Selling by the Gallon
Wilkins covers the gallons nobody agreed on: Queen Anne's wine gallon, the ale gallon, the corn gallon and the British imperial gallon, the town sealer of weights and measures, the gauger's rod, thick-bottomed jugs, and lead-glazed crocks. He tells how Barnaby caught a night-thief filling fake Fort Wilkins jugs, and retired revenue officer Captain Donald Vance tells new stories about catching cheats with a scale, a notched tavern measure, a Canadian peddler's 'patriotic' imperial gallons and a cider crock that blew up. Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro asks whether hickory ashes or red oak shavings clean the heads out of a thump keg, and Wilkins debunks the old shake-test bead along with the beading oils sold to fake it.
▶ Listen in the Radio Moonshine app
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 that great stinking carcass down! That jar is not yours, and neither is the leg of any gentleman who comes up my lane tonight, whatever gravy he spilt on his trousers. Down, I say. Lie in your own muck like a decent Christian bear.
♦ Bear huffs, chain drags across frozen ground, a low disgruntled groan
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth
Wilkins: Good evening, neighbors, sinners and sheriffs' spies, and welcome to Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, coming to you from Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, in Pittsfield, New Hampshire. I am your host, dentist, blacksmith, coin-puncher and only half-reformed rascal of Merrimack County. Tonight's subject is Selling by the Gallon: jugs, crocks, demijohns, and the weights and measures no two men in this county ever agreed on. Every man in Merrimack County swears his jug holds more than it does, and every woman in Merrimack County has learned to smile and say nothing about it.
Wilkins: Before we go on, the plain truth, said once and said straight: 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. The Collector at Concord has made sure I know that, twice over.
♪ Banjo flourish fades under
Announcer: A quick word, friends! Want copper as honest as a sealed gallon? The Fort Wilkins 2-Gallon Tabletop Mini-Still is hand-riveted and made of pure spun copper, sized for your kitchen table and built for botanical waters and floral oils. See it at moonshinestill.com!
♪ Fiddle sting
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Wilkins: SEGMENT ONE. The Gallon That Wasn't.
Wilkins: Now then. You would think a gallon was a gallon the way a molar is a molar. It is not. When this country was still English, England had three gallons going at once. There was the wine gallon, two hundred and thirty-one cubic inches, fixed by a statute of Queen Anne in 1707. There was the ale gallon, about two hundred and eighty-two cubic inches, because a brewer wants more room for his foam. And there was the corn gallon, the dry gallon, around two hundred sixty-eight and eight-tenths, for measuring grain. That is two more gallons than an honest man needs and one fewer than a lawyer can bill for.
♦ Coals shifted in the forge, a soft hiss
Wilkins: Then in 1824 the British, never content, threw all three out and made the imperial gallon, about two hundred seventy-seven and four-tenths cubic inches. So a gallon bought in Montreal holds about a fifth more than a gallon bought in Pittsfield. A Canadian gallon is like a Canadian winter: bigger than ours, and the fellow who brings it down will not shut up about it.
Wilkins: Our own Congress got around to the matter by a joint resolution in 1836, telling the Treasury to send every state a set of standard weights and measures. An old Swiss surveyor named Ferdinand Hassler fussed over the brass and settled us on Queen Anne's wine gallon of two hundred thirty-one cubic inches. The standards came to the state, and from the state they trickled down to the towns, where every New Hampshire town chooses a sealer of weights and measures. The sealer is a man paid about fifty cents a year to be hated by every merchant on the turnpike. He tests your pewter quart against the true one, and if it measures honest he stamps it with the seal. If it measures short he is supposed to condemn it, unless the tavern keeper is his brother-in-law, and in Merrimack County everybody is somebody's brother-in-law.
Wilkins: And now the revenue men have joined the fight. Since Mr. Lincoln's tax came in, the government does not just count your gallons. It counts proof gallons, meaning a stronger spirit owes more tax than a weak one. So the gauger comes up the lane with a long, notched gauging rod to measure your casks and a glass hydrometer bobbing in a tin cup to measure your strength. A gauger's rod is the only stick in New Hampshire that a man is gladder to see go into somebody else's barrel.
