Flavoring the Rough Stuff
Dr. G. G. Wilkins covers the history of flavored spirits in 1860s America: peach brandy, cherry bounce, honey spirits and the city rectifiers who dressed up raw spirit with burnt sugar, prune juice, plug tobacco and red pepper. He also tells how Barnaby the bear dealt with a Boston flavoring-essence salesman. Retired revenue officer Captain Donald Vance tells new stories: a widow's single peach that went from jug to jug, a tobacco-and-pepper outfit that sent a crew of barn raisers off the ridgepole, a scorched-honey still he found by smell, and the time he seized a judge's wife's brandied peaches. In the call-in segment, Wilkins answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, NC about hickory ashes and red oak shavings in the thump keg, then knocks down the blue-flame test at 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 four-hundred-pound sack of fleas and grievances. That is a peach stone you are gnawing, not a deputy's knuckle, and growling will not make it taste better. Down. DOWN, I say. There. He has flopped onto the woodpile like a Concord alderman after a Fourth of July dinner: stuffed, belching and convinced he earned it.
♦ Bear grunt, chain settles in the dirt
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth, swelling then falling under the voice
Wilkins: Good evening, neighbors, sinners, and anybody in a revenue coat who has his ear to the knothole. 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, in Pittsfield, Merrimack County, New Hampshire. I am Doctor Wilkins: puller of teeth, beater of iron, stamper of coins and keeper of the bear. Tonight's subject is one I have studied with my own liver for thirty years: Flavoring the Rough Stuff. Peaches, honey, burnt sugar, plug tobacco, red pepper, and the great American craft of the cover-up. Before anybody writes the sheriff, here is my standing notice. Making spirits for drinking without the federal license is against the law of these United States, and this program is for history and learning only. The sheriff knows where I live, and so does the bear.
♪ Theme resolves on a banjo flourish
Announcer: A quick word, friends! Your spirit is only as honest as your copper. Look at the Flame-Flow Still, U.S. Patent 10,561,960, made of heavy-gauge pure copper by Moonshine Stills. Go see it today at moonshinestill.com!
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, a log shifts in the stove
Wilkins: Segment the first, the history lesson. Pour yourself a cider and set it where the cat cannot reach.
Wilkins: Most of what a man drinks in this country was never meant to be drunk as it came off the worm. Raw corn spirit, fresh and unaged, tastes like a hot horseshoe dipped in turpentine. So since the first Dutchman landed with a kettle, Americans have been putting things in their liquor to make it go down. Some of what they put in is honest and some of it is a crime, and tonight you will learn to tell which.
Wilkins: Start with the honest kind. Peach brandy. Before corn whiskey took over the frontier, peach brandy was the pride of the Southern planter and the Jersey orchard man. General Washington himself ran a distillery at Mount Vernon. It turned out rye whiskey mostly, but it also made fruit brandies, peach among them. That brandy came from fermenting the fruit and distilling it. Nobody poured peach syrup into a jug of corn liquor and called it Virginia's finest. When it is done properly, the peach is in the mash, and the spirit carries the fruit because it came from the fruit.
Wilkins: Then you have the bounces. Cherry bounce: a crock of cherries, a heap of sugar, spirit poured over the lot, and a month or two in the dark. Grandmothers all over New England keep one behind the flour barrel and swear it is for the croup. It is a fine and honest drink, provided the spirit was clean before the cherries ever went in. A bounce flavors spirit that is already made. It does not distill anything, purify anything or forgive anything. Remember that, because it comes back tonight.
Wilkins: Our forefathers in this valley drank black-strap, which is rum and molasses, and metheglin, which is honey wine with spices. Down in New York, a barkeep named Jerry Thomas put out a whole book of mixed drinks in '62, The Bar-Tender's Guide. It is page after page of sugar, bitters, lemon and nutmeg poured over spirit. I own a copy. Barnaby ate the chapter on punches, and his breath has smelled of nutmeg ever since.
