Yeast Before Science
Dr. G. G. Wilkins talks about the strange history of yeast before anyone understood it, from the old English brewers who called it God-is-good to Liebig's rude cartoon of yeast animals pissing out spirit, and walks listeners through how a New Hampshire family kept its mother yeast alive through a frozen winter. Appalachian slang historian Clara Higgins brings new mountain stories: a grandmother who slept beside her yeast crock, a persimmon-beer barrel that set off a Home Guard alarm, and a twenty-year feud over a borrowed cup of weak emptins. In the mailbag, Wilkins answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller's question about hickory ash and red oak in the thump keg by explaining pearlash chemistry and leaky red oak staves, and he puts an end to the old belief that thunder sours the mash.
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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 nose off that windowsill, you four-hundred-pound sack of fleas and bad intentions. That's not your supper, it's my yeast crock, and if you lick it one more time I'll pull every tooth in your head and sell 'em to the Concord dandies for watch fobs. Down. DOWN, I said. That's better. Lord, the breath on that animal. It would wilt a fiddlehead at forty paces.
♦ Bear grunts once, chain drags across frozen ground, settles
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth, swelling then dipping under
Wilkins: Good evening, neighbors, sinners, selectmen and whatever deputy has his ear pressed to the stovepipe tonight. This is Radio Moonshine, I'm Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, and I'm coming to you from Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, in Pittsfield, Merrimack County, New Hampshire. The river's froze, the turnpike's rutted like a washboard and twice as unfriendly, and the snow's banked to the bottom of the window where my bear sits watching me like a creditor. Tonight we're talking about the most important, most ignorant, most necessary creature in the whole craft. It isn't the still, it isn't the copper, and it sure isn't the distiller. It's the yeast. Yeast Before Science, I call it: how our grandmothers raised bread and our grandfathers raised hell for two hundred years without the faintest notion what was doing the work, and how a Pittsfield family kept that little beast alive through a January cold enough to crack a church bell.
♪ Theme resolves with a final fiddle flourish
Announcer: A quick word, friends! Want the craft of the Fort Wilkins coppersmiths sitting right on your kitchen table? The Fort Wilkins 2-Gallon Tabletop Mini-Still is built of pure spun copper and made for botanical waters and floral oils. See it today at moonshinestill.com!
♦ Wax crackle swells briefly
Yeast Before Science
♪ Slow solo fiddle, low and thoughtful
Wilkins: Now. Gather close to the stove, because this is a story about ignorance, and I'm something of an authority on that, having been married, arrested and elected to the school committee.
Wilkins: For as long as men have made beer, wine, cider and bread, they've known one thing and nothing else: put a little of the old foam into the new sweet liquor, keep it warm, and it comes alive. It heaves, it bubbles, it stinks like a tanner's apron, and three days later the sweet is gone and the strong has come. Nobody knew why. Not the priest, not the professor, not the alewife. Back in old England, the brewers of Norwich, four hundred years ago, had a name for that foam. They called it goddisgoode. God-is-good. That's the only time in history a churchman and a brewer agreed on anything, and they agreed because neither one of them knew what the hell they were talking about.
♦ Wilkins sets down a tin cup on a plank table
Wilkins: Then along comes a Dutchman named Leeuwenhoek, a cloth merchant of Delft who ground his own spectacle lenses until his eyes must have looked like boiled onions. Around 1680 he puts a drop of working beer under his glass and sees little round globules floating in it, like frog's eggs in a ditch. And what does he conclude? Nothing much. He saw the culprit and didn't know it was alive. That's like a sheriff looking straight at me with a jar in each hand and writing down 'two lamps.'
Wilkins: A hundred and fifty years later, around '37, a Frenchman named Cagniard-Latour and a pair of Germans, Schwann and Kutzing, look again with better glass, and they say: this yeast is alive. It buds. It grows little children off its own side like a potato grows eyes. It eats the sugar and gives off the spirit and the gas.
