Proofing Without a Hydrometer
Dr. Alchemist G. G. Wilkins covers the three old ways to judge proof without an instrument: the bead, the gunpowder and the fire test. He explains why each one could fool, burn or blind a man, and tells a new tall tale about Barnaby the bear and a Concord gauger's brass hydrometer. Coppersmith Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister tells three new stories: a tavern keeper who faked his beads with lye soap, a militia sergeant who burned off his eyebrows with the gunpowder test, and a cousin who caught fire from a flame he couldn't see in the July sun. Wilkins then answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, NC, explaining that hickory ash makes lye and red oak lets liquid seep through its pores, so neither one cleans bad heads out of a thump keg.
▶ 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! Quit your rattling, you moth-eaten sack of lard! You've had a peck of windfall apples and the hind end of a Chichester ram this morning, and you are not getting the jar. The jar is for the paying public. Lie down. LIE DOWN. ...There. He's lying down now, mostly on my woodpile, but down.
♦ Low bear grumble, chain settling into dirt
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth
Wilkins: Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, deacons and drunkards, and whatever else is out there in the back pews of the listening world. This is Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins: dentist, blacksmith, inventor, twice arrested and twice unrepentant. We're broadcasting from the log fortress of Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, in Pittsfield, Merrimack County, New Hampshire, where the river runs brown, the mill whistle blows at six, and the bear outside my window has eaten more county property than the county has.
Wilkins: Tonight's sermon is Proofing Without a Hydrometer. That means how the old-timers told strong spirit from weak with no brass instrument and no government tables. They had three tests: the bead, the gunpowder and the fire. Each of those three has burned, blinded or swindled a better man than you, and I'll tell you exactly how, down to the smell of the eyebrows.
♪ Theme fades under wax crackle
Announcer: A QUICK WORD, friends! Want to learn the craft the way Wilkins learned it, but without the singed whiskers? The Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Master Distilling Course is waiting for you at moonshinestill.com! That's moonshinestill.com. Now back to the Doctor!
♦ Wax crackle, single drip into jar
Wilkins: SEGMENT ONE. Where the word 'proof' comes from, and why a lot of men lost their eyebrows finding out.
Wilkins: When a man says 'proof' he means 'proved.' Before anybody floated glass and brass in a jar, a buyer would pour some spirit over a pinch of gunpowder and put a flame to it. If the powder still lit, flashing and smoking through the wet, the spirit was proved. If the powder just sat there sulking like a deacon at a dance, the spirit was under proof, and somebody had been at the well with a bucket.
Wilkins: Now here's the joke of it. Powder soaked in spirit generally won't light unless the spirit is up above about fifty-seven parts in a hundred of pure alcohol. That's why the old English proof sat way up there, hotter than ours. The story goes that the pursers in the Royal Navy proved the sailors' rum ration with powder right in front of the men, so no sailor could say he'd been cheated with water. That's where 'navy strength' comes from. Mind you, calling spirit 'proved' because it lit a pinch of powder is like calling a man honest because he didn't explode in church.
Wilkins: The English got tired of setting their customs houses on fire and went to instruments. First there was Mr. Clarke's hydrometer, back in the last century, and then by act of Parliament in 1816 they settled on the Sikes hydrometer as the lawful one. It's a brass float with weights, and it measures how heavy the liquor is. Alcohol is lighter than water, so the higher it floats, the weaker your spirit, and the deeper it sinks, the stronger. Here in America we reckon proof spirit as half alcohol by measure, at sixty degrees by Mr. Fahrenheit's glass. A hundred proof is half and half, and no amount of praying will make it otherwise.
Wilkins: Why sixty degrees, you ask? Because spirit swells when it's warm and shrinks when it's cold, the same as a sheriff's opinion of himself. Take a reading in a hot August barn and you'll get a different answer than in a January cellar. So every revenue gauger from Concord carries a brass hydrometer in one coat pocket and an ivory-backed thermometer in the other, along with a little book of tables. A revenue gauger with a brass hydrometer is the only man in New Hampshire who can insult your liquor with arithmetic. And a Concord gauger's thermometer and a Concord gauger's temper both rise with the heat and both read wrong after dinner.
