Barrels from the Cooper's Yard
Dr. G. G. Wilkins visits the cooper's yard by the Suncook falls to cover riven white-oak staves, hoop-poles, firing and charring, and why a root cellar can't be hurried. He tells how a revenue gauger got a rod full of mackerel brine, and how Barnaby pulled a deputy out of an empty puncheon like a molar. Blue Ridge herbalist Clara Higgins brings new barrel stories: a keg tied to a mill wheel, a cooper's notched-hoop code, her grandmother's burnt eyebrows, and a cousin who sweated a pickle barrel. Wilkins also answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller's question about hickory ashes and red oak shavings in the thump keg, and knocks down the bead test and the idea that dark whiskey means old whiskey.
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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! Get your snout out of that cider cask, you four-hundred-pound sack of fleas and flatulence. That cask belongs to the cooper. It is not your feed trough, and I will not climb out that window again to pull a barrel hoop out of your gullet. Last time it took me, my best molar forceps, and a bucket of hog lard, and the hoop came out the end nature never intended, singing like a church bell.
♦ Bear huffs, chain rattles, then drops slack in the dirt
Wilkins: There. He has lain down on top of it like a drunk alderman on a bench and he will not move till supper. Good.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth, swells and then settles under
Wilkins: Good evening, neighbors, sinners, and whatever revenue man is listening with his ear to the chinking. Welcome to Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, broadcasting from Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, in Pittsfield, New Hampshire. I am your host, Doctor George G. Wilkins: tooth-puller, blacksmith, inventor, alchemist, and twice a guest of the Merrimack County sheriff, which is twice more than that sheriff has ever been host to an honest thought.
Wilkins: Tonight's subject is Barrels from the Cooper's Yard. We have oak, fire, hoops, root cellars, and the most dangerous thing in distilling. That is not wood spirit, not the revenue man, and not that bear. It is impatience. Later on I have Miss Clara Higgins, up from the Blue Ridge of Virginia by the cars, with a mouth on her that would make a mule skinner blush. And I have a cylinder from a fellow in Wilkesboro, North Carolina, who wants to know about hickory ashes. But first, the gentleman who pays for my lamp oil.
♪ Brief cornet fanfare, patent-medicine style
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♪ Fanfare cuts off; theme returns briefly and fades
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Wilkins: Segment the first. Pull your chair up to the stove and let us speak of the barrel, the most honest piece of furniture a Yankee owns. Think on it. Every blessed thing in New England has lived in a barrel at some point: salt pork, salt cod, flour, nails, lamp oil, cider, the molasses that comes up from the Indies to be turned into rum, and now and then a dead admiral.
Wilkins: You think I jest. When Lord Nelson took his musket ball at Trafalgar in 1805, the British could not bear to bury him at sea. They folded his lordship into a cask of brandy and sailed him home to London. The sailors' tale is that some of the crew drilled a little hole and drank from that cask on the voyage, and to this day an old salt calls a sneaked drink 'tapping the admiral.' Picture it, neighbors. You lift the cup, and there's a faint aftertaste of epaulettes and a good deal of admiral. I've drunk worse at Grange suppers.
♦ Distant rhythmic tock-tock of a cooper's mallet driving a hoop
Wilkins: You hear that knocking? That's Amos Brackett down at the cooper's yard by the falls of the Suncook, driving hoops. Amos has hands like two burnt hams and a vocabulary that would peel the varnish off a hearse, and I love him like a brother, which is to say I want to strangle him three days a week. Amos is a tight cooper, also called a wet cooper. That means his casks hold liquid: cider, spirits, molasses. A slack cooper, or dry cooper, makes barrels for flour and nails and apples, where a little gap between the staves does no harm. Then there's the white cooper, who makes pails and churns and washtubs and gets no respect from either of the others.
Wilkins: The first secret of a tight cask is that Amos never saws a stave. He splits it, rives it out of the bolt with a froe and a maul, because a split follows the grain the way water follows a ditch. Saw across the grain and you open up a thousand little channels, and the cask weeps like a widow at a reading of the will, where she finds the money went to the hired man. A riven stave stays tight.
