Vinegar, Ashes, and Elbow Grease: Cleaning a Still at Fort Wilkins
Dr. G. G. Wilkins covers how New Englanders have cleaned copper, from the old potash trade and the farmhouse ash hopper to the vinegar run, and tells how Barnaby caught a Merrimack deputy who came to Fort Wilkins dressed as a traveling kettle-scourer. Retired revenue officer Captain Donald Vance shares new stories: a Sandwich Notch still so polished it gave away its owner, a Wentworth man who cleaned with chamber lye, a mouse sealed in a filthy Rumney pot, and a Danbury widow who scoured her worm with a logging chain. In the call-in segment Wilkins answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, NC. He explains that hickory-ash lye was a cleaner used after the run and not a cure inside the thump keg, and that red oak shavings belong in the aging barrel.
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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 great hairy carcass down. That is the vinegar bucket, not your supper, and if you stick that snout in it again you will pucker so hard you turn inside out like a wet stocking. Down, I say! Down, you four-hundred-pound sack of fleas and bad decisions!
♦ Bear huffs, a sour snort, chain goes slack against the logs
Wilkins: He tasted it. Look at that face. Like a deacon who bit into the communion bread and found it was a lemon.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth
Wilkins: Good evening, friends, neighbors, sinners, and whatever county deputies have their ears pressed to my chinking tonight. Welcome to Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, broadcasting from the log walls of Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, in Pittsfield, New Hampshire. I am Dr. George G. Wilkins: dentist, blacksmith, inventor, alchemist, and twice the guest of the Merrimack County sheriff, who keeps a cot warm for me out of plain good manners. Tonight we take up the dirtiest, least glamorous, most necessary job in the whole craft. Not the mash, not the fire, not the pretty drip into the jar. No sir. Tonight we scrub. Cleaning a still. Vinegar, ashes, and elbow grease. And elbow grease, I will remind you, is the only grease in Merrimack County that does not go rancid, and the only kind a Concord lawyer has never once applied.
♪ Theme fades under
Announcer: A quick word, friends! A clean run starts with honest copper, and there is none more honest than the Flame-Flow Still, protected under United States Patent 10,561,960 and hammered from heavy-gauge pure copper. See it at moonshinestill.com, or at the Fort Wilkins Showroom right here on Route 28!
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
♪ Short fiddle sting, segment one
Wilkins: Segment the first. Before any man in these hills scrubbed a still, his grandmother was scrubbing a kettle, and his great-grandfather was burning down half of New Hampshire to make the soap she scrubbed it with. Let me explain that.
Wilkins: When the first settlers came up the Suncook and into Barnstead and Gilmanton, the land was nothing but trees: oak, maple, beech, ash, birch, thick as hair on a Frenchman's knuckle. A man had to clear it to plant. He could not sell the logs, because there was no road fit to haul them, so he burned them. Great roaring heaps of hardwood, burning for days, smoke hanging over the valley like the wrath of the Almighty. And when the fire went out he did not curse the ashes. He shoveled them up.
Wilkins: He soaked those ashes in water and drew off the lye, then boiled that lye down in big iron kettles until he had black salts. Boil it further and bake it and you have potash, and finer still, pearlash. That potash went by oxcart down to Boston and onto ships for soap-makers and glass-makers across the water. Potash was some of the first hard cash this colony ever saw. So the very trees that stood where Pittsfield stands went to London as soap. I find that poetic. A potash boiler and a preacher both turn the forest into ashes and call it profit.
♦ Barnaby grunts, chain shifts
Wilkins: Even Barnaby agrees, and he is a Congregationalist.
Wilkins: Now, every farmhouse in this valley had an ash hopper out back, a wooden trough shaped like a V with straw in the bottom. You shovel in the ashes from the hearth all winter, pour rainwater over them in spring, and brown lye drips out the bottom into a crock. How did Grandmother know when it was strong enough? She dropped in a fresh egg or a potato. If it floated, the lye was ready. If it sank, she poured more of it back through the ashes. Then she boiled that lye with the grease of a whole winter's hog butchering and got soft soap, brown as molasses, that would take the hide off a horse thief.
