Black Coal and Clear Spirit: Charcoal Filtering, Maple, Hickory, and the Stuff That Goes Wrong
Dr. G. G. Wilkins covers the history of charcoal filtering, from the apothecary Lowitz and the bone-char sugar refiners to the New Hampshire charcoal pits and the sugar-maple leaching tubs of Tennessee, then explains how to build a charcoal bed and lists everything that goes wrong with one, from coal-dust specks to deadly charcoal fumes. Blue Ridge herbalist and slang historian Clara Higgins tells new stories about corncob 'gone-to-glory' brandy, a smokehouse-charcoal 'breakfast dram,' a collier who fell through a burning pit, and a revival-meeting petticoat strainer. Wilkins also answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, NC, about hickory ashes and red oak shavings in the thump keg, and knocks down the myth that charcoal draws the poison out of bad liquor.
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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, you great black sack of grievances, settle your carcass down. That is charcoal smoke you smell, not supper. Chew that window sash one more time and I will pull your eyeteeth with the big forceps and wear them on my watch chain to the Grange supper.
♦ Bear huffs, chain drags across frozen ground, a heavy body flops against the log wall
Wilkins: There he lies. Four hundred pounds of sulk and bad breath. If there were a market for bear moods I would be the richest man in Merrimack County.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth
Wilkins: Good evening, neighbors, travelers, sinners, and the two or three deacons I know are listening with the curtains drawn. This is Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, coming to you from the log fortress of Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, in Pittsfield, New Hampshire, where the river runs cold and the company runs colder. I am Dr. George G. Wilkins: dentist, blacksmith, inventor, merchant, and a disappointment to the Merrimack County bench.
Wilkins: Tonight's subject is charcoal. Black, filthy, wonderful charcoal. Maple coal, hickory coal, and all the stuff that goes wrong with it, and believe me, plenty goes wrong. I have been burning and crushing coal in the yard since sunup, and my hands are black to the wrist. I look like I have spent the afternoon strangling a chimney sweep, and losing.
Wilkins: First, the sermon the law requires and my conscience allows. Making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of these United States. Everything on this program is for history and education only. Take the learning, leave the larceny. Now, a word from the gentleman with the loudest waistcoat in New England.
Announcer: A quick word, friends! The Flame-Flow Still, protected by United States Patent 10,561,960, is heavy-gauge pure copper and handcrafted for herbal tinctures, essential oils, and honest demonstrations of the old craft. See it at moonshinestill.com, or visit the Fort Wilkins Showroom on Route 28!
♪ Short fiddle sting
♦ Wax crackle, a log settles in the stove
Wilkins: Segment the first: the history. Charcoal is older than whiskey, older than the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, older than the grudges in the Pittsfield town meeting, and those go back to the Flood. But somebody had to work out scientifically that the stuff could clean a liquid, and that was an apothecary in St. Petersburg, Russia, by the name of Tobias Lowitz. In 1785 he reported that wood charcoal took the color and the stink out of the liquids he was working on. Imagine the poor man, up to his elbows in foul brine, dropping in a lump of coal out of frustration, and the stink simply giving up and leaving. Every alchemist dreams of a day like that. Mine have mostly ended with a deputy at the door.
Wilkins: The sugar refiners caught on next. Early in this century they took to running raw sugar syrup through bone char, which is charcoal made from charred animal bones. Yes, neighbors: that white sugar in your Sunday cake was strained through the burnt skeletons of oxen. Pass the frosting.
Wilkins: The sailors knew it in their own way. On a long voyage they charred the insides of their water casks, because charred wood helped keep the drinking water from going foul. A man six months out of New Bedford on whale oil and hardtack will take any small mercy, and a sweet cask was one of them.
Wilkins: Now to our own granite hills. Every forge in New Hampshire, mine included, ate charcoal before the coal barges came, and the iron furnaces ate it by the mountainside. The Franconia Iron Works up north burned whole forests to feed the stack. The men who made it were colliers, and they were a breed of their own. A collier stacks cordwood in a great cone around a chimney of split sticks, covers the whole pile with leaves and dirt, lights it down the middle, and then smothers it so it burns with almost no air for days, sometimes two weeks. He lives beside it in a brush hut and never sleeps a full night, because if that mound gets a breath of air in the wrong place it flares up, and a month of chopping goes up as smoke.