Wilkins: The second secret is the oak. It has to be white oak, nothing else. White oak has its pores stopped up from inside by little bladders the wood grows, the way Providence stopped up the ears of my mother-in-law. Red oak is open-pored as a sieve. Amos once took a length of red oak, put his lips to one end, and blew his pipe smoke clean out the other end three feet away. Red oak holds whiskey the way a deputy holds a secret: it weeps it out the sides to anybody standing close. Red oak goes to the slack cooper for apple barrels and nobody cries about it.
Wilkins: Then the hoops. Before iron hoops took the trade, and plenty of them still today, a cask was bound with hoop-poles: hickory or ash saplings split down the middle and bent green. Many a farmer in Barnstead and Gilmanton paid his winter taxes cutting hoop-poles in the swamp and hauling them to the cooper. A cooper is the only man in New Hampshire paid to put a ring on something and have it stay faithful.
Wilkins: The old Bay Colony thought barrels so important that the towns appointed officers called cullers of staves, to go through a cooper's lumber and throw out the bad pieces, and gaugers, to measure what a cask held so nobody got cheated on a hogshead of rum. You'd think a free people would resent that. They did, but they resented a leaky rum cask more. Today the gauger works for Washington. He comes up Route 28 with his long rod and his little brass-bound book, dips my barrels, and figures what I owe the Union. That gauger dips his rod in my barrels more often than he dips it anywhere at home, and his wife wrote me a letter of thanks.
Wilkins: Now, fire. When Amos raises a cask he stands the staves up in a ring with a hoop on one end, the barrel splayed out like a petticoat, and he sets a cresset inside. That's an iron fire basket full of oak chips. The heat softens the staves, he wets them down, and he draws them together with a rope and windlass until they bend into the belly of the barrel. Leave the fire in longer and the inside goes black and crackled like gator hide. That's the char.
Wilkins: Ask who first charred a barrel on purpose and you'll get as many answers as there are liars in a tavern. Kentuckians credit a parson named Craig. Others say some cooper got careless with his cresset. Some say a fellow bought used fish casks cheap and burned them out to get rid of the mackerel stink. I can't prove a word of any of them and neither can they. What I can tell you is what that fire does to the spirit. That's coming, after we hear about some men who dodged the gauger.
♪ Fiddle sting, a quick rising run
♦ Wax cylinder crackle; Barnaby snores outside
Wilkins: Segment the second: legends, outlaws, and the occasional bear. Let me confess one, since the statute has run on it and the gauger in question has gone to Ohio, which is punishment enough.
Wilkins: Spring of '64, I had Amos build me a special cask, double-headed. A false head sat four inches below the real top, sealed tight with flour paste and beeswax. The little chamber on top I filled with mackerel brine and a few genuine fish heads, eyes and all. Below the false head was forty gallons of my finest. I branded the head SALT MACKEREL, BOSTON, and rolled it into the shed with three honest fish barrels.
Wilkins: The gauger came. He sniffed, he frowned, he pulled the bung on my special cask and ran his rod down. It came up dripping brine with a mackerel eye stuck to the end of it, looking at him like it pitied him. He gagged, he wrote 'fish, no spirit' in his little book, and he went out to the turnpike and was sick in the ditch. And Barnaby, God bless him, came and ate what the gauger left there. A bear will eat anything twice.
♦ Bear grunts in his sleep
Wilkins: Now the puncheon. A puncheon is a big cask, eighty-odd gallons. I keep an empty one behind the still-house that has had whiskey soaking into its staves for six years. A county deputy named Hollis Pike came sneaking around one August night to catch me at the worm. He heard Barnaby's chain, panicked, knocked the head out of that empty puncheon, and climbed in like a hermit crab. He figured no bear would think to look in a barrel.