Wilkins: For her copper kettles, the jam pan, the wash boiler, the big kettle that made the apple butter, Grandmother used the other weapon: the acid. Vinegar and salt, mixed to a paste and rubbed on with a rag, and the tarnish slides off like a sin at a revival. When she had no vinegar she used sour milk or buttermilk, which does the same work. For a shine fit for the minister's visit she rubbed it down with rottenstone and a bit of oil until she could see her own disappointed face in it.
Wilkins: Ashes for the grease, acid for the tarnish, and a woman's forearm for the rest. That is the whole science, and the women of New England knew it a hundred years before any man in a Boston college wrote it in a book and took the credit.
Wilkins: The old cider-brandy men of colonial days learned it the hard way. Every fall the presses ran, the cider went hard, and the stills went to work turning it into apple brandy. And every one of those stills needed scrubbing when the season was through, because apple pomace and cider lees bake onto a copper bottom like tar on a sailor.
Wilkins: Which brings me to Ichabod Tuttle of Barnstead, God rest whatever is left of him. I tell this one as a warning. Ichabod held that washing a still was for women and Episcopalians. He ran that pot season after season and never once cleaned the worm. Scorched mash crept up the cap and into the coil, year after year, until that worm was choked like an old man's pipe stem. One cold morning in October he built a hot fire, the vapor had nowhere to go, and the pressure built and built until the cap went off like a Union cannon at Fredericksburg. Clean through his roof, friends. It came down in the churchyard and dented a headstone belonging to a fellow who, by the inscription, had died of a fever, which I reckon was a mercy compared to what Ichabod got.
Wilkins: The steam caught him across the arms and neck. When I got there the skin was sliding off his forearms like the peel off a boiled potato, wet and pink, hanging in loose gray rags at the wrist. He was screaming in a high thin voice like a teakettle with a grudge, and the whole shed stank of scorched corn, burnt hair, and something like roast pork that I will not describe any further, because some of you have eaten supper. I packed him in cold wet linen and poured spirit down his throat to quiet him, and he lived. He lived ugly, but he lived. His wife said she would come home when the still was clean, and she has been living in Gilmanton eleven years now.
Wilkins: So mark it well. A worm or vapor line clogged with crud can build pressure until the cap blows or the pot bursts, spraying scalding steam and vapor that will catch fire. Cleaning is not vanity. Cleaning is what keeps your skin on your arms.
♪ Banjo bridge
♪ Fiddle sting, segment two
Wilkins: Segment the second, legends and outlaws. And since tonight is about scrubbing, let me tell you about the day the county tried to sneak a spy into Fort Wilkins dressed as a scrubber.
Wilkins: It was a warm spring. Up the turnpike from Epsom comes a fellow with a handcart, a sack of scouring sand, a bundle of rags, and a sign painted on a shingle: KETTLES SCOURED, COPPERS BRIGHTENED, TEN CENTS. He wore a tinker's hat and an apron, and he smelled of boot blacking. Now I ask you: what traveling tinker blacks his boots? None. A tinker's boots are the color of every road from here to Portsmouth. This one had the shine of a county deputy who wanted to look nice for the magistrate.
Wilkins: He asked very politely to see my coppers. I said, Friend, my coppers are round back by the window. Go on around. And I did not mention who else was round back by the window.
Wilkins: Barnaby was having his afternoon rest in the sun, stretched out like a fur rug that had eaten a smaller fur rug. The deputy came round the corner with that sack of sand on his shoulder, and Barnaby lifted his head and smelled the boot blacking. I do not know what that bear has against boot blacking. Maybe a former life. He came off the ground the way a stump would if a stump had a temper.
♦ Bear roars, chain snaps taut against the logs
Wilkins: First swipe opened the sand sack like a Christmas present, and sand went everywhere: in the deputy's eyes, his mouth, down his collar. Second swipe took the seat of his breeches. It made a sound like a sailmaker tearing a new sheet of canvas, a long rrrrip, and then a sort of wet slap. When he turned to run I saw Barnaby had not only taken the breeches but a fair portion of what had been in them. A strip of hide the size of a pocketbook was flapping, and the deputy ran bowlegged down the turnpike leaving a trail of blood and sand like a sugared ham dropped off a wagon.
