Winter Without Whiskey: Cider, Spite, and the Long Merrimack January
In January 1865 the new $2.00 whiskey tax hits and the Suncook freezes solid, so Dr. G. G. Wilkins explains how Merrimack County got through the winter on hard cider, red-hot flip irons, freeze-jacked barrels and plain neighborly spite, and he tells how a half-asleep Barnaby greeted a deputy on snowshoes. Blue Ridge herbalist Clara Higgins brings new wartime-winter stories, including Virginia's ban on distilling grain, a hound that sniffed out a buried snow jug, two deserters splitting one jug of applejack, and a crop of Civil War soldier slang for bad liquor. Wilkins then walks through a January apple-brandy run, answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, NC about hickory ashes and red oak shavings in the thump keg, and debunks the blue-flame test at his anvil.
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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! Settle your hairy backside, you great fur-bottomed heathen. It is January. Every decent bear in New Hampshire is snoring in a hole, and you are up grunting at my window like a widower at the pie table. Lie down or I will trade you to the Concord tannery for a rug and two pairs of mittens, and the mittens will be better company.
♦ Bear huffs, chain drags across frozen ground, a heavy flop into straw, then quiet
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth
Wilkins: Good evening, you frostbit sinners, and welcome to Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, coming to you from the log fortress of Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, in Pittsfield, New Hampshire. That is Merrimack County, where the thermometer nailed to my door reads eighteen below and has given up and gone inside to get warm. The Suncook River is froze so hard the mill hands are skating to work and calling it a raise. Tonight's matter is Winter Without Whiskey: how this county got through the black heart of January on nothing but cider and spite. And mark me, friends, the spite had the higher proof.
♪ Theme fades under crackle
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♪ Short fiddle sting
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, wood stove door creaks open, a split log thrown in, door clanks shut
Wilkins: Segment the first. History, and it is a cold one. On the first day of this January, 1865, the Congress of the United States in its wisdom put the full two dollars a gallon on distilled spirits. Last summer it was a dollar and a half, and a year before that hardly sixty cents. Two dollars on New Year's Day! That is the federal way of wishing you a happy new year and picking your pocket during the handshake.
Wilkins: Now consider a Pittsfield farmer in January. His corn went to the hogs and the army. His wheat costs more than his daughter's wedding. The tavern keepers at the turnpike stage stops have marked a glass of honest rye up so high that a teamster from Barnstead has to sell an ox to get drunk, and then he has nothing to drive home. A Pittsfield winter is nine months of snow and three months of poor sledding, and in that country a man without whiskey is a man looking for a reason to stay alive until mud season.
Wilkins: So what did the county do? It went back down the cellar stairs, the way its grandfathers did. Every farmhouse from Catamount Mountain to Berry Pond has a row of cider barrels in the cellar, pressed in October from the windfalls and the wormy ones the pigs turned up their snouts at. Hard cider was the everyday drink of New England long before any of us were born. Old John Adams himself, a Massachusetts man and a President, wrote that he took a tankard of hard cider in the morning. Breakfast of a statesman! And look how the Republic turned out. Mostly upright, a little sour, and given to hollering in the afternoon.
Wilkins: But January cider is a thin, cold, cellar-bitter thing, so the old folks learned to torture it into something better. First came flip. You take a great pewter mug of cider or beer, sugar it, slop in a little rum if you hid any from the tax, and an egg if the hens are speaking to you. Then you pull the loggerhead out of the fire. That is a long iron rod with a ball at the end, kept glowing red in the tavern coals. You plunge it in the mug. Hssssss! It boils and froths and scorches and smells like burnt sugar and a blacksmith's apron. That is flip, friends. And when the second mug went down and somebody said something about somebody's sister, that same loggerhead came out of the fire for a different purpose. That is why they say two men are at loggerheads. The loggerhead was invented to heat the flip, and the second use, splitting your neighbor's skull, was the first labor-saving device in New England.
♦ Iron hiss into a mug, liquid frothing, a man's coughing laugh
Wilkins: The other trick was jacking. In a hard freeze like this one, you roll a cider barrel out into the dooryard and let the night work on it. Water freezes before spirit does. By morning there is a shell of ice inside, and in the middle, the heart of the barrel, a dark, strong, syrupy liquor that won't freeze. Bore it out, draw it off, and you have applejack. That is the poor man's still, made of nothing but January. Freeze-jacked cider is the only drink in the county that gets stronger the colder your wife is to you.
