The Bear Who Wouldn't Leave the Still
In the winter of 1864-65, a cold snap and three barrels of frozen cider drive Barnaby into the boiler room at Fort Wilkins, and he refuses to leave until spring. A deputy who mistakes him for a buffalo robe in the dark learns the hard way. Master coppersmith Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister talks about soldering a seam with the bear asleep across his shins and about the choked chimney that finally drove Barnaby out. Wilkins walks through colonial cider jacking and step-by-step apple brandy with careful cuts. He also answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, NC, about whether hickory ashes and red oak shavings belong in a thump keg, and knocks down the blue flame myth.
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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 off that boiler-room latch, you four-hundred-pound sack of wet sin. It is the middle of November, not the Second Coming, and that firebox is not taking lodgers.
♦ Bear huffs, chain drags across frozen planks
Wilkins: Don't you sass me. I have pulled teeth out of better jaws than yours, and I kept the teeth. Settle. SETTLE. There. Lie down in the leaves like the Almighty intended and quit fogging my window glass. Your breath smells like a tannery fell into a cheese cellar.
♦ Long grumbling bear sigh, chain slumps into the leaves
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth
Wilkins: Good evening, neighbors, rogues, widows, and gentlemen of uncertain employment. You are listening 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, your tooth-puller, your blacksmith, and on alternate Tuesdays the reason the Merrimack County sheriff drinks.
Wilkins: Tonight's tale is Fort Wilkins lore of the highest and hairiest order: The Bear Who Wouldn't Leave the Still. The winter Barnaby drew his staple, shouldered open my boiler-room door, wrapped himself around my thump keg like a drunk around a hitching post, and would not vacate until the peepers sang in April. Four months, friends. Four months sharing a warm room with a beast who breaks wind like a field cannon and snores like a sawmill with a broken belt.
Wilkins: As always, this is history and education. Making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of these United States, and I tell you so with the straight face of a man arrested for it twice.
Wilkins: But first, a fellow in a loud waistcoat has paid good coin to holler at you. Go on, then.
♦ Wax crackle, small brass hand bell
Announcer: A quick word, friends! Why scorch your mash over a smoking stump when you could heat with the Flame-Flow copper still, protected by U.S. Patent 10,561,960? Even heat and honest copper, built for a lifetime! See it today at moonshinestill.com, that's moonshinestill.com!
♪ Short fiddle sting
♪ Banjo bridge, fading under
Wilkins: Segment the first. Before I tell you how a bear came to winter in my boiler room, you have to know what he was running from. That means we go back to the apple.
Wilkins: Long before any Scotch-Irishman coiled a worm in these hills, New England ran on cider. Our great-grandfathers planted orchards before they built meetinghouses, and a colonial farm in these parts would put up barrel after barrel of hard cider every fall. The children drank it watered, the parson drank it straight, and the hired man drank whatever the parson left behind the pulpit.
Wilkins: Now, cider left on a north porch in a Merrimack County January does a peculiar thing. The water freezes first. The spirit doesn't, not so readily. So the old-timers let a barrel freeze, knocked a hole through the ice crust, and drew off the dark, strong heart pooled in the middle. That is jacking, and what comes out is applejack. It will make a deacon dance a hornpipe on a coffin lid.
♦ Wilkins knocks knuckles on a wooden barrel stave
Wilkins: Here's what Grandpa never told you, because Grandpa was usually face-down in the woodshed. Jacking takes out nothing but water. Every wicked thing in that cider, the fusel oils, the harsh alcohols, the dose of wood spirit, stays in the jug and just gets packed tighter. A still lets you cut the bad from the good. A frozen barrel hands you the whole sinful congregation in a smaller pew. That's why jacked cider gives a headache like a mule shod your skull from the inside.
Wilkins: And apples are worse than grain on that score. Apples carry a deal of pectin, the stuff that makes your wife's jelly set, and pectin breaks down in fermenting into more wood spirit than a plain corn mash ever makes. So the fruit-brandy man has to be the most careful cutter in the trade. Hold that thought till we get to the craft.
Wilkins: Now to December of 1864. The boys were still in the trenches before Petersburg, and up here the cold came down so hard the ink froze in the town clerk's bottle. I had three barrels of cider jacking on the north porch, out of the wind, right where Barnaby's chain could reach if he stretched. Well, he stretched. He hooked a claw in the bung of the first barrel, pried it like I'd pry a molar, and sucked the slush heart out of all three barrels in one night.