Wilkins: Well. The great chemist of the age, Professor Justus von Liebig, a man so important his own whiskers had a footman, thought that was the stupidest thing he'd ever heard. Liebig said fermentation was just decay, a kind of chemical rot, no more alive than rust on a plow. And in 1839 him and his friend Wohler printed a joke in their chemistry journal, and neighbors, I have read a translation, and it's the filthiest thing ever set in type by a man with a university chair. They drew the yeast as tiny animals shaped like distilling flasks. These creatures eat the sugar, and out of their back ends they pass the spirit, and out of their bladders they let fly the carbonic gas, and the whole beer vat is just a crowded privy of little beasts pissing whiskey. That's what they printed to make fun of the other fellows. And I've tended bar in Concord on court week, and I'm here to tell you the Professor wasn't describing yeast. He was describing the Merrimack County bench.
♦ Barnaby grunts outside, as if in agreement
Wilkins: Hush, Barnaby, you never read a word of German in your life.
Wilkins: Now here's the joke on the joker. Right now, these past several years, a French chemist named Louis Pasteur, a careful, sour-faced man by his engraving, has been proving with his glass and his flasks that the yeast is alive after all, and that when wine or beer goes to vinegar and slime, it's because other little living things got in and spoiled the party. The papers out of Paris say the Emperor himself set Pasteur to figure out why French wine goes sick, and Pasteur says warm it gently and the spoilers die. So Liebig drew the yeast as a pissing animal to mock it, and it turns out the yeast really is an animal, or near enough, and it does piss whiskey, near enough. I could've told Monsieur Pasteur for one jar of cider. Nothing that's dead eats that much and complains that loud.
♪ Fiddle shifts to a homey, low banjo pluck
Wilkins: But I said this was about New Hampshire, and I meant it. Out here, nobody was reading Liebig. Out here, your grandmother had a crock. And that crock was worth more to her than her silver spoons, because spoons don't die if you let the fire go out.
Wilkins: In old New England they called the stuff emptins. Emptyings. The dregs at the bottom of the beer barrel or the cider barrel, the gray sludge you empty out, full of the working. Miss Amelia Simmons, in her American Cookery printed in 1796, the first cookbook any American ever wrote, calls for emptins to raise her bread, and in the same book she calls for pearlash, which is the refined white potash from wood ashes, to raise her cakes without any yeast at all. Remember that pearlash. It'll come back to bite a fellow from North Carolina before the night is done.
Wilkins: Now the trouble with emptins is that it don't keep. Leave a crock of loose yeast on the shelf and it'll go sour, go pink, go slimy, grow a fur coat like Barnaby's, and stink like a dead cat in a rain barrel. So the women of these hills worked out two tricks, and I'll give you both.
Wilkins: Trick one is hop yeast. You boil a fistful of hops in water, strain that bitter tea over mashed potatoes and a little flour, cool it, and seed it with the old yeast. The hops hold back the souring rot. Nobody knew why, they just knew a hop yeast kept twice as long as a plain one. Pittsfield housewives grew hops on the side of the woodshed for no other reason, and I've seen hop vines climb a privy so thick you had to part 'em like a curtain to do your business.
Wilkins: Trick two is the yeast cake. Take your live, foaming yeast and work it into cornmeal until it's stiff, pat it into little cakes the size of a dollar, and dry 'em slow in the shade. Not by the stove, not in the sun. Heat kills it dead, and a dead yeast cake is just a bad cracker. Dried proper, a cake stays asleep for months in a cloth bag hung from the rafter, and when you want to wake it you crumble it into warm potato water and it comes up like Lazarus.
♦ Wind gusts against log walls, a shutter rattles
Wilkins: Now, keeping it alive through a New Hampshire winter. Here's how Fort Wilkins does it, and how my mother did it before me on the Catamount road.
Wilkins: First, the cold won't murder your yeast. It just puts it to sleep, like a deputy after dinner. What murders it is freezing hard and thawing, over and over, and above all, scalding. So in deep winter I keep my mother crock in a niche in the chimney masonry where the bricks stay warm as a hen's belly all night. If the fire's going to drop low, I pack the crock in a box of dry sawdust, the way the ice men pack ice, only backwards: sawdust keeps cold in in summer and keeps warm in in winter. On the coldest nights a hot brick wrapped in flannel goes in the box alongside.
Wilkins: Second, I feed it. Once a week, a cup of the old goes into fresh potato water and hop tea with a spoon of molasses, and the rest gets used or given away. A yeast that ain't fed gets tired, and a tired yeast is a sour yeast.
