The Dog Who Hated the Tax Man
Dr. G. G. Wilkins tells the story of Brandywine, a lop-eared Suncook foxhound he won in a card game who could smell a federal assessor through a closed barn door. He also explains the new Internal Revenue machinery, the wartime wool boom and the dog tax, and how a distiller can make his cuts by nose like a hound. Wilkesboro runner Junior Vance tells three new Brushy Mountain dog stories, and Wilkins answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller's voicemail about hickory ashes and red oak shavings in the thump keg, then knocks down the old shake-test bead myth on 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 your carcass. You have got the manners of a Concord legislator and the breath of a Dover tannery, and I will not have you rattling that chain while I am talking to Christian people. Lie down. Lie DOWN. There. Look at him, four hundred pounds of sulk and fleas.
♦ Barnaby lets out a long, wet, resentful huff; chain settles in the dirt
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth, swelling and then easing under
Wilkins: Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, farmers and fiddlers, sinners and selectmen. 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, here in Pittsfield, Merrimack County, New Hampshire. I am Dr. George G. Wilkins: dentist, blacksmith, inventor, counterstamper of copper, twice the guest of the Merrimack County sheriff, and the only man in the Suncook Valley who has pulled a molar and poured a jar in the same quarter hour without washing his hands in between. Tonight we are telling a story of Fort Wilkins lore that I have kept back for a good while, because it still makes my eyes wet and my backside clench. It is the story of a hound. A lop-eared, flea-bitten, piss-proud Suncook foxhound named Brandywine. The dog who hated the tax man.
♪ Theme fades out
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Announcer: A quick word, friends! Do you want the copper craft of Fort Wilkins on your very own kitchen table? Then ask for the Fort Wilkins 2-Gallon Tabletop Mini-Still: spun pure copper, hand-riveted, small enough for the parlor and handsome enough for the preacher's wife. Explore Tabletop Stills at moonshinestill.com, that is moonshinestill.com!
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
♪ Short banjo turnaround
Wilkins: SEGMENT ONE. The Man in the Plain Coat: the Assessor Comes to the Suncook Valley.
Wilkins: Now, before you can understand why a dog would hate a tax man, you have to understand the tax man, and that is harder, because there is not much there to understand. Back in the summer of 1862, Mr. Lincoln's Congress passed the Revenue Act, and with it they built a whole new beast called the Bureau of Internal Revenue. They carved the country into collection districts, put a collector and an assessor over each one, and then they hired a swarm of fellows called assistant assessors. And the assistant assessor's whole job, his whole reason for being on God's green earth, was to walk up your lane, knock on your door, and write down everything you owned, everything you did, and everything you earned.
Wilkins: They taxed everything in New Hampshire but the weather, and only because the assessor could not find a column for it. They put a tax on incomes, three cents on the dollar for any man earning over six hundred a year and five cents for the fat cats over ten thousand. They made a man buy a federal license to sell liquor, a license to distill it, and licenses for half the trades in the Valley. I paid for the privilege of pulling teeth, mind you, as if the screaming were not tax enough.
Wilkins: And here is the devil of it. These men wore no uniform. No blue coat, no brass eagle, no badge, nothing. The assessor came to Pittsfield with no uniform, no badge, and no friends, so he was half right about how to dress. He looked like a cattle buyer from Epsom or a lightning-rod peddler out of Manchester, right up until he unbuckled his satchel and pulled out that long, thin ledger and that inkhorn. And that inkhorn, ladies and gentlemen, that is where the trouble starts. Because Treasury ink has a smell. Iron gall and gum and something sour, like a bank vault that has been pickling. A man cannot smell it. A hound can.
Wilkins: Now set that alongside another thing going on in these war years. When the Southern cotton stopped coming north, every mill from Lowell to Suncook started hollering for wool, and every hill farmer in New England went and bought himself sheep. Sheep on the Catamount slopes, sheep on Berry Pond Road, sheep in places God never meant a sheep to stand. And where there are sheep, there are dogs that kill sheep. A pack of curs gets into a flock at night and you will find thirty ewes in the morning with their throats opened up like a mail sack, wool all red and matted, the lambs bleating at the bodies. So the State and the towns got the bright idea to tax the dogs, and pay the sheep farmers out of the dog money.
