old-whiskey prices. Shavings make a counterfeit barrel, and they do not clean anything.
Silas: And red oak is the wrong oak entirely, Doctor.
Wilkins: Tell him, Silas.
Silas: White oak makes barrels because its pores are plugged up inside with natural growth, so it holds liquor tight. Red oak's pores run open end to end. Cut a short stick of red oak, put one end in a mug of beer, blow in the other, and the beer will bubble. A cooper who builds a whiskey barrel of red oak will have a leaking barrel and an angry customer.
Wilkins: Red oak is so full of holes you can blow smoke through a stick of it, which makes it like a Concord alibi. And if your water carries iron, Rabbit, those shavings will turn your shine into writing ink, as we said earlier. So here is the truth for your uncle, with my respects. The bad heads are not cleaned out in the keg. They are cut out at the spout, at the start of the run, by a man who is paying attention. Foreshots and heads go in the discard bucket, every time. Nothing you throw in the pot, the keg or the jar does that job for you.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Two coins. Now a myth of our own, since tonight is about water. The old saying in these hills is that clear water is clean water. Not so! John Snow's pump in London ran clear as gin and buried hundreds. The Suncook below the tannery runs clear on a sunny day. A deputy's word and a river's clarity are the same: both look fine until you have a doctor in the house. Clean water comes from a clean source, protected, cold, with no barnyard above it and no privy beside it.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Three coins. And one more: there is an old granny's notion that a spring running north is purer than one running south, on account of being nearer the Pole Star. Friends, the water does not know which way it is pointed. The rock it came through and the filth it passed on the way decide whether it is good. My spring runs a little east of south, and it is the best water in Merrimack County.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin; Barnaby grunts at the noise
Wilkins: Four coins, and Barnaby wants me to stop banging. Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, my thanks and a shout down the turnpike to you and your uncle. Tell him he is a fine man with a fine imagination, and that his soap would sell better as soap. A G. G. Wilkins counterstamped cent is on its way to you by post, if the post office does not drink it first.
♪ Slow fiddle air, sign-off bed
Wilkins: That is the evening's water drawn, neighbors. If you want the whole craft, the history, the metallurgy and the cuts, and you want to learn it from a man who has buried his mistakes and pulled his patients' teeth, then enroll in the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. You will learn reading water the way Silas's father did, scalding a mash, running a cold worm, making honest cuts, keeping your copper bright, and keeping your fire where it belongs. It is all history and education, mind, and the law of the land about permits still applies.
Wilkins: My thanks to Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister, coppersmith, philosopher, and a man who once refused a fee to keep a stranger from poisoning himself, which is more than any physician in Concord has done for free.
Silas: Thank you, Doctor. Mind your spring box.
Wilkins: Barnaby minds it for me.
Announcer: A quick word before the lamps go down! Bright, heavy-gauge copper, hand-crafted under United States Patent 10,561,960: that is the Flame-Flow still from Moonshine Stills. See it at the Fort Wilkins showroom on Route 28, or order tonight at moonshinestill.com!
♦ Wax crackle; stove door clanks shut
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 surface crackle, then silence