Wilkins: But listen here, because I pull teeth for a living and I have smelled the breath of the jack-drinkers in my chair. Jacking cuts nothing away. When I run a still, I throw out the first, foulest spirit that comes off, the foreshots and heads, where the wood-alcohol poison and the harsh oils ride. Freezing throws out only water. Every drop of the poison and the fusel stays in the jack, packed tighter than mourners at a rich man's funeral. That is where the old applejack headache comes from, the kind that makes a man's eyeballs feel two sizes too big for his skull. I have seen Ezra Peaslee of the upper road, a fictional fool but a true type, drink frozen-barrel jack from New Year's to Twelfth Night and wake on the eighth day convinced his hat was singing to him. It was not. It was his wife.
Wilkins: And then there was the spite. You cannot make whiskey out of spite, but by God the Suncook Valley tried. Old Deacon Thorndike of my own invention, and you all know a dozen like him, preached from Christmas to Candlemas that cider was the devil's apple juice. Then each night he took a candle down to his own barrel 'to pray over it,' and judging by the noise down there the barrel always lost. His neighbor, out of pure spite, went and told the whole congregation, and the deacon sued him for slander, out of pure spite. And the magistrate fined them both, out of pure spite, and took the barrel as evidence, and that magistrate's grin went on into March. Spite is the only crop in Merrimack County that thrives at twenty below, needs no seed and never fails at harvest.
♪ Banjo bridge, bright and twangy
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, wind against log walls, Barnaby snoring outside
Wilkins: Segment the second. Legends, outlaws, and the plain stupidity of men who carry badges. Now, folks hereabouts suppose Barnaby sleeps the winter through like a proper bear. He does not. He dozes in the woodshed straw like a drunk on a pew, one eye half open, and he wakes in January as foul as a selectman at tax time, though with better breath. Mostly.
Wilkins: This was three Januaries back. A county deputy, call him Orrin Pike, a man with a face like a boiled turnip and the brains to match, came up the turnpike on ash snowshoes in the dead of the afternoon. He had heard at the Pittsfield store that the bear was denned, and he figured to slip round back and peep in my still-house window while Barnaby snored. I was at the anvil and saw him through the frost on the glass, high-stepping over the drifts like a heron in a cranberry bog.
Wilkins: He got within six feet of the woodshed. The straw heaved up like a grave on Judgment Day, and out came four hundred pounds of black hair, steam pouring off him, breath like a privy fire. Barnaby caught the toe of that left snowshoe in his jaws and bit through the ash frame. Crack! Like a Christmas wishbone. Down goes Pike in the snow, and the bear takes hold of the man's buffalo coat by the collar and shakes it the way a terrier shakes a rat, until the coat tears straight down the back seam with a sound like a sheet ripping. Pike rolls out of the front half. Barnaby keeps the back half. And then, being a thoughtful animal, Barnaby sits on him.
Wilkins: Friends, I have heard a hog stuck at a church raffle, and I have heard a Barnstead fiddler try a waltz with a cold in his nose, and neither one squealed like Orrin Pike under that bear. Barnaby licked the frost off his face from chin to eyebrow, slow, like a boy at a sugar mold, and the deputy's whole bladder let go into his long drawers. At eighteen below, I want you to know, that sets up quicker than mortar. By the time I got my boots on and came out with a ham bone, the man was glazed from the belt down like a Christmas ham. He was frozen in the shape of his own regret.
♦ Bear growl, a man's distant wail, chain snapping taut
Wilkins: I traded Barnaby the ham bone for the deputy. In all the thrashing Pike had cracked his face on my chopping block and snapped two front teeth off at the gum. Now I am a merciful man and a licensed tooth-puller, and I set him in my chair by lantern light and drew those broken roots out with my forceps. The first came easy. The second was hooked like a fishhook and came out with a crunch I could feel in my own elbow. He bled down his chin onto the half of his coat he had left. I charged him half a dollar. And what does he pay me with? A copper cent I'd struck myself at this anvil, G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. So the county paid my fee with my own advertisement. That coin went round the valley and came home to roost like a pigeon.
Wilkins: And I'll tell you a fact about the stamping in this weather, since I am a metallurgist when I'm not a menace. In deep cold, iron and steel go brittle. Copper does not. Strike a coin with a cold steel punch on a January morning and it's the punch that chips, not the cent. So I warm my punch in the forge until it's comfortable to hold before I strike. Copper's like a good woman in winter, friends: soft and forgiving when everything else around you turns hard and cracks.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Now, I have a guest tonight who came all the way up from the Blue Ridge of Virginia. Lord knows why. She could be sitting by a warm Virginia hearth, and instead she's in a log fort with a bear that has eaten half a deputy's overcoat. Mountain herbalist and an authority on every rude name ever hung on a jug. Miss Clara Higgins, welcome to Fort Wilkins.