Wilkins: Now the dishonest kind, and here my blood heats up. In the cities there is a trade called rectifying. A rectifier is a man who never made a drop of anything and will sell you the whole history of Kentucky in a jug for six bits. He buys raw, cheap, neutral spirit by the barrel, the thinnest and meanest the stills turn out, and then he dresses it. He darkens it with burnt sugar so it looks aged. He adds prune juice for body and drops of essence, oil of cognac or oil of rye, bought by the vial from some druggist's wholesaler, so it smells like something it is not. That much is merely fraud, and fraud is as old as the Garden.
Wilkins: Then the meaner ones go further. Red pepper, to give a thin spirit the bite of an old one. Plug tobacco steeped in the barrel for color and kick. I have heard of worse than that, things I will not name before supper. They printed guides for this trade, friends. A liquor dealer's manual came out of New York back in '57, and it reads like a cookbook written by the Devil's own grocer. Those barrels went west on the wagons and became the stuff the boys call forty-rod, because it will kill a man at forty rods. The rectifier who made it stands at forty-one.
Wilkins: Then there is bitters. You have seen the bottles: Hostetter's Stomach Bitters, Drake's Plantation Bitters with that S. T. 1860 X painted on every fence and barn from here to Ohio. They are sold as medicine for the stomach, the liver and the general melancholy of being alive. The boys in blue carried Hostetter's by the case through the whole war, because a sutler could sell medicine where he could not sell whiskey. Some of those bitters are strong enough to make a Vermont regiment sing in Latin. The roots and barks in them are real enough. They are also a disguise, because the bitterness hides what is under it.
Wilkins: Here is the lesson of the whole night, and I will say it again before the bear sleeps. Flavor can hide a bad taste, but it cannot hide a poison. Putting a peach in bad whiskey is like putting a Sunday bonnet on a hog. The hog is no better, and now the bonnet smells of hog.
♦ Barnaby snorts outside, chain rattles
Wilkins: He agrees with me. He has worn a bonnet, too. That is a story for another night.
♪ Short fiddle bridge, a jaunty reel
Wilkins: Segment the second: legends, outlaws, and what happens to a man who walks up to my woodpile uninvited. I promised you a flavoring story, and this one has Barnaby in it.
Wilkins: Three autumns back, a drummer came up the turnpike from Boston in a hired buggy. He had a waxed mustache, yellow gloves and a sample case of black leather with brass corners. He was selling flavoring essences: essence of rye, essence of old cognac, oil of pear, oil of peach, oil of something he called Jamaica bouquet. All the little bottles a rectifier buys to turn sheep dip into Madeira. He had heard the Doctor in Pittsfield kept a still, and he figured the Doctor would want to stretch his batches.
Wilkins: I told him through the window that I make my liquor out of grain and fire, not out of a Boston druggist's cabinet, and he could take his little bottles back down Route 28 and be grateful for the scenery. But a drummer cannot hear the word no. It is a sickness with them. He walked around the corner of the still-house to try the back door, and the back door, as every child in Pittsfield knows, is where Barnaby lives.
Wilkins: Barnaby had been asleep in the sun. A bear does not wake up the way a Christian does, slow and yawning. He goes from asleep to standing in the time it takes you to blink, and the first thing he smelled was oil of pear. A whole case of it, warm in the sun. That bear has a sweet tooth the size of a church bell.
Wilkins: He did not go for the man, mind you. He went for the case. The trouble was that the case was clamped under the man's arm, so the man came along with it. Barnaby got the case in his jaws and shook it the way a terrier shakes a rat, and the drummer went round and round on the end of it like the clapper in a fire bell. Bottles were bursting. Oil of rye ran down his trousers and oil of cognac went in his ear. Then he let go and ran, and that was his mistake, because a bear will chase whatever runs. Barnaby took one swipe and caught the seat of those fine Boston trousers. He took the wool, the drawers under the wool and a strip of the gentleman's hide about the width of a razor strop, and he took it clean, the way a man tears bark off a birch.
