The Barn Dance Brawl of '64
Dr. Wilkins tells how a September 1864 husking dance in the widow Sanborn's barn turned into the biggest brawl in Suncook Valley memory. There are fiddles, a bitten-off earlobe, eleven teeth swept off the threshing floor, and a butter churn full of brandy punch smashed to kindling. Retired revenue officer Captain Donald Vance joins him to tell new stories about dance callers who were really lookouts, a bass viol full of spirits, and a dance-night still that gave half a town lead colic. 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 strikes a coin on his anvil to knock down the blue-flame myth.
▶ 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. Barnaby! Settle down, you overstuffed hearthrug. You ate half a bushel of windfall Baldwins this afternoon, and now you are breaking wind against my window glass like a tuba player at a Fourth of July muster. Lie down. Lie DOWN. There. Good bear. Ugly as a tax bill, but good.
♦ Bear huffs, chain settles in the dirt
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth, swelling, then settling under
Wilkins: Good evening, friends, neighbors, sinners, and whatever deputies are listening at the keyhole. This is Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, coming to you from the log fortress of Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, in Pittsfield, Merrimack County, New Hampshire. I am your host, Dr. George G. Wilkins: dentist, blacksmith, inventor, and the only man in this valley who has pulled a tooth, shod a horse, and run a still all before breakfast, and charged for all three.
Wilkins: Tonight I tell the tale this valley still argues about around every cracker barrel from Barnstead to Epsom: the Barn Dance Brawl of '64. Fiddles, fists, and a butter churn ruined beyond any cooper's help. I was there. I brought the punch. I also brought my forceps, which was the smarter of the two decisions.
Wilkins: First, the plain word I give you every week, as honest as a fresh-pulled molar. Making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of these United States, and everything on this program is for history and learning only. Now, a quick word from the gentleman who keeps oil in my lamps.
Announcer: Friends! A quick word! The Flame-Flow Still, protected under United States Patent 10,561,960, is handcrafted from heavy-gauge pure copper and stands ready for your essential oils, herbal tinctures, and distillation demonstrations! See it today at moonshinestill.com. That is moonshinestill.com!
♪ Short, bright fiddle sting
♪ Banjo vamp under, slow and homey
Wilkins: Segment the first. Life in 1864, and what a barn dance meant to a New Hampshire farm town.
Wilkins: You have to understand autumn in the Suncook Valley. The hay is in, the corn is standing in shocks, the apples are falling faster than you can press them, and there is a whole season of work that needs too many hands for any one family. So you call the neighbors. You hold a husking bee, a raising, or an apple bee, and when the work is done you sweep the threshing floor, hang lanterns from the beams, and somebody fetches a fiddler.
Wilkins: The dances were contra dances, two long lines of ladies and gents facing one another, with a caller hollering the figures over the music. 'Balance and swing! Down the center! Cast off!' The tunes were the old ones: 'Money Musk,' 'Chorus Jig,' 'Portland Fancy,' and 'Hull's Victory,' named for Captain Isaac Hull, who put the British frigate Guerriere to the bottom with the Constitution back in 1812. Play 'Hull's Victory' in a New Hampshire barn and every man over sixty will stand up straighter and tell you he was nearly there.
Wilkins: There was courting too, under the corn. At a husking, any young buck who stripped back the leaves and found a red ear could claim a kiss from the girl of his choosing. I have seen boys smuggle a red ear into a husking in their trouser leg like a Canadian smuggling tobacco, and I have seen girls see it coming from across the barn and move to the other end of the pile. A red ear is a red ear, but a lady's judgment is final.
Wilkins: Now put yourself in 1864. The war had gone on three years and more, and it had gutted the valley of young men. New Hampshire regiments were in Virginia and the Carolinas and Louisiana, and the towns kept voting cash bounties to fill their quotas. Under the Enrollment Act of '63, a drafted man could pay three hundred dollars to stay home, at least until Congress shut that door for most men in July of '64. So the dance floor that fall was men too old to march, boys too young to shave, and gentlemen who had paid three hundred dollars to stay home, and the ladies let none of them forget which was which.
Wilkins: There was another war on, too, and that one was against the jug. Mr. Lincoln's revenue men had been creeping up the whiskey tax like a cat up a curtain. Twenty cents a gallon in '62. Sixty cents in March of '64. A dollar and a half in July of '64. Two dollars promised for New Year's Day of '65. So in September of 1864, every man in the valley knew his drink would cost more by spring, and he drank like a man paying in advance.