Clara: Well, thank you, Doctor. I've been up here three days and I've not felt my toes since Concord. Y'all don't have winter in New Hampshire. You have a punishment the Lord made up special and called it weather.
Wilkins: And we're grateful for it, because it keeps out the Virginians. Now, Miss Clara, what does Winter Without Whiskey mean down in your hollows? I'm told you folks had it worse than we did.
Clara: Oh, we had it whole hog, Doctor. Back early in the war, Richmond went and banned distilling grain. Corn and wheat were for bread and the army, they said. Meanwhile the government was buying up whiskey for the hospitals, so they called it medicine when they drank it and a crime when we did. So my kinfolk in the hollow drank frozen-barrel cider all winter, and they took to calling it Assembly water.
Wilkins: Assembly water!
Clara: After the legislature that made 'em drink it. Granddaddy said it was the only thing the General Assembly ever give him that he could hold in his hand, and he was right sorry he could.
Wilkins: Ha! That's a better name than any politician has earned. Tell me about the slang, Miss Clara. What were the soldier boys calling bad liquor, both sides of the line?
Clara: Lord, the boys were poets when it came to rotgut. They called it tanglefoot, 'cause it would braid your legs up like a pigtail. Bust-head, because that's what it done. Oh-be-joyful, which was mighty hopeful. Rifle knock-knee. And nockum stiff, which was what it did to a man, knocked him stiff as a fence rail. A soldier would say, I took two pulls of that nockum stiff and woke up with my boots on my hands and my hands in the colonel's cornbread.
Wilkins: Nockum stiff. I have served a few deputies some nockum stiff myself, though mine came in bear form. Now, tell us one from your own family, Miss Clara. A January story.
Clara: Well, my great-great-granny Tabitha was a hard woman, and she kept what she called her snow jug. Big brown stoneware jug of persimmon brandy. Come the first good snowfall she'd bury it in a drift at the foot of the springhouse, with a hickory stake to mark it, so no revenue man nor no husband would find it. Only trouble was the hound. Old dog named Preacher.
Wilkins: A dog named Preacher. I like him already.
Clara: Every thaw, without fail, that dog would dig down to the jug and set there howlin' over it like a camp-meeting revival, Doctor, just a-baying to Heaven. Whole holler knew where Granny's brandy was by the sound. She said Preacher was the only Christian in the family, 'cause he always led sinners straight to the spirit.
Wilkins: Ha! That's a dog with a calling. Did she ever move the jug?
Clara: Moved it every year, and that hound found it every year. Finally she give up and poured him a capful in his dish come spring, and Preacher quit howlin', and then she had two drunks on the porch instead of one.
♦ Wilkins slapping the table, laughing, cylinder crackle
Clara: Now here's one about this very month, January of '65. We had a sugar camp up on the ridge, maple sugar camp, with a rough lean-to for the boilin'. My kin went up after a snow and found two fellas in it. One was a Union deserter in a blue coat, and the other was a Confederate deserter in a gray coat, both of 'em starved half to death and both of 'em sharin' one jug of applejack they'd found buried under the sap kettle.
Wilkins: The war ends in a sugar shack. Lincoln and Davis ought to have saved the powder.
Clara: Well, Doctor, it wasn't peaceable. They was keepin' score with notches on a single ramrod, one side for blue and one for gray, so neither'd drink a swallow more'n the other. And they came to the last swallow, and they argued over whose turn it was. Argued two days. Finally they got so spiteful that the Union boy took the jug and poured that last swallow right on the fire so the Reb couldn't have it. And the Reb shook his hand for it. Said it was the fairest thing a Yankee ever done.
Wilkins: That's the whole war, isn't it? Spite down to the last drop and then a handshake over the ashes. And what of the ramrod?
Clara: Granddaddy kept it over the door. Thirty-one notches on the blue side, thirty-one on the gray. Even as a fiddle tuned.
Wilkins: One more, Miss Clara, and make it a scandal.