Wilkins: He did not get far. A man missing half his backside does not set any speed records. I brought him into the shop, laid him belly-down on the very bench where I pull molars, and stitched him up with dental silk. Eleven stitches. He bit a leather strap clean through and called me words I had not heard since the Pittsfield mill hands went on strike. Then I charged him one dollar for the stitching, and he paid with a five-dollar note, so I gave him his change in coppers fresh off the anvil.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Every one stamped G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., so he would remember who pays him and who patches him. The deputy came disguised as a kettle-scourer, and Barnaby gave him the first honest scouring of his life, starting at the seat.
♦ Barnaby grunts contentedly
Wilkins: Now, tonight I have a guest in the shop who has spent more years looking into other men's stills than any parson has spent looking into other men's souls. A retired federal revenue officer out of Manchester, twenty-eight years in the service, and somehow I like him anyway. Captain Donald Vance, welcome to Fort Wilkins.
Captain: Thank you, Doctor. I will say your bear looked at me through that window like I owed him money.
Wilkins: You smell of government, Captain. He can smell it the way a hog smells truffles. Sit down, have a cider, it is legal and it is hard. Now, Captain, I am told you used to judge a man's still by its cleanliness. Is that so?
Captain: It is. I carried a white linen handkerchief in my breast pocket, laundered every Sunday. When I found an outfit I would reach up inside the cap and wipe it around. If the linen came out clean or a little green at the edges, I knew I was dealing with a careful man, and a careful man rarely poisons anybody. If the linen came out black and greasy and smelling like a drowned dog, I knew I had a man to watch.
Wilkins: So that handkerchief has caught more bad distillers than the Merrimack sheriff, and it never once asked for a jar. But Captain, surely a man can be too clean?
Captain: A man can be too proud of being clean, and that is a different sin. Up in Sandwich Notch there was a fellow who kept the brightest copper pot I ever saw, before or since. He scoured it every week with vinegar and salt and finished it with rottenstone. Lord, it was beautiful. And he set it up in a clearing on the south slope, because he liked the light.
Wilkins: Oh no.
Captain: Oh yes. We were two miles off on the ridge one bright morning, not sure which hollow to search, and the sun came up over the shoulder of the hill, hit that pot, and flashed back at us like a lighthouse. My deputy said, Captain, is that the Second Coming? I said, No, son, that is a fellow who polishes his work too well. We walked straight to it. I wrote it up in my report as convicted by vanity.
Wilkins: That is what my mother called my moustache. Now, Captain, I have heard tell of men who clean with things a Christian would not keep in the house.
Captain: You are thinking of the man in Wentworth.
Wilkins: I am now.
Captain: An old fellow, never married, and you will understand why. He had heard the old wool-dyers and washerwomen used chamber lye, that is stale urine, saved up in a barrel, as a cleaner. Well, he saved his own. Months of it. And he scrubbed his copper pot with it, inside and out. When we came in, the smell in that shed would have knocked a buzzard off a dead cow.
Wilkins: Captain, I have pulled teeth from men who had not bathed since the Mexican War, and I believe you.
Captain: Here is the curious part, Doctor. The ammonia in that stuff attacks copper. It eats it and turns the liquid blue as a bluebird. His rinse barrel was blue. His rags were blue. His hands were blue to the wrist. And when I held the pot up to the doorway, I could see daylight through the bottom in three places. The man had pickled his own still in himself.
Wilkins: A man who scrubs his copper with his own chamber lye has found the one way to make whiskey worse than the Barnstead kind. Did you seize it?
Captain: I did not touch it. I told him he was under arrest, and he could carry the evidence to the wagon himself.
♦ Wilkins slaps the bench, laughing
Wilkins: Now give me the opposite. Give me the worst-kept still of your career.
Captain: That would be in Rumney, on the Baker River. A big rough outfit, three men working it, and I do not believe that pot had been washed since Mr. Polk was president. When we broke it down I took a cold chisel to the pot to make sure it could not be used again, and when I split it open, the crust inside was thick as a pie crust. Black on top, green underneath, layered like the rock in a quarry wall. And there in the middle of it, Doctor, sealed in like a fly in amber, was a mouse.
Wilkins: A whole mouse?
Captain: A whole mouse. Whiskers, tail, little feet curled up like he was praying. He must have fallen in years before and been cooked into the crust run after run. My youngest deputy took one look and lost his breakfast. He did not have time to get outside, so he lost it into his own hat. Then he had to ride home bareheaded in November.