Wilkins: So you see the comedy of it. The government was taxing my whiskey, taxing my income, taxing my dentistry, and then it went and taxed my dog. A hound is the only citizen in Merrimack County who pays his taxes by being alive and does not complain about it. Well. Brandywine complained. Brandywine complained with his teeth.
♦ Barnaby grunts outside, chain clinks once
Wilkins: Yes, Barnaby, you were here first, nobody is forgetting you. Brandywine came to Fort Wilkins in the fall of '62. I won him at high-low-jack from a Barnstead peddler named Otis who had marked cards and a cheating heart, and I still came out ahead, because the cards were marked wrong. Otis put up the dog against a jar of my double-run, and when he lost he cried harder over the jar than the dog. Brandywine was red and white, with ears so long he would trip on them going downhill, a voice like a church organ with a cracked bellows, and a nose, God bless him, a nose that could have found Judas in a crowd of apostles.
Wilkins: Within a week I saw it. Any common man could come up my lane, a farmer, a drover, a Free Will Baptist with a pamphlet, and Brandywine would sniff his boots and go back to licking himself. But one October afternoon a stranger came up from the Concord road, and that dog stood up off the woodpile, and every hair on his back went up like a hog bristle brush, and he made a noise I have only ever heard from a man getting his wisdom tooth taken out without the jar first. Brandywine could smell government ink at forty rods. I have known wives who could not smell another woman's rosewater on a husband standing in the doorway.
♪ Low, ominous fiddle drone
Wilkins: SEGMENT TWO. Eleven Stitches and a Brass Button: the Legend of Brandywine and Assistant Assessor Pettengill.
Wilkins: The man's name was Ephraim Pettengill, assistant assessor for our division, a Concord man with a Concord tailor. He had a black broadcloth frock coat with a velvet collar, brass buttons he polished every morning with spit and pride, and a little waxed mustache like two commas that had lost their sentence. He came up my lane on a spring day in '63 to take my income return and look over my, as he put it, manufacturing apparatus. I had him by the forge with my best face on, telling him the copper in the back was for boiling dental instruments, when Brandywine came round the corner of the still-house.
Wilkins: Now, I had chained Barnaby, as always, by the log window. I had not thought to chain the dog. Nobody chains a hound. A hound is a hound. I learned better.
♦ Distant, rising bay of a foxhound, then a snarl
Wilkins: That dog did not bark. A barking dog is a dog making conversation. Brandywine came low and silent across the dooryard like a sin across a Sunday, and by the time Pettengill turned around the dog had his teeth set in the tails of that frock coat. The man ran. Of course he ran. And a running man pulling against a forty-pound hound is a contest of broadcloth, and the broadcloth lost. That coat tore off the assessor like the last page of a hymnal, all down the seam, with a sound like a wet bedsheet ripped by a jealous wife. Then the dog went back for the trousers.
Wilkins: I will tell you exactly what I saw, because I was a medical man and I take notes. Brandywine got the seat of those Concord trousers, good wool, and the meat underneath, a fair bite out of the left cheek of Mr. Pettengill's federal backside. What showed underneath that wool was whiter than a Shaker's conscience and twice as frightened, and then it was not white anymore. The man let out a sound I can only describe as a turkey being taught the violin. Blood running down to his garters. His ledger flying one way, his inkhorn the other, Treasury ink spattered over my anvil, and the dog shaking that mouthful of wool and assessor like a woodchuck.
Wilkins: And then, God help him, Pettengill ran the wrong way. He ran towards the still-house. Towards the log window. Towards Barnaby.
♦ Barnaby roars, chain snaps tight and rattles violently
Wilkins: Barnaby had been asleep in the sun, and Barnaby does not like being woken, and he especially does not like being woken by a bleeding man who smells of bay rum and fright. The bear came up on his hind legs to the full stretch of that chain and gave one swipe, and he took that velvet collar clean off the coat, and three of those brass buttons went pinging across the yard like grapeshot. The man was so close to the bear he could count his teeth, and he did, he told me later, he counted eleven before he quit. And Pettengill went up my sugar maple faster than any federal money ever went out of Washington. Stripped to his drawers and half a waistcoat, one shoe, bleeding down the bark, with a hound baying at the bottom and a bear sulking twelve feet off, pulling on his chain.