Clara: Oh, I'll give you a preacher, Doctor, since you're fond of 'em. We had a circuit rider in Rockbridge County, temperance man, thin as a rake handle. All that January he rode from church to church thunderin' against the jug. Said liquor was the serpent's milk. Said a drinkin' man's soul would freeze in Hell, which was a novel idea in January. And the whole time he wore a pair of tall boots, and down in the shank of each boot was a flat tin flask of apple brandy, a-warmin' against his shin.
Wilkins: Oh, a hot-footed hypocrite!
Clara: Well, it come to the big revival in a Lexington meetin' house, and he got down on his knees on the floorboards for the closing prayer, and his soles went glug, glug, glug in front of four hundred people. You could've heard a pin drop, except it wasn't a pin, it was the apple brandy. A widow in the front pew hollered out, Brother, your boots are backslidin'!
Wilkins: A preacher whose boots gurgle when he kneels is a man of two faiths, and one of them is aged in oak. Miss Clara Higgins, you're a treasure and a scandal, and you may stay at Fort Wilkins as long as you like, so long as you don't let the bear hear your persimmon stories. He's partial.
Clara: Doctor, that bear looked at me this mornin' like I was a pie on a windowsill. I'll keep my persimmons to myself.
♪ Fiddle reel swells, then cuts to a showman's drum roll
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♪ Brass flourish, then banjo returns
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, the copper pot ticking as it warms, a fire crackling low
Wilkins: Segment the third: Copper and the Craft. Now, friends, a word I mean plain. Making spirits to drink without a federal permit is against the law of the United States. What follows is history and the education of the curious, and if you want to try any of it, get yourself licensed like a gentleman. Here is how an old Merrimack hand would turn a cellar of January cider into apple brandy, step by step.
Wilkins: Step one, the cider. You pressed it in October, put it in barrels in a cellar that stays above freezing, and let it work. Cold yeast is lazy yeast. A cider that sits in a frozen cellar will sulk till April. Keep it near the chimney, cool but not cold. Step two, once the working has quit and the bubbling stops, draw the cider off the dead yeast at the bottom, the lees, so you don't burn that sludge to the bottom of your pot and get a stink like a scorched mitten.
Wilkins: Step three, charge the copper pot. Fill it no more than three parts in four, because apple wash foams like a mad dog's lip, and a full pot will puke froth into your arm and your worm and stop them up. Step four, a low fire. Hardwood, steady and patient. Run the cider through once and gather all of it that comes over, which we call low wines. Step five, run those low wines a second time, slower still, and this is where you earn your keep, because now you make your cuts.
Wilkins: The first spirit to drip is the foreshots. Throw them out. All of it. Do not drink it, do not rinse your mouth with it, do not give it to a deputy no matter how much he deserves it. Then come the heads, sharp, smelling of lamp spirit and pear drops and a headache yet to come. Out they go too, or into a jar marked for the fire, never the cup. And mark this, because apples are not corn. Fruit makes more of the wood-alcohol poison than grain does, because the pectin that sets your grandmother's jelly breaks down into it in the working. So with apple brandy you throw away more at the front end, not less. When in doubt, throw it out. Better a short jug than a short life.
Wilkins: Then come the hearts, sweet and clean, smelling of baked apple and a warm kitchen. Those you keep. Then the tails, oily and flat, smelling of a wet dog in a hay barn. Set them aside to go back into the next run. And January gives you one blessing for all its curses. Pack your worm tub with snow. Snow makes the finest condenser water God ever shoveled, and it is the only thing in New Hampshire that comes free and falls on the rich and the deputies alike.
♦ Shovel scraping snow, snow packed into a wooden tub, sizzle
Wilkins: Now, the alchemy. Apple juice is poor food for yeast. It's sweet but starved, and starved yeast gives off a rotten-egg stink, sulfur in the air of it. Run that through iron and your brandy will smell like a spoilt duck egg in a hot pocket. Run it through bright copper, and the copper grabs that sulfur on its way past and holds it fast to the metal, and the spirit comes out sweet. That is why the metal must be kept bright. And the old way to brighten it is with the very cider gone wrong: cider vinegar and a handful of salt, scrubbed with a rag till the copper blushes like a bride. Then rinse it, and rinse it again, with clean water, so not a lick of salt nor sour is left behind to work on the pot.