Wilkins: Hollis was wrong about bears and barrels. What Barnaby smelled was six years of good spirit soaked into white oak, and maybe some deputy. He came around on his chain and hooked his claws over the rim. He pulled that puncheon over, and Hollis inside began to pray, loud and out of tune. Barnaby got his teeth on the boot and pulled him out of that barrel the way I pull a stubborn molar: a twist, a crack, and a good deal more screaming than the job required. It sounded like a hog at the scalding tub.
Wilkins: Hollis came out of there like a cork out of a bung, and he left behind one boot, one warrant, and a square of trouser seat with a square of himself still attached. I'll spare you the color of it. No, I won't. It was the pink of a boiled ham and it bled like a Fourth of July speech. Barnaby didn't want him. Barnaby wanted the barrel. He licked the soak out of those staves for an hour and spent the rest of the night singing to a woodchuck.
Wilkins: I sat Hollis on my dental chair face down and stitched his backside with silk thread and a curved needle. He bit through a leather strap and called me names his mother never taught him. I poured a little spirit on the wound to clean it, which made him bite through a second strap. He paid me fifty cents for the stitching and never came back to Fort Wilkins without hollering from the road first. That's what I call a law-abiding relationship.
♪ Banjo vamp, warm and quick
Wilkins: My guest tonight came up from Virginia by the cars with a carpetbag full of dried roots and a tongue like a skinning knife. From the Blue Ridge, an herbalist and a scholar of every rude word a mountain ever uttered over a jug: Miss Clara Higgins. Welcome to Fort Wilkins, Clara.
Clara: Well, thank you, Doctor. I'll say this for your fort: it's the first place north of the Potomac where the welcome came from a bear. He sniffed my satchel like a customs man.
Wilkins: He's checking for ginseng. He's partial to it.
Clara: Mister, you keep that bear the way my granddaddy kept a Bible, chained up close and mostly for scaring company.
Wilkins: Ha! Now, Clara, we're talking barrels tonight. You mountain folk can't have had a cooper on every ridge. How did you age a thing?
Clara: Impatiently, Doctor, the same as everybody. I'll tell you about my Uncle Jubal. Uncle Jubal had a keg of persimmon brandy he thought was too young and sassy. He'd heard tell that whiskey which rode down the river on a flatboat came out older from all the rocking. So he reckoned a week of rocking was as good as a year of sitting. He took that keg over to the mill on the creek in Rockbridge County, and in the dark of night he lashed it to the paddles of the wheel.
Wilkins: To the wheel itself? Going round?
Clara: Round and round, under the water and up again, all week long. Uncle Jubal said it aged ten years in a week. It surely aged the miller ten years in a week. That keg wept brandy into the millrace the whole time, and the miller's cornmeal came out smelling like a tavern floor. Every family on the creek ate johnnycake that month and swore the johnnycake gave them barrel fever.
Wilkins: Barrel fever. Say what that is for the folks in Epsom.
Clara: Barrel fever is the miseries after drink: the head pounding and the belly sour and you wishing to God you'd been born a fence post. On the creek they called the miller's johnnycake 'tanglefoot bread' and kept on buying it.
Wilkins: And what did the keg taste like at the end of the week?
Clara: Creek water and regret, Doctor. And there wasn't but a quart left in it.
Wilkins: There's the lesson of impatience in one keg. Tell me about your coopers down there, the honest ones and the other kind.
Clara: There was a cooper over in the Shenandoah Valley, Hezekiah Rowe, who made flour barrels and spirit kegs out of the same shop. The runners came in the dark with no lantern, because a lantern is a confession. So old Hezekiah took a file and cut notches in his hoops: one notch for flour, two for brandy. A man could run his thumb round the top hoop in pitch black and know what he was loading without striking a match.
Wilkins: That's a clever man. Did the revenue ever find him out?
Clara: A revenue man did catch on, after he unloaded a wagon of flour and found two notches on every barrel. So Hezekiah quit notching and started counting nails in the barrel heads instead: an even number for flour, odd for brandy. That poor revenue man spent a whole summer counting nails, Doctor, and he never did figure out whether it was the nails or Hezekiah that was odd.
