Why Your Still Weeps
Dr. Alchemist G. G. Wilkins covers stills that weep and leak, from the oatmeal-paste habits of old-country distillers and the sheet copper Paul Revere first rolled at Canton to the flour-paste seal Wilkins swears by. Master coppersmith Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister talks about stills he has repaired: one patched with spruce gum, a cap baked shut with molasses paste, a weep found by a barn cat, and the boiler seam his father made him throw away. On the call-in line, Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina asks about hickory ashes and red oak shavings in the thump keg, and Wilkins also takes apart the old saying that a weeping joint will seal itself once it gets hot.
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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 is flour paste on the cap of my pot, you overgrown bag of fleas, not a johnnycake. Lick it off one more time and I'll seal your jaws shut with it and sell you to the Concord circus as a mute.
♦ Barnaby grunts, long and low; chain drags across the frozen dooryard
Wilkins: He ate half a pound of my flour seal last Tuesday and broke wind for three days like a Concord militia salute on the Fourth. The hens quit laying, the cat moved to Barnstead, and the Methodist minister crossed to the far side of the turnpike holding a hymnal over his nose.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth, swelling, then settling under
Wilkins: Good evening, neighbors, sinners, and you poor wretches who married into the Suncook Valley. You've found Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, broadcasting from the log fortress of Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, in Pittsfield, Merrimack County, New Hampshire. I am Dr. George G. Wilkins: tooth-puller, blacksmith, inventor, stamper of coins, and twice a guest of the Merrimack County sheriff, both visits paid for by the county and neither one worth the price.
Wilkins: Tonight's subject is close to my heart and closer to my pocketbook. Tonight we talk about why your still weeps. I mean the drip from the seam, the wisp from the cap, the slow green tear running down the side of your copper that cries away your profit and calls every revenue nose in New England straight to your woodshed. A weeping still is like a weeping widow: it costs you money, it draws a crowd, and sooner or later the law comes around to ask questions.
Wilkins: Before we start, a word from the folks who keep the lamp oil burning in this cabin.
♪ Brief bright banjo flourish
Announcer: A quick word, friends! A still that weeps is a still that cheats you. The Flame-Flow Still, under United States Patent 10,561,960, is made of heavy-gauge pure electrolytic copper with tight, honest unions. See it at moonshinestill.com!
♪ Flourish ends
♦ Wax cylinder crackle; a log shifts in the stove
Wilkins: SEGMENT ONE. Let's go back a ways, past the war and past the Revolution, to where weeping stills began, which is wherever a man first put a lid on a pot and expected it to keep its mouth shut.
Wilkins: In the old country, Scotland and Ireland, the highland men and the poteen-boilers in the bogs had no fine machined fittings. They had a pot, a head, a worm, and a bowl of oatmeal. They mixed oatmeal or barley meal with water into a thick dough and pressed it into every seam between the cap and the pot to stop the vapor sneaking out. When the Scots-Irish came over and settled the Pennsylvania hills, the Carolina mountains, and our own granite country, they brought the habit with them. Down South the mountain boys call it slobber. Here in Merrimack County we call it paste, and anybody who calls it slobber at my table can eat outside with the bear.
Wilkins: Now think about what a colonial New England distiller had for copper. Not much! Until Mr. Paul Revere, the same silversmith who rode out to Lexington yelling about regulars, opened his copper rolling mill at Canton, Massachusetts, in 1801, nobody in this country could roll a proper sheet of copper. It all came over from England, dear as a bishop's dinner. Revere rolled the copper that sheathed the bottom of Old Ironsides and the copper on the dome of the Massachusetts State House. Before him, a cider-brandy man in Exeter or a rum boiler in Medford worked one pot for forty years, patching it the way you'd patch your grandfather's trousers, until it was more patch than pot and wept from every seam like a congregation at a hanging.