♦ A wooden rod rapped twice against an oak cask, hollow knock
Wilkins: And barrels! Lord deliver us. Measured by the wine gallon, a barrel ought to be thirty-one and a half. One cooper in Barnstead swears his whiskey barrel holds forty. His cousin in Epsom swears his holds forty-two, and nobody has ever caught either cooper sober enough to check. Then come the jugs and crocks. A good salt-glazed stoneware jug, like the Bennington pots from the Norton works over in Vermont, has a number painted on the shoulder in cobalt blue, a 1 or a 2 or a 3, to say how many gallons it holds. But a potter throws on a wheel by eye and thumb. His 2 means two gallons, give or take a pint, depending on how his wife spoke to him that morning.
Wilkins: One warning, given straight: keep spirits, cider and vinegar out of the cheap lead-glazed redware. The acid draws lead out of the glaze and into the drink, and lead will sour your belly and rot your wits slower than any sheriff. Salt-glazed stoneware is the honest vessel. A redware jug of hard cider is a coffin with a handle.
♪ Short banjo bridge
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Wilkins: SEGMENT TWO. Short Measure and Long Teeth.
Wilkins: Let me tell you about the summer a Barnstead fellow decided Fort Wilkins jugs were worth stealing. I sell nothing to nobody, as the Collector well knows, but this rascal had been buying stoneware, scratching my name on the shoulder with a nail, and selling barn-cellar swill up and down the Suncook as Wilkins' Best. The man had no shame, no chin and no front teeth, and I know about the teeth because I pulled two of them in '59 and he never paid.
Wilkins: One moonless night he crept up behind the still-house to fill his fakes from my own cask, figuring an honest Wilkins quart on top would dress up three quarts of his slop. He had four jugs on a rope over his shoulder, clanking like a tinker's cart. He forgot that Barnaby sleeps with one ear cocked toward the cask.
♦ Chain snaps taut, a deep bear roar, stoneware jugs knocking together
Wilkins: Barnaby took him by the coattail first, and the coattail gave way like wet birch bark. Then he took the seat of the man's trousers, and the trousers gave way too. Then he took a mouthful of what was underneath, and that did not give way at all. It made a noise like a boot pulled out of April mud, followed by a howl in two octaves at once. The fellow went down on his own jugs, all four of them, and rolled in the broken crockery like a hog in a nail barrel, with Barnaby huffing on his neck and dripping slobber into his ear.
♦ Crockery shattering, a man's strangled yelp, bear chuffing
Wilkins: I called the bear off with a ham bone, the only bribe he takes, and spent two hours by lantern light on that fellow bent over my anvil, fishing crockery out of his hindquarters with my molar forceps. Fourteen shards in all. The last one was the size of a dollar, and it still had a cobalt-blue number 2 on it. The only honest measure that thief ever carried, and he carried it in his arse. He is the only patient I ever had who complained about the bill from the wrong end. I punched one of my coppers on the anvil that night, G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., and set it in his palm. I told him that was his change, and that if he ever scratched my name on another jug I would scratch it on him.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Now, speaking of short measure, I have a guest in the fort tonight who has caught more crooked gallons than the Concord jail has fleas. He spent most of his life in the revenue service hunting copper in these hills, he lives down Manchester way, and he is the only revenue man Barnaby has ever let pass without tasting. Captain Donald Vance, welcome to the fort.
Captain: Thank you, Doctor. I'll say your bear gave me a good long smelling at the gate. I believe he was deciding whether I was a ham or a warrant.
Wilkins: He decided you were neither, which is the highest compliment he pays. Captain, sit down and tell the listeners how a man catches a cheat in the matter of gallons.
Captain: Well, the eye lies, Doctor, and so does the potter. My first lesson came at a farm up in Gilmanton. The farmer had a row of fine gray jugs with a cobalt 1 painted on each, a gallon apiece, all tied up proper for the Concord trade. He swore up and down they were honest. I lifted one and it felt light in my arm. Something about it was wrong, the way a handshake is wrong when the fellow is hiding a knife.
Wilkins: And did you break it open?