Wilkins: Cider was the farm drink. Every cellar had barrels of it. The stronger article was apple brandy, which some folk call applejack, and that is what I brought to the widow Mehitable Sanborn's barn, out the Barnstead road, on the last Saturday of that September.
♦ Wax crackle; a cork pulled from a jug
Wilkins: The widow Sanborn had a cedar dasher churn, four gallons, white-pine dasher, hooped in iron I forged myself. You know a dasher churn: a tall wooden tub with a long-handled plunger you work up and down, up and down, until the butter comes. The widow could work a dasher like no woman in the valley, and half the bachelors in Merrimack County had offered to help her bring the butter. She turned every one of them down and churned alone, which tells you all you need to know about the bachelors of Merrimack County.
Wilkins: Now, you will remember the old belief that when the butter will not come, a witch has got into the cream. The cure was to heat a horseshoe red-hot in the fire and drop it into the churn. Hiss! There goes the witch, scalded out through the lid. I have seen it done in three kitchens in this county. I have never seen it fetch the butter any quicker, but I have seen it fetch a witch out of a grandmother, who went at the hired man with the fire tongs.
Wilkins: That night the widow scalded the churn clean, and I filled it with what I called Husking Punch: cider, a fair measure of apple brandy, maple sugar, a grating of nutmeg, and a bruised stick of cinnamon. No revenue man ever opens a butter churn. They are too frightened of being asked to work the dasher.
Wilkins: One more thing about that barn, and I want you to mark it. There were six lanterns hanging from the beams and forty ton of dry hay in the loft overhead. One kicked lantern in a barn like that and the whole building goes up like a powder magazine, with fifty people inside it. So I had my rule: no jug unstopped within a rod of a lantern, ever. Spirit vapor and an open flame are bad company. You will see in a minute why I was glad of that rule.
♪ Fiddle tune 'Money Musk' fades up briefly, then down
Wilkins: Segment the second. Legends, outlaws, and the Brawl itself.
Wilkins: The fiddler that night was Lemuel Hoyt of Chichester, a long rail of a man who could play with a broken string and a broken nose at once, and that night he got to prove it. The Pittsfield crowd held one end of the barn: mill hands from the cotton mill down on the river, farm boys, and Asa Kimball, who carded wool all day and had forearms like smoked hams. The Barnstead crowd came in by wagon, eleven of them, led by Obadiah Fogg. Obadiah had a face like a pie somebody dropped on the meetinghouse steps, and a disposition to match the filling.
Wilkins: The trouble began with a red ear. Fogg found one in the husking, or brought one in his boot, which is my opinion and also the opinion of everybody who watched him walk in limping. He marched across the floor to claim his kiss from Miss Lydia Kimball, Asa's sister. Miss Lydia looked at the ear, looked at Fogg, and said, 'I'll kiss the corn.' And she did. She kissed that red ear square, handed it back to him, and walked off. The barn roared.
Wilkins: Fogg went the color of a boiled beet. He called up to Hoyt for 'Hull's Victory,' and the caller sang out, 'Down the center!' Fogg went down the center all right, straight down the center of the line and straight into Asa Kimball's face with his forehead.
♦ A dull, wet thud and the crack of cartilage; the crowd gasps
Wilkins: I have heard many noses break in my career. Most go 'crick.' Asa's went 'crunch,' like a boot through a crust of March snow. It spread across his face like a squashed turnip, and the blood came down both lips into his collar. Asa staggered, wiped it, looked at his hand, and smiled. You never want a wool carder to smile at you.
Wilkins: He took Obadiah by the ears like the handles of a jug and swung him. Then all hell came up through the floorboards. Barnstead men on Pittsfield men. A Barnstead boy jumped off the haymow onto two of our mill hands and the three of them rolled across the floor like a barrel down a ramp. A grandmother from Upper City cracked a man across the shins with her knitting basket. The caller kept calling, 'Balance and swing!', and by God they did.
Wilkins: Lemuel Hoyt never stopped. When 'Hull's Victory' ran out he went straight into 'Soldier's Joy,' because a Chichester fiddler is paid by the tune, not by the casualty. Somebody's elbow caught him in the nose and he played on with the blood dripping into his f-holes, which I am told improved the tone.
Wilkins: Then came the churn. Obadiah, losing, and losing on his back, reached up and grabbed the only weapon in reach, which was the widow's dasher. He tore it out of the churn and came up swinging a five-foot pine club dripping with hot buttered brandy. He laid the dasher across Asa's jaw.