Wilkins: The honest coppersmiths of that day joined their seams by brazing. That's hard soldering, done with spelter, a brass solder, and a pinch of borax for flux, worked in a fire hot enough to make the joint glow. A brazed seam is strong. It takes the heat of a run and laughs at it. But a lazy man or a cheap man used soft solder, the tinker's kind, and soft solder on a still is like a cold wife: it looks like it's holding, right up until you put some heat to it.
Wilkins: Since this is a dentist's program as much as a distiller's, let me put it in teeth. A weeping seam is a bleeding gum. Folks think the trouble is the blood, but the blood only shows you where the trouble is. Down under it there's a crack, a rot, or a bad fit. Every man in Merrimack County has a weeping joint somewhere he won't discuss in church, and I've seen most of them, in my chair or in my still-house.
Wilkins: That brings me to Ebenezer Crotchett of Epsom. Ebenezer is long gone from these parts, and his eyebrows went before he did. He was a stingy, spit-on-the-floor, short-weight-on-the-scale kind of man who wouldn't spend a nickel on spelter if a dime's worth of pitch could do the job badly. One autumn his cap seam started weeping. Did he braze it? He did not. He smeared it with pine pitch, slapped soft solder over the top, wrapped the whole works in a wet rag, and tied it down with fence wire. He sealed that pot up as tight as a Baptist's purse.
♦ Wilkins taps a copper pot with a knuckle, a dull ring
Wilkins: Then his worm clogged. A wad of mash got up into the coil and stuck there like a chaw in a dog's throat. The vapor had nowhere to go, and the pitch and wire and rag held, because for once in his life Ebenezer had done something thoroughly. The pressure built and built. His dog ran off into the woods. His wife, who had more sense than the whole Crotchett line put together, went out to the privy and stayed there.
♦ Distant low boom, wax cylinder crackle jumps
Wilkins: That cap went up through the shed roof with a bang they heard in Chichester. It went so high the Epsom church bell rang when it came down, and that was the first time Ebenezer Crotchett was ever connected with a church service. The boiling mash came out after it in a scalding brown fountain. It boiled him pink as a Christmas ham from the collar up. It took the skin off his left ear like the skin off hot milk, and he peeled it himself for a week, one little curl at a time, and fed the curls to his hogs, because Ebenezer never wasted anything. His hair grew back in patches like a sheep that lost an argument with a threshing machine. The lesson isn't that Ebenezer was a fool, though he was. The lesson is that he sealed his still so well it couldn't breathe, and a still that can't breathe will blow. Remember that. We'll come back to it.
♪ Short fiddle sting
♦ Barnaby grunts; chain clinks against the log wall
Wilkins: SEGMENT TWO, legends and outlaws. Here's something the runners and the tax dodgers all learned the hard way. It's seldom the smoke that hangs a moonshiner. It's the smell. A weeping still sends out a sweet, sour, corny breath that drifts across a valley like gossip, and a revenue assessor's nose is the only part of a federal man that works a full day.
Wilkins: A couple of winters back an assessor came up from Concord. I won't name him, because his mother is still alive and I'm not sure she knows what he does. He came up the turnpike on a hired gray mare in a fur collar, a fine broadcloth coat, and trousers so tight across the seat they looked painted on by a portrait man. I had a weep that week, I'll admit it. My worm connection was crying a little, and he caught it on the north wind half a mile off. He tied up his mare and came around the back of Fort Wilkins on his toes like a heron after a frog, sniffing and following his nose, so busy with his nose that he never once looked at his feet. His feet carried him straight over Barnaby's chain.
