Blending by Ear and Nose
Dr. G. G. Wilkins lines up his numbered jars and gives listeners his eight tasting and blending rules, none of them scientific, then corrects each one with sound craft: how heads and tails smell, why a nose gets tired, why water and spirit warm up when you mix them, and why a blend has to rest before you judge it. Clara Higgins of the Blue Ridge comes on with new stories about the Sunday 'smelling porch' at Rockfish Gap, a widow's birch-bark scent book, an applejack peddler caught by a sharp-nosed judge, and the mountain words for spirit that has gone wrong. In the mailbag, Wilkins answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller's question about hickory ashes and red oak shavings in the thump keg and strikes a coin while he takes apart the bead-shake test.
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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. Get your snout off that window sash. You've fogged the glass, smeared the putty, and if you sneeze on my jars one more time I'll pull every tooth you've got and string 'em on my watch chain. Settle down, you four-hundred-pound sack of wet hair and bad decisions.
♦ Barnaby grunts once, low and sulky, chain drags in the dirt
Wilkins: That's better. He knows what tonight is. He's been sniffing at the crack under the door since noon.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth, swells and settles under
Wilkins: Good evening, friends, neighbors, and you sorry deputies listening at the keyhole. This is Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, coming to you from the log walls of Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, here in Pittsfield, Merrimack County, New Hampshire. The river's high, the mill wheels are turning, Catamount Hill has her first frost, and on my bench I've got thirty-two jars lined up in a row like a mouth full of teeth. Tonight's lesson is Blending by Ear and Nose, and I'll give you my eight tasting rules. Not a one of them is scientific. I'll own that up front, and then I'll tell you where each one goes wrong.
♪ Theme fades out
Announcer: A quick word, friends! Behold the Flame-Flow Still, U.S. Patent 10,561,960, built of heavy-gauge copper as bright as a new-struck cent! Inspect one at Fort Wilkins on Route 28, or order direct at moonshinestill.com. That's moonshinestill.com!
♪ Short banjo sting
Wilkins: Now let me state the law of the land, because I've been dragged before the bench often enough to know it by heart. Distilling spirits meant for drinking without a federal permit is against the law. This program is history and education. You may listen like a scholar, but you'd better not act like a fool.
Wilkins: Now. Blending. Folks reckon the art is all in the copper and the fire. It ain't. The copper makes the spirit, but the nose decides which of it you keep. A run don't come out of the worm all one quality. It comes out in a parade. First the foreshots, which go in the waste. Then the heads, sharp enough to strip paint. Then the hearts, which are the sweet sermon you came to church for. Then the tails, the long dull benediction while the deacons nod off. The blender's whole job is standing at the end of that parade and deciding where the good part starts and where it stops. And brothers and sisters, you do that with your nose.
Wilkins: I've got a qualified nose. It's been broke three times: once by a mule, once by a Barnstead fiddler, and once by my own wife, who was aiming for the mule. Every break made it a little crookeder and a little more honest.
♦ Clink of glass jars being slid along a plank bench
Wilkins: RULE NUMBER ONE. Number your jars like a tooth chart. Thirty-two to a run, upper set and lower set, catch them small and in order. When I pull a molar I don't throw it in a bucket with the rest of the day's teeth and guess whose it was afterward. Same with spirit. Catch it in small jars, number every one, and don't mix a single drop until you've smelled them all in a row. Like a mouth, the trouble always starts at the back.
Wilkins: That one's halfway scientific, and I'm ashamed of it. Small numbered jars are the honest way, because when you find a sour jar you can set it aside instead of ruining a whole crock.
Wilkins: RULE NUMBER TWO. Taste before supper, never after pie. A man who blends after pie will praise anything, the same as a man who courts after midnight will marry anything. Sugar and grease coat the tongue, and pepper and pipe smoke deaden it. Come to the bench clean.
Wilkins: And when I say taste, I mean the smallest sip of hearts watered down, held on the tongue, and spat into the slop pail like a Methodist spitting out a rumor. You never taste foreshots. You never taste heads. Those you smell from a distance, set aside, and keep away from every cup in the house.