Wilkins: The drummer squealed like a shoat caught under a gate. He went over my fence at a height I would not have believed of a city man and landed in the turnpike with his bare backside to the sky, shining pink and red like a Baldwin apple. I am a doctor, so I went out with a bottle of honest spirit and some lint and dressed the wound while he lay on his belly cursing me, Barnaby, Pittsfield and the state of New Hampshire in that order. I stitched him with seven stitches, using my good silk thread. Then I charged him for the stitches, because I am a doctor and not a missionary.
Wilkins: Barnaby ate every drop of those essences, glass and all, so far as I could tell, and belched oil of pear for a week. He was the best-smelling bear in Merrimack County, and the only one with a Boston accent on his breath. The drummer's sample case is nailed to my wall to this day. I call it the bear's diploma.
Wilkins: While we are on flavoring and the law, one more. My first arrest, years back. The sheriff took everything in the still-house as evidence, including a jug of my peach-steeped spirit I had been keeping for the winter colds. The jug went to the courthouse in a deputy's saddlebag. By the time it reached the magistrate's bench, it was a third empty and there were tooth marks on the cork. That deputy tested the evidence so thoroughly he should have been sworn in as a chemist. I raised the point with the magistrate. He told me evaporation was a natural process. I told him so was a deputy's thirst.
♦ Laughter of the host, a slap on a knee, wax crackle
Wilkins: Now, I have a guest with me tonight who has spent more years chasing men like me than I have spent dodging them, and that is saying something. He is a retired federal revenue officer out of Manchester, where the Amoskeag mills make cloth and the men make trouble. He has walked every cart track from the Green Mountains to the White, and he can smell a still the way Barnaby smells a ham. Ladies and gentlemen, Captain Donald Vance. Sit down, Captain. Mind the chair, the leg is loose. I loosened it myself, for revenue men.
Captain: Thank you, Doctor. I have sat in worse chairs at worse hearings. I will say your bear looked at me through the window like I was a side of bacon that had learned to walk.
Wilkins: He looks at everybody that way, Captain, but with you he means it. You revenue men are like a toothache in a church. Everybody knows you are there, nobody wants to mention it, and somebody always ends up pulling a face.
Captain: And you country doctors are like a revenue man's pension. Everybody has heard of one, but nobody ever saw one paid out honest.
Wilkins: Ha! He has teeth, folks. I may pull one before he leaves. Now Captain, tonight is flavoring. Peaches, honey and cover-ups. You must have seen the whole parade of lies men pour into a jug.
Captain: The whole parade, Doctor, drums and fifes. I will start you gentle. Up in Caledonia County, Vermont, past St. Johnsbury, there was a widow who sold what she called peach cordial. Now, there are not many peach trees in Caledonia County. It is too cold for them, the trees die of shame. I got word she was selling forty jugs a season, and I wanted to see this orchard.
Wilkins: There was no orchard.
Captain: There was one peach, Doctor. One brandied peach, out of a crock she had put up maybe in Polk's time. She would drop that peach into a jug of plain corn spirit, let it sit overnight, fish it out in the morning with a darning needle, and drop it in the next jug. Forty jugs a season, one peach. By the time I got there it was more of a memory than a fruit. It was brown and shrunk and about the size of a walnut.
Wilkins: That was the hardest-working peach in Caledonia County, and it never once got a day off or a raise.
Captain: That is what I wrote in my book. But here is the thing. I tasted her spirit, and it was clean. She had a little copper pot her husband had made, and she ran it slow and threw away the front of the run like her husband taught her. There was no harm in the stuff except the lie on the label. So I did not haul her in. I made her paint the word peach a good deal smaller on the jugs. She painted it so small I needed my spectacles, and she gave me a slice of rhubarb pie for my trouble. She was a fine woman. That peach is likely still at it.