♦ Barnaby roars; chain snaps taut; a man's yelp
Wilkins: Barnaby was having a tender moment with a frozen ham bone right then and took the interruption badly. He came off that woodpile like four hundred pounds of wet black sin and got that assessor by the seat of his painted-on trousers. The broadcloth tore with a sound like a sail splitting in a gale. The bear shook his head once and took the whole seat away, drawers and all, with a good mouthful of wool and, by the look of it, a little bit of Concord. The man went down the turnpike with his bare hindquarters bouncing like two boiled turnips in a sack, red-striped where Barnaby's teeth had kissed him, hollering about the Constitution. Barnaby sat in the snow chewing that piece of trouser like a pastor chewing a sermon. He kept the fur collar a week and slept on it.
Wilkins: That was the only federal assessment ever made in Pittsfield where the government ended up showing more than the citizen. Now, listeners, a sensible word: a chained wild bear is a danger to every soul nearby, the owner included, and no one should keep one. Barnaby is a Suncook Valley tall tale and should stay one. And the moral isn't to get a bear. The moral is to fix your weep before the wind carries it to Concord.
Wilkins: Speaking of fixing, there's a man here tonight who has crawled inside more crying copper than any undertaker has seen corpses. He works the forge right here at the Fort Wilkins foundry. He has burned scars on his forearms like a map of the White Mountains, and his hands are steady enough to braze a seam on a hummingbird. Please welcome Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister.
♦ Chair scrapes on plank floor; a heavy boot thud
Silas: Evening, Doc. Evening, folks. I'll ask you to keep that bear outside where he belongs.
Wilkins: He can't get in, Silas. The window's too small, and the last man who measured it for him is resting in the Pittsfield burying ground for unrelated reasons. Now, you've seen every kind of foolishness a man can do to a seam. What's the worst patch you ever pulled off a weeping still?
Silas: That'd be a farmer over in Barnstead. He had a crack in the cap seam about as long as your finger. Instead of fetching a smith he chewed up a fistful of spruce gum, good Maine spruce gum, the kind Curtis has been peddling since forty-eight, and packed it into the crack with his thumb. It held while the pot was cold.
Wilkins: Of course it did. Everything holds cold. My first marriage held cold.
Silas: Then he lit the fire. Spruce gum softens with heat, Doc. It went soft, ran down the inside of the cap, and dripped straight into the vapor path. Every drop he made that day tasted like a Christmas tree soaked in turpentine. His wife used it to polish the pews. He brought it to me and asked if I could filter the pine out, and I told him I could filter the pine out of the whiskey about as easily as I could filter the fool out of him.
Wilkins: Patching a still with spruce gum is like filling a tooth with fudge. It holds until the first hot supper. Now Silas, a smith isn't born knowing. Tell the folks about a seam you ruined yourself.
Silas: I'll tell it, though I don't enjoy it. I was fourteen or so, apprenticed to my father, and I had a boiler seam to close. I thought harder was better, so I hammered that copper cold for most of a morning. I never put it back in the fire to soften. Copper gets hard and mean when you beat it cold. It work-hardens. Keep at it and it goes brittle as a February icicle.
Wilkins: What did your father do? Tan you?
Silas: Worse. He took a wooden mallet and rang the sheet. Good soft copper sings when you tap it, a bright note. Mine went thunk, flat and dead, like knocking on a coffin lid. He said, Silas, that's the sound of a seam that'll crack the first time it's heated. Then he handed me the shears and made me cut the whole seam out and start over. Since then I anneal every time it starts to stiffen. Heat it up, let it cool, even quench it in the trough. Soft copper bends and hard copper breaks, and a broken seam weeps.
Wilkins: That's the best tooth-pulling advice I've heard on this program, and it was about copper. A stiff jaw cracks. Loosen it first. Now, I've told folks the flour-paste seal is the honest seal. But you've seen paste go wrong too, haven't you?
Silas: Once, but it went wrong the other way. There's a widow up in Gilmanton, a good woman and a fierce one. She read somewhere that molasses makes things stick, so she stirred a good dollop of blackstrap into her flour paste and packed the cap seam with it. It baked on during the run like brick in a kiln. Next morning that cap wouldn't come off for her, her hired man, or the hired man's brother. They sent for me. I spent most of an afternoon on it with a cold chisel and a mallet, chipping like a man carving his own tombstone, all the while trying not to scar the copper.