Wilkins: So what do the heads smell like? Uncork a jar from early in the run and it'll hit you like a cabinetmaker's varnish pot. Glue, lamp spirits, and a mean green-apple sourness, like a pippin picked in July by a boy who couldn't wait. The green apple comes from what the chemists call acetaldehyde, and the varnish smell comes from ethyl acetate and his cousins. Smell that and you're still in the heads, and that jar goes on the other shelf. Folks used to clean harness buckles and paintbrushes with the stuff. You'd no more drink it than drink from a cobbler's glue pot.
Wilkins: The tails come at the far end, and they're quieter and sneakier. Wet wool. A cellar after a spring flood. Newspaper that sat out in the rain. A hound that rolled in the Suncook and came home proud of it. The tails feel oily on the tongue, like the spirit has put on an overcoat. Those are the fusel oils and heavy stuff that creep over late, when the pot is getting weak and you're getting greedy.
♦ Barnaby snorts loudly outside, chain rattles
Wilkins: Yes, yes, Barnaby, you smell them too. And that brings me to the tale I promised the boys at the Pittsfield depot. Barnaby's nose is a far finer instrument than mine. A bear can smell a ham bone through two feet of snow, which is more than any revenue man has managed with a warrant and a lantern.
Wilkins: Two autumns ago a revenue man came up the turnpike from Concord. A dandy, with a checked waistcoat and his hair slicked down with bear's grease pomade, the fancy kind out of a Boston apothecary, smelling of bergamot and dead bear. He crept round the back of the still-house to peek at my bench, and the fool walked straight into the range of Barnaby's chain.
Wilkins: Now Barnaby took one sniff of that pomade and decided this was a long-lost cousin who needed grooming. He got the fellow by the back of the head the way a sow cleans her piglet. First the lick, a long wet tongue that sounded like a mop on a barn floor. Then the teeth came out, gentle at first, then not so gentle. He took hold of that slicked-down scalp and pulled, friends, and it came up off the skull with a sound like a wet boot coming out of April mud. A palm-sized flap of hair and hide, still combed and parted. The man hollered louder than the noon whistle at the Pittsfield mill, and the mill at least stops when it's finished.
Wilkins: Barnaby chewed that flap of pomaded hair for an hour like a schoolboy with spruce gum, and then he spat it out, because underneath the bergamot was a revenue man, and even a bear has his limits. I hauled the fellow inside, sat him in my tooth-pulling chair, poured a dipper of spring water over the wound, and stitched his scalp back down with waxed fiddle string. Eleven stitches. He's the only revenue man in Merrimack County who plays in tune when the wind blows. He never did see my bench. He spent his visit staring at my ceiling and calling for his mother.
♦ Barnaby grunts contentedly
Wilkins: Mind you, listeners, a chained bear is no watchdog and no joke to the poor man who meets him, and any of you who keeps a wild animal at his door is a bigger fool than that revenue man. Barnaby is a Suncook Valley legend, and that's how he should stay.
♪ Fiddle bridge, quick and jaunty
Wilkins: Now I've got a guest who has smelled more jars than any of us. She's come up from the Blue Ridge of Virginia by rail, stagecoach, and one very ill-tempered ox cart out of Concord. She's a mountain herbalist and she knows the old words for spirit better than the men who made it. Please welcome Miss Clara Higgins. Clara, welcome to Fort Wilkins.
Clara: Doctor Wilkins, I've been in your fort a quarter of an hour and your bear has already eaten half a pound of my sassafras root and looked at me like I owe him the other half.
Wilkins: He reckons everybody owes him. Clara, if you ever leave the Blue Ridge, Pittsfield will take you, and Barnaby will take your basket. Now tell me how they blended where you come from. Was it the nose or the tongue?
Clara: The nose, sir, and mighty strict about it. Back home at Rockfish Gap there was a porch folks called the smelling porch. Every Sunday after meeting, three old men sat out on it. Uncle Amos had the best nose in the county, Mister Dabney had the worst teeth, and the third was a schoolmaster nobody liked but everybody needed, on account of he could read the jar tags. Neighbors brought their jars up, and those men judged by nose alone. The prize was a blue ribbon cut off a hymnal marker.