Wilkins: Third, and this is the Yankee part, I never keep my eggs in one crock. There's always a string of dried cakes hanging from the rafter, and there's always a cup of my mother yeast living in a neighbor's kitchen, in case the worst comes. Because the worst does come. And in the winter of '63, it came wearing a coonskin cap and smelling of Barnstead.
♪ Ominous low fiddle drone
Legends, Outlaws And The Great Yeast Robbery
Wilkins: Hosea Pettengill. Some of you know the name. He made spirit over in Barnstead, if you can call it spirit. I've smelled better liquor wrung out of a horse blanket. And Hosea's trouble was that every batch he made tasted like a boiled boot, because his yeast was a sick, mean, slimy thing he'd kept going since Polk was President, and he never fed it, never warmed it, and I believe on two occasions he spit in it.
Wilkins: Now my mother yeast came down from my mother's mother, and it raises a corn beer so clean and quick that men have walked from Gilmanton to smell my mash tub. That crock has a pedigree older than half the families in Merrimack County and is better behaved than all of them. And Hosea wanted it.
Wilkins: So one night in January of '63, with the thermometer gone so low the mercury was hiding in the bulb, Hosea Pettengill comes creeping up the turnpike on foot, figuring Barnaby's asleep for the winter like any Christian bear. And Barnaby mostly was. Except a chained bear's den by a still-house wall is warmer than most, and Barnaby sleeps light. Like a widow with money.
Wilkins: Hosea pries the back shutter, reaches through to my chimney niche, gets both hands round my crock, and backs out the window bent over double. And the first thing in this world he presents to Barnaby, who's just coming up out of his straw, is the broad seat of a pair of Barnstead wool trousers.
♦ Sudden deep bear roar, chain snapping taut, a man's scream
Wilkins: Neighbors, I was abed and I heard it. First a sound like a sail tearing. That was the wool. Then a sound like a cleaver going into a ham on a butcher's block. That was not the wool. Barnaby took a mouthful out of the meat of that man's hindquarter the size and shape of a Sunday pork chop, and he shook it the way a terrier shakes a rat, and Hosea came off the ground at each shake and slapped down again, flat on the snow crust. Whump. Whump. Whump. And through all of it, and I'll give him this, Hosea Pettengill did not drop my crock. He held that yeast to his chest like a Christian holding the Gospel in a shipwreck.
Wilkins: When I got there with the lantern the snow was pink for six feet around, Hosea was face down screaming for his mother, his mother's been dead since the Embargo, and Barnaby was sitting back on his haunches with a look of deep disappointment. He'd spit out the piece. Spit it out on the snow like a Baptist spits out Communion wine. Barnaby knew cheap stock when he tasted it.
♦ Wilkins chuckles, a cork pulled from a jug
Wilkins: So I take the crock off Hosea first, because priorities, and then I haul him inside, belly down across my dentist's chair, and I sew up his backside by lamplight with the same silk I use to close a gum after a hard molar. Eleven stitches. He bawled louder than any tooth patient I ever had, and I've pulled a wisdom tooth from a Pittsfield mill boss who promised to have me hanged. I poured a dose of the good stuff on the wound and a second dose down his gullet, and in the morning I sent him home in a borrowed sleigh, lying on his belly in the straw like a shot hog, with a bill for a dollar and six bits for the needlework. He's never paid it. Hosea Pettengill left Fort Wilkins with half his backside and none of his dignity, and he still owes me a dollar and six bits.
Wilkins: And the yeast? Never even chilled. It rose that Tuesday like nothing had happened. The yeast has more sense than either man in the story.
♪ Bright banjo sting
Wilkins: Now, I've got a guest tonight who knows more about the living ferment than any man in this valley, and she's come a long way to sit by my stove, so mind your manners, Barnaby. From the Blue Ridge of Virginia, a mountain herbalist who has the old talk of the stillhouse in her head like a hymnal. Clara Higgins, welcome to Fort Wilkins.
Clara: Well, thank you, Doctor. I'll say I've been in some rough cabins, but this is the first one where the welcoming committee had a chain and four hundred pounds of halitosis.
Wilkins: He likes you. If he didn't, you'd know about it a good deal sooner, and in pieces.
Clara: I heard that story about your Barnstead neighbor, and I'll tell you, down home that man would be prized for not dropping the crock. We'd forgive a fellow most anything if he kept the yeast alive.
