Fire Control: Keeping the Still Hot Without Losing Your Eyebrows
Dr. G. G. Wilkins spends the night on fire, the oldest killer of still-houses: how the old firebox was built, why hardwood beats pine, and how alcohol vapor creeps along the floor looking for a flame. He tells of the night a Merrimack deputy tried to smoke him out of Fort Wilkins and got it back in his own face. Blue Ridge herbalist Clara Higgins brings mountain slang and stories of fires gone wrong. In the call-in, Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro asks about hickory ashes in the thump keg, and the Doctor takes the blue-flame proof test apart 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 down, you overstuffed mattress. That is woodsmoke out of my own chimney, not a forest fire, and not the sheriff coming with a torch. Lie down before I make you into a hearth rug and sell your teeth to a Boston dandy for a necklace.
♦ Bear huffs, chain drags, heavy body flops against log wall
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth
Wilkins: Good evening, friends, neighbors, sinners, and the two of you in the back who are both at once. This is Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, coming to you from Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, in Pittsfield, New Hampshire, in the county of Merrimack. I am your host, Doctor George G. Wilkins: dentist, blacksmith, inventor, and the only man in this valley the sheriff has had to arrest twice, because the first time did not take. Tonight's subject is fire. Fire is the oldest friend a still-man has and the oldest enemy too. It warms your pot and it cooks your mash, and if you turn your back on it, it will eat your still-house, your boots, and the eyebrows off your face. My eyebrows have been burned off so many times that the last pair grew back with gray in them out of pure exhaustion.
♪ Theme fades under crackle
Wilkins: Before we light the kindling, a word from the folks who keep the lamps lit around here.
Announcer: Friends! A quick word! Craftsmen who want honest copper with no foolishness choose the Flame-Flow still, protected by U.S. Patent 10,561,960 and hand-built from heavy-gauge electrolytic copper by Moonshine Stills. See it for yourself at moonshinestill.com, or call at the showroom at Fort Wilkins on Route 28!
Wilkins: Thank you, sir. Now hush while I tend this fire, or I will tend you instead.
♪ Short fiddle sting
The History Of The Still-House Fire
♦ Crackle of a hardwood fire, log shifting, sparks popping
Wilkins: Let us begin with history, since history is the only thing in this valley older than my jokes. Ask any old-timer what kills a still and he will name the revenue man first. But the true answer is fire. For every still the government ever broke with an axe, I would wager two were turned to ash by their own owners, every one of them a man who thought he could run a hot fire and keep his good sense at the same time.
Wilkins: The old still of New England and the mountain South alike was a copper pot on a firebox. You laid up a hearth of brick or fieldstone or plain clay, set the pot in it like a hen on a nest, built a fire beneath, and ran a flue or a chimney to take the smoke and sparks out the roof. That was the whole contraption: a pot, a fire, and the smoke, which God and good masonry carried away from your face.
Wilkins: Here in Pittsfield the town was incorporated in 1782, and every mill along the Suncook falls learned the same lesson the hard way. Fire and spirit live in the same house the way a cat and a dog do. They can get along, but only if somebody is standing between them with a broom. The mills in this valley have burned, the barns have burned, and I have seen a still-house go up on the shoulder of Catamount Mountain so bright you could have read your Bible by it from the village, if any man in this valley read his Bible, which none of them do.
♦ Barnaby grunts outside
Wilkins: Barnaby agrees. Barnaby does not hold with fire of any kind, which makes him the only resident of Fort Wilkins who has never once been half-Lusked. That word will make sense after my guest arrives. Patience is a virtue, and so is a low fire.
Wilkins: Now, wood. That is where it all starts. The Yankee distiller of my father's day burned seasoned hardwood: maple, beech, oak, a stick of ash if he had it. Hardwood burns steady. It gives a long, even heat and settles into coals you can manage. Pine is another animal. Pine is full of pitch, so it flares and spits and throws sparks up the flue, and it coats the chimney with black creosote that will one day catch and roar like the Devil's own bellows. A pine-knot fire is like a Concord politician: it makes a grand blaze, throws sparks at everybody, and leaves nothing behind but soot and a smell.
Wilkins: Why does the steadiness matter? Because a pot that is run too hot, or that swings from cold to hot and back like a drunk on a fence rail, will puke. That is the trade word, and it is exactly as pretty as it sounds. The charge foams up, climbs the neck, and spews through into the worm, and you get a jug of slop that tastes like a wet dog's dinner. Run it hotter still and the solids on the bottom of the pot scorch, and then every drop tastes of burnt toast and regret. A man who runs his fire hot to finish early is like a husband who hurries his courting: he is done quick, nobody is happy, and something got scorched.