Wilkins: A hymnal marker! Did the preacher know?
Clara: He knew, and he never asked for it back, which tells you how he did his own blending. And here was the rule on that porch: a judge who swallowed a sample was put out of the contest. Put out! Uncle Amos said, and I'm quoting him with the cussing taken out, any fool can drink, but it takes a Christian to smell and spit.
Wilkins: I'll pull my hat off to Uncle Amos. That's a better rule than any of mine. What happened to a man who swallowed?
Clara: Mister Dabney swallowed one Sunday in the summer of '58, and they took his chair off the porch and set it out in the yard by the hog lot. He judged from out there the rest of the season, and folks said his scores improved, because the hogs smelled worse than any jar he got.
Wilkins: Ha! A hog lot does wonders for a man's standards. Now you mentioned noses. Did the women keep any of this knowledge, or was it all porch-sitting old men?
Clara: Lord, the women kept the best of it. Over in Nelson County there was a widow, Missus Tolliver. She kept what she called her nose book. It wasn't paper, Doctor. Paper was dear. It was strips of birch bark, scratched with a nail and tied up in a bundle with twine. Each strip was a smell, good or bad. I've held that bundle in my own hands. One strip said 'good, like a wet blackberry cane.' Another said 'bad, like a churn left out in August.' And one said 'very bad, like Tolliver's boots,' and that was her late husband.
Wilkins: God rest Tolliver and his boots.
Clara: She taught her boys to blend from that bundle. She'd hand one of them a strip and say, 'Find me this one in the jars,' and he wasn't allowed his supper until he did.
Wilkins: That's a schoolhouse I'd have paid tuition at. Now, I'm told you collect the old mountain words for spirit. Give my listeners the names for a blend that's gone wrong.
Clara: Oh, there's a whole hymnal of them. When a man cut too greedily into the front end, the sharp stuff, folks called it pop-skull, because it felt like your skull was fixing to pop the next morning. When he cut too greedy into the back end, the oily stuff, that was tangle-leg, because it wrapped your legs around each other like bean vines. A careless blend that knocked a fellow flat on his back was who-hit-John. And when a man watered his jars to stretch them, that was stump water. You'd say, 'Brother Pruitt's selling stump water again,' and everybody knew.
Wilkins: Stump water! I've drunk stump water at three weddings and a funeral, and the funeral had the best of it. Now Clara, I hear the applejack and persimmon men down your way were the fussiest of all.
Clara: They had cause to be, Doctor. Fruit's a different animal from corn. Apples and persimmons carry pectin, and a fruit mash throws off more of the bad spirit than a grain mash does, so a fruit man had better keep a strict nose or he'll hurt somebody. And here's a story about one who didn't. There was a peddler near Lynchburg who sold a persimmon brandy blend at the market fair. Beautiful stuff to look at, colored like a sunset. But he'd been stretching his jars with the back end of the run. He was greedy, keeping tails he ought to have set aside.
Wilkins: Tangle-leg in a sunset jar.
Clara: Exactly so. Now a county court judge came by the fair. Old Judge Rives, who didn't trust anything sold off a wagon. He didn't drink it. He poured a few drops into his palm, rubbed his hands together like he was warming them at a stove, and then cupped them over his nose and smelled. And he hollered loud enough for the whole fair to hear: 'Wet hound! This man is selling wet hound!'
♦ Wilkins slaps the bench, laughing
Wilkins: Wet hound!
Clara: That peddler was laughed out of the county before the sun went down. Children followed his wagon barking. He moved to Tennessee, and I hear he's honest now, but the barking followed him there too.
Wilkins: Clara, that palm trick is the truest thing that's been said on this program tonight. Listeners, here's why it works. When you rub spirit between your hands, the light alcohol flies off first, and what's left on your skin is the heavy, oily, sour stuff, all by itself where your nose can't miss it. A jar can smell sweet at the mouth and still leave wet hound in your palms.