♦ A sharp wooden crack, then a scatter of small hard things across planking
Wilkins: That sound you hear is teeth. I know my teeth, friends, and those were Asa's: two lower incisors and a canine, skittering across the threshing floor like dice across a tavern table. Asa spat a mouthful of blood and fell on Obadiah like a church steeple coming down, and the two of them went over into the churn.
Wilkins: Four gallons of Husking Punch went across the floor in one brown wave. Cider, brandy, maple sugar, nutmeg, all of it. The floor turned slick as a frozen millpond. Thirty people went down at once, legs in the air like overturned beetles. And then, God help me, a lantern began to swing. Somebody's head had knocked the beam, and that lantern was swaying over a floor soaked in brandy, with forty ton of hay above it.
Wilkins: I have never moved so fast in my life, not even the time a selectman's wife came at me over a bill. I went across that floor on my backside like a boy on a sled, caught the lantern bail in one hand, and blew it out. Then I went down the row and blew out every lantern but the one by the door. Fifty people brawled the rest of the night by the light of one lantern and the moon through the cracks, and not one of them knows how close they came to being roast pork.
Wilkins: And now the part the ladies of this valley still will not let me tell at supper, so I will tell it to you. In the dark, Obadiah Fogg got his teeth into Asa Kimball's left ear. He bit down and worried it like a terrier with a rat, and a piece came away, the soft lobe and a good crescent of the rim. Fogg spat it out, and it went into the wreck of the churn. When the widow came with the skimmer next morning to clean up, she fished out a half-inch of Kimball, looked at it, and said, 'Well, that is the first thing that has come out of this churn all night.'
♦ Wax crackle; Barnaby grunts outside
Wilkins: The deputy came at midnight, one of the county's finest, by which I mean the one they could spare. He walked in the door, put one boot in the punch, and his heels went up over his head. He landed square on his tailbone with a noise like a dropped sack of oats. He sat there in the brandy and wrote in his book: 'riot of unknown origin, and the floor was against me.' Then he asked for a cup of whatever was on the floor. I gave him some from the jug instead, out of professional courtesy.
Wilkins: When the sun came up, I swept that threshing floor with a lantern and a dustpan like a man panning for gold, and I found eleven teeth. Eleven! I had a fair idea whose they were, too, because I had looked in most of those mouths. I spent the morning on the widow's kitchen bench pulling the stumps, stitching lips, and setting Asa's nose with two goose quills up the nostrils, while a dozen grown men lined up behind him holding their jaws and swearing they started none of it.
Wilkins: The churn was kindling. The dasher was split down the middle and the hoops were sprung. I hauled the wreck home, and Barnaby got at it. That bear licked the brandy and the butter-slurry out of every stave, and he licked so hard he pulled the hoops off. I have strong reason to believe he also ate the rest of Asa Kimball's ear. He has looked at Barnstead men with a connoisseur's eye ever since. I forged the widow new hoops and paid a Concord cooper for a new churn, and she still says the butter came better from the old one.
♪ Banjo flourish
Wilkins: Now I need a man of the law in the room, so somebody can tell me I am a disgrace. My guest tonight is Captain Donald Vance of Manchester, lately retired from the federal revenue service. He has chased copper through the White Mountains and the Green Mountains, and he has the reputation of a man who leaves a good honest pot alone and takes an axe to a poisoner's rig. A revenue man I like is as rare as a wolf I would trust with my lambs, and even then only after he has eaten. Captain, welcome to Fort Wilkins.
Captain: Thank you, Doctor. I walked past your bear on the way in. He looked at me the way a banker looks at a widow's mortgage.
Wilkins: He is measuring you, Captain. Pay him no mind. He has already eaten one ear this year. You have the look of a man who has been bitten by every dog in two states and only apologized to the dogs.
Captain: Three states. And I apologized to the dogs because the dogs had done nothing wrong. Their owners were another matter.
Wilkins: Ha! Tell me, Captain. You have been to more country dances than any revenue man alive, and you were never invited to one of them. What did a barn dance look like from your side of the door?
Captain: It looked like a trap, Doctor, and usually it was. Here is the first thing I learned. In a Vermont town west of the mountains, I won't say which, every time I came up to a barn dance the music was going fine and the jugs were gone. Every time. So one night I lay in the stubble outside the cracks and listened. The caller would sing out 'Balance and swing,' and nothing happened. Then a boy on the fence whistled, and the caller sang out 'Cast off!' Every jug in the barn went up the ladder and out the haymow door.