Wilkins: That mouse had been run through more distillations than the whiskey had, and came out more refined. And the men drinking that stuff?
Captain: The whole valley had been drinking it. Bellyaches, headaches, one fellow with the shakes so bad he could not hold a spoon. A filthy still will not always kill you outright, Doctor, but it will make you wish it had. And a still that is never cleaned is a still nobody is inspecting, inside or out. When the cleaning stops, the caring has stopped, and that is when you find the worst things.
Wilkins: A filthy still is like a bachelor's underdrawers: it works, technically, and nobody wants to know how. Now, Captain, tell me there is one story where cleaning made somebody a hero.
Captain: There is the widow in Danbury.
Wilkins: I like her already.
Captain: She ran her late husband's still for years after he passed. Her problem was the worm. You cannot get a rag inside a copper coil. So she took a length of light logging chain, tied a rope to each end, and fed it through the worm. Then she sat on a stump and hauled that chain back and forth, back and forth, an hour every week, scouring the inside of the coil while she sang hymns.
Wilkins: Did it work?
Captain: It worked on the worm, and it worked on her. By the time we came to call, that woman had forearms like a blacksmith. My deputy was a big young fellow from Hooksett, very full of himself, and he made some remark about a lady being in the trade. She said, Sit down at that chopping block, young man. They locked hands. She put him down in about the time it takes to say amen. He asked for another try, and she put him down with her left.
Wilkins: The Danbury widow could put a deputy on his back faster than any woman in the county, and I mean that strictly about arm wrestling, so sit down, Deacon. What did you do with her?
Captain: Her copper was clean, her joints were sound, and she had nobody else to feed her. I wrote up her still, the law being the law, and she paid her fine. My deputy carried her chain to the wagon for her. She never asked him to.
Wilkins: Captain, stay in that chair. We are going to put you to work in a minute. But first a word from the folks who keep the lamp oil in this place.
♪ Brass band flourish, patent-medicine wagon style
♪ Calliope and snare roll under
Announcer: Step right up, friends, step right up! Are you tired of crusted pots, leaky joints, and tinny metal that sours your work before the first drop falls? Then lend me your ears for one minute, because Moonshine Stills is proud to present the finest copper ever to leave a craftsman's bench: the Flame-Flow Still, the Flagship, protected under United States Patent 10,561,960! Hammered from heavy-gauge, high-purity electrolytic copper, the purest copper a man can lay his hands on, with precision-machined brass unions that seal tight and come apart clean, so your scrubbing day takes an hour and not a week! Its shape is built to keep the heat rolling and circulating evenly through the pot, for unmatched purity in your essential oils, your herbal tinctures, and your traditional distillation demonstrations. Authentic American craftsmanship, friends, at just eight hundred ninety-nine dollars! Order it today at moonshinestill.com, that's moonshinestill.com/products/flame-flow-copper-still. Or come lay your own hands on the copper at the Fort Wilkins Showroom on Route 28 in Pittsfield, New Hampshire, where the bear will greet you and the Doctor will not charge you for looking! Once more, friends: moonshinestill.com/products/flame-flow-copper-still. The Flame-Flow, from Moonshine Stills. Honest copper for honest work!
♪ Brass flourish ends
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
♪ Fiddle sting, segment three
Wilkins: Segment the third, Copper and the Craft. Tonight the craft is the scrubbing. First, the law. Making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is illegal under United States law, and everything on this program is for historical and educational purposes only. Essential oils, tinctures, demonstrations, and scrubbing, which the government has not yet found a way to tax, though give them time.
Wilkins: Here is how it is done at Fort Wilkins, step by step. Captain, holler if I lie.
Captain: I will holler before you finish the sentence.
Wilkins: Step one. Let the fire die. Every coal out, the copper cooled until you can lay your palm flat on it, and no spirit vapor hanging in the room. A man who scrubs a hot still with live coals underneath and a jar of spirit on the shelf is the same man they find in the spring with his boots on and his eyebrows gone. Spirit vapor and live coals do not keep company with anything but the undertaker.