Wilkins: I left him up there a little while. Long enough for a reasonable man to reconsider his line of work. Then I hauled Brandywine off by the scruff, gave Barnaby a ham bone to settle his feelings, and coaxed the assessor down. I laid him face down on my own operating chair, the one I pull teeth in, poured clean spirit over the bite, and put eleven stitches in his backside with silk thread and a curved needle while he bit down on a leather strap and called on every saint the Episcopalians have got. I charged him the standard tooth-pulling rate, since by my reckoning I was extracting a dog from his trousers.
Wilkins: He never came back. His report to the collector, I have it on good authority from a clerk who drinks, read: Wilkins, G. G., Pittsfield. Apparatus, not examined. Dogs, one, hostile. Bears, one, more hostile. That is the first true line a revenue man ever wrote in Merrimack County. And Brandywine kept one of those brass buttons. He carried it around in his jowl like a plug of tobacco for the rest of his life and would growl if you tried to take it.
♦ Barnaby grunts contentedly
Wilkins: Now, I am a Yankee, and a Yankee will believe a dog story only if a second man swears to it, and he had better be a stranger. So tonight I have brought in a stranger of the first water, a man from the Brushy Mountains of North Carolina who has run more jars down more crooked roads than there are crooked lawyers in Concord. He knows dogs, he knows government men, and he talks faster than a Methodist at a camp meeting when the collection basket is coming round. Junior Vance, welcome to Fort Wilkins.
♦ Wooden chair scrapes on plank floor
Junior: Well, I thank you, Doctor. Mighty fine place you have got here. I will say, I have never set down to talk with a bear breathing at me through a window, and I have set in some rough company.
Wilkins: He will not trouble you unless you smell of federal ink or ham, Junior. You do not smell of ink, do you?
Junior: No sir. I smell of tobacco and nerves, and I am working hard on the tobacco.
Wilkins: Ha! Now Junior, you heard about Brandywine. Tell me the truth. Down in Wilkes County, did a hound know a government man the way mine did?
Junior: Doctor, I'm going to tell you about my granny's dog. She had a one-eyed Plott hound, brindle, with a head like a cinder block and the disposition of a wet cat. And she named him Sheriff.
Wilkins: Sheriff!
Junior: Out of pure spite, sir. She said she wanted one sheriff in the county she could holler at and he would come when she called. Now Sheriff was lazy as a church deacon in August. Would not hunt, would not tree a coon, would not get up off the porch for a dropped biscuit. But you let a government man be within a mile of that ridge and Sheriff would know it. And here is the queer part, Doctor. He did not go after them. He went after me.
Wilkins: After you?
Junior: After me. I would come round the bend below Moravian Falls loaded heavy, and there would be that one-eyed dog, laid out flat across the road like a fallen log, right in the ruts. He'd stare at me with that one eye. I'd holler, I'd blow, I'd cuss him up and down, his mama and his granddaddy too, and he would not move an inch. First time I like to run over him. Got out and drug him off by his hind legs and he walked right back and laid down again. So I turned around and took the long way, cussing him the whole road. Found out the next morning there were two revenue men set up by the creek ford half a mile on, with a lantern and a pile of fence rails across the road. That dog had smelled 'em up the wind.
Wilkins: So he was not a guard dog. He was a gatekeeper.
Junior: He was a better lookout than any man I ever paid, and all he wanted was neck bones. After that, if Sheriff was laid across the road, I turned around, no argument. I reckon that dog saved me six or seven times. I never did thank him proper. You can't thank a dog like that. He'd just look at you like you were simple.
Wilkins: Junior, your granny named a dog Sheriff out of spite. I named my bear Barnaby out of pity, and the bear has never forgiven me for it. Now, did the government men ever try to make friends with this dog?
Junior: Oh, they tried. There was one fellow, a revenue agent, tall skinny thing with a hat too big for him, sat on his ear like a skillet on a fence post. He figured if he could get the dog to like him, he could come up the ridge quiet. So one Sunday he drove right up to granny's place, polite as you please, asking directions to some church he had no intention of visiting, and he had a fried pork chop wrapped up in wax paper. Set his hat on the fender. Squatted down. Here, boy. Here, Sheriff.
Wilkins: Oh no.