Wilkins: The Treasury should hire that cooper for a clerk. Now tell me, did the women of your family char their own kegs, or leave the fire to the men?
Clara: Lord, the women did it, because the men were off courting and lying. My grandmother charred a keg in the dooryard one fall. She had it on its side over a fire of hickory chips and was turning it with a stick. Her apron strings blew into the coals and went up like a fuse on a Fourth of July rocket. She didn't scream, she just set down the stick, walked three steps to the spring branch, and rolled right into it like a sow in a wallow.
Wilkins: Was she hurt?
Clara: Not much, but she lost both her eyebrows, singed clean off, and she wore a face of permanent surprise that whole season. She drew them back on with lamp-black for church, and she drew them a little too high. The preacher said she looked so astonished at his sermons it made him preach better.
Wilkins: Lamp-black brows! Well, I'll say it plain to every soul listening: you char a keg out of doors, nowhere near your still or any spirit, with a bucket of water at your elbow. Fire and drink don't keep company. Go on, Clara, I can see you've got another one.
Clara: My cousin Tobe. Tobe heard that an emptied whiskey barrel still holds a good deal of spirit soaked into the wood, which is true. So he got himself one, poured in hot water, rolled it around the yard for a day, and drained off the washings to sell. That's what they call sweating a barrel.
Wilkins: That's true enough. White oak drinks spirit like a deacon drinks gossip.
Clara: But Tobe didn't ask what that barrel had held last. It was the barrel Aunt Effie kept her pickled pig's feet in. The sweating come out yellow and briny and smelling like a smokehouse in a thunderstorm. Tobe put it in jugs and sold it to a tax collector passing through as genuine Tidewater rye.
Wilkins: And the tax collector drank it?
Clara: Drank two swallows and said it had a fine maritime character. Doctor, there's no force in creation so strong as a government man determined not to look a fool.
Wilkins: Clara, before you go, give my listeners a bit of your barrel slang. They're tired of hearing me cuss.
Clara: Well, there's tanglefoot, which is liquor that ties your feet in a knot. There's forty-rod, meaning it'll kill a man at forty rods' distance. Bust-head is anything that goes in sweet and comes out a hammer. And when a fellow's too impatient to wait for the jug and puts his mouth straight to the barrel, we say he's 'drinking from the bung.' It's not a compliment, Doctor. It's what we say about a man who's no account.
Wilkins: Then I have been called no account by better women than you, Clara, and none of them so prettily. Miss Clara Higgins of the Blue Ridge, everybody. Stay put, I may need you to talk that bear out of the cider.
Clara: I'll throw him a persimmon and pray.
♪ Fiddle and banjo flourish, then a brass-band snare roll
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
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♪ Snare roll ends with a cymbal tap; theme returns softly
♦ Wax cylinder crackle; fire crackling under a copper pot
Wilkins: Segment the third: copper and the craft. First the plain word. The law of the land requires a federal permit to distill spirits for drinking, and what you hear in this log fort is history and instruction. Now, a barrel can't save a bad run, so let's start where the run starts.
Wilkins: The wash comes into the pot already fermented, a sour, low beer of grain or fruit. You bring it up gentle, with the fire low, mind you, because alcohol vapor near an open flame will burn your shed down around your ears. The first drops off the worm are the foreshots. They smell like a varnish shop, and they carry wood spirit, the same poison that blinds a man and then kills him. I pour every drop of the foreshots out on the ground, and not on the ground where Barnaby walks. Then come the heads, sharp and nail-polish nasty. They go out too, never into a cup and never into a barrel. Then the hearts come sweet and clean, and the hearts are all that goes into oak. Last the tails run oily and dog-wet, and I set them aside for the next charge.
Wilkins: The copper has already done the first scrubbing. The bright metal grabs the sulfur that would make the spirit stink like a rotten egg in a hot stable, and it holds onto it. The barrel does the second scrubbing. That black char inside the cask is charcoal, and charcoal grabs harsh compounds and some of the sulfur the copper missed. So the copper scrubs the spirit and the char polishes it.