Clara: My grandmother had a test of her own, Doctor, and I'd wager it'd sort your Merrimack men out quick. When a young fellow told her he had a fine nose for blending, she'd set four tin cups in front of him. Three had spirit in them, cut proper. The fourth held plain spring water. She'd ask him to rank them.
Wilkins: And the ones who praised the water?
Clara: Any man who praised the water for its 'fine smooth finish' went straight back to hoeing corn. She sent off two cousins and a Baptist deacon that way.
Wilkins: Never trust a man who calls spring water smooth. He'll call a deputy honest next. Clara Higgins, you are a treasure of the Blue Ridge, and you're welcome at Fort Wilkins any time Barnaby's had his breakfast.
Clara: I'll come back when he's paid me for the sassafras.
♦ Barnaby grunts, as if in protest
♪ Fiddle and banjo bridge, lively
Wilkins: Now, back to the bench. RULE NUMBER THREE. If it makes Barnaby sneeze, it goes on the other shelf. I swear by it. Of course, the trouble is that Barnaby also sneezes at pepper, goose down, and the Methodist minister. So it ain't scientific. The real rule is that varnish, glue, or green apple means heads, and heads stay out of the drinking jars no matter what the bear thinks.
Wilkins: RULE NUMBER FOUR. Listen to the still. This is the 'ear' part of tonight's sermon. A still sings. When the fire's right and the run is coming through the hearts, the spirit falls from the worm in a thin steady thread, and it makes a soft little patter in the jar like rain on a shake roof. When the run starts going to tails, the song changes. The thread thins and stutters, and the thump keg's knocking changes its tempo like an old man climbing stairs.
♦ Slow drip into glass jar, then a stuttering drip
Wilkins: Now I'll confess that the ear only tells you something is changing. It doesn't tell you what. The speed of that drip changes with the fire, the weather, and how much wood the hired boy shoved in when you weren't looking. Your ear says go and check. Your nose is the one that checks.
Wilkins: RULE NUMBER FIVE. Never blend by candlelight. Partly that's because you can't judge a jar's color by candle, and if a jar's gone cloudy you'll want to see it. But mostly, friends, it's because strong spirit gives off a vapor, and that vapor catches fire easier than a Concord rumor. I've seen a man uncork a jar beside a lantern and lose his eyebrows, his mustache, and the respect of his children in one bright whoosh. Blend by daylight. Keep the stove, the pipe, and the lantern on the far side of the room or out of it altogether.
Wilkins: RULE NUMBER SIX. Smell your own sleeve. Here's a strange thing about the nose. Smell four or five jars in a row and it gets tired. It quits telling you about smells it just met. It's like a deputy at a hanging: after the third one he stops paying attention. So between jars, I step outside, take a breath of turnpike air, and smell the back of my own wrist or the wool of my sleeve. That resets the nose, the same way a dentist's patient rinses before the next tooth.
Wilkins: RULE NUMBER SEVEN. My wife's nose outranks mine. In this house it does, and so does her rolling pin, and they generally arrive together. She can smell a tails jar from the bottom of the stairs. I've no science for it, only twenty-two years of marriage and a scar over my left ear.
Wilkins: RULE NUMBER EIGHT, and it's the best of them. Rest the blend a fortnight before you judge it, same as you'd do with a sermon, a quarrel, or a bad tooth. And here's a bit of real alchemy. When you pour spirit and water together, the jar gets warm in your hand. Feel it. And the two together come out a little less than the sum of what you poured. A quart of this and a quart of that don't make a full half-gallon. The water and the spirit are settling into each other like an old married couple into a feather tick, and they need time before they're getting along. Judge a blend the hour you mix it and you're judging a wedding by the first argument.
Wilkins: And while we're on water. If you cut a jar with water and it turns cloudy like dishwater, friends, that's tails talking. Those heavy oils stay dissolved while the spirit is strong, and they come out of hiding as soon as it's weakened. A cloudy jar is the jar confessing you cut too deep.
♪ Patent-medicine fanfare, brass and banjo
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♪ Fanfare ends with a banjo flourish
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Wilkins: Now to the mailbag, or rather the talking-tube, which is what my hired boy calls this new contraption that catches the voices of our faraway friends. This one comes all the way from Wilkesboro, North Carolina. Let's hear it.