Captain: No sir. I carried it down to the grist mill and set it on the miller's scale, first full, then emptied into the millpond, which pained me. A gallon of water weighs about eight and a third pounds, Doctor, and spirit runs a touch lighter, so I knew roughly what the difference ought to be. It came up nearly a quarter short. When I broke one open after, the bottom was as thick as a church Bible. That farmer had paid the potter extra to throw them heavy in the foot. Three quarts in a gallon jug.
Wilkins: Nothing so disappoints a widow as a gallon that turns out to be three quarts.
Captain: [Deep laugh] I'll not repeat that to my wife. The farmer told me, and I wrote it down word for word, Captain, it was a gallon when I filled it. I told him it must have been an awful thirsty jug.
Wilkins: You are the only revenue man I ever met who could find a short measure by weight, and the only one I ever met I would trust with the weight. What else?
Captain: A tavern keeper in Rochester. Two pewter quart measures, painted the same dull gray, same dent in the lip, same everything. One was honest, and he showed it to the sealer every spring. The other had a false bottom of hammered pewter sitting half an inch high. He kept them side by side on the shelf and told them apart by one little file notch on the handle. Nobody knew that notch but himself and his wife.
Wilkins: And a secret two people know is only a secret until one of them gets sore.
Captain: That is the gospel, Doctor. He sold her best Sunday bonnet, ostrich feather and all, to pay a horse debt. Next Monday morning she was in my office in her second-best bonnet, holding the short measure in one hand and the file in the other. She said, Captain, he may sell my hat, but he will not sell me short. I never had a better witness, and I never wanted to be married to one less.
Wilkins: A tavern keeper with two measures is like a deacon with two wives: one for Sunday, one for business, and the truth comes out the day one of the women gets angry. Now tell them about the Canadian.
Captain: [Chuckles] A peddler from Stanstead, up in Canada East, came down through the border woods with a wagonload of kegs. He declared everything in imperial gallons, wrote it up as pretty as a schoolmaster. I converted it to our wine gallon, which made his ten gallons better than twelve, and figured the duty accordingly. He stood up in his wagon and argued, I swear before God, that his gallons were bigger, and therefore more patriotic, and therefore ought to be taxed less, not more.
Wilkins: Patriotic to which flag?
Captain: That was my question. He said whichever one was cheaper that day. He paid the duty in Queen Victoria's coppers and our pennies mixed, counted out one at a time on my boot, and cussed me in two languages the whole way.
Wilkins: I'd have punched my name on every one of those coppers and sent them back to the Queen. Captain, was there ever a cheat you admired?
Captain: Just one, and he broke no law I could find. A Pembroke merchant bought his spirit by the gallon only in January, when the cellar was so cold the cider froze. He sold it by the gallon only in July, when the store was as hot as a sinner's conscience. Spirit swells in the heat, Doctor. He gained near three gallons in every hundred, just by waiting for summer. That is why the law reckons proof at sixty degrees. I wrote in my book, ingenious, lawful, and annoying, and I bought a jug off him myself in January.
Wilkins: That is the first honest swindle I ever heard of. And the crock?
Captain: [Voice lowers] That one is not so funny, though it ends all right. We were searching a cellar in Epsom, me and a young deputy, sweet boy, ears like a pair of open barn doors. Somebody had put up a big stoneware crock of new cider and stopped it with a cork wired down tight, which you must never do. Cider keeps working, and the gas has nowhere to go. That boy bent down to read the potter's mark, and the crock let go like a six-pound gun.
♦ Sharp crack of stoneware bursting, liquid splashing on stone
Captain: A shard the size of a playing card went past his head and took the top of his left ear clean off, neat as a tailor's shears. Cider and blood all over the cellar stairs, and he stood there in the foam not knowing what had happened. He only found out when he reached up to scratch and came away a little short.
Wilkins: Did you find the piece?
Captain: We did. It was stuck to the cellar wall like a dried apple. The lady of the house wrapped it in a hanky and gave it to him, and he wore it on his watch chain for years. The lesson is that a stopped crock of working cider is a bomb that smells nice. Let it breathe.
Wilkins: Captain Vance, you are welcome back at Fort Wilkins anytime, and Barnaby agrees, which is more than I can say for the Merrimack sheriff.
Captain: Obliged, Doctor. Keep that bear fed. I'd hate to be the gallon he comes up short on.