Wilkins: Which brings me to Mr. Thaddeus Pomfret.
♦ Barnaby grunts, chain clinks
Wilkins: Yes, Barnaby, you remember him. Pomfret was a gauger of the Concord sort, thin as a rake handle, with spectacles and a waistcoat the colour of old mustard. One November he came up the turnpike to gauge a cask he'd heard about. He found it, too, sitting by my still-house window, because I'm an honest man about where I keep things. He drew a sample into his tall glass jar, uncased that lovely brass hydrometer, and set the jar on the windowsill to get the light. Then he bent over to read the float, with his coat-tails out behind him and his hindquarters aimed square at the dooryard.
Wilkins: Barnaby's chain reaches exactly to that window. I measured it myself, purely for science.
Wilkins: The bear got the coat-tails first. It sounded like a sail splitting in a gale, a long ripping sound, and then Pomfret went up on his toes and made a noise I've only ever heard from a Gilmanton hog at butchering. Barnaby wasn't done with the coat. He went through the broadcloth, through the trousers and through a pair of good red flannel drawers, and he took a mouthful of Mr. Pomfret's left hind cheek about the size of a breakfast steak. Pomfret let go of everything. The jar shattered on the sill, the thermometer went into the snow, and the brass hydrometer dropped right into Barnaby's open mouth like a communion wafer.
Wilkins: Then Pomfret ran. He went down the turnpike toward the Barnstead line with his bare stern flashing in the cold like a harvest moon and leaving a trail of red drops on the snow, and every child in Pittsfield came out to watch him go. I hear he wrote his report standing up, and he's sat on a feather cushion and a grudge ever since.
Wilkins: But this is the true marvel. Three days later Barnaby passed that hydrometer, out the far end, brass shining and not a dent in it. I took it to the brook with tongs and lye soap, scrubbed it an hour, then floated it in a jar of known spirit, and it read true to the mark. It's the only government instrument in Merrimack County that has ever been through a bear and come out honest. I keep it on the mantel. I mailed Pomfret a letter offering to return it, and he never answered.
♦ Barnaby huffs contentedly
Wilkins: Most men in these hills never had a hydrometer, though, unless they got one from a bear. So they used the bead, the powder and the fire. Before I bring my guest in, let me tell you my first gunpowder test. I was fourteen, behind my father's barn, with a spoon of his cider brandy and a pinch of powder borrowed from his horn without asking. I lit it with a splinter from the cookstove. It went WHOOMPH, and it took the hair off my right forearm to the elbow and the eyelashes off one eye. For a month I looked like a man winking at the whole town. My father whipped me for the powder, not the brandy, which tells you that man's priorities. I've treated black powder with respect ever since, and you'll hear tonight why you should too.
♪ Short banjo sting
Wilkins: SEGMENT TWO. Legends and liars. My guest is a man who has hammered more copper than the U.S. Mint and kept all ten fingers doing it. He's master coppersmith at the Fort Wilkins foundry: Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister. Silas, sit down, mind the bear's water bucket, and tell these good people about proof.
Silas: Evening, Doctor. Evening, folks. Barnaby looks well fed.
Wilkins: He's been eating a diet of revenue men. Lean meat and bad attitude. Silas, I've heard you say a bead can lie straighter in your face than a horse trader.
Silas: It can. My Uncle Jedediah worked brass and copper over in Barnstead, and he drank at a tavern there kept by a fellow named Ebenezer Hodge. Ebenezer's whiskey had the most beautiful bead in three townships. You shook the jar and the bubbles stood up fat and round as peas, and they stayed there. People paid extra for it. Jedediah thought it was too handsome. He said a bead that stays all afternoon is like a girl that laughs at all your jokes: something's being sold.
Wilkins: A wise man. Go on.