Wilkins: Now give us the other side, Captain. You did not ride all those miles for pie.
Captain: No. This one I do not tell for laughs. Over in the Pemigewasset valley, up past Plymouth, there was an outfit that ran its whiskey fast and hot and never separated a thing. The front of the run, the heads, everything went in the same barrel. That stuff is raw and sharp as a scythe, and it smells of varnish. So to hide the stink and fake some age, the fellow steeped plug tobacco in it, and red pepper, a whole fistful to the barrel. It came out dark brown, and it burned all the way down, so the men who bought it thought it was old and strong.
Wilkins: A man who flavors his heads with plug tobacco is not a distiller. He is an undertaker with a sideline.
Captain: That he was. He sold a keg to a crew putting up a barn over toward Rumney. You know how a raising goes, Doctor. The neighbors come, the timbers go up, and the jug goes around. By the time they set the ridgepole, half of them were sick as poisoned dogs. One man stood up on the plate beam, turned the color of skimmed milk, and went down like a sack of meal, twenty feet onto a sawhorse. He broke three ribs and his collarbone. A second fellow went off the other side into the manure pile. That saved his bones but not his reputation.
Wilkins: The manure pile has saved many a New Hampshire man and shamed every one of them.
Captain: The worst one was a young fellow who never fell at all. He just sat down on a sill and said the sky had gone dark at noon. He could not see his own hand for the better part of a week. The doctor said it was the bad spirit that did it. He got his sight back, thank God, but some never do. I went up to that still with two men and an axe and I staved in every barrel he had. The ground there soaked up so much tobacco and pepper and poison that nothing grew on that spot for three summers. The crows would not land on it.
Wilkins: Mark that, neighbors. The pepper did not make it safe, the tobacco did not make it safe, and the brown color did not make it old. It made the poison easier to swallow. That is all a cover-up ever does.
Captain: That is the whole of my career in one sentence, Doctor.
Wilkins: Now tell them about the honey, Captain. I hear you have a nose.
Captain: I do. Up near Stowe, under Mount Mansfield, I was riding a ridge road one October and I smelled burnt sugar. Not maple, it was too late in the year for sugaring. It was scorched honey, thick and black and bitter, the kind of smell that sticks in the back of your throat.
Wilkins: I have smelled scorched honey. It smells like a beehive that has lost an argument with a blacksmith.
Captain: That is exactly it. I followed my nose down off the ridge, a mile and a half through spruce, and found a fellow standing over his pot, swearing a blue streak. He had a good copper still. But he had heard that honey makes a sweet spirit, so he poured six quarts of it straight into the pot with his wash. It sank to the bottom and burned there like tar on a roof. His whole batch tasted like a chimney fire, and his pot was crusted black an inch thick.
Wilkins: I put honey in a still pot once, when I was young and stupid. It set like a cobbler's glue, and I spent two days with a chisel getting it out. I am still young, in my own opinion.
Captain: I told him the same thing the Doctor will tell your listeners. Honey goes in the fermenting tub, or it goes in the jug after the run. It never goes in the pot. He was so grateful for the advice that he near forgot I had come to arrest him. Near.
Wilkins: Did you take him in?
Captain: I wrote him up. But I let him scrub his pot first. A man should go before the magistrate with clean copper, if nothing else.
Wilkins: That is the most Christian thing I ever heard a revenue man say. Now Captain, I am told you have a confession of your own on the subject of peaches.
Captain: Who told you that?
Wilkins: Barnaby. He hears things.
Captain: Well. Early in my service I was green as spring grass, and I was eager. I got a tip that a fine house in a county seat, which I will not name because the family is respectable, had a crock of peach brandy in the cellar. I went down there with my badge out and my chest puffed, found a big stoneware crock that smelled of peaches and spirit, and seized it in the name of the United States. I carried it out the front door in front of the whole street.