♪ Fiddle reel swells
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Wilkins: AD BREAK. And now, a word from the folks who keep the copper in this county shining.
Announcer: Step right up, friends, step right up! Are you tired of cracked crocks, leaky kettles and pots made from heaven-knows-what? Do you crave the true precision of Fort Wilkins coppersmiths, cut down small enough to fit your kitchen table? Then behold the Fort Wilkins 2-Gallon Tabletop Mini-Still, a compact alembic of pure copper! It is spun from heavy twenty-ounce, pure electrolytic copper, with no cheap pot metal and no mystery scrap. The handles are riveted by hand and won't let go when the work is hot. The quick-connect cooling lines go on and come off as easy as a Sunday collar. It's the premier choice for distilling botanical waters, drawing out essential floral oils of rose, lavender and mint, and putting on a countertop demonstration that will leave your guests slack-jawed! All of it for just two hundred eighty-nine dollars. Come see it gleaming in the showroom at Fort Wilkins on Route 28 in Pittsfield, New Hampshire, or go this very evening to moonshinestill.com/products/tabletop-alembic. That's moonshinestill.com/products/tabletop-alembic, to explore tabletop stills today. Copper that measures up, friends. Go see it now!
♪ Banjo flourish and a ringing triangle
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Wilkins: SEGMENT THREE. Copper, Cuts, and the Gallon in the Jar.
Wilkins: Now let us talk craft, the way the old alchemists talked about the marriage of mercury and sulfur, only with fewer lies. Again, for the Collector's benefit: unlicensed distilling of spirits to drink is against federal law. This is history and education, and I tell it the way it was done.
Wilkins: First, the wash. Your grain or fruit is fermented into a weak beer of a few parts in the hundred of alcohol. That wash goes in the pot, and never filled to the brim. Leave a quarter of the pot empty at least. A charge that foams up into the cap and the arm will plug the vapor path, and a plugged copper still is a cannon pointed at your own belly. I have pulled teeth from men who learned that lesson, and I have pulled them from a fair distance, because some of those teeth were in the rafters.
♦ Copper lid seated on a pot, low ring
Wilkins: Second, the fire. Bring it up slow and keep it low. Alcohol vapor is heavier than air. It rolls along a floor like a deputy looking for his dropped warrant, and it finds the stove about as quick. Keep the receiving jars well away from any flame, lantern or pipe. I have seen a man light his clay pipe at the end of a run and lose his eyebrows, his mustache and the respect of his wife all in one blue whoosh.
Wilkins: Third, the copper, and here is where the alchemy lives. The copper that matters most is the copper the vapor touches on its way to the worm, meaning the cap, the head and the arm. That's where the sulfur stink gets caught and held back, so keep that part bright and scrubbed. A still of fine copper that's black with crust is like a dentist with fine forceps who never washes his hands.
Wilkins: Fourth, the cuts, and listen close. Don't run your still into one big crock. Catch it in many small jars, a pint or less apiece, numbered as they come, so you can smell and judge each one. The first to come are the foreshots. Throw them out every time, and generously. The old rule was better than a gill for every five gallons of wash, and more if you are in any doubt. Then come the heads, sharp and solventy, smelling of varnish and headache. Those go out too, never down a throat. Then the hearts, clean and sweet, which are what all the fuss is about. Last come the tails, oily, flat and wet-dog smelling, which get set aside and run again with the next charge. A good cut is like a good extraction: quick, decisive, and you do not go back in to fetch the piece you left.
♦ Glass jars clinking in a row on a plank shelf
Wilkins: Fifth, and this is the bit that ties back to tonight's subject: proofing down and measuring. When you cut the hearts with clean water to bring the strength down, add the water slow and stir. Here is a fact to win you a wager at the Pittsfield tavern. A gallon of spirit and a gallon of water poured together make less than two gallons. The little particles of each nestle in among the other like puppies in a basket. It is the first thing in chemistry that ever acted like a Concord banker. And remember the Captain's Pembroke merchant: spirit swells when warm and shrinks when cold. So if you are measuring for any honest purpose, measure cool, at about sixty degrees, and the gauger and the Lord will both be satisfied, which is rare.