Wilkins: And fire, friends. Fire is the January killer. In winter a man shuts his still-house up tight as a coffin against the cold, and lights his stove, and he's breathing the stove's foul air, the kind with no smell that puts you to sleep and doesn't let you wake. Crack a window, even at twenty below. And if one joint leaks spirit vapor in a closed room with a lantern hanging by the spout, you'll go up to Heaven in a single whoosh without the courtesy of a hymn. Never leave a run alone. Keep the spout far from any flame. Keep a pail of sand by the door. I lost an eyebrow in '58 and Barnaby has never let me forget it. He looks at the bald side and grunts.
♦ Barnaby grunts outside, chain clinks
Wilkins: You hear? He remembers.
♪ Banjo bridge with a mischievous turn
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, the scratch of a second cylinder being set on the machine
Wilkins: Segment the fourth: myths, slang, and the mail bag. Tonight I've a message, caught on a cylinder and carried north by the mail, from a gentleman in Wilkesboro, North Carolina. Let us hear him.
♦ Second wax cylinder spins up, heavy crackle
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?
♦ Cylinder clicks off
Wilkins: Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro! Named after John Wilkes, that Wilkesboro is, the English rascal who annoyed the King of England for a living. I claim him as kin by temperament if not by blood. Rabbit, your uncle isn't crazy. He's just a hundred years out of season. Let me tell you where the ash idea come from.
Wilkins: Wood ash, boiled and leached, makes lye and potash. That was the first cash crop of New England before there was a town here worth the name. Settlers burned whole forests to sell the ashes. And the very first patent the United States ever granted, in 1790, went to a Mr. Samuel Hopkins for a better way of making potash. So when the old-timers had a thing that cleaned their shirts and their kettles and made their soap, they figured it ought to clean their liquor too.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: But here's the trouble. Lye and grease make soap. That is how your granny made it. So you throw ash into a pot where there's any oil in the wash at all, and you're making soap in the still, and soap makes foam, and foam climbs. It climbs out of the pot, up the arm, into the thump keg, and right on into the worm, and plugs her up while the fire's still going under her. Rabbit, an ash bucket in a thump keg is how you make soap out of liquor, and then the only clean thing in the run is the floor after she boils over. Ash doesn't take out the poison. The poison comes off first in the foreshots and heads, and the only cure is throwing them out.
Wilkins: Now the red oak shavings. Oak gives tannin and color, and a man sees his liquor go amber and figures he's cleaned it. Color is not purity, Rabbit. A deputy in a clean coat is still a deputy. And red oak is the wrong oak entirely. White oak has little natural plugs in its grain that keep the liquor in. Red oak hasn't got 'em. It's open-pored as a sponge. Coopers won't make a liquor barrel out of it. Red oak holds liquor the way a deputy holds a secret: it leaks out every side, and the whole county smells it by Thursday.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: And while I've got the hammer in my hand, let me knock down one more old lie. The blue flame. Every tavern loafer from here to Wilkesboro will pour a spoonful of liquor, set a match to it, and if it burns blue he calls it good and safe. Listen to me. The good spirit burns blue, and the wood-alcohol poison burns blue too, pale as a ghost's nightshirt. A blue flame proves your whiskey will burn. So will a cord of birch, and so will a revenue man's warrant, and neither one is fit to drink. Flame color can't find the poison. Your cuts are the only test that counts.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin, coin rings as it drops onto the anvil
Wilkins: Rabbit, that coin I just struck is yours, G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., and I'll send it south with my compliments. Tell your uncle he's welcome to keep his ashes for the soap kettle, where they belong. Thank you for writing, Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, and keep your ears up, Rabbit.
♪ Fiddle sting
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♪ Parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme returns, soft and warm
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, the stove ticking, wind easing outside
Wilkins: That's our January, friends. A county with its whiskey taxed out of reach, drinking cider in the cellar, heating flip with a red-hot iron, jacking barrels in the dooryard, and keeping warm on spite. My thanks to Miss Clara Higgins of the Blue Ridge, who has taught me that Virginians are just Yankees who talk slower before they cheat you.
Clara: And thank you, Doctor. I'll tell the folks back home that New Hampshire is a mighty fine place, from the far side of a stove.
Wilkins: If you'd learn the honest craft the honest way, the copper, the mash, the cuts and the fire, sign on for the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. I'll teach you everything I know about turning fruit and grain into history, and nothing about getting yourself sat on by a bear. That last lesson you'll have to learn on your own, like Orrin Pike did.
♦ Barnaby grunts at the window, chain clinks
Wilkins: Yes, yes, you too, you overgrown rug. Friends, keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.
♦ Bear grunt and final drip into jar
♪ Theme fades into wax cylinder crackle, then silence