Wilkins: You've never seen a bear with a jacked-cider head, and I hope you never do. Come morning he was lying on his back in the snow with all four legs in the air like a dead mule, moaning in a voice I last heard from a Gilmanton tenor at a funeral. Then he rolled over and gave back about two gallons of half-thawed applejack and a raccoon I didn't know he'd eaten. It steamed. It froze to the porch boards. I chipped it off with the same chisel I use on bridge-work, and that porch still smells like a cider mill that lost a war.
Wilkins: A sick bear, a cold snap, and a warm room twenty feet away. You can guess the rest. After the break, I'll tell it anyway, and I'll bring in the man who had to work around him.
♪ Fiddle reel transition
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Wilkins: Segment the second, legends and outlaws, and tonight the outlaw is mine. The morning after the cider, I found Barnaby's iron staple drawn clean out of the log like a rotten tooth, his chain trailing across the snow into the still-house, and my boiler-room door hanging off its leather hinges like a drunk's jaw.
Wilkins: For you city folk, the boiler room is the lean-to behind the brick wall where my firebox lives. It heats the water bath my pot sits in, and the pipe runs through the wall to the still proper. It's the warmest room in Pittsfield, warmer than the parsonage and a sight warmer than the parson. And there was Barnaby, curled round my thump keg with his chin resting on the swan neck, sighing like a widower at the cemetery gate.
Wilkins: I tried everything to move him. I laid a molasses trail to the door. He ate the molasses, the trail and the pail, and came back looking for the receipt. I had Hosea Leavitt bring his fiddle and play Old Dan Tucker at full gallop, and the bear slept through it. I'll grant that's the most honest review Hosea's fiddling has ever had.
Wilkins: What you should know about a wintering bear: he doesn't truly sleep the way a woodchuck does. His heart slows down to near nothing. I put my ear to Barnaby's ribs and timed it against my pocket watch, and it beat slower than the Pittsfield selectmen think. But he can wake, and a bear woken in his winter bed comes up mean, stupid and fast, all three at once. Remember that for the next part.
♦ Wind howling against log walls
Wilkins: January of '65, a black, moonless night. A county deputy, a fellow I'll call Thorne since he's long since left these parts, decided he'd catch Wilkins in the act. He came in through the woodlot with a warrant in his coat and a dark lantern with the shutter closed. He crept into my boiler room and felt his way along the brick. His hand found fur. A big soft heap of it, draped across what he was certain was my thump keg.
Wilkins: Thorne thought it was a buffalo robe thrown over the evidence. So he took a good two-fisted grip and yanked it off.
♦ A deep, rising bear roar, wood splintering, a jar shattering
Wilkins: Friends, Barnaby came off that floor like a chimney falling upward. One swipe opened Thorne's greatcoat from collar to tails like a gutted trout. The second took the seat of his trousers, his drawers, and a slab of the deputy's own hindquarter about the size of a church hymnal. The sound was a wet tearing, the way a flannel shirt sounds when you rip it for rags, only meatier. The deputy's scream went up two octaves and hit a note that cracked a jar of hearts on the shelf, and that jar was worth more than his salary.
Wilkins: He went out the door leaving one boot behind in Barnaby's mouth, and he ran bare-bottomed down the Turnpike in eleven-below with his tail feathers flapping. He left a trail of red on the snow from my door to the road like somebody had spilled a crock of cranberry sauce the whole way. I found him half a mile down Route 28, sitting in a snowbank to stop the bleeding, steaming like a boiled pudding.
Wilkins: I hauled him home on a hand sled, laid him face-down on my kitchen table, gave him a leather strap to bite, and stitched his backside with waxed linen thread, nineteen stitches. He bit so hard he cracked a molar, so since he was already on the table I pulled that too. I charged him nothing for either. That's the only time Merrimack County has ever gotten a bargain out of me.
Wilkins: The warrant? Barnaby ate it, boot and all, which makes him the only creature in the county who has ever digested the law.
♦ Bear grunts approvingly from outside the window
Wilkins: Now, the man who spent more hours in that boiler room with Barnaby than anyone but me is sitting at my bench tonight with soot under his nails and a look on his face like he still smells it. Master coppersmith and thumper builder of Pittsfield, Silas Hacksaw McAllister. Welcome, Silas.
Silas: Evening, Doc. Evening, folks. And yes, I still smell it. Some smells stay in a man's beard like a debt.