Wilkins: In the big distilleries of Boston and Philadelphia they have gone more and more to steam heat and to water-jacketed pots. That puts the open flame in another room altogether, or wraps the pot in a jacket of hot water so the heat is gentle and even. It is safer. It is also costly, so out here in the hill country we still go by the old way, with a firebox, a woodpile, and a man who is awake. And that leads to the first law of Fort Wilkins: an unwatched still is a widow-maker with a copper hat on.
♪ Banjo transition
The Deputy On The Roof, And Clara Higgins
♦ Wind across a roof, a ladder creaking
Wilkins: Now a true story, sworn on my anvil. It was the dry back end of one October, a fine smoky evening much like this one. A certain young Merrimack County deputy, whose name I will spare because his mother still buys liniment from me, got it into his head that he could catch me at the pot without ever setting foot past Barnaby. His plan was to climb my roof, stuff a wet feed sack down my chimney, and smoke me out the front door into his waiting arms like a fox out of a den.
Wilkins: So up he went, quiet as a cat in sock feet, and down went the sack. Now, gentlemen, a chimney has a first law, and it is this: whatever goes down comes back up and goes into the face of the fool who sent it. My hearth backed up for about the time it takes to say the Lord's Prayer badly. Then the draft turned, that sack started to smolder, and a column of greasy black smoke came boiling straight back out of the chimney mouth and swallowed that deputy whole. He coughed like a consumptive goose. He swore words I have not heard since the Mexican War. He swore at me, at God, at the county commissioners, and at his own mother for raising a son who climbs roofs.
♦ Bear roar, wooden ladder clattering to the ground
Wilkins: And Barnaby, who as I said does not hold with fire, smelled that smoke, rose up on his hind legs to his full length, which is longer than a church pew, and took one swipe at the ladder. Down it came. That deputy spent the next quarter hour clinging to my chimney like a tick on a dog's ear, and twice as welcome. His trousers snagged on the flashing and tore from the belt to the knee, so the whole of Route 28 got a moonlit view of a part of county government it had never voted for.
Wilkins: When he finally slid down the far side of the roof, he was blacker than a Methodist's opinion of dancing. Barnaby ambled over to the end of his chain, sniffed him over from boots to brow, and turned away, refusing to eat him on grounds of seasoning. I put out the smoldering sack, gave the poor fellow a jar of water, a rag, and my old work trousers, and sent him home. He left his warrant on my doorstep. I used it to light the next morning's kindling, and I can tell you that a deputy's warrant burns faster than pine, gives off less heat, and smells worse.
♦ Wilkins chuckles, fire crackles
Wilkins: Now, I promised you a guest. She has come a long way up the turnpike from the Blue Ridge of Virginia, she knows more mountain talk than a revival preacher, and she has a tongue that could strip paint off a hay wagon. Please welcome Miss Clara Higgins.
Clara: Well, thank you, Doctor. I've been in your still-house a quarter hour and I've already been introduced to your bear, your smoke, and a story about a deputy's britches I'll never get out of my head. You do keep lively company.
Wilkins: The britches will haunt you to the grave, Miss Clara. I am sorry, and I am not. Now, fire. Your people in the mountains ran their pots on open wood, same as us. How did your kin keep the flame honest?
Clara: My great-grandmother Delphy ran her fire by ear, Doctor. She'd sit on a split-log bench with her eyes shut and listen to that pot. When it hummed low and soft like a beehive in clover, she'd feed in a stick. When it got to whistling and chattering like a jaybird, she'd pull one out with the tongs and set it to smoke in the dirt. Said a pot talks the whole time, if a body will hush long enough to listen.
Wilkins: A rare woman. I have known men in Pittsfield who could not hush long enough to hear their own houses burn down.
Clara: Oh, we had a word for that kind. Where I come from there are two sorts of fire. A hen fire is low and patient. It sets steady, never squawks, and turns out a good egg every time. A rooster fire is the other sort. It's loud and proud, it crows at sunup, and by noon it's burnt the barn to the ground.
Wilkins: I have been a rooster fire for most of my life, and the sheriff can attest to it. Now tell these good people about that word I promised them. Half-Lusked.
Clara: [laughs] Lord. Ephraim Lusk of Floyd County. Ephraim was a tight man with a dollar and lazy about his woodpile, so instead of splitting good oak he'd gather pine knots off the ridge, rich and pitchy, the kind folks use for torches. One cold morning he wanted his pot up to heat quick, so he shoved in a whole armload. That pine took off like a powder keg, blew out the firebox door with a sound like a mule kick, and the flare took off the left half of his beard clean to the skin. Singed his eyebrow to a stub and curled his hat brim like a fried egg.