Silas: So he buys a dram, doesn't drink it, carries it home in a vial, and pours it on a sheet of fresh-scoured copper on his bench, bright as a new penny. Good spirit dries off copper and leaves next to nothing. That dram dried to a white crust, slick and soapy, like the ring on a washtub. He touched his tongue to it and said it was like licking the laundress. Ebenezer had been dropping lye soap into his whiskey to puff up the bead. It made the stuff look strong while he watered it down by the bucket.
Wilkins: Lye in a man's whiskey. That's a crime against the throat.
Silas: That's just it, Doctor. Lye burns. Jedediah figured that was why half of Barnstead had a cough that whole winter. He brought that copper sheet into the tavern on a Saturday night and set it on the bar. The men there gave Ebenezer a choice: drink his own jar, the whole pint, in front of everybody, or take a ride on a rail out of town. He drank it.
Wilkins: And?
Silas: He spent the next day blowing bubbles from both ends, Doctor, and the whole of Barnstead got to watch. He sold honest whiskey from then on. Weaker-looking, but honest.
Wilkins: [laughing] A man who can't raise a bead blames the jar, and a man who fakes one with soap ought to be made to drink the washtub. Now, folks, listen here, because this is the true point of it. The bead test is like judging a molar by how it shines. I've pulled pearly white teeth that were black rot underneath, and pretty beads can hide lye just the same. Sugar changes the bead, oil changes it, and so do cold and heat. A bead is a rough guess and nothing more. Silas, tell them about the powder.
Silas: This one I saw with my own eyes as a boy, at the Gilmanton muster. That's militia training day, when every man in the county shows up with a musket, a powder horn and a jug, and drills until the jug wins. There was a sergeant there, Asa Dudley, a big proud fellow with a moustache like a broom and eyebrows to match. Somebody'd brought whiskey to sell, and Asa says he'll prove it the old way.
Wilkins: Oh, Lord. I can smell it coming.
Silas: So you can. He pours a spoon of whiskey into a little heap of powder in his palm, his left palm, with his full powder horn hanging on his belt right underneath. Then he takes a slow match from the cannon crew and touches it to the heap. The powder catches, which proves the whiskey, mind you, and a spark jumps down and finds the open spout of that horn.
♦ Distant muffled thump, like a barrel dropped on a barn floor
Silas: It wasn't a bang so much as a big orange cough. A sheet of flame went up the front of him. When the smoke cleared, Asa's eyebrows were gone, his moustache was gone, and his forelock was burnt back to the crown. The whole parade ground smelled like a singed hog. His hand was blistered for a month. He was lucky it didn't take his eyes, and he knew it.
Wilkins: What did he do for eyebrows?
Silas: Drew them on with burnt cork every morning. He drew them a little high, so he looked startled the whole summer until the first frost. But there was a widow in Loudon who said he had the most attentive face she ever saw, and she married him that October.
Wilkins: There's a moral in that, folks, and it isn't 'set fire to your face to get a wife.' Black powder will go off from a spark, an ember, a nail scraping a rock, or a hard rub on a dry day. A man doing the gunpowder test has an open flame in one hand, an explosive in the other, and a jar of flammable spirit somewhere nearby, and that's three ways to the burying ground in one test. Silas, the fire test. I can see from your face you've got a story.
Silas: My cousin Abner. A July noon, hot and sunny, with the sun straight overhead in the dooryard. He wanted to show a buyer how strong his run was. He pours a spoon of spirit into a pewter dish and lights it. You know how it is, Doctor: an alcohol flame in daylight is pale blue and thin, and in that sun you couldn't see it at all. Abner looks at the dish, sees nothing, figures it went out, and tips the jar to pour in more.
Wilkins: Oh, no.
Silas: The flame ran right up that stream of liquor like a squirrel up a tree. The mouth of the jar went WHUFF, flame came out of the neck, and his shirt cuff was soaked with spirit, so it lit. Nobody could see it burning. All we saw was Abner's arm hair curling and Abner dancing, then the smell, then the cloth going brown and black with no fire anybody could see. I was sixteen. I tackled him into the horse trough, jar and all, and we lost the jar but kept the cousin.