Wilkins: Tell them about the seam.
Silas: It was February. Doc sent word the thump keg was weeping at a side seam, a slow tear of liquor down the copper. Now, you don't fix a vessel like that while it's working. Doc had drained it, rinsed it, and left the room aired out a full day, because you never put flame or solder near a pot that's held spirit until it's empty, washed and aired. That part was easy.
Wilkins: The hard part was four hundred pounds of bear.
Silas: The hard part was the bear. He was wrapped round that keg like ivy round a stump, and the bad seam was on the side he was lying against. There was no moving him. So I lay down on my back on the bricks, slid in under the keg, and he shifted in his sleep and laid his whole belly across my shins. Warm as a feather tick and heavy as a church bell.
Wilkins: And he smelled like?
Silas: Like wet dog, rotten apples, and something he'd eaten in October that hadn't finished with him. I lay under him three hours. I cleaned the seam bright, fluxed it, and ran silver solder. Never lead, Doc. I'll not have lead in anything I build. And every time I tapped the seam with my little planishing hammer, his snore skipped a beat. So I learned to tap between snores. Breathe in, tap, breathe out, tap. I've never worked to a steadier beat in my life.
Wilkins: The finest seam in New England, and it was done with a bear for a metronome.
Silas: Held tight for years. Didn't do my knees any favors, though.
Wilkins: Tell them about the guard rail, because I'm still sore about my copper.
Silas: Well, about a week later Barnaby rolled in his sleep against the firebox door. It singed a patch of fur off his flank the size of a dinner plate. The stink was like a feather pillow burning in a privy. He woke up roaring and spun around twice, and Doc's lantern ended up in the woodbox.
Wilkins: I put that fire out with my hat.
Silas: So I hammered him a guard, a curved rail of copper standing a hand's width off the firebox door on iron pins so he couldn't roll against the heat. Then the fool bear took a liking to it. He licked that rail every night like it was maple candy. By March there was one patch on it polished so bright you could shave in it.
Wilkins: That bear polished more copper in one winter than my apprentice has in three years, and he didn't ask for wages. It was the cleanest square foot of metal at Fort Wilkins.
Silas: The rest of it was green as a frog. But that one spot was a mirror.
Wilkins: Now tell them about the tub, and don't spare the ladies.
Silas: Doc.
Wilkins: Tell them.
Silas: In March the bear started getting restless, and he decided the condenser cooling tub was his private necessary. The tub where the worm sits in cold water to turn vapor back to liquor. He climbed half in, sat, and did his business. A whole winter's worth, and a bear in the den doesn't go much, so he'd been saving. The water turned the color of strong coffee and the room smelled like a hog yard in August.
Wilkins: I treated my cooling tub the way Congress treats the Treasury, and so did he.
Silas: I had to pull the whole worm out, coil by coil, and scour it inside and out with sand and vinegar. Then I rinsed it, scalded it with boiling water, rinsed it again, and dumped and scrubbed the tub. Nothing touches spirit until it's cleaner than it was new. I'd sooner throw a coil in the Suncook than run liquor through one a bear has sat in.
Wilkins: And you've never let me forget it. Now tell them how it ended, because it wasn't me, and it wasn't Hosea's fiddle.
Silas: It ended with the chimney. Late in March, Doc fired up the box for the first run of spring. Didn't any of us know a sparrow had built in the flue cap, and a winter of shed bear fur had drifted up and packed in behind the nest. The smoke didn't draw. I was in there checking my guard rail, and inside a quarter hour my head was splitting like somebody had a froe in it. My eyes swam. I couldn't smell a thing out of the ordinary, just the usual bear.
Wilkins: That's the devil of it. Those stove fumes have no smell to speak of.
Silas: Barnaby got up, staggered like a drunk at a camp meeting, put his shoulder through what was left of the door, and walked out into the snow. I crawled out after him and lay in a drift being sick. Doc came running and pulled the stovepipe with a pole and a hook.
Wilkins: Mark this, listeners, and I say it without a joke. A choked flue in a closed room fills it with poison fumes you cannot smell, and men die of it in their beds every winter in this state. Keep your chimneys swept and your flue caps clear, and give any room with a fire in it fresh air. That bear and that coppersmith both came near to dying in my boiler room, and it was a sparrow that nearly did it, not a deputy.
Silas: And Barnaby never went back in, not once. He went back to his chain and his leaves, and he looked at that door all spring like it owed him money.