Wilkins: Here is the part they leave out of the schoolbooks. When the mound settled and a soft spot opened, the collier climbed up onto the smoking heap himself and stamped it down with his boots. He stood on a burning mountain he had built and kicked it into shape, which is also how most men run their marriages. And sometimes the crust gave way. I knew a collier up past Gilmanton, I will not give his name since his grandchildren still buy nails from me, who went through to the knee. He said the cold air hit his trouser leg and the coals underneath flared like a bellows, and when they hauled him out the wool had cooked right onto the skin. I treated the man with lard and laudanum and a bucket of cold Suncook water, and he lived, and he went back to coaling inside a month on account of a mortgage. That is New Hampshire for you: we will not let a little hell keep us from paying the bank.
Wilkins: But the place where charcoal and whiskey were truly married is south and west of here, in Lincoln County, Tennessee. A cattle drover through Concord told me how they do it. They burn sugar maple into coal, the same hard maple we tap in March, pack it into deep tubs taller than a man, and drip the new whiskey through it slow as Sunday, a drop at a time, before it ever goes to market. They call it leaching. Whiskey goes in with a bite like a wet dog and comes out mellow as a parson after his second helping. People argue over which Tennessee man started it, and there are three different families who swear it was their granddaddy, which tells you it was probably none of them.
♦ Barnaby grunts and the chain rattles hard
Wilkins: Barnaby remembers the last time anyone came to Fort Wilkins to ask about charcoal, so let me tell you about it. Last October, a tax assessor up out of Concord, a fellow I will call Pruitt because it suits him, with a nose like a parsnip and a disposition to match, saw smoke rising from my coaling pit behind the forge and decided he had found an untaxed still. He did not knock. Revenue men never knock. He crept along the back of the woodshed in his good gray trousers, saw the coal pile, and stepped right inside the length of Barnaby's chain, which, to be fair to the man, Barnaby keeps hidden under a drift of leaves like a Christian keeps his worst habits.
Wilkins: Well. Barnaby did not roar, neighbors. A bear that roars is a bear that wants you to leave. Barnaby wanted Mr. Pruitt to stay. He came up out of those leaves like a black wave and took the assessor by the seat of the trousers, cloth and a fair helping of what was in them, and I heard it from the anvil: a sound like a wet quilt ripping down the middle. Then a scream that went up an octave every second, until it was a noise I have only ever heard from a hinge. Barnaby dragged him backward through the coal heap, three times around the post, and every time around the man came up blacker, until he was black as a stovepipe from his hair to his boot heels, with two white eyes rolling in it like a pair of boiled eggs.
Wilkins: When I got the bear off him with a pail of molasses, Pruitt had left one boot, his hat, his warrant book, and most of his dignity in the yard. The coal dust and the blood had worked together into a sort of black paste, and that is a fine thing to see in a wound, because charcoal will stop a little bleeding. I sat him face-down on my operating chair, the same chair where I pull molars, and stitched his backside with dental silk, eleven stitches, while he called me every name in Scripture and several that are only found in the Navy. Then I charged him two dollars. That was the first tax in American history that ever ran in my direction. His wife, I am told, did not know him when he came home, and set a plate for him at the servants' table.
♪ Banjo transition, a quick descending run
Wilkins: Segment the second: legends, outlaws, and the men who ran jars under the noses of the law. Charcoal has been an honest friend to the dishonest trade for one reason above all others: nobody wants to search it. It is filthy. It ruins your cuffs. A deputy will dig through hay, through apples, through a widow's linen closet, but he will not plunge his good blue sleeve into a wagon of coal if he can help it.
Wilkins: The year after Mr. Lincoln's tax men grew teeth, I sent forty jars of hearts up the turnpike toward Barnstead under twenty sacks of maple coal on a collier's wagon. The collier was paid in copper cents I had counterstamped on my anvil the night before, which he claimed made them worth more, and I did not argue with a man holding the reins of my livelihood. At the Barnstead line a deputy waved us down. He walked around that wagon twice, took out a stick, poked it into a sack, pulled it out black, and announced to the whole road that he had discovered charcoal. It was the finest detective work Merrimack County had seen since one of his colleagues discovered his own feet. Then he wiped the stick on the collier's mule and let us through.