Wilkins: Better trade than most.
Silas: Afterward I hammered him a proving spoon, copper, with a handle three feet long and a small bowl that holds a thimbleful. And from then on our family had a rule: do the fire test in the shade or the dark, so you can see the flame. Pour off a little sample into the spoon, cork the main jar, and set it well away. Don't do it anywhere near the still, the barrels or the fermenters. Never pour onto a flame, ever, even one you're sure is out.
Wilkins: A man doing a fire test at noon in July is trying to see a ghost in a snowbank. Silas, I've been lit on fire twice, arrested twice and married once, and the marriage left the most scars, but I'll take your rule over any of them. Folks, that's Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister. Stay put, Silas, I want you for the copper talk. But first, the man with the big voice has something to sell you.
♪ Brisk calliope-and-fiddle patent-medicine jingle
Announcer: Step right up, friends, step right up! Do you know your foreshots from your feints? Can you tell a true hearts cut from a guess and a prayer? You don't need a bear to swallow your hydrometer to learn the hard way. Introducing the ALCHEMIST G. G. WILKINS MASTER DISTILLING COURSE, presented by the Fort Wilkins Academy! It's eight full weeks on the thermodynamics of vapor, the art of the cuts, and the deep history of American spirits! You'll learn directly from master distillers, coppersmiths and historians, the same men who hammer heavy-gauge pure electrolytic copper at the foundry right here! That's over THIRTY HOURS of detailed lessons, along with blueprints, plans and live question-and-answer sessions with the masters themselves! You'll learn to judge your spirit by science instead of singed eyebrows! And the price for the whole eight-week academy is one hundred ninety-nine dollars. One ninety-nine! Visit the showroom at Fort Wilkins on Route 28 in Pittsfield, New Hampshire, and see the copper for yourself! Seats are limited, so enroll today at moonshinestill.com/course. That's moonshinestill.com/course, or fortwilkins.com/course. Reserve your seat before your neighbor does!
♪ Jingle ends on a fiddle flourish
♦ Wax crackle, drip into jar
Wilkins: SEGMENT THREE. Copper and the craft. I'm going to walk you through a whole run, folks, and show you where proof fits into it. Remember, this is history and instruction, not an invitation. Making spirits for drinking without a federal permit is illegal under United States law, and everything on this program is for historical and educational purposes only. If you do it anyway and end up in the Concord jail, tell them Barnaby sent you, and watch the turnkey go pale.
Wilkins: First, the mash. Tonight let's do a rye of the old Merrimack style. Take a bushel of cracked rye and a peck of good barley malt. Heat clean soft water in the kettle until it's just too hot to keep your hand in, and stir the rye in slowly so it doesn't ball up like a Baptist's porridge. Hold it there and stir. The heat swells the grain open. Let it cool to about where a finger feels warm but not scalding, then stir in the malt. The malt is what turns the starch into sugar. The sweetness comes up like spring sap, and you'll taste it on a spoon. Cool it further, to blood warm or a little under, put it in a clean barrel, and pitch in your yeast. Cover it with cloth, keep it in a warm room with a door open so the bad air can get out, and let it work for several days. It'll bubble, hiss and stink of bread, and when the bubbling stops it's a wash, only a few parts in a hundred of spirit. Strain it, and the solids go to the hogs once they're cool.
Wilkins: Second, the run. Charge the pot with the strained wash, not the thick solids. Thick solids scorch on the bottom and burn, and then you'll have liquor that tastes like a blacksmith's apron. Seat your cap, seal your joints with flour paste, and bring it up on a LOW fire. Low, I tell you. A roaring fire pushes everything over at once, heads mixed into hearts, and puke from a boiled-over pot into your worm. A slow, steady drip is the sign of a man who knows what he's doing.