Junior: Sheriff got up, Doctor, which he never did for nobody. He walked over slow, took that pork chop out of the man's hand gentle as a deacon taking communion, and he ate it. Ate the whole thing, bone and all, crunching. Man was smiling. Thought he'd done it. Then Sheriff licked his chops, turned round, walked over to the fender, lifted his leg, and let go on that hat. Filled it up, Doctor. That hat was so big it held near about a quart. And the dog looked him dead in the eye with that one eye the whole time.
Wilkins: (laughing) Filled it like a collection plate!
Junior: Granny come out on the porch with her snuff stick and said, mister, I believe he has give you his answer. That man put that hat on the seat beside him and drove off with the windows down, and I would bet he took the long way home too.
Wilkins: A revenue man who tries to bribe a hound with a pork chop has never once in his life understood loyalty, and on that day he learned something about hats. Now Junior, I have heard tell that down your way some folks did not just use dogs to warn them off. Some put the dogs to work.
Junior: My cousin Pruitt. Pruitt was too lazy to walk and too scared to drive, so he trained his bird dog to do the walking. Little liver-spotted pointer bitch named Dolly, sweet as pie, soft mouth like they're bred for, would carry an egg a mile and never crack it. Pruitt figured if she'd carry an egg she'd carry a pint. So he'd put a pint jar in an old wool sock, tie the top, and send Dolly off through the laurel thicket to a fellow's back porch two hollows over. Fellow would take the pint, put his money in the sock, send her back. No government man alive is going to stop a bird dog in the laurel and ask her for her license.
Wilkins: The first honest delivery service in the South.
Junior: It was, until one Thursday. Dolly got turned around, or smelled something better, I don't know, and she went down the wrong hollow and laid that sock right on the doorstep of the Baptist preacher. Brother Hollis. Hard-shell, foot-washing, sin-hollering Brother Hollis. Pruitt about died. Figured he'd be preached about by name come Sunday and run out of the county.
Wilkins: And was he?
Junior: No sir. Next morning Dolly come trotting home with that sock in her mouth, empty, and a note folded up inside in Brother Hollis's own hand. Said: Received with thanks for my rheumatism. Thursdays suit me fine. Then he signed it, in Christian fellowship.
Wilkins: (roaring laughter) Pruitt's dog delivered to the preacher by mistake, and I would wager that was the only honest sale ever made on a Sunday in Wilkes County, even if it was a Thursday!
Junior: Pruitt delivered to that man every Thursday for four years. Preached the hottest sermons on the evils of drink in the whole Brushy Mountains, and his rheumatism never was better.
Wilkins: Junior Vance, you are a credit to Carolina and a menace to the Treasury. Stay put, we will need you again before the night is out.
Junior: I ain't going nowhere, Doctor. That bear's between me and the door.
♦ Barnaby grunts
♪ Bright, quick banjo and fiddle reel
Ad Break
♦ Wax cylinder crackle; a hand bell rings three times
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♦ Hand bell rings once; wax cylinder crackle
♪ Banjo flourish back to the program
Wilkins: SEGMENT THREE. A Nose Like a Hound: Copper and Judging the Cuts by Smell.
Wilkins: Now, Brandywine taught me something about the craft, and I mean that honestly. A dog does not read a hydrometer. A dog does not trust a tax man's paper. A dog trusts his nose. And a distiller who wants to make his cuts honest had better learn to use his own nose like a hound, because the nose will tell you what the eye cannot. Before I go a step further, hear me: making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of the United States, and everything I tell you on this program is history and education only. And while I am at it, do not go setting dogs on folks. Brandywine is a tall tale of Fort Wilkins, and setting a dog on any man is cruel to the dog and dangerous to the man.
Wilkins: Let me walk you through it, the old way, step by step. First the mash. You cook cracked corn in water till it gelatinizes, thick as a Boston pudding, then stir in a share of malted barley once it cools to where you can hold your hand in it, so the malt can turn that starch into sugar. Cool it further, pitch your yeast, and ferment it warm and covered with the air able to get out. Keep the yeast happy. A starving, overheated, crowded yeast is a stressed yeast, and a stressed yeast belches sulfur, that rotten-egg, cooked-cabbage stink. Most of the sulfur in a fresh run comes from yeast that was badly treated, the same way most of the bad temper in a bear comes from being woken up.