Wilkins: The sheriff has collared me twice, as most of you know, and both times the evidence smelled better than the courtroom. But I did not invite tonight's guest to listen to my rap sheet. She has come up from the Blue Ridge of Virginia, where the hollows are deep, the slang is deeper, and a woman can name more kinds of liquor than a Boston bishop can name saints. She is a mountain herbalist, a scholar of the old talk, and the only person who has ever come through my door and made Barnaby sit like a dog. Neighbors, welcome Miss Clara Higgins.
♦ Door latch, boots stamping off snow, Barnaby gives a low, almost polite grunt
Clara: Evening, Doctor. Evening, Barnaby, you old sweet-talker. I'll tell you how I did it, I just looked him in the eye like I was his mama and I meant it. Lord, it smells like a burnt church in here.
Wilkins: That is maple coal, Miss Higgins, and the burnt church is coming next week. Now, they tell me your people have been leaching liquor through charcoal on the Blue Ridge longer than New Hampshire has been complaining about the weather.
Clara: Longer than that, and we complain about weather just as good. But I'll tell you the truth, Doctor, charcoal has made more fools in my family than whiskey ever did. Take my great-granny Dorcas. She made persimmon brandy, the good stuff, orange as a fox and sweet as a Sunday sin. And somebody told her that charcoal cleans a spirit. So she figured, if a day is good, nine days is godly. She burnt a whole crib of corncobs into coal, packed a washtub full, poured her brandy in and left it sitting there nine days.
Wilkins: Nine days. A man could get married and regret it in less time.
Clara: And it came out clear as springwater, Doctor. No color, no smell, not a lick of persimmon in it. Tasted like you were drinking the memory of brandy. Granddaddy took one sip and said, well, Dorcas, it's gone to glory. And that's what we called it after that, gone-to-glory brandy. Only thing is, the circuit judge come through that spring, and Granny sold him a jug of it, and he stood up on the courthouse steps in Lovingston and pronounced it the purest liquor in the Commonwealth of Virginia.
Wilkins: A judge who praises liquor that tastes of nothing is a judge who has made a whole career of hearing nothing. I have stood before several.
Clara: That one never heard a word in his life that didn't come with a ham attached. Which reminds me of my Uncle Absalom.
Wilkins: The ham is coming, is it?
Clara: The ham is coming. Uncle Absalom was too lazy to burn his own coal, so he scraped it up off the floor of the smokehouse, where they'd been smoking hams over hickory every winter since the Revolution. Black, greasy, beautiful coal. And he ran his whiskey through it. Doctor, that liquor tasted like a hog had been baptized in it. Folks called it the breakfast dram. Men would take a pull and then look around for the biscuits.
Wilkins: There are worse habits on a cold morning.
Clara: Well, the trouble come of a Sunday. He'd take a nip before preaching, and every hound in Nelson County followed him to the meeting house. He'd sit in the pew and there'd be six dogs on the steps with their noses to the crack of the door, howling through the hymns. The preacher finally told him, Absalom, either quit the ham liquor or start tithing in bacon.
Wilkins: A man who smells of ham in church will draw more hounds than converts, though in my experience the hounds pay better attention to the sermon. Now, you know the colliers down your way. I told my listeners about one fellow who went through the crust. Are your Virginia men any wiser?
Clara: Not a bit, Doctor. Up on Rockfish Gap there was a collier called Long Tom Ballard, six foot five in his stocking feet and none of it brains. He was stamping down a soft spot on his pit one night in a wind and the whole crust gave out under him. He went down to the hip. My grandmother was a girl and she was there, and she said he didn't scream at first. She said he just said, well, damn, real quiet, like he'd dropped his pipe. Then the air hit that coal and it flared up all around his legs like a forge, and then he screamed. They roped him out with a log chain hitched to a mule.
Wilkins: God help him. Burns like that go deep. The flesh tightens as it heals and draws the joints up.
Clara: It did. He walked like a heron the rest of his life, stiff-legged, all knees. But he went back to coaling inside of a year. Folks asked him why in the world he'd go back up on a pit, and he said, I've been to hell knee-deep, and they had nothing down there worth staying for. He said it was the only place he'd ever been where the fire was more honest than the people.
Wilkins: I would buy that man a drink and I would make him stand on a stone floor to drink it. Now tell me some talk, Miss Higgins. What does a Blue Ridge mouth call liquor that has met the coal?