Wilkins: Is that so? Then tell me how the Virginia folks kept it alive. I've told 'em about my chimney niche and my sawdust box. What does the Blue Ridge do when the snow comes?
Clara: Doctor, my granny did it the simplest way there is. There came a winter, I was little, the snow came over the fence rails and we didn't see the road from Christmas to the March thaw, and the fire would die back every night no matter how Granddaddy banked it. So Granny took her yeast crock, wrapped it in her wedding quilt, the double wedding ring pattern, and put it in the bed. Right in the middle. Between her and him.
Wilkins: In the bed.
Clara: In the bed. Every night for two months. That crock got the warm side, against her, and Granddaddy got the cold side, against the log wall. He said he'd been married forty years and lost his place in the bed to a jar of sour batter. And Granny said, well, the batter don't snore, and it don't kick, and it gives something back in the morning.
♦ Wilkins laughs, slaps the table
Wilkins: Clara, they tell me Virginia women sleep with their yeast. New Hampshire women sleep with a hot brick and a grudge, and I'd say the yeast does better in Virginia.
Clara: The husbands do worse, though. Granddaddy said he near froze to the chinking. Come spring he had a cough and the crock had a fine fat head on it, and Granny said that was the right way round.
Wilkins: A sensible woman. Now, you folks down there run a good deal of fruit. Persimmon, I'm told.
Clara: Persimmon beer, Doctor. Folks around home make it for the table and some run it further. You take the persimmons after frost, when they're so soft they'd slide off a spoon, and you mash 'em with wheat bran, pat it into cakes, and bake it. Then you crumble that bread into a barrel of water and let it work. And I'll tell you what happened in Botetourt County in the fall of '64, because my great-uncle swore to it on a Bible he couldn't read.
Wilkins: Those are the most reliable kind of oaths.
Clara: There was a man up a hollow there who set a big barrel of persimmon beer working in his smokehouse, and he drove the head down tight on it because the coons were after it. Tight as a drum. Then a warm spell came through, Indian summer, and that barrel got to talking.
Wilkins: Talking.
Clara: That's what we say, Doctor. When the beer's working and the bubbles come up and pop, it's talking. When it's done and you can run it, it's quit talking. Well, that barrel talked itself into a temper. Round about midnight that head blew off with a bang like a musket, took out the smokehouse door and a side of bacon besides, and down the road, the Home Guard, all old men and boys, since everyone else was off in the war, they heard that shot ring off the ridge and turned out with squirrel guns and a pitchfork, sure as the world that Yankee cavalry had come over the mountain.
Wilkins: Did they find any?
Clara: They found one old man in his nightshirt, standing in the smokehouse dripping persimmon beer from his eyebrows to his ankles, holding a ham and cussing in words my great-uncle wouldn't repeat to anybody under the age of sixty.
Wilkins: Clara, I'll be honest with you, Yankee cavalry would not come over a Virginia ridge for persimmon beer. I've tasted persimmon beer.
Clara: And you've tasted New Hampshire cooking, Doctor, so I'd hush about what's worth crossing a mountain for.
♦ Barnaby grunts loudly outside
Wilkins: Even the bear agrees with you, and he's eaten my cooking. Now, I've heard there's a feud in your country over yeast. That true?
Clara: The Feud of the Weak Emptins. Lord, yes. Two families up our home hollow, I won't name 'em, because some of 'em are still sore. In the old days, if your yeast died, you went to a neighbor for a borrowing, a cup of their mother to start yours again. And the rule, the mountain law, was you gave a borrowing back strong. Fed and lively. Better than you got it.
Wilkins: That's a fine law. Better than most in the statute books.
Clara: Well, one woman borrowed a cup of mother from the family across the creek, and a week later she sent it back. And it was tired. Flat. Barely a bubble in it. And the lady who'd lent it took one sniff and said, out loud, at a burying, in front of the preacher, that she'd sooner raise bread with creek mud than with what come back across that creek.
Wilkins: At a burying.
Clara: At a burying. Those two families didn't speak for twenty years. Took separate pews. Took separate roads to the mill. One boy got a broke nose over it at a corn shucking. And it only ended when a granddaughter from one side ran off and married a grandson from the other, and the bride's mother, to save face, sent her off with a dowry. A feather tick, two laying hens, and a crock of fresh mother yeast, the very same stock that started it all, fed till it was fit to crawl out of the jar.