Wilkins: Then the copper. Copper does its best work where the hot vapor touches it: the dome of the pot, the lyne arm, the coils of the worm. That is where the metal grabs those sulfur compounds and holds on to them. An iron pot with a copper worm is half a still. A copper pot head and arm is where the catalytic magic, the true alchemy, happens. Keep that copper bright and clean, inside and out.
Wilkins: Now the run. Low fire. Low and steady, never a roaring blaze, and never, ever leave the still alone while she is running. Alcohol vapor is heavier than air. It will creep along a floor like a cat to a cream pan, and if it finds the firebox, it will blow you through your own roof. I have seen a still-house in Gilmanton go up like a Fourth of July rocket and the owner come out the door with no eyebrows, no beard, and no recollection of his middle name. Keep your collection jars well away from the flame.
Wilkins: When she starts to drip, the first little run is the foreshots. Throw it away. All of it. A few ounces for every five gallons of wash in the pot, and more if you are in doubt, and be in doubt. That is where the methanol runs heaviest, the blinding stuff, the coffin varnish. Not for drinking, not for rinsing teeth, not for the hired man, not for the sheriff, though I have been tempted.
Wilkins: Then you collect the rest, not in one big crock, but in a row of small jars, numbered one, two, three, on down the line, a pint or less in each. This is where the hound's nose comes in. Let them sit uncovered a spell, with a cloth over them against the flies, so the sharpest vapors can air off. Then go down the row and smell them, one at a time, like Brandywine working a fence line.
Wilkins: The early jars, the heads, smell sharp. Glue pot. Green apple. Varnish and nail lacquer from a coachmaker's shop. That bite at the back of your nose that makes your eyes water. Heads smell like a varnish pot, and a man who drinks them will get a shine on his coffin long before he gets one on his reputation. Those go out with the foreshots. Then the middle jars, the hearts: clean, sweet, smelling of the corn, warm bread, a little honey, no sting. That is your keeping spirit, the good hearts.
Wilkins: And then comes the late jars, the tails, and here a hound would perk right up, because tails smell like dog. Wet dog, wet paper, sweaty wool socks, a dirty sheep. Those are the heavy oily fusel compounds coming over as the run goes on. A tails jar smells like a wet hound that rolled in a dead woodchuck and then went to church to brag about it. Set the tails aside. Do not mix them into your hearts out of greed. Your nose will tell you when the sweet goes sour and the clean goes cloudy, and when it does, make your cut, and do not argue with it.
Junior: Doctor, can I say something about that?
Wilkins: Speak up, Junior.
Junior: My granny's daddy used to say a greedy man cuts with his wallet and an honest man cuts with his nose. And the greedy man's customers is the ones that end up in the graveyard.
Wilkins: Your granny's daddy should have been a Pittsfield man. That is the whole sermon in one line. Cut with your nose, not your pocketbook.
♦ Slow drip into jar
♪ Gentle fiddle interlude
Wilkins: SEGMENT FOUR. Swamp Medicine and Soap: the Listener Call-In and the Myth of the Bead.
Wilkins: We have a message on the speaking tube tonight, all the way up from Wilkesboro, North Carolina, Junior's own home ground. Let us hear it.
♦ Crackle; a tinny voicemail recording plays with a faint hum
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?
♦ Crackle ends
Wilkins: Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro! Rabbit, you are a fine young man to ask, and your uncle is a fine old liar, and I mean that with affection. Let me take the two halves of his medicine one at a time.
Wilkins: First, red oak. Every cooper from here to Portsmouth will tell you that red oak will not hold liquor. Pour spirit into a red oak cask and it comes out through the staves like sweat out of a deacon at a dance. Red oak's pores run open, straight through the grain like a bundle of drinking straws. White oak's pores are plugged up from the inside by little natural growths the wood makes, and that is the only reason we put liquor in white oak barrels and not red. So red oak shavings in a thump keg will lend your spirit some color and a mouthful of bitter tannin, and it will look aged, the way a painted harlot looks young, but it does not clean out a single drop of bad heads.
Wilkins: Rabbit, red oak in a thump keg is like a Concord alderman at a temperance meeting: it soaks up everything, holds on to nothing, and leaks all over the floor afterwards.