Wilkins: Her paste was harder than her heart, and her heart had buried three husbands without missing a church supper. So molasses is bad?
Silas: Molasses is fine in a pie. Plain flour and water does the job and washes off with hot water. And here's the part folks miss: the paste is supposed to be the weakest thing on your still. If it ever comes to a contest between the paste and the copper, you want the paste to lose.
Wilkins: Exactly what Ebenezer Crotchett never learned. One more, Silas. Ever found a leak nobody else could find?
Silas: Never found one myself that way. A cat found it for me. A farm over in Chichester had a still with a weep somewhere at the worm connection. The owner smelled it, his wife smelled it, I smelled it, and none of us could see it. Then I noticed the barn cat, a fat old orange tom, curled up every night on the same spot by the connection. Same spot every night, same shape like a muffin.
Wilkins: Warmest seat in the barn.
Silas: That was the giveaway. Wet vapor was creeping out through a hairline gap there and keeping the metal warm after the fire went down. When I wiped the dust away there was a faint little line of green crust, verdigris, where the vapor had been drying on the copper for weeks. I brazed it that afternoon. The cat glared at me like I'd burned his house down.
Wilkins: That cat found a leak no inspector, smith, or sheriff in the county could find, which tells you what our county officers are worth in mice. Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister, thank you. Stay by the stove, there's a cup of coffee in it for you, and coffee is all you're getting while the microphone is open.
Silas: Coffee's fine, Doc. Keep the bear fed.
♪ Banjo bridge, quick and jaunty
♦ Wax cylinder crackle; a showman's bell rings twice
Announcer: STEP RIGHT UP, friends, and hear me out! Is your still crying on you? Is it leaking your fine spirit out its seams like a spendthrift's purse, drip by drip, dollar by dollar? Stop the weeping today! If you appreciate authentic American craftsmanship, look no further than Moonshine Stills, proud home of the Flame-Flow Still, protected under United States Patent 10,561,960! It's built from heavy-gauge, high-purity electrolytic copper, with precision CNC-machined brass unions that fit as truly as a watchmaker's gears, so no gaps, no guesswork, and no paste patches! The Flame-Flow is designed to maximize convective circulation and deliver unmatched purity for essential oils, herbal tinctures, and traditional distillation demonstrations. And the price, friends, is only eight hundred ninety-nine dollars for the flagship that will outlast your mule, your mortgage, and your mother-in-law! Visit moonshinestill.com, that's moonshinestill.com/products/flame-flow-copper-still, or come see it with your own eyes at the showroom at Fort Wilkins on Route 28 in Pittsfield, New Hampshire! Once more: moonshinestill.com! Don't let another drop cry away!
♦ Showman's bell rings once
♪ Theme sting
♦ Wilkins sets a copper cap down on the bench with a heavy clang
Wilkins: SEGMENT THREE: copper and the craft. You've got the history and you've got the horror stories. Now here's the honest method from my own bench, so your copper stops crying.
Wilkins: First, why does a still weep? There are four reasons, same as there are four reasons a tooth aches. One, a bad seam: soft solder where brazing belonged, or a cold joint. Two, cracked or tired metal: copper beaten hard and never annealed, or a pot so old it's more patch than pot. Three, a poor fit between the cap and pot, or at the arm, the thump keg, and the worm. Four, the one that fools everybody: heat. Copper grows when it's heated. A joint that's tight as a drum at breakfast can open up by dinner once the pot is hot. That's why so many leaks don't show until the run is halfway along.