Clara: Well, the polite ones say it's coal-cooled, or leached likker. Coal-cooled means it went through slow and come out soft. But if you didn't rinse your coal, and there's little black specks swimming around the bottom of the jar like gnats in a rain barrel, that's a sooty Sally. You don't ever want to be the man selling a sooty Sally at a frolic. They'll sing about you.
Wilkins: I have been sung about. It is not a pleasure. And I hear there is one more term, a finer one, and it has a story behind it.
Clara: Petticoat-strained. You don't want to know that one, Doctor.
Wilkins: Miss Higgins, I pull teeth for a living and I keep a bear for company. I want to know everything.
Clara: All right. There was a brush-arbor revival over by Massies Mill, three days of preaching and hollering in a field. Now, a revival goes on into the night and it's a thirsty business saving souls. So a couple of the men had a leaching tub set up back in the laurel, out of sight, and the night before the big sermon their strainer cloth, the wool blanket that holds the coal in, fell into the fire. Burnt right up. No cloth, no tub. And who should come walking through the laurel looking for a place to pray in private but the preacher's own wife.
Wilkins: Oh, Lord.
Clara: She looked at that tub and she looked at them men, and she sized up the situation like a general. She stepped behind a chestnut tree, and out come a red flannel petticoat over the branch. She said, boil that first, and I'll want it back Tuesday, washed. And that tub ran the smoothest liquor that mountain ever tasted. To this day, when a man down home wants to say a jar is the finest there is, he says it's petticoat-strained.
Wilkins: That is the only time in Christian history a preacher's wife's underthings did more for the congregation than the sermon did. Did she get it back?
Clara: Tuesday, washed and pressed, just like she said. Though they say it was a little pinker than when it left her.
Wilkins: Miss Higgins, stay by the stove, you have earned the good chair. Barnaby has earned nothing and will get it. Neighbors, after a word from our sponsor we will get our own hands black.
♪ Brassy medicine-show fanfare on fiddle and banjo
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♪ Fanfare resolves on a banjo flourish
♦ Wax crackle, Wilkins dumps a sack of charcoal onto a plank bench with a dry clatter
Wilkins: Segment the third: copper and the craft. Tonight it is coal and the craft, and I will take you through it the way I would teach my own apprentice, if I could ever keep one past the first time Barnaby yawns.
Wilkins: Start with the wood, because most of what goes wrong is decided before the fire is ever lit. Sugar maple, hard rock maple, is the queen of filter coal. It burns down clean and even, and it leaves a mild, sweet coal. Hickory is the king: harder and with more opinion to it. Beech and white birch will serve in a pinch. Now the ones you must never use. No pine, no spruce, no hemlock. They are full of pitch, and pitch makes a tarry coal that will put turpentine in your spirit. No painted boards, no tarred barn timber, no old fence rails soaked in God knows what, no mill scraps with nails in them. And watch for vines. If a poison ivy vine is wound around that log, the smoke from it carries the poison into your eyes and down into your lungs, and I have seen a man's lungs blister so badly from it that he coughed for a month. Clean hardwood, bark off, split small, and dry.
Wilkins: You do not need a collier's mountain to make a tubful. Here is the small way. Take an iron kettle with a tight lid and drill a hole in the lid the size of a goose quill. Pack the kettle with your split maple, clap the lid on, and set it in a hot fire outdoors, in the open yard, well away from the still-house. Soon a jet of smoke and gas comes hissing from that hole, and it will often catch and burn there like a little torch. That is the wood giving up everything that is not coal. When the jet sputters out and quits, your coal is done. Pull the kettle from the fire, plug the hole with clay, and leave it shut until the next morning. Do not open it hot, or the air will rush in and your coal will go up in front of you.
Wilkins: Here is the first thing that kills people, so listen to me as if I had your tooth in my forceps. Smoldering charcoal gives off a fume you cannot see and cannot smell, and it will put you to sleep and you will not wake up. Every winter the newspapers have it: a family in a tight room with a pan of coals for warmth, and all of them found dead in their beds by morning. Make your coal outdoors, cool it outdoors, and never bring a pan of hot coals into a closed room, still-house, or cellar. The second thing is quieter. New charcoal can heat up all by itself in a heap and catch fire in the night. Spread your fresh coal out, let it cool all the way and air out for a day or two, and only then put it in the bin. I lost a perfectly good woodshed in '59 learning that, and Barnaby lost his eyebrows, and they grew back crooked.