Wilkins: Step two. Empty the spent wash while it is still warm, so it does not set up hard. Rinse the pot with hot water right away, before the scorched mash on the bottom cures like mortar. If you have scorched it, and every man scorches it once, fill the pot with water and leave it to soak overnight. In the morning, lift the crust with a wooden paddle. Not an iron scraper, and not sand.
Captain: The sand scouring is where the old-timers went wrong.
Wilkins: It is. Sand and iron scratch the copper, and every scratch is a little ditch where crud settles in to raise a family. You want the inside of that pot smooth as a bishop's cheek.
Wilkins: Step three. The ashes. The oily tails leave a greasy film up in the cap and the top of the pot, a yellow slick that smells like a lamp gone bad. Grease is a job for lye. Draw yourself a weak wood-ash lye from the hopper, weak enough that the egg barely floats, and wipe the greasy places with a rag. But hear me: lye is caustic. It eats skin, and one splash in the eye can blind you. Wear greased leather gloves, keep your face back, keep a bucket of clean water at hand to flush yourself, and when the grease is cut, rinse every drop of lye out of that copper with plenty of fresh water.
Wilkins: Step four. The vinegar. Now you are after the oxide and the dull tarnish, and the green spots that creep in at the seams. Inside the pot, a rag and vinegar. But the worm, the thump keg, the cap, the lyne arm: you cannot reach those with a rag unless you are the Danbury widow, and she is spoken for. So we do the vinegar run. One gallon of good cider vinegar to every three of clean water, charged into the pot, a gentle fire, and let that hot sour vapor and liquid work through the whole rig: pot, cap, keg, and coil. It comes out the far end looking like pond water, with flecks of black and green, and that is the dirt you could not reach.
Captain: And not a drop of it gets drunk.
Wilkins: Not one drop. What comes out of a cleaning run is dirt in sour water, and it goes on the manure pile. Then step five: a plain water run right behind it, clean water only, run through the whole rig to flush out the vinegar.
Wilkins: Mind this next part, because it is the one men skip. Do not leave vinegar sitting in copper for days. Vinegar does its work in an hour or so. Leave it a week and it turns on you and grows a crop of green copper acetate, which is a verdigris and a poison. Let the vinegar work, then rinse it away.
Wilkins: Step six, the outside. Vinegar and a pinch of salt as a paste, the way Grandmother did her jam pan, or buttermilk if you are out of vinegar. Then a little rottenstone and oil if you want her to shine. Polishing the knob on a copper cap is a Christian virtue and the only kind of polishing the Methodists will let a man brag about in mixed company.
♦ Barnaby grunts
Wilkins: Barnaby does not agree with that. Barnaby has never polished anything but a ham bone.
Wilkins: Step seven. Check the worm runs clear. Pour clean water in at the top and make sure it comes out the bottom free and quick. If it dribbles or backs up, something is lodged in there, and you remember Ichabod Tuttle and his churchyard.
Wilkins: Step eight. Dry her with the lid off and her mouth open, and store her upside down or open to the air. Copper sealed up wet will corrode and mildew, and in a New Hampshire summer she will smell like the inside of a Concord alderman's boot by August.
Wilkins: Now, Captain, the forbidden things.
Captain: Two of them, and they matter. First, chloride of lime, the bleaching powder. Some fellows got the notion that if it whitens linen it ought to brighten copper. It does not. It pits the copper. And if a man mixes it with vinegar, or splashes it into a pot that still has vinegar in it, it gives off a green choking gas that burns the lungs. I found one man in Groton on his knees in his own dooryard, coughing and weeping, because he did exactly that in a closed shed. He was lucky to get the door open. Keep bleaching powder and acid apart, and keep bleaching powder away from your still entirely.
Wilkins: And second?
Captain: Second, do not mix your vinegar and your lye in the same bucket thinking you have made a double-strength cleaner. They cancel each other out, and you have made salt water and wasted both. Lye for grease, rinse, then vinegar for tarnish, rinse.
Wilkins: Mixing vinegar and lye is like marrying a Baptist to a Universalist: they fizz, they cancel each other out, and nothing gets cleaned. And then, friends, clean copper is only half of it. Clean copper does not excuse dirty cuts. You throw out your foreshots and your heads, every time, you keep your hearts, and you set the tails aside. A spotless still running careless cuts is a handsome coffin.