Wilkins: Third, the cuts. Pay attention here, because no bead, no powder and no flame will save you. The first spirit off the worm is the foreshots. It's sharp, it smells like nail varnish or a hot glue pot, and it carries the wood alcohol that blinds and kills. Pour it out. Not into a jar for later, not into the bear, not into your brother-in-law, though I understand the temptation. On a small pot that's the first cupful or more, and more again on a big one. Then come the heads, still harsh, solvent-smelling and headachy. Catch them in small jars, one after another, and set them aside, because none of it is for drinking. Then come the hearts: clean, sweet, smelling of the grain. That's your whiskey. Then the tails, oily, smelling of wet dog and old dishrag. Those go aside too.
Wilkins: Now here's where proof earns its keep at the still. Through the run, the strength of what's coming off the worm falls steady as a deacon's collection after a dull sermon. It's strong at first, then it fades. Old hands would shake a little of each jar for a bead as it came off. When the beads got small, lingered and wouldn't stand up, they knew the hearts were thinning and the tails were knocking at the door. Some passed a drop over a candle across the room from the still, using Silas's long spoon, to see whether it still held a flame. Those are guides for the end of the run. They tell you how strong it is. They NEVER tell you how safe it is. Wood alcohol beads up and burns the same as good spirit. The only thing that keeps poison out of your jar is your nose, your patience, and throwing the front of the run away.
Wilkins: Silas, tell them what the copper's doing in all this.
Silas: Folks think the copper does its work in the belly of the pot, Doctor. A good deal of it happens up top, in the cap, the arm and the worm, where hot vapor rubs against the metal. That's where it grabs the sulfur that makes spirit stink of rotten eggs. So I hammer my caps tall and my arms long, with plenty of bright copper for the vapor to touch before it cools. And I keep the inside scoured, because a copper surface that's gone dull does half the work.
Wilkins: And when you cut it down to drinking strength?
Silas: Use soft water, rain or a good spring, and add it slow, a little at a time, with a rest in between. Hard well water full of minerals can cloud it. And if your whiskey turns milky the minute water touches it, Doctor, that's usually tail oil you let into your hearts. The water's just showing you your own greed.
Wilkins: The water's showing you your own greed. I'll have that carved over my door. Thank you, Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister, the best hands in the Suncook Valley. Go home and kiss your wife, and wash your hands first.
Silas: Thank you, Doctor. Barnaby, you stay right there.
♦ Barnaby grunts, chain drags
♪ Short fiddle reel transition
Wilkins: SEGMENT FOUR. Myths, slang and the mailbag. We've got a voice cylinder that came up by rail all the way from Wilkesboro, North Carolina. Let's put it on the horn.
♦ Cylinder machine cranked, needle drop, thin scratchy playback
Cletus (on recording): 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, crackle
Wilkins: Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller, of Wilkesboro, North Carolina! Rabbit, I love you and I love your uncle, and your uncle is making laundry.
Wilkins: Here's why. Go to any farmhouse from here to the Blue Ridge and you'll find an ash hopper out back, a wooden trough full of hardwood ash. Granny pours water over it and catches what drips out the bottom, and that's LYE. It's what she makes soap with, by boiling it with fat. And the ash she wants most is hickory, because hickory makes the strongest lye in the woods. So when your uncle throws hickory ash in his thump keg, he's brewing a weak lye in there. It doesn't clean anything. It turns the liquor slippery, alkaline and soapy. Rabbit, your uncle's hickory ash doesn't clean whiskey. It does laundry, and I've never met a man who wanted his dram to taste like Monday morning.
Wilkins: And it gets worse. You heard Silas a minute ago: soap in liquor fakes a bead. So your uncle's ashes may well make his whiskey LOOK stronger while it's no better and burns the throat going down. It's the same swindle Ebenezer Hodge pulled in Barnstead, only Ebenezer did it on purpose.