Wilkins: Now soldering mistakes, since I see them weekly. A cold joint is solder that sat on the seam without flowing into it. It looks dull, grainy, and lumpy, like oatmeal left out overnight. It comes from dirty metal, no flux, or not enough heat. Scour the copper bright first. Use borax for brazing. Heat the work, not the solder, so the metal pulls the solder in the way a dry sponge pulls in water. The worst sin is cheap tinker's solder, which carries lead. Lead has no business in anything a person eats or drinks. Have your seams brazed by a smith who knows his trade, or use good mechanical unions.
Wilkins: Now the flour paste, the fix I swear by. Here's my recipe from this bench. Take plain flour. Rye's what I like, wheat does fine, and Reverend Sylvester Graham's coarse flour works too. The Reverend swore his flour would cure a man of lust. I can't speak to that, but it has cured more leaky caps than it ever cured a sinner. Add water a little at a time and work it with your fingers until it's stiff as bread dough or a glazier's putty. It should hold its shape and not run. Mrs. Child in The American Frugal Housewife would tell you not to waste a pinch, and she'd be right. Roll it into a rope about as thick as your thumb.
Wilkins: Step two. Fit your cap to the pot dry first, so you know it seats true. Then lift it, lay your paste rope around the joint, set the cap back down, and press the paste into the seam all the way around with your thumbs. Do the same at the arm where it meets the thumper, and wherever the line meets the worm. Smooth it flat. Don't leave any bubbles or gaps.
Wilkins: Step three. Bring your fire up low and slow. The paste dries and then bakes hard in the heat, like a crust on a loaf. Rush the fire and the paste cracks before it sets, the vapor finds the crack, and you're crying again.
Wilkins: Step four, and the part that keeps you alive. Never seal a still airtight, same as you never seal a mother-in-law in your house. Something has to have a way out or the whole place blows. Your worm must run clear and cold, with fresh cold water on the condenser the whole run, so the vapor always has an open road to the jar. The paste is your weak link on purpose. If something clogs, you want that paste to puff and give way, not the copper. Ebenezer sealed his with pitch and wire and got boiled for it. If you ever see your paste bulging or hissing, kill the fire right then and find the blockage after everything has cooled.
Wilkins: Step five, hunting a leak. Look for the wisp. Smell for the sweetness. Hold a damp cloth near the seam and watch for a wet bead, or feel for a warm wet patch. Look for green crust on the copper, which is often the mark of a slow weep that's been going for a while, same as Silas found under that cat. But never, ever hold a lit candle or a match up to your still to look. Escaping vapor catches fire. A man who holds a candle to his still to look for a leak will find it right away, and then go on looking for his eyebrows for a month. Bank the fire and keep open flame away from any weep.
Wilkins: Step six, after the run. Let it cool. Soak the paste with hot water and it softens right off. Scrub every bit of crust away, rinse the copper, and let it dry. Old paste left on goes sour, and sour paste in a seam breeds green rot.
Wilkins: A word on the run itself, since a weeping still tempts a man to hurry. Bring it up gentle. The first spirit to come off is the foulest, and it gets thrown out and never drunk, never sold, and never given to your enemies, however much they've earned it. Take your cuts honestly and in order, and keep your jars separate. A leak wastes your spirit, but a careless cut can poison your neighbor. And a man's worm should be firm, cold, and coiled tight. If your wife complains otherwise, that's a matter for the doctor and not for this program.
Wilkins: The fine print, said plainly: making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against United States law. Everything on this program is for history and education. The sheriff can arrest me a third time if he likes, but he's never once fixed a leak, so I count the county as owing me for two days' labor.
♦ Barnaby grunts contentedly; chain rattles
♪ Fiddle bridge, slow and warm
Wilkins: SEGMENT FOUR, myths, slang, and the call-in line. We've had a voice cylinder come all the way up from North Carolina. Let me crank it up.
♦ Phonograph crank winding; needle scratch; faint hiss
Wilkins: Here's Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro.
♦ Distant, tinny playback with crackle
Cletus (recorded): Alchemist, my uncle swears old-timers used to throw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads. Is there any truth to that, or was he just making swamp medicine?