Wilkins: A family feud over a cup of yeast is the most sensible feud I ever heard of. At least the yeast was worth something. Up here they feud over line fences and who's buried closer to the church door.
Clara: You'd understand it if you'd ever had a good mother die on you, Doctor. Yeast mother, I mean.
Wilkins: I've had both kinds die and I'll tell you, I mourned the crock louder. Not proud of it. Now, one more. You folks make the apple brandy too. Applejack. How do you start a cider working down there?
Clara: My great-grandfather wouldn't even tell you he started it. He'd say it starts itself. He grew Winesaps, and come pressing time he would not let anybody wash those apples. Not a bucket of water near 'em. My great-grandmother'd go out to wipe off the bird droppings and he'd chase her off the press. He said if you wash 'em you wash off the working.
Wilkins: And he was right, by God. That gray bloom on an apple skin is a whole crowd of Liebig's little pissing animals, waiting for their chance.
Clara: He didn't know a thing about animals. He just knew a washed apple made a lazy cider. And a lazy cider makes a man mean.
Wilkins: Now, Clara, I'll say a serious word here, since you brought up fruit. An apple or persimmon mash carries pectin, and that makes more of the wood-spirit poison in the early part of a run than a corn mash does. So a fruit man has got to be twice as honest with his heads cuts as a grain man.
Clara: That's true, and the old men knew it even if they didn't know why. My great-grandfather threw away a heap more of the front of his apple runs than he did his corn. He said apple heads would make you blind or make you a preacher, and he wasn't sure which was worse.
Wilkins: Clara Higgins, you are welcome at Fort Wilkins any time, and Barnaby has my orders to eat anybody who says different. Stay by the stove, have some cider, and don't put your hand near the window.
Clara: I've raised hogs, Doctor. I know where not to put my hand.
♪ Lively banjo and fiddle reel, rising
Ad Break
♦ Wax crackle, a brass bell rung three times
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♦ Brass bell rung once
♪ Brief banjo flourish
Copper And The Craft
♦ Fire crackling in a firebox, faint simmer of a kettle
Wilkins: Now, back to the craft, and I'll lay it out step by step the way I'd teach it to an apprentice with a good head and a strong stomach. Mind what I said at the top of the hour, though. This is history and education, not an invitation to land yourself in the Concord jail beside me.
Wilkins: Step one, raise your yeast. Here's my hop yeast, the way my mother made it. Boil a good double handful of hops in two quarts of water for twenty minutes or so. Strain that bitter brown tea over four or five boiled and mashed potatoes, stir in a cup of flour and a big spoon of molasses, and let it cool. Now, this is the place where most fools ruin it. You do not put your old yeast into that until it's down to lukewarm. Blood heat or under. If you can't hold your finger in it to a slow count of ten, it'll kill your yeast. Somewhere near a hundred and forty degrees by the glass, the yeast dies outright, and a good deal cooler than that it starts to suffer. A man who pitches his yeast into a scalding mash is like a dentist who pulls the tooth before he gets the patient in the chair: quick work, and everybody screams.
Wilkins: When it's lukewarm, stir in your cup of old emptins or a crumbled yeast cake and keep it warm by the chimney. In a day it'll foam up like a Methodist at a temperance meeting. That's your starter. Pour some off into a stone jug, cork it loose so it can breathe, and keep it cool but never froze. The rest goes into your mash.
Wilkins: Step two, the mash. For corn, take cracked corn and cook it in water till it's a thick porridge, and if you're a careful man you throw in a portion of malted grain, sprouted barley or rye, once it's cooled some, to turn the starch to sugar. Cool the whole tub down to lukewarm. Same rule. Then pitch your starter in, cover it with a cloth, and let it work.
Wilkins: And now, a Kentucky lesson. Thirty years back there was a Scotch doctor named James Crow, a physician working at the Oscar Pepper still-house on Glenn's Creek in Woodford County, Kentucky. Crow did something no backwoods distiller had bothered with. He used a thermometer and a saccharometer, measured everything, and wrote it down. What he gave the trade is what they call sour mash. When you finish a run, you save some of the hot, sour, spent liquor from the bottom of the still, the backset, and put a portion of it, a quarter or so, into your next mash. It sours the new mash just enough that the yeast is happy and the spoilers ain't, and every batch comes out the same as the last. Crow's whiskey was famous before he died, and his method has outlived him.