Wilkins: Now crush it. Not to powder, mind you, but to about the size of peas or beans. I do it in a feed sack on the anvil with a wooden mallet, never the hammer, or you will be breathing coal until Thanksgiving. Sift out the fine dust through a riddle. Then wash it. Pour clean spring water over it and stir and pour off, again and again, until the water runs clear and not like a Concord inkwell. Skip this and you will make a sooty Sally, as Miss Higgins taught us, and everyone at the frolic will know your name.
Wilkins: Now the tub. Take a clean crock or a sweet oak keg, never one that held kerosene, paint, or pickles, and bore a hole near the bottom for a wooden spigot. Lay in a pad of clean wool blanket, boiled first, or a good linen. A red flannel petticoat will also do, I am told, with the owner's permission. Pour in your washed coal and pack it down firm and even, a foot deep or two for a home tub. The Tennessee men go to ten feet, but they also have more patience and fewer bears. Lay another cloth over the top, so the spirit spreads out over the whole bed instead of boring a hole straight down.
Wilkins: Here is the truth that keeps you alive, so I will say it plain. Charcoal is a polisher. It is not a physician. You make your cuts at the still first, every time, the same as ever: throw out the foreshots and heads, keep the hearts, set the tails aside. Only the hearts go into the coal tub. Charcoal will not take out methanol, not a single drop of it. It will mellow the bite, it will take up some of the oily, harsh, stinking matter, and it will round the corners. But if you pour heads into a charcoal tub, what comes out the spigot is mellow poison. A blind man who drank smooth liquor is still blind.
Wilkins: And understand that copper and coal do different jobs. The copper in the still works on the hot vapor, taking the sulfur stink out while the spirit is still steam. The charcoal comes after, working on the cooled spirit in the tub. One is the barber and one is the tailor. You do not ask your barber to hem your trousers, and you should not ask your charcoal to fix a dirty still.
Wilkins: Now let the spirit go through slowly. A thin trickle, nothing more. If it gushes out the bottom, you have packed it loose, and the spirit has cut a channel straight through the bed like a spring freshet through a sand bank and never touched the coal. Tamp it down and start again.
Wilkins: Now, the stuff that goes wrong, and I will take it in order. One: specks, from coal you did not wash. Two: too long a stay. Leave spirit on the coal too long and it comes out as innocent as a Sunday school picnic and about as much fun. That was Granny Dorcas's gone-to-glory brandy. Taste it as you go. Three: tired coal. A charcoal bed fills up after a while and stops working. When your spirit comes out tasting the way it went in, dump the bed and lay in fresh. Four: borrowed flavors. Coal that has leached apple brandy will hand some apple to the next thing you pour through it, and smokehouse coal will hand you a ham, as Uncle Absalom learned in front of the Lord and six hounds. Five: mold. Wet coal left sitting in a damp cellar all summer grows a fur like a cat that lost its way. Dry it or throw it out. And six: fire. Never make your coal anywhere near the place where alcohol is running. Spirit vapor and an open coal fire make a quick, bright end to a building, and I would rather you stayed alive to listen next week.
♦ Barnaby snorts loudly, chain clinks
Wilkins: Barnaby agrees, mostly because he can smell the molasses pail. Miss Higgins, does a mountain woman have anything to add before we go to the mail?
Clara: Just this, Doctor. My granny used to say charcoal is like a good husband: it'll take a lot of your bad off you, but it won't take any of the poison you brought into the marriage yourself.
Wilkins: I have been married. Your granny was a scholar.
♪ Fiddle reel, brief and bright
♦ Wax crackle, a cylinder is threaded onto a playback machine, a faint hiss
Wilkins: Segment the fourth: myths, slang, and the mailbag. Tonight we have a voice on the cylinder all the way from Wilkesboro, North Carolina, sent up the post road and played here on my own machine. Our caller is Cletus Miller, whom the hollow calls Rabbit, I presume because he runs fast or breeds faster. Let us hear him.
♦ Recorded playback, thinner and scratchier, with a mountain echo
Announcer: The call-in cylinder of Mister Cletus Rabbit Miller, of Wilkesboro, North Carolina.
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?
♦ Playback clicks off, room tone returns
Wilkins: Rabbit, you have asked exactly the right question on exactly the right night, because tonight is about the difference between charcoal and ash, and your uncle has got them muddled the way some men muddle their wife with their mother-in-law. It is an easy mistake to make, and a costly one.