♦ Needle lifts; cylinder hiss fades
Wilkins: Rabbit, God bless you, and God bless your uncle, though I suspect your uncle needs it more. I'll set the record straight with my punch and anvil.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: First strike, the ashes. Do you know what ash turns into when you wet it down? Lye. Potash. Your grandmother leached hickory ash through a hopper and boiled the run-off with hog fat to make soap. So your uncle's old-timer wasn't cleaning his heads. He was putting the soap-kettle in his thump keg, adding a caustic to a drink. Lye is what your grandmother used to make soap. Put it in your keg and the only thing you'll clean out is your own insides, from the top down. Putting ash in your thump keg is like giving a toothache a shave. It makes a fellow feel busy, and the tooth still rots.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Second strike, the red oak shavings. Now there's a grain of truth in this one, so I'll give your uncle half a coin. Oak does change spirit. Put whiskey in a charred oak barrel and leave it alone through seasons and summers, and the oak gives it color and softens it. But that takes months and years, not one hot afternoon in a thump keg. Oak shavings in a hot keg is like telling a boy to grow a beard by Sunday. It won't happen, and you'll just end up with a mouthful of splinters.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Third strike, and the true word. The thump keg makes the spirit stronger. It doesn't sort out good from bad. The bad first runnings come off first because of how they boil, and the only cure is the distiller's hand and his jar: catch them, set them aside, throw them out. No ash, no bark, no wood shavings, and no preacher's blessing will do it for you. I'd guess the habit came from an old fellow who saw his granddaddy toss ash on a fire and got confused about which end of the operation he was in.
Wilkins: Rabbit, I'm stamping this coin for you with G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. right across the old Liberty's forehead. Tell your uncle he's a good man with a bad recipe, and tell him the Suncook Valley says hello to Wilkesboro.
♦ One final punch clang; coin rings as it drops in a tin
Wilkins: Now one more myth, since it fits tonight's subject. Every still-house loafer from here to Kentucky will tell you: don't fuss over a little weep, boy, it'll seal itself once the pot gets hot. Hogwash!
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: I told you about heat. Copper swells in the fire, and a seam that's already weak usually opens wider when it's hot. A weep that heals itself when it's hot is like a deputy who arrests himself. I've heard of it, I've never seen it, and I wouldn't bet a coin on either one. And every drop that weeps out is spirit lost, smell sent to the revenue men, and vapor too close to your firebox. Some fools call it the angels' share. The angels get their share out of a barrel in a cool cellar over years. What comes out a crack in your cap is no angel's share. That's your own carelessness. Find it, bank your fire, let it cool, and fix it right.
♪ Theme creeping in softly underneath
♦ Wax crackle; a log settles in the stove
Wilkins: That about wraps it, friends. Before you go, if you want to learn this trade the honest way, the history, the metallurgy, the copper and the cuts, the safety, the law, and the plain sense to keep your eyebrows, sign on for the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. I'll teach you to read copper like a dentist reads a jaw, to hear a dead seam from a living one, and to make a flour paste that'll hold until it's supposed to give. Ask at Fort Wilkins on Route 28, or inquire with our good sponsor below.
Announcer: A quick word before goodnight! Retire your weeping pot for the Flame-Flow Still, United States Patent 10,561,960, heavy-gauge pure electrolytic copper built to hold true. Order today at moonshinestill.com!
Wilkins: My thanks to Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister and his steady hands, to Rabbit Miller down in Wilkesboro, to the Gilmanton widow whose cap is finally loose, to the Chichester cat, who's still sore about it, and to Barnaby, who has kept a good fur collar warm all winter and asks for nothing more than a ham bone and his liberty, though he'll only get the ham bone.
♦ Barnaby grunts at the window
Wilkins: Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme swells, then fades to the crackle of the wax cylinder
♦ Bear grunt and final drip into jar