♦ Wooden paddle stirring thick mash
Wilkins: Step three, watch it work. It'll heave up a cap of foam. It'll hiss. It'll smell like bread and sour apples and a wet dog. And mind this well: that working mash breathes out carbonic gas, the same gas that settles in old wells and kills men who go down after a dropped bucket. Keep your mash in an airy room with a door open or a window cracked. I've known a man who went into a closed fermenting cellar to fetch his hat, and his wife fetched his hat and him both, the second one feet first.
Wilkins: When the cap falls, the bubbles stop, and the mash tastes sour and dry instead of sweet, the beer is done. Clara's people say it's quit talking. Now it goes to the copper.
Wilkins: Step four, the still, and here's something even the old-timers didn't know. You all know copper sweetens the spirit by grabbing hold of the sulfur stink and keeping it. What they didn't know is where a good deal of that stink comes from. It comes from the yeast. Starve a yeast, scald it, crowd it, work it too hot in August, and it fights back by giving off rotten-egg gas. A healthy, well-fed yeast at a gentle warmth gives off a good deal less. So a good yeast is half the copper's work done before the fire's lit. Mother yeast and bright copper are partners, like a dentist and a stiff drink.
Wilkins: Step five, the fire, and the cuts. Heat slow. A low fire, steady, never roaring. A still running too hot will puke mash up into the cap and the arm and foul everything. And never, ever walk off from a running still. The vapor that comes off is as hungry for fire as a Pittsfield boy is for pie, and one leaky joint near an open flame will put your still-house in the next week's paper under the heading of Melancholy Accidents.
Wilkins: The first liquor off is the foreshots. A small amount, but it's the meanest. Then the heads. Heads smell like a lamp full of camphene and a varnish pot. They carry the wood spirit, the poison that blinds men and kills them, and a man who drinks the heads will see the light, and very shortly after that he will see nothing at all. You throw the foreshots and the heads away. All of 'em. Not on the dog, not in the tooth patients, not in the sheriff, tempting as that is. Away.
Wilkins: Then come the hearts. Clean, sweet, smells of the grain and nothing sharp. That's the keeping liquor. And at the end the tails come, oily, wet-cardboard smelling, dull. Those you set aside to run again next time. And as Clara said, a fruit mash makes more of the poison up front, so you cut wider and more honest on an apple or persimmon run than you would on corn.
Wilkins: Step six, clean up. Scrub your copper bright after every run so it's ready to work next time. And save a cup of your working mash, or your foam, for the crock. Because if there's one lesson in tonight's whole sermon it's this: the yeast you keep alive this winter is the beer you drink next summer, so treat it better than you treat your relations.
♪ Banjo picks up, a jaunty transition
Myths And The Call-In Tape
Wilkins: Now let's go to the talking-cylinder line, where folks send their questions in to Fort Wilkins and I answer 'em whether they like it or not. This one comes from a long way south. Roll the call-in tape.
♦ Click of a lever, heavy crackle, a faint hiss
Cletus: Alchemist, this is Cletus Miller, but folks call me Rabbit, down in Wilkesboro, North Carolina. 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?
♦ Click, crackle fades
Wilkins: Rabbit Miller of Wilkesboro. That's a good name for a man in your line of work. A rabbit runs fast, breeds fast, and lives just long enough to be a nuisance. God bless you, son. Here's your answer, and I'll take it in two pieces, the ash and the oak.
Wilkins: The hickory ash. Remember Miss Amelia Simmons and her pearlash? Pearlash is just wood ash refined. Ash is lye, it's potash, it's an alkali, the stuff your grandmother leached in an ash hopper to make soft soap. And here's the grain of truth in your uncle's sermon. When a man runs a mash that's gone too far sour, that's turned partway to vinegar, his liquor comes off with a sharp, vinegary bite. Ash is the enemy of vinegar. Put a little lye against a little vinegar and they cancel each other and the sour smell softens. So your uncle's grandfather tossed in his ash, sniffed, and said by God it's cleaner. And it was, a little, in the nose.