♦ Faint crackle and hiss of a recorded message
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! A fine question from a man named for an animal Barnaby would eat in one bite. Let's take your uncle's remedy apart one piece at a time, the way I'd take apart a bad jaw.
Wilkins: First, the hickory ashes. Wet wood ash and it turns into potash lye, the same lye your grandmother leached in a hopper behind the woodshed and boiled with hog fat to make soap. That's lye, Rabbit. Throw it in a thump keg and it'll knock down some of the sour acids, true enough. But it also gives the run a slippery, soapy, bitter taste, and it does nothing to methanol. Rabbit, your uncle put lye and red oak in his thump keg and called it cleaning. That's just how my Aunt Hepzibah did her laundry, and she wore the stains to her grave.
Wilkins: Second, the red oak shavings. Here's a cooper's secret. Red oak has open pores running the whole length of the grain, like a bundle of soda straws. That's why no cooper worth his adze will make a liquor barrel out of red oak. It leaks like a selectman leaks secrets, all along the grain and mostly at town meeting. White oak is the barrel wood. Now red oak shavings in a thumper will give you color and a rough, tannic, woody bite, like chewing a fence rail. That's flavor, Rabbit, not cleaning. Folks put apples, peaches, and every kind of wood in their thumpers to flavor a run, and that's an honest custom. But flavor isn't a cure.
Wilkins: And third, the bad heads. There ain't a powder, a shaving, an ash, or a prayer that turns bad heads good. You find them with your nose: varnish, glue, green apple. Then you set them aside and keep them out of every drinking jar. That's the whole medicine. Your uncle's swamp medicine was half soap and half lumber, and neither one ever cured anybody.
Wilkins: And while I've got the anvil warm, let me take apart one more old myth. The bead test.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: That's one coin struck, G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., and here's what goes with it. Old-timers shake a vial of spirit and watch the bubbles. Big beads that vanish quick mean strong, and little beads that hang around mean weak. Fine. As a rough guess at strength, it'll get you into the right county. But I've watched men shake a vial, see a pretty bead, and declare the jar safe and sweet. The bead tells you what the bubbles think of the liquor, and I've never once met a bubble with a palate.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: That's two. The bead knows nothing about heads, nothing about tails, and nothing about wet hound. A jar full of pop-skull will bead as pretty as a church choir. I trust the bead test the way I trust a Concord horse-trader's smile: it tells you something, and none of it is the truth.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: And three. If you want to know strength honestly, use a hydrometer. The British excise adopted the Sikes instrument in 1816. It's a little glass float with a scale on it, and it's more honest than the bead or the man shaking it. For everything else, use your nose. Rabbit, these three coins are going in a little sack with your name on it, Cletus Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina. Thank you for calling, and tell your uncle Alchemist Wilkins says to wash his thumper and leave the soap to the women.
♪ Banjo bridge, warm and slow
Wilkins: Before we close, a word about the sheriff, since I promised him a mention and he never misses the broadcast. The sheriff says he has a nose for crime. I say the only crime his nose ever found was the one sitting on his face. And let me speak to blending one more time. A good blend has a long, warm finish, which is more than the Widow Pickering's second husband could claim, God rest him and his early bedtime.
Announcer: A quick word before we part! The Flame-Flow Still, U.S. Patent 10,561,960, is waiting for you in pure electrolytic copper. Order today at moonshinestill.com, that's moonshinestill.com, or stop by Fort Wilkins on Route 28!
♪ Theme begins softly underneath
Wilkins: My thanks to Miss Clara Higgins of the Blue Ridge, who's out by the woodpile right now negotiating with Barnaby over the sassafras. And if tonight's talk of jars, noses, and wet hounds has caught your fancy, enroll in the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. You'll learn the old craft properly: copper, fire, cuts, and the nose, along with the law of the land and the respect the craft deserves. I'll teach you everything I know, except how to stitch a revenue man's scalp. That one costs extra.
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 rises, then fades into wax cylinder crackle