Wilkins: And whose was it?
Captain: It was the judge's wife's brandied peaches, Doctor. Her preserves, put up for Christmas. They were peaches in a little brandy, all perfectly lawful, as every grandmother in New England knows. The judge was not amused, and his wife was a good deal less amused than the judge. My penance, by order of the judge, was to come to Sunday dinner and eat those peaches in front of her. She sat across the table and watched every spoonful, Doctor, every one. I have faced armed men in the hills, and nothing ever frightened me like that woman's eyes over a dish of peaches.
Wilkins: Eating a judge's wife's peaches in front of her while she counts every spoonful is the closest a revenue man ever comes to a hanging.
Captain: I would have preferred the rope. The rope is quicker.
Wilkins: Captain Donald Vance, everybody. He is the only revenue man I have ever let sit in my chair. Stay where you are, Captain. Barnaby is between you and your horse, and we have a word from our sponsor.
♦ Bear grunts loudly outside, the Captain chuckles nervously
♪ Brisk medicine-show banjo vamp, tambourine shake
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♪ Banjo vamp ends on a cymbal tap
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, the scrape of a stool
Wilkins: Segment the third, copper and the craft. Captain, you can stay and listen. You might learn how the other half works.
Captain: I have always wondered, Doctor. I was usually busy arresting them before they finished.
Wilkins: Then mind closely. I will tell it the way I would tell an apprentice, step by step, and I will tell the dangers true, because a lie about fire or poison is the worst lie a man can tell.
Wilkins: Peach brandy, done honest. First, the fruit. You want peaches ripe to the point of sloppy, soft and fragrant, the bruised ones the grocer cannot sell. My peaches come up by wagon from the Concord depot, half crushed, and I pay half price for them. Bruises are fine. Rot is not, and neither is mold. If a peach has gone gray and fuzzy, throw it to the pigs.
Wilkins: Second, and this matters: pull the stones. Inside every peach stone is a kernel that tastes of bitter almond, and that bitter is prussic acid waiting to happen. Crush those kernels into your mash and you are brewing the same poison a lady in a novel puts in her husband's tea. Peach stones are like a deputy's conscience: leave them whole and they do no harm, crack them open and something poisonous comes out. Take them out, every one. I give mine to Barnaby to roll around. He does not crack them. He is a bear of taste.
Wilkins: Third, mash the flesh by hand or with a clean wooden pounder in an oak tub. Add clean water, about enough to make a thick soup. Some men add sugar to stretch it, but then you are making sugar spirit with a peach accent. Pitch your yeast, cover the tub with a cloth, not a lid, and keep it warm. Seven days, maybe ten or fourteen, until the bubbling stops and it tastes dry and sour instead of sweet. Keep the room aired, because a working tub breathes out a gas that will put a man to sleep for good.
Wilkins: Fourth, strain it. Fruit pulp left in the pot will settle and scorch, the same as the Captain's honey man. Strain it through a clean sack and squeeze it. The pig gets the pulp and the pot gets the liquor.
Wilkins: Fifth, the pot. Fill it no more than three-quarters full, and with a fruit wash or a honey wash I go less than that. Those washes foam like a rabid dog. Overfill your pot and the foam will boil up into the cap and the arm, and puke right over into your thump keg and your worm. A clogged worm with the fire under it is how you make a bomb out of a kettle. I have seen a still cap blow off and go through a barn roof, and it took the barn cat with it. The cat lived but never trusted man again.
Wilkins: Sixth, the fire. Keep it low and patient. No open flame near any joint that might be weeping vapor, because that vapor is fire looking for a way to happen. Never walk away from a running still, not for a jug, a woman or a sheriff. Keep a bucket of sand by the door.