Wilkins: But it never touched the poison. Not one drop. The heads boil off early because they're light and volatile, and no handful of fireplace sweepings will grab 'em and hold 'em. The only thing that saves a man from the heads is a jar, a nose, and the good sense to pour the front of the run on the ground. Rabbit, your uncle's hickory ash is pearlash, and pearlash raises a johnnycake fine, but it never yet raised a dead man from the heads cut.
Wilkins: Now the red oak shavings. Here's a thing every cooper from Wilkesboro to Pittsfield knows. Red oak is full of open pores, running the length of the wood like straws. You can take a red oak stave, put one end in your mouth, light your pipe, and blow smoke clean out the other end. I've done it at a cattle show for a bet and won a goose. That's why no cooper worth his adze makes a whiskey barrel of red oak. He uses white oak, because white oak's pores are stopped up with natural plugs inside the wood. Red oak leaks. You can blow pipe smoke clean through a red oak stave, which makes it a fine barrel for a man who wants his whiskey to leave town before he does.
Wilkins: A few red oak shavings in a hot thump keg will give you a little color and a little bitter tannin, the way tea leaves would, but they won't clean a bad head any more than a horse blanket will. Your uncle was making swamp medicine, Rabbit, but it was swamp medicine with a reason behind it, and that's more than most medicine can say. Mine included.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: That's for you, Rabbit Miller of Wilkesboro. A copper cent struck tonight on my anvil, G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. I'll mail it south, and if the Wilkesboro postmaster steals it, tell him it's cursed and the bear knows his name. Fine question, fine uncle, wrong ash. Shout it from the top of the Blue Ridge.
Clara: Doctor, I'll carry it down myself if the post won't. Wilkesboro's only a few days over the mountains from home, and I know some of the Millers.
Wilkins: Then tell the Millers the Alchemist says hello and to cut their heads wide.
♪ Low fiddle, mischievous
Wilkins: Now one more myth while the anvil's warm. My grandmother swore, and Clara's probably did too, that thunder sours the mash. A good clap of thunder in August and the milk turns, the bread sours, the beer goes to vinegar. Women would cover their crocks with an iron pot lid during a storm, as if the thunder were a burglar coming through the window.
Clara: Mine laid a horseshoe across the crock. She said the iron drew off the thunder.
Wilkins: And the crock went sour anyway, I'll wager.
Clara: Every time, Doctor. Every single time.
Wilkins: Because the thunder ain't to blame. Think about when thunder comes. Hot, wet, sticky August afternoons, when it's so close in the kitchen the butter weeps on the dish. That heat is exactly what the souring creatures love, Pasteur's spoilers, and they grow fastest when the air's warm and wet as a dog's mouth. The thunder just shows up the same day the heat does and takes the blame, like a deputy who arrives after the fight and arrests the nearest Irishman with a split lip, which is to say himself, I've seen it happen. Keep the crock cool and clean in the dog days and it'll sit through a thunderstorm like a deacon through a long sermon. Thunder no more sours a mash than a sermon sours a Methodist. It's the heat that does the spoiling in both cases.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Myth struck flat. Next.
♪ Banjo transition, warm and slowing
Sign-Off
Announcer: One more quick word, friends! Bring the coppersmith's art home with the Fort Wilkins 2-Gallon Tabletop Mini-Still, pure spun copper with hand-riveted handles, just $289.00. Explore the Tabletop Stills at moonshinestill.com!
Wilkins: Thank you kindly. And before Barnaby eats the furniture, if this hour lit a lamp in your skull, I've put the whole craft down in order in the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course: yeast and mash, copper and fire, cuts and cleanup, history and law, every lesson I learned the hard way so you can learn it the easy way, without losing an eyebrow or a backside. Ask after it at Fort Wilkins on Route 28, or at moonshinestill.com.
Announcer: And mind this, listeners: making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of the United States. All you've heard tonight is for history and education only.
Wilkins: Clara Higgins, thank you for coming all the way north to sit by a dentist's stove and a bear's window.
Clara: Thank you for having me, Doctor. And tell that bear my granny's crock would've whipped him.
Wilkins: I believe it would, Clara. I believe it would. Rabbit, your coin's in the post. Hosea, your bill's in the post too, and it's gathering interest. And to every soul in the Suncook Valley with a crock in the chimney corner tonight: feed it, keep it warm, and don't let a Barnstead man near it.
Wilkins: Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.
♦ Bear grunt and final drip into jar
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme returns softly, fades under wax cylinder crackle to silence