Wilkins: Under the char is the toasted layer. That's oak heated but not burnt. The fire breaks the wood's lignin down into a vanilla smell you'd swear came from a pastry shop in Boston, and it breaks the wood sugars into something like caramel. That's where your color comes from, and your sweetness. Spirit comes off the still clear as spring water, every drop. Any man who tells you his whiskey ran amber out of the worm is lying, or he's got rust in his copper and you shouldn't drink a drop.
Wilkins: Here's how I char a small keg, step by step. One: do it outside, far off from the still-house and any spirit or vapor, with two buckets of water close by, because two is how many you'll want when the first one tips over. Two: knock out one head, stand the keg up open-end up, and set a handful of oak shavings burning inside. Three: let it roar. Inside of a minute you'll hear it crackle and see the staves blister. Four: when it's black and checked like an alligator's back, clap the head on loosely to smother it, or dash in a dipper of water. Stand back from the steam, because it'll scald you worse than any sheriff. Five: knock the loose soot out, set the head back, drive the hoops snug, and fill her with clean water for a day or two to swell the wood. A new keg weeps till the oak drinks its fill. Then empty the water and fill her with hearts.
Wilkins: I bring my hearts down with spring water before they go in, to a touch over a hundred by my Sikes hydrometer. That's the same instrument the British excise adopted back in 1818. They're a dreadful empire, but they're good at measuring what they mean to tax.
Wilkins: Then down to the root cellar, alongside the potatoes and the turnips and the jar of horseradish my wife is saving to punish me with. A root cellar is cool and steady, and that means slow. The spirit sits there like a judge on a hot afternoon, barely moving. In the summer the cellar warms a hair and the spirit swells into the wood, and in the winter it cools and the spirit draws back out carrying the oak's sweetness with it. Every season is a breath, in and out. Most years you get only a few good breaths.
Wilkins: Now, the cellar takes its toll. Down in a damp cellar, the spirit gets out through the wood faster than the water does, so your proof drops a little every year. Up in a dry, hot garret it goes the other way: the water leaves faster and the proof climbs. Either way the barrel gets lighter. Folks call it the angels' share. The angels of Merrimack County must be a thirsty lot, for they take more off me than the Bureau of Internal Revenue does.
Wilkins: Now impatience. Impatience in whiskey is like impatience on the wedding night: the result is raw and harsh, and somebody ends up weeping in the cellar. A man will set his keg against the kitchen stove to hurry it. I've seen it done, by the Tilton boys up the turnpike. The staves dried and shrank, the hoops slid down like an old man's stockings, and the spirit ran across the floorboards straight toward the firebox. Their mother put it out with a horse blanket and then put the boys out with a broom. No heat near spirit. None.
Wilkins: Another man buys a little two-gallon keg because he's heard small kegs work faster, and it's true, because more of the spirit touches wood. But if he forgets it a month too long it tastes like he licked a split-rail fence in August. A small keg needs tasting every week or two, out of a clean glass thief, and you pull it when it's right, not when the calendar says. I have the patience of a saint, provided the saint is pulling his own tooth.
Wilkins: And the worst men of all are the city rectifiers. A Boston rectifier can make whiskey six years old in a single afternoon, the same way a Concord dowager stays thirty-nine for a decade. He does it with burnt sugar for color, prune juice for body, and a plug of chewing tobacco for bite. Tobacco in spirit will give you the green sweats and a heart going like a rabbit's. Those rascals are the reason I trust no color I didn't watch the oak put there myself.
♪ Low fiddle drone under
♦ Wax cylinder crackle; the click of a cylinder machine being cranked
Wilkins: Segment the fourth: myths, slang, and the mail. We've got a cylinder come up by express from the far side of the Yadkin. Let's hear it.