Wilkins: Charcoal is wood that was cooked without enough air. It still has its shape, full of tiny pores, and those pores catch things. Ash is wood that burned all the way, with plenty of air, until only the mineral is left. And what do the women of this country do with ash? They pour water through it in a hopper and run off lye, Rabbit. Lye. The same lye that boils the soap and scours the floorboards, and the same potash we ship down the Merrimack by the barrel. Throw hickory ash into a thump keg and the hot spirit pulls that lye right out, and you get a harsh, soapy, alkaline bite in the back of your throat like you gargled with a wash-day kettle. Your uncle has made himself a soap-boiler's cocktail. He could drink it or wash his drawers in it, and the drawers would come out ahead.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: As for the red oak shavings: oak gives color and tannin, and with time and a proper barrel it does good work on whiskey. But here is a fact every cooper on Route 28 will swear to: you build a whiskey barrel out of white oak, never red. Red oak is so open in the grain that you could pour cider through a red oak stave and catch it in your boot. Raw red oak shavings dumped in a hot keg give you bitter tannin, a raw lumber taste, and a darker color that fools the eye into thinking the liquor is older than it is. They do not clean out a single bad head.
Wilkins: So here is the truth, Rabbit. The thump keg strengthens the run, but nothing you throw into it, no ash, no shavings, no rabbit's foot, and no prayer, takes the heads out. The heads come out in the cuts. You catch the first of the run in a separate jar and throw it away, and you keep only the hearts. That is the whole medicine. If your uncle wants to do something with hickory, have him burn it into proper coal, the way I described tonight, and run his finished hearts through it afterward. That will give him a mellower jar. Not a safer jar, mind you, a mellower one. The safety was settled back at the still, or it was not settled at all.
Wilkins: Which brings me to the myth of the evening, and I hear it from every tavern bench between here and Dover: that charcoal draws out the poison. That a man can take a bad run, heads and all, pour it through a bed of coal, and it will come out clean and harmless as milk. Neighbors, it is a damned lie, and it has blinded better men than the ones repeating it.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Charcoal does not draw out the poison. The only thing that draws the poison out of a bad jar is the undertaker, and he charges by the foot. Charcoal is a fine servant and a lousy priest. It will polish your sins, but it will not forgive a single one of them.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: And a smaller myth, while I have the hammer warm: that black specks in the jar prove the liquor is honest mountain work. They prove only that the man was too lazy to rinse his coal. A sooty Sally is not a badge of honor, Rabbit. It is a confession.
Wilkins: Now, Rabbit Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, I have just struck you a fresh copper cent at the anvil, stamped G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., still warm from the punch, and it goes in tomorrow's post with my compliments. Give it to your uncle. Tell him it is worth one cent, which is exactly one cent more than the ashes in his keg. My regards to all the Wilkes County hollows, and keep your rabbits running.
♦ Coin dropped into a tin cup, a bright ring
Wilkins: Miss Clara Higgins, you have been a delight and a scandal, which is the best a guest can be. Barnaby has not growled at you once, and he growls at the parson.
Clara: Thank you kindly, Doctor. And you tell that bear if he's ever down Nelson County way, my Uncle Absalom's smokehouse is still standing, and it still smells like Sunday breakfast.
Wilkins: Do not say that so loud, he will slip his chain and walk to Virginia. Barnaby will eat charcoal, ash, shavings, and a revenue man's left boot, and the only one of those that ever improved him was the boot.
♦ Barnaby grunts, as if insulted
♪ Theme returns softly beneath
Announcer: A quick word before the doctor says goodnight! The Flame-Flow Still, United States Patent 10,561,960, made of heavy-gauge pure electrolytic copper and handcrafted to last a lifetime. Order today at moonshinestill.com, or see it at the Fort Wilkins Showroom on Route 28 in Pittsfield!
Wilkins: And if tonight's talk of maple coal and tubs and cuts has given you an appetite for the honest learning of the old craft, enroll in the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. I will teach you the history, the metallurgy, the right cuts and the wrong ones, how to build a coal tub, and how to keep your eyebrows, which is more than Barnaby managed. It is all for education and lawful demonstration, as the government insists and as your mother would want.
Wilkins: Next week the stove will be hot and the bear will be hungrier. Until then, wash your coal, mind your fumes, and never trust a man who says the charcoal will save him.
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 swells and fades into wax cylinder crackle