Wilkins: The left half only?
Clara: Only the left. And Ephraim was too proud to shave the right half to match. Said the Lord had given him half a beard and he'd keep what the Lord had left. So he wore it lopsided to meeting every Sunday for a month. The preacher couldn't look at him without losing his place in the sermon. Since then, back home, when a man runs his fire too hot and pays for it, we say he got half-Lusked.
Wilkins: I have been half-Lusked twice and fully Lusked once, and the full one was in front of a widow I had hoped to marry. Now Miss Clara, you were telling me before we went on the air about a fire nobody could see.
Clara: That one's no laughing matter at the start, Doctor, though it ended all right. It was a bright summer afternoon in the hollow below my grandmother's place. A neighbor man knocked over a crock at the tail of his still, and it ran downhill in a little creek through the leaves, straight to a lantern he'd left burning on a stump from the night before. It caught. But in that bright sun you couldn't see a flame at all. There was just a shimmer on the air like heat on a summer road. It ran right back up the wet track to his boots, and the next thing anybody knew, his hat brim was afire.
Wilkins: And nobody saw it?
Clara: Not a lick. They smelled singed felt and saw his hair curling, and his boy hollered that Pap was smoking like a ham. Two of them tackled him and rolled him down a sand bank into the branch, and he came up wet, mad, and alive, with a bald spot shaped like the state of Tennessee. After that my grandmother hung a flour sack full of creek sand on a peg by every still-house door on the mountain. She called it the parson.
Wilkins: The parson?
Clara: Because it was the only thing in the hollow that could put out hell. [laughs]
Wilkins: Miss Clara, I am going to steal that. I will credit you exactly once, and after that I will tell it as my own for twenty years. Stay right where you are, because after the break I want your mountain ears on my copper.
Clara: I'll be right here, Doctor, so long as your bear stays out there.
♦ Barnaby grunts, chain clinks
♪ Fiddle bridge
Copper And The Craft: Taming The Firebox
♦ Coals settling, a copper lid tapped with a knuckle
Wilkins: Now to the craft. I will speak as a historian and a metal-man and not as your teacher, for the law is plain. Making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is illegal under the laws of the United States, and everything said on this program is for history and education alone. If you are a licensed man, or you are running water and herbs for oils and tinctures, listen close. If you are neither, listen and be entertained, and leave the fire to the professionals and the bear.
Wilkins: The first principle is that a still-house is laid out for fire before it is laid out for anything else. The old masters set the firebox and flue so the smoke went up and away, and they set the place where the spirit came out of the worm well off from the flame, out of the draft and away from the hearth. Remember that alcohol vapor is heavier than air. It does not rise politely like woodsmoke. It sinks and creeps along the floor and into the low corners, like a cat hunting a mouse, until it finds a spark. More than one still-house has been blown apart by a stray drip at the collecting end and a lantern set on the floor.
Clara: My grandmother would never let a lantern set lower than her own shoulder in the still-house. She'd hang it high on a nail and fuss at anybody who moved it.
Wilkins: Your grandmother knew her physics better than half of Harvard College. Second principle: bring the heat up slow and keep it steady. Copper conducts heat as eagerly as a gossip carries news, so a hot fire under a copper pot gets to the charge fast. That is a blessing if you are patient and a curse if you are not. Rush it and you get the puke I spoke of, or a scorched bottom and a jug of burnt toast. A low, even, hardwood fire, a hen fire as Miss Clara says, lets the pot come up gently, and the spirit separates the way it ought to.
Wilkins: Third principle, and I will say it until I am buried: never leave a running still alone. Not for a pipe, not for supper, not for the prettiest widow in Barnstead. If a line clogs with mash or a joint is sealed too tight, the pot cannot breathe, the pressure builds, and something gives way. When it does, you get scalding, flammable liquor sprayed straight over an open fire. That is not a tall tale, friends. That is how men were burned and still-houses lost all over this country.
Wilkins: Fourth: check your joints and seams cold, before the fire is lit, never by waving a candle along them while the pot is running. That is how I lost the eyebrows I mentioned, so you may take it on authority. And keep your metal honest: clean copper, with joints made by a proper smith, and never any lead solder or scavenged junk.
Wilkins: Fifth: have your parson ready. Keep a bucket or a barrel of dry sand by the door, a barrel of water beside it, a good blanket, and a clear path out. Remember Miss Clara's neighbor. In daylight a spirit fire can burn pale as spring water and you will not see it until your hat is smoking. Spills get wiped up at once and set nowhere near the hearth. I keep a sand barrel at the still-house door and a barrel of water beside it, and between the two of them they have saved more lives in Pittsfield than the Congregational church, the Baptists, and the town doctor put together.