Wilkins: Because you fixed the door.
Silas: I fitted it with my grandfather's bear latch, the kind he made in his Barnstead shop. It's a copper latch you have to lift up and then slide sideways. A bear will push all day and pull all night, but he never thinks to go sideways.
Wilkins: That describes every revenue man I've ever met. Silas Hacksaw McAllister, ladies and gentlemen. Stay at the bench, Silas. We'll need your hands in a minute.
♪ Banjo flourish into ad break
♦ Wax crackle, brass hand bell rung three times
Announcer: Step right up, distillers of discernment! Is your still held together with flour paste and prayer? Do your hose clamps slip, your joints hiss, and your precious vapor leak out to tempt every lantern and spark in the room? Friend, a vapor leak is a thief in the night, and sometimes it's a fire as well! Banish it forever with Heavy-Duty Sanitary Tri-Clamp Ferrules and Gaskets from Moonshine Stills! These are heavy-gauge ferrules, precision-milled in 304 stainless and paired with heavy-gauge pure electrolytic copper. They're sealed with food-grade PTFE gaskets and locked tight with quick-release stainless wing clamps. Every one is pressure-tested for a lifetime of airtight reliability. No more paste, no more slipping, no more worry! Just $34.95! See them with your own two eyes at the showroom at Fort Wilkins on Route 28 in Pittsfield, New Hampshire, or order today at https://moonshinestill.com/products/tri-clamp-fittings. Once more, friends: https://moonshinestill.com/products/tri-clamp-fittings! Shop Hardware at moonshinestill.com, from Moonshine Stills!
♦ Bell rings once, crackle
♪ Fiddle sting
Wilkins: Segment the third, copper and the craft. Since tonight is about my boiler room, I'll tell you why a still-house ought to have one at all.
Wilkins: First, the fire. Put a pot of thick mash or apple pomace straight over a roaring fire and the bottom scorches. It gets a burnt-sugar, burnt-hair stink that no cut will ever get out. So at Fort Wilkins my pot sits in a larger kettle of water, a double boiler as the ladies say. The firebox heats the water, and the water heats the pot. The pot can never get hotter than boiling water, and nothing scorches.
Wilkins: Second, and mind this one. Alcohol vapor is heavier than air. It doesn't rise politely like chimney smoke. It sinks, and it creeps along the floor like a cat burglar until it finds an open flame, and then it goes up with a whoomp that will take your eyebrows, your beard, and your house. That's why my fire is behind a brick wall in its own room, and my condenser outlet and receiving jars are on the far side. Never leave a running still alone, not for a minute, not for a pipe, not for a pretty neighbor.
Wilkins: Third. A still must always breathe out through the end of the worm. Never seal it up tight, and never let the line plug. A sealed pot is a bomb with a handle on it, and I have pulled copper shrapnel out of a man's cheek to prove it.
♦ Ladle clinks against a copper pot
Wilkins: Now, the old New England way of making apple brandy, step by step, as history.
Wilkins: Step one. Pick sound apples, a mix of sharp and sweet. Cut out the rot and throw away the ones the wasps have hollowed. Grind them in the trough and press the pomace in straw on the cider press until you've got sweet cider.
Wilkins: Step two. Pour it into a clean barrel and leave the bung loose, or set a water seal on it, so the gas can get out and the vinegar flies can't get in. Keep it in a cellar that's cool but not freezing. The yeast works it two to four weeks until it's hard and dry and the bubbling stops.
Wilkins: Step three. Rack it, meaning you draw the clear cider off the muck of dead yeast at the bottom. That muck burns and stinks if it gets in the pot.
Wilkins: Step four, the stripping run. Charge the pot with your hard cider and bring it up gentle in the water bath. Collect everything that comes until it runs weak and watery. That's your low wines.
Wilkins: Step five, the spirit run, and this is where honest men and dead men part company. Run the low wines again, slow. The first liquor out is the foreshots, sharp and mean, carrying the worst of the wood spirit. Throw it away, every drop. Don't drink it, don't rub it on a toothache, don't give it to the sheriff, though I've been tempted. At the very least a good cupful from every five gallons of low wines, and more if you're in doubt. With apples, always be in doubt, because of that pectin I told you about.
Wilkins: Next come the heads, smelling of varnish and green apples and a hard night. Set them aside and keep them out of the jug. Then the hearts come, sweet and clean, smelling of a September orchard. That's what you keep. When the smell goes flat and oily, like wet wool and old dishwater, that's the tails. Set them by to run again with the next batch.