Wilkins: Seventh, and this is the heart of the alchemy: the cuts. With fruit you must be stricter than with grain, and here is why. Peaches, apples, cherries and pears are all full of pectin, the stuff that makes jelly set. When fruit ferments, that pectin gives off wood spirit, methanol, more of it than a grain mash makes. Wood spirit comes over early in the run. The first little bit to drip, the foreshots, you throw out, every drop. Then the heads come. With fruit, the heads smell like a carriage-maker's varnish pot, sharp and sweet and wrong. You throw those out too, or set them aside for cleaning your tools, and you cut wide. A little waste in the heads costs you a pint. A little greed in the heads can cost a man his eyes, as the Captain told you.
Captain: The boy on the barn sill. I think of him every time somebody tells me a little heads gives it character.
Wilkins: Then come the hearts. That is when the varnish smell fades and the peach blooms up out of the spirit like a girl in a June doorway, soft and round. Those you keep. Last come the tails, oily and dull and smelling like wet dog and old dishrag. Set them aside to run again with the next batch.
Wilkins: Now the copper, because this is a copper program. A fruit wash, and a honey wash even more, will make the yeast work hard and complain. A complaining yeast throws off sulfur, that rotten-egg, boiled-cabbage stink. When that vapor rises through a bright copper pot and cap and worm, the copper grabs the sulfur and holds it, and it never reaches your jar. That is catalytic sulfur reduction in plain Yankee words. The copper must be bright to do it. Scrub after every run.
Wilkins: Now honey. There are two honest roads. On the first, you dissolve honey in warm water, about one part honey to four or five of water. Ferment that slow and cool into a honey wine, then distill it with the same cuts, and you get honey spirit, light and flowery. On the second, you take your finished, cut, proofed-down hearts and stir in a spoonful of honey to the pint, after the still and never in it. That is a cordial, and it is lovely for a sore throat in February. The road you do not take is the Stowe man's road, honey in the pot, black glue and a chimney fire.
Wilkins: Last, the bounces and the dressings. Put your peaches, cherries, a stick of cinnamon or a curl of orange peel into good clean spirit and let them sit. Burnt sugar for color, if you like, and a stick of charred oak for some barrel flavor. That is all fair, so long as you say what it is. But hear me, all of you, from Pittsfield to Wilkesboro. Every one of those things goes into spirit that is already cut clean. Not one of them can take out what the cuts left in. Sugar, peaches, honey, pepper and tobacco can hide the taste of wood spirit from your tongue, but they cannot hide it from your liver or your eyes.
♪ Low fiddle drone, then a bright banjo bridge
Wilkins: Segment the fourth: myths, slang, and the mail. A wax cylinder came in the post this week, all the way from North Carolina, wrapped in a feed sack and smelling faintly of tobacco barn. Let us play it. Captain, crank the horn.
♦ Phonograph cylinder crank, hiss and pop of a recorded message
Cletus: Alchemist, this here is Cletus Miller, folks call me Rabbit, from Wilkesboro, North Carolina. 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 with a click
Wilkins: Rabbit Miller, from the Yadkin country, where the hills fold up like a dropped quilt and every second cabin has a copper worm in the springhouse. Welcome to Fort Wilkins, son. Your uncle is not entirely a liar, but he is not entirely a chemist either. Let us take it piece by piece, the way I take a jaw.
Wilkins: Hickory ash first. Wood ash is lye-stuff. It is what your grandmother leached through a barrel of straw to make soft soap. It is alkaline, the opposite of sour. If a man's mash had gone sour as vinegar, a little ash might knock back some of the sourness, the way a pinch of saleratus settles a sour stomach. That much is real. But throw ash into your thumper and you get a cloudy, foaming mess that looks like a mule's lather. It does not touch the wood spirit, Rabbit, not one drop of it.