♦ Cylinder hiss and a faint mechanical whir
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, North Carolina! Any town that half-spells my name is kin, and Wilkesboro owes me back rent on the first four letters. Rabbit, I'll take your uncle's two remedies one at a time, and gently, because he's family to you and a fool to me.
Wilkins: Hickory ashes first. Every farm wife in New Hampshire knows what hardwood ash is good for. You run water through it in a hopper and you get lye. That's potash. This state used to run asheries all up the Merrimack, boiling potash down in kettles to sell to soap-makers and glassmen, and it fetched hard money when nothing else did. So when your uncle tosses hickory ash into his doubler, what he has made is a kettle of weak lye soap. It foams, it scums, it leaves a grey crust on the copper, and it does nothing at all about the heads. Rabbit, hickory ash in a doubler makes soap, and your uncle's is the only whiskey in Wilkes County that will wash your mouth out and dirty it in the same swallow.
Wilkins: Now the red oak shavings. Here's where your uncle wandered into tonight's lesson without knowing it. Red oak is the open-pored oak, the one no tight cooper will let in his shop, the one Amos Brackett blows his pipe smoke clean through. A cooper won't make a cask that holds whiskey out of red oak, and your uncle wants it to clean whiskey? Shavings in a hot thump keg will give the vapor a little woody, puckery taste, and some old-timers did put fruit and such in the doubler for flavor. But it's a tea of fence rail, Rabbit, and a fence rail never improved anybody's head except by falling on it.
Wilkins: The heads come off at the front of the run, and the only cure for them is a man with his nose over the jar and the nerve to pour them out. No ash, no shavings, and no prayer does it for him.
Wilkins: Rabbit, I'm going to stamp you a cent for your trouble and nail it to the head of my next keg. That keg is yours in name, and in spirit if you ever walk up Route 28.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., struck square on Miss Liberty's forehead. That's Rabbit's Cask now. Hold still, Barnaby, it isn't for you.
♦ Bear grunt, chain clink
Wilkins: Now a pair of myths while the anvil's warm. Myth the first: shake the bottle, watch the bead, and if the bubbles sit up big and slow, the spirit is pure and safe. Hogwash. The bead gives you a rough notion of strength and that's all it gives you. Spirit full of wood spirit will bead just as prettily as a parson's daughter's best lace, and it'll blind you all the same. The bead tells you how strong it is, not whether it's clean. Only honest cuts make it clean.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Myth the second: the darker the whiskey, the older and finer it is. Dark whiskey proves age the way a dark beard proves wisdom: half of them are dyed with stove-blacking. I told you about the Boston rectifier and his burnt sugar. A small keg left too long by a warm stove will go dark as coffee in a season and taste like a burnt barn. A big old cask in a cold cellar can stay pale as straw for years and taste like heaven's own pantry. Taste it and smell it. Don't go by the color.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: And a bonus myth from Clara's Uncle Jubal: tie your keg to a mill wheel and it ages ten years in a week. No, friend. It doesn't age in a week. It goes to the miller.
Clara: And it ages the miller.
Wilkins: The lady has the last word, which is how it's always been in this valley. Benjamin Rush once drew up a Moral Thermometer to show where drink leads a man. Mine reads 'Pittsfield' at the bottom and 'Pittsfield, but louder' at the top.
♪ Theme creeps up under
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♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Wilkins: That's the end of the barrel for tonight, neighbors. If you want to learn the whole art from me, the mash and the cuts, the copper and the oak, and the patience I so plainly lack, then sign up for the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. Enquire at the showroom here at Fort Wilkins on Route 28, or by way of moonshinestill.com. I teach history, chemistry, and safety, and a little bad language at no extra charge. My thanks to Miss Clara Higgins of the Blue Ridge, to Rabbit Miller of Wilkesboro, to Amos Brackett for the noise, and to Deputy Hollis Pike's backside for the material.
Clara: Goodnight, Doctor. Mind your eyebrows.
Wilkins: And mind yours, Clara. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.
♦ Bear grunt and final drip into jar