Wilkins: Step six. Proof the hearts with a hydrometer and lay them down in a good white-oak barrel to rest, and keep your copper scrubbed bright between every run.
Silas: And Doc, if I may: check your seams and your joints before every run. A weep you can see is a leak you can fix. A leak you can't see is how the floor fills with vapor.
Wilkins: The man has hammered sense into more copper than most men have hammered into their sons. Thank you, Silas.
♪ Banjo bridge
♦ Wax cylinder hiss, needle drop on the call-in line cylinder
Wilkins: Segment the fourth, myths, slang, and the mailbag. We've got a voice on the call-in line from way down south. Let's hear him.
♦ Faint cylinder crackle, distant hollow voice
Cletus: Alchemist, my uncle swears old-timers used to throw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads. Is there any truth to that, or was he just making swamp medicine?
♦ Cylinder clicks off
Wilkins: Cletus Rabbit Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, down on the Yadkin, where they make liquor so strong the river runs uphill to get away from it. Rabbit, your uncle isn't all swamp. He's about one-third swamp and two-thirds stubborn, which is how most uncles are put together.
Wilkins: Here's the true part. Hickory ash is mostly potash, the same lye your great-grandmother leached through an ash hopper to boil soft soap. Up here our farmers burned whole hillsides of timber clearing land and sold the potash and pearl ash down to Boston by the cartload. Lye is alkali. Put it in a hot keg and it can hold back a little of the sour, vinegary sharpness so it stays in the keg. So the old-timer tasted a smoother run and gave the hickory all the credit.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Now the false part. Your bad heads aren't sour, Rabbit. They're light, flighty vapors that boil out early, and lye in a keg doesn't stop a single one of them. Worse, lye and any fat or oil in that keg make soap. Your keg suds up like a washtub on Monday, foams over, and pukes into your worm, and you have soap in your liquor and a mess in your copper. The only cure for bad heads is the cut. That's the whole sermon.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: As for red oak shavings, every cooper from here to Wilkesboro will tell you red oak is too open in the grain to hold spirit. Blow through the end of a red oak stick and you'll bubble your coffee. That's why barrels are made of white oak. Shavings in a keg give you color and tannin and a taste of the barrel in a hurry. That's a flavoring trick, Rabbit, not a cleaner. Your uncle's ash-and-shavings keg is like a widow's rouge at a barn dance: it changes the color but not the age.
Wilkins: And since we're slaying myths, here's one more for you. The blue flame. Some fellow pours a spoonful in a ladle and sets it alight, and if it burns blue he says it's safe, and if it burns yellow or red he says there's lead in it.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Hogwash. Wood spirit, the stuff that blinds and kills, burns with a clean blue flame of its own. A dose of lead won't reliably show itself by the color of a fire either. If flame color proved a spirit safe, every wood-alcohol drunkard in the graveyard would be holding a blue ribbon. The only proofs are clean copper, no lead anywhere in the rig, and honest cuts.
♦ Hammer lifted, a final deliberate punch strike, coin rings on anvil
Wilkins: There you are, Rabbit. A fresh large cent with G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. struck clean across Liberty's forehead, waiting at Fort Wilkins with your name on it. Give your uncle my regards, and tell him to keep his ashes for soap and his oak for barrels. Wilkesboro, Wilkins salutes you.
♪ Fiddle sting
♦ Wax crackle, brass hand bell
Announcer: One more quick word, friends! Even heat, honest copper, and a lifetime of service. Ask for the Flame-Flow copper still, U.S. Patent 10,561,960, at moonshinestill.com! That's moonshinestill.com!
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme returns softly
Wilkins: That's our evening, neighbors. My thanks to Silas Hacksaw McAllister, who has lain under a bear for the sake of a good seam, and to Cletus Rabbit Miller of Wilkesboro and his uncle's swamp medicine. And my thanks to Barnaby, who taught me that a warm room, a full belly, and a cleared flue are worth more than any warrant ever printed.
Wilkins: If you want to learn the old ways proper, the history, the metallurgy, the copper, and the cuts that separate the living from the dead, enroll in the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. It's taught the honest way, with the law kept in mind and safety at the head of the table.
Wilkins: Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.
♦ Bear grunt and final drip into jar
♪ Theme fades into wax cylinder crackle