Wilkins: And last, a word on the cuts, since fire and cuts walk hand in hand. A steady fire is what lets a man see his cuts clearly as the run comes over. The early running, the foreshots and heads, gets thrown away and is never drunk. The hearts are the good spirit. The tails are set aside. A rooster fire smears all of it together so you cannot tell one from another, and that is a danger to your customers and not merely to your reputation.
Clara: Back home they say a hot fire makes a liar out of an honest pot.
Wilkins: And a hot head makes a liar out of an honest man, which is why I married late and am still not certain I should have married at all. Miss Clara, my thanks for your wisdom and your parson.
Clara: Thank you for having me, Doctor. I'm going to go stand by your sand barrel a spell, just to feel safe.
♪ Banjo roll into ad break
Ad Break
♪ Brisk patent-medicine wagon march, tambourine
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♪ March ends with a cymbal crash
The Call-In Tape And The Blue Flame Myth
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, a click as the call-in cylinder starts
Wilkins: Now to the mailbag, or the cylinder bag, as it were. We have a voice that has come all the way up from Wilkesboro, North Carolina. Let us hear him.
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 click off
Wilkins: Cletus Rabbit Miller of Wilkesboro! A fine name for a man. A rabbit is quick, careful, and wise enough to run from fire, and I hope you are the same. Rabbit, let me come at your question from a direction your uncle has not. Hickory ash is not a cure. It is a chemical. Pour water through hardwood ashes and what drips out the bottom is lye, the same lye your grandmother boiled with tallow to make soap and soaked corn in to make hominy. That is an honest use, and a good one. But toss it into the doubler and you are not cleaning out bad heads. You are putting washing day into the liquor. Rabbit, a man who puts lye in his thump keg ends up with a jug of whiskey that tastes like his grandmother's washing day and a belly that does the laundry for a week after.
Wilkins: The red oak shavings are only show. They do the poison no harm, though they may make the old men nod wisely. The true cure for a bad head, Rabbit, is the very thing we have preached all night: a slow, steady fire so the run separates clean, and honest cuts with the heads thrown away. No ash, no shavings, no prayer. So tell your uncle he is half right. Hickory is a fine thing in the firebox, under the pot, and no use at all inside it.
Wilkins: And while we are clearing out old foolishness, let us take up another one that ties straight to tonight's fire. Hand me my punch.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: That is one more large cent wearing my name, G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. And the myth goes onto the anvil next. There is an old trick of pouring a spoonful of spirit and touching a match to it. Some say a blue flame means it is good and safe. Others say the color of the flame will warn you of poison. Bosh. All that flame tells you is that the spirit is strong enough to burn. Methanol, the wood alcohol that blinds and kills, burns with a pale blue flame of its own. So that spoon cannot tell a good jug from a deadly one.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: And worse, the men who play this trick tend to play it right beside the still, with the vapor creeping along the floor and an open jug at their elbow. I have known a man to light a spoon to prove his liquor and end up proving his still-house would burn. If lighting a spoonful of spirit proved it was safe, every barn fire in Merrimack County would be a certificate of purity. Rabbit, thank you for writing up from Wilkesboro. Keep your ears long and your fire low, and give my regards to your uncle, ashes and all.
♦ Barnaby grunts in agreement
♪ Fiddle reel, short
Sign-Off
Announcer: One more quick word, friends! Before you bank your fire tonight, think of the Flame-Flow still, U.S. Patent 10,561,960, heavy-gauge pure electrolytic copper built to last a lifetime. Order yours at moonshinestill.com!
Wilkins: Thank you, sir. And for those of you who want to learn the history and the metal and the fire at my elbow instead of the sheriff's, there is the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. It covers copper and craft, cuts and safety, history and law, all taught plain, without a single pine knot in sight. Ask after it at the Fort Wilkins showroom on Route 28. I will see that you come out of it with both eyebrows, which is more than I can say for myself.
Wilkins: My thanks to Miss Clara Higgins of the Blue Ridge, to Rabbit Miller of Wilkesboro, to a certain deputy whose trousers have never been the same, and to Barnaby, who tonight kept order better than the entire county government. Remember what we learned: hardwood, not pine. A hen fire, not a rooster. Never leave the pot alone, and keep the parson by the door.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme returns, soft
Wilkins: Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.
♦ Bear grunt and final drip into jar
♦ Wax cylinder crackle fades to silence