♪ Banjo bridge
♪ Fiddle sting, segment four
Wilkins: Segment the fourth: myths, slang, and the call-in line. First, a myth I hear in every tavern from Epsom to Alton Bay: Never wash a still. The black crust is the seasoning. It is what gives the old stuff its flavor, just like Grandmother's iron spider skillet.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Hogwash. Hogwash stamped and certified. An iron skillet gets seasoned with baked-on fat, which protects the iron. A copper still crusted black is choked with sulfur crust, burnt mash, and old oily tails. It is not protecting anything. It is smothering the copper and stinking up every run. The Captain's mouse was seasoning too, if you want to talk that way. Seasoning is for skillets and sermons, and a pot crusted black is neither one.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: There. One more coin with my name on it, to honor the death of a bad idea. Now. We have a tape off the call-in cylinder, come a long way up the post roads from the Carolina mountains. Let us hear it.
♦ Call-in tape hiss, cylinder crackle
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?
♦ Tape clicks off
Wilkins: Cletus Rabbit Miller, of Wilkesboro, North Carolina! Rabbit, I will tell you something your uncle may not know himself. He is not lying. He is just remembering it wrong, and on tonight of all nights I can show you where it got twisted.
Wilkins: You heard us. The old-timers absolutely used hickory ashes on their stills. Hickory makes some of the strongest ash-lye there is. But they used it after the run, on a cold, empty pot, with a rag and a bucket, to cut the grease out of the cap and the worm. Somewhere between your great-granddaddy's still and your uncle's porch, after a few generations of storytelling, it went from: we cleaned the still with hickory ash, to: we cleaned the whiskey with hickory ash. Same ash, wrong hole. Rabbit, your uncle got the right ash and the wrong hole, which is the story of half the marriages in Wilkes County, I would wager.
Captain: And lye in a thump keg full of hot vapor and spirit is the last place you want it, Doctor. It will not do what he thinks. It will only foul the run.
Wilkins: Right. Now the red oak shavings. Here again there is a grain of truth. Oak belongs with whiskey, sure enough, but in the barrel, after the run, where the charred wood gives the spirit color and that tannin bite over the months. Shavings in a keg of boiling liquid will not clean out a single bad head. Red oak shavings in a thump keg are like a necktie on a hog: a fine idea in the wrong place.
Wilkins: The bad heads come out one way, Rabbit. You catch them at the spout and you throw them out. No ash, no bark, no shavings, no prayer. A clean pot, a low fire, and an honest cut. So tell your uncle, with all affection, that he is half a historian and half a swamp doctor, and the history half is right. Rabbit Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, you are hereby an honorary citizen of Fort Wilkins. I am stamping a coin for you right now.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: That one goes in the mail to Wilkesboro, if the post office does not drink it on the way.
♦ Barnaby grunts
Wilkins: Barnaby says hello to the Carolina bears, and that he could whip any three of them.
Captain: Doctor, I want to say something before I go.
Wilkins: Go on, Captain. You have earned it.
Captain: In twenty-eight years I never once had to haul a man out of a clean still-house half dead. The dirty ones, I did. A man who cleans his copper is a man who thinks about tomorrow, and that is worth more than any jar.
Wilkins: Captain Donald Vance, retired out of Manchester, the only revenue man ever to sit in my chair without needing a tooth pulled or a backside stitched. Thank you, sir.
Captain: Thank you, Doctor. And tell the bear I am leaving by the front door.
♪ Banjo bridge
Announcer: Before you go, friends, one more quick word! Clean copper starts with good copper: the Flame-Flow Still, U.S. Patent 10,561,960, heavy-gauge pure electrolytic copper with unions that come apart clean for scrubbing day. Order yours at moonshinestill.com!
♪ Theme rises softly
Wilkins: And if you want to learn it all properly, the copper, the fire, the cuts, the scrubbing, and all the rest, sign up for the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. I will teach you everything my grandmother taught me, everything the Captain taught the courts, and everything Barnaby taught that deputy's hindquarters. Ask at the Fort Wilkins Showroom on Route 28 in Pittsfield, or by post.
Wilkins: Now go scrub something. Your pot, your boots, your conscience, in whatever order the Lord lays upon you. 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 fades out
♦ Wax cylinder crackle runs out to silence