Wilkins: Second, hickory ash. Every farm wife in New Hampshire knows what you get when you soak wood ash in water, because she makes it every spring. Lye. Potash. You boil it with hog fat and get soft soap. Now ask yourself what lye does when it rides along in a doubler full of hot spirit and any fats and oils from the mash. Your uncle's hickory ash makes lye, and lye makes soap, so if he keeps it up he will have the cleanest-tasting bellyache in Wilkes County. A soapy, bitter, lye-touched spirit. And no, it does not catch methanol, because nothing tossed in a keg catches methanol. The only cure for bad heads is the cut. Throw away the foreshots, throw away the heads, keep the hearts. That is the whole law and the prophets.
Junior: Rabbit, I know your people. Your uncle also swears a horsehair in a rain barrel will turn into a snake. I'd take his thump keg advice about the same.
Wilkins: (laughing) There you have it, from Wilkesboro and from Pittsfield both. Rabbit Miller, thank you for writing in, give your uncle my respects and a bar of good soap, and tell him to keep his ashes in the garden, where they belong. Now, since we are knocking down foolishness, let me knock one more, and I will do it properly, with a little help from my anvil.
♦ Coins clink into a tin dish; Wilkins sets the punch
Wilkins: There is an old trick every barroom sport loves. You shake a jar of spirit hard and watch the bubbles, the bead. If the beads come up big and fat and sit on top a good while, the old boys say it is strong, it is good, it is safe to drink. Well, half of that is true and the other half will kill you.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: True: the bead does tell you, roughly, how strong the spirit is. Spirit near half alcohol throws a big, lasting bead, weak spirit throws small beads that vanish quick. A rough guess of proof, nothing more. A big fat bead tells you the proof the way a big fat belly tells you a man's character: roughly, and with plenty of room for lying.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: False: the bead tells you nothing about whether it is safe. Methanol will bead. Lead-poisoned spirit run through soldered junk will bead. Spirit full of heads will bead as pretty as any church-supper lemonade. A bead never saved a man's eyesight or his liver. Your nose and honest cuts do that, and clean copper, and no lead solder anywhere in the rig.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin; coin drops into dish
Wilkins: There. One more copper with my name on it: G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. I have stamped my name on more coppers than the Treasury has honest clerks, and that is no great boast, since the Treasury has two.
Junior: Doctor, could I get one of those to carry home?
Wilkins: You may have this one, warm from the anvil. Show it to your granny's ghost and tell her Sheriff has a cousin in New Hampshire.
♪ Slow, warm banjo and fiddle, sentimental
Wilkins: SIGN-OFF.
Wilkins: Before we close, let me tell you how it ended for old Brandywine. He lived to be fourteen, which is ancient for a hound, gray in the muzzle, deaf as a selectman at budget time, but he could still smell a revenue coat coming up the turnpike till the very end. He died in his sleep on the woodpile in the sun, with that brass assessor's button still in his jowl. I buried him under the woodpile with the button in his teeth, and Barnaby lay by the grave three days and would not eat his ham bone. Brandywine is the only Union veteran in Pittsfield who never once asked for a pension. Here is to him.
♦ Barnaby lets out a low, mournful grunt
Wilkins: My thanks to Junior Vance of the Brushy Mountains, to Rabbit Miller of Wilkesboro, and to every one of you listening by the stove tonight.
Junior: Thank you, Doctor. And tell that bear I said goodnight, from a safe distance.
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Announcer: One more quick word, friends! Take the Fort Wilkins craft home in a shape that fits your kitchen table: the 2-Gallon Tabletop Mini-Still in gleaming spun copper, perfect for botanical waters and floral oils. Explore Tabletop Stills at moonshinestill.com, that is moonshinestill.com!
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Wilkins: And if you want to learn this craft the right way, the copper, the mash, the fire, the cuts by eye and by nose, and the history of every scoundrel in the Suncook Valley, then enroll in the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. I will teach you what Brandywine taught me: trust your nose, respect the fire, throw away what ought to be thrown away, and never trust a man with a ledger and a too-clean coat. And remember, the law is the law: no spirits for drinking without a federal permit. History and education, friends.
Wilkins: Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.
♦ Bear grunt and final drip into jar
♪ Theme rises briefly and fades into wax cylinder crackle