Wilkins: Now, red oak. Ask a cooper why he won't make a whiskey barrel of red oak. He'll put a short piece of red oak in a bucket of soapy water, put his lips to the dry end and blow, and bubbles come out the other end. The pores in red oak run the full length of the wood like pipes. White oak's pores are plugged up inside, so it holds liquor, and that's why every honest barrel is white oak. Red oak leaks so bad you can blow smoke clean through a stave, which makes it a fine material for a sieve or a sheriff's promise. Shavings of it in the keg will give your liquor colour and a puckery bite of tannin. That makes young whiskey look old and makes a buyer think he's getting aged goods. It dresses the liquor up. It doesn't clean it.
Wilkins: So, the bad heads. Rabbit, tell your uncle there's exactly one cure, and it isn't in the woodpile. It's at the spout. You throw out the foreshots and keep the heads out of the hearts, every run, every time. That's all there is to it. Nothing you put in the keg will pull out the poison you were too greedy to throw away.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: That coin is for you, Rabbit. A big copper cent with G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. struck fresh across Lady Liberty's forehead, and it's going in the post to Wilkesboro. Give your uncle my compliments, and tell him the ash hopper is for soap.
Wilkins: Now for tonight's myth, and it's a deadly one: the blue flame. Men all through these hills will tell you, 'Light a spoon of it, and if it burns blue, it's good and safe.' Hogwash.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: A blue flame tells you your spirit will burn. That's all. Good grain spirit burns pale blue, and so does wood alcohol, the blinding kind, which burns blue and nearly invisible. You can't tell them apart by the flame. Then there's that old rhyme, 'lead burns red, and you'll be dead.' Flame colour is not a reliable test for lead or for anything else. If you got your still soldered with lead or your worm from a junk pile, no candle is going to warn you. You'll just get sick.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: I strike a coin every time somebody repeats that myth, and at this rate I'll have counterstamped the entire Treasury by Thanksgiving. A blue flame tells you your spirit will burn. It doesn't tell you it won't kill you, and the undertaker over in Epsom sends his thanks to every man who mixed the two up.
Wilkins: So let's have a fair summary of tonight's three tests. The bead gives a rough guess, and it's fooled by cold, sugar, oil, soap and lye. The gunpowder test puts an explosive next to a flame and next to alcohol vapor, and it costs men eyebrows, eyes and fingers. The fire test gets you a flame you can't see in sunlight that will follow a pour back into the jar and up your sleeve. All three tell you something about STRENGTH. Not one of them tells you anything about SAFETY. Safety comes from clean copper with no lead in it, a low fire, a still-house with no open flame near the vapor, and honest cuts with the foreshots and heads thrown out. That's the alchemy. The rest is showing off.
Wilkins: And as for my rival over in Loudon, who will remain nameless because I'd hate to give him the advertisement: he proves his whiskey by drinking it until he falls down, then measures the proof by how far he fell. Last week it rated about eleven feet and a broken fence rail.
♦ Barnaby lets out a long, rumbling groan
Wilkins: Barnaby agrees. Barnaby has opinions about Loudon.
♪ Banjo theme creeps back in softly
Announcer: ONE MORE QUICK WORD, friends! Don't leave the craft to guesswork and gunpowder. Learn the old ways the safe way with the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Master Distilling Course. Start today at moonshinestill.com! That's moonshinestill.com!
♦ Wax crackle
Wilkins: That's our show, friends. If tonight's taught you anything, it's that a man can lose his eyebrows, his good name, or a steak-sized piece of his backside trying to prove what he could have learned properly. So learn it properly. Enroll in the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Master Distilling Course: eight weeks, master distillers, coppersmiths like Silas, historians, blueprints, all of it. Go to moonshinestill.com/course, or come see the copper at the showroom right here at Fort Wilkins on Route 28 in Pittsfield. Mind the bear.
Wilkins: My thanks to Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister, to Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller down in Wilkesboro, and to Mr. Thaddeus Pomfret of Concord, wherever he's sitting tonight, carefully.
Wilkins: Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.
♦ Bear grunt and final drip into jar
♪ Parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme swells and fades into wax cylinder crackle