Wilkins: Now the red oak shavings, and this is where it gets interesting, because it is exactly tonight's subject. Oak in the thump keg will color the spirit, add tannin, and give it a taste of the woodshed. It makes a raw white spirit taste like it sat in a barrel a season. That is not a cleaning, son. It is flavoring and a cover-up. And red oak is a poor choice anyhow. Ask any cooper. White oak holds liquor because its grain is plugged up tight inside. Red oak is so open in the grain you can blow pipe smoke through a stick of it. Coopers will not make a whiskey barrel of red oak, because it leaks like a Concord politician. White oak holds whiskey, red oak holds grudges, and I hold my tongue for neither.
Wilkins: Rabbit, red oak shavings in a thump keg are like a Concord lawyer's wig. They give the thing an air of age and wisdom, and underneath it is the same bald scoundrel. The only cure for bad heads is the one I gave an hour ago: throw out the foreshots, throw out the heads, cut wide and honest, and keep your copper bright. There is no other cure. Tell your uncle the Doctor in New Hampshire says so, and tell him the Doctor would still buy him a drink, a clean one.
Captain: If I may, Doctor. I took a good many stills in the Green Mountains with oak chips in the doubler. Every one of those men believed the chips were cleaning it. The ones that had made good cuts made good liquor, and the ones that had not made poison with a woody taste.
Wilkins: There it is, Rabbit, from a revenue man's own mouth, and they do not give out the truth for free. Now, while we are on the myth-busting, let me knock down the oldest one of all: the blue flame. Every old-timer from here to Georgia will tell you to pour a spoonful of liquor and light it. If it burns blue it is good, and if it burns yellow or red there is something wrong. Well, wood spirit, the very poison we are scared of, burns with a pale blue flame of its own, near as pretty as good whiskey's. That spoon cannot tell you which is which. Lighting a spoon of whiskey to test it for poison is like asking a horse thief whether he is honest. He will give you a lovely blue answer either way.
Wilkins: The only thing a blue flame proves is that you are about to set your eyebrows on fire, and my eyebrows have been proving that since Polk was president. Hand me that copper cent, Captain. Rabbit has earned one.
♦ Coin set on the anvil face, a pause, steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., struck fresh on a big copper cent and still warm. It goes into the post tomorrow, Rabbit, bound for Wilkesboro. Show it to your uncle and tell him it is worth more than all the ashes in Wilkes County. I keep a coin for every honest question and a bear for every dishonest visitor, and I have run short of coins more often than bears.
♦ Second steel punch clangs on copper coin, ringing off into the rafters
Wilkins: That one is for the widow's peach, wherever it rests. Captain Vance, thank you, sir. You are a scourge, a nuisance and a credit to your trade, and I mean all three kindly.
Captain: Doctor, it has been an honor and a fright. I will go out the front door if it is all the same to you.
Wilkins: The bear is at the back, Captain, so you are safe. Barnaby likes you, but only the way he likes a ham.
♦ Bear grunt, chain clinks, the Captain's boots retreat quickly across a plank floor
Announcer: One more quick word, friends! Clean spirit starts with clean metal. The Flame-Flow Still, U.S. Patent 10,561,960, is solid electrolytic copper with honest craftsmanship in every seam. Visit moonshinestill.com, or the showroom at Fort Wilkins on Route 28!
♪ Parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme returns softly, slow and warm
Wilkins: That is our night, neighbors. Peaches in the mash, stones out of the peaches, honey in the tub and never in the pot. Cut wide, cut honest, and do not let any rectifier, drummer or uncle tell you a peach can cover up a poison. If you want to learn this old craft properly, history, metallurgy, cuts and all, ask after the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. I teach it the way I pull a molar, firm, quick and with no lies about the pain. Ask for it at the showroom here at Fort Wilkins or at moonshinestill.com. And remember, making spirits for drinking without the federal license is against the law of the land, and this program is for learning and history only.
Wilkins: Barnaby is asleep at last on his woodpile, dreaming of oil of pear and Boston trousers. The fire is banked, and the last drops are coming off the worm. So until next time: 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 and silence