Wilkins: And put the result up in clean salt-glazed stoneware or glass, not lead-glazed redware, and never in anything soldered with lead. Honest copper, honest cuts, honest jug. Three honest things in a row is more than most men in Merrimack County manage in a year.
♪ Brief fiddle interlude
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Wilkins: SEGMENT FOUR. The Mailbag, the Myth, and the Anvil.
Wilkins: We have got a voice come all the way from the hills of North Carolina. Let me crank up the call-in cylinder.
♦ Crank turning, cylinder hiss and pop
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 hiss ends
Wilkins: Cletus Rabbit Miller of Wilkesboro! A man named Rabbit asking about heads, and I will not make the joke, because I am a professional. Rabbit, your uncle is half a chemist and half a liar, which is the right ratio for an uncle. Let us take the ashes first.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: When the first settlers cleared these New Hampshire hills, they burned whole forests of hardwood, ran water through the ashes, and boiled down lye and potash. For a time it was one of the biggest things this young country sold abroad. So ash in water makes lye, and lye is caustic. It will eat your skin, it will pit your metal, and in a boiling pot it might blunt a little of a vinegary sourness. But it does nothing at all to the poison in the heads. Lye in a thump keg is like a Baptist at a dance: it might tame a little of the sour, but it ain't going to save anybody.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Now the red oak shavings. Here is a cooper's trick for you, Rabbit. Take a red oak stave, put your lips to one end and blow, and you can blow bubbles out the other end into a pail. Red oak is full of open pores, and that's why no cooper worth his adze makes a tight whiskey barrel of it. White oak is what holds spirit. Oak in spirit does give color and a bite of tannin over weeks and months, but that is aging and flavoring, not cleaning. Rabbit, your uncle's red oak shavings would make a fine barrel, if he wants a barrel that whistles when the wind blows through it. The only thing that cleans out bad heads is the man at the jars throwing the heads away. Make your cuts, Rabbit. Everything else is decoration.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: And since we are knocking down myths, let me take a swing at the one every jug-buyer on the turnpike trusts: the bead. A man buying by the gallon picks up the jug, gives it a hard shake, and watches the bubbles. If the bead is big and stays a while, he says it is strong. If it is small and quick, he says it is weak. There's a grain of truth in it, Rabbit. Near half alcohol, the bubbles do stand longer. But sugar changes the bead, oils change it, and a hot or cold day changes it. Above all, the bead tells you nothing about whether the heads were cut out. A jug full of poison can bead as pretty as a deacon's daughter's pearls.
Wilkins: And the city rectifiers knew it. They sold little bottles of what they called beading oil, nasty stuff, to fake a fat bead on weak, watered whiskey. Beading oil is face paint on a corpse: the bead looks lively and the patient is still dead. Judge spirit by honest cuts, an honest hydrometer and an honest maker, and never by the bubbles.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Cletus Rabbit Miller, I've stamped a copper here on my anvil with your name in my heart and mine on the coin, G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. I'm setting it on the windowsill where Barnaby can guard it till you come north. Barnaby measures his supper by the gallon too, and he has never once been accused of short measure. My regards to your uncle, and tell him to keep his ashes for the soap kettle.
♦ Bear grunts approvingly outside the window
♪ Parlor banjo theme returns softly
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Wilkins: SIGN-OFF. That's our hour, neighbors. If you'd like to learn the craft proper, the history, the copper, the cuts and the safety, without losing an ear to a cider crock or your backside to a bear, enroll in the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. I'll teach you to read a run jar by jar, to keep your copper bright, and to keep the law in mind. That's more than the Concord magistrate ever managed to teach me.
Announcer: One more quick word, friends! Small copper, big pride! The Fort Wilkins 2-Gallon Tabletop Mini-Still is spun from pure copper, hand-riveted, and ready for your botanical waters and floral oils. Visit moonshinestill.com tonight, or stop by our showroom on Route 28 in Pittsfield!
Wilkins: My thanks to Captain Donald Vance for his honest scale and his crooked stories, to Cletus Rabbit Miller for his question, and to Barnaby for not eating anybody this week. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.
♦ Bear grunt and final drip into jar
♪ Theme fades into wax cylinder crackle