Wilkins: The dance caller was the lookout!
Captain: The dance caller was the lookout. 'Balance and swing' meant all clear. 'Down the center' meant somebody on the road. 'Cast off' meant revenue at the door. So the next dance, I walked in without my coat, took my place at the end of the line like any farmer, waited for a quiet moment, and sang out 'Cast off!' in the best voice I had.
Wilkins: Oh, you devil.
Captain: Six jugs went out that haymow door at once, Doctor. Six. And the haymow door opened right over the manure pile. They landed soft. Nobody ever went down after them, because nobody wanted to explain to his wife why he was digging in the manure pile at a dance. I didn't arrest anybody. The jugs were in a manure pile. I figured that was punishment enough for the jugs.
Wilkins: Captain, that is the most Christian act of revenue enforcement I have ever heard of. Tell me about the musicians. The fiddlers I know are a low, thirsty breed.
Captain: Fiddlers carry their own. That I expected. What I did not expect was the bass viol. Up near the Lamoille there was a band of three: a fiddler, a fellow with a flute, and a big young man with a bass viol nearly as tall as he was. I noticed he never played anything but the one note, all night, in every tune. So at the break I went over, and I put my knuckle to the belly of that bass viol and gave it a knock.
♦ A hollow wooden knock, followed by a slosh
Captain: It answered with a flat G and a slosh, like a cow walking through a puddle. He had poured near three gallons into it through the f-holes and corked them from the inside with wax.
Wilkins: That is still the most honest note I ever heard out of a bass viol. What did you do?
Captain: I asked him to play me a tune. He couldn't, of course. Three gallons of spirit is a poor sounding board. So I told him if he could play me 'Chorus Jig' through, all of it, he could keep the instrument. He sawed away at it for a full minute and never found the second note. So we poured it out on the ground behind the barn, and I tell you, Doctor, that grass came up greener the next spring than anything in the county.
Wilkins: Ha! Now, Captain, I heard a rumor in Concord that you were once beaten at your own trade by a woman.
Captain: More than once, but I'll give you the best. Green Mountain farm, a kitchen junket, a winter night with snow to the window-sills. I knocked on the door, and the farm wife opened it. Small woman, arms like a blacksmith. She looked at my badge and said, 'Nobody comes into this kitchen but dances. Them's the rules of the house.' And I, being a gentleman, said all right. She called for 'Portland Fancy.'
Wilkins: Oh no. The whole of it?
Captain: The whole of it, Doctor, with every figure, every repeat, and her husband sawing the fiddle twice as slow as any man ever played it. She held me by both hands and swung me till my boots left the floor. I was twenty minutes in that dance. When it ended I was sweating like a hog at a barbecue, and I went down to the cellar, and there was nothing in that cellar but potatoes and a clean, dry spot on the floor shaped exactly like the bottom of a still. They had carried it out the cellar hatch and halfway up the mountain while I was doing 'right and left four.'
Wilkins: What did you write in the report?
Captain: One word. 'Outdanced.' My superior sent it back and asked what it meant, and I wrote under it, 'It means what it says.'
Wilkins: I would sooner face a sheriff than a farm wife with a fiddle and a grudge. Now, Captain, I want something from you that isn't so jolly. You are known as a man who will leave a clean pot be, but you also took the axe to some rigs. Was there ever a dance that went to the bad because of what was in the jug?
Captain: There was, and I think about it still. Down on the Connecticut River, a town I'll leave unnamed. They held a harvest dance every fall, and a fellow supplied the spirits, a cheerful man, well liked. That year, inside of a week, half the dancers came down with the cramps. Bellies knotted up, men doubled over in the field, a blue line on the gums, wrist drop in one old fellow. The doctor called it painter's colic.
Wilkins: Lead.
Captain: Lead. I found the still in a sugarhouse. He had made the worm and the lining of the condenser out of the lead foil that comes inside the tea chests. He'd collected it from every store in three towns and soldered it into a pipe. Lovely work, Doctor. Neat as a watch. And it was poisoning the whole county one dance at a time.
Wilkins: God in heaven. What did you do?
Captain: I hauled it into the middle of the town common on a Saturday, with the whole town there, and took an axe to that lead worm while they watched. Then I told them why, plain as I could. Then I let him go. He hadn't meant harm. He just didn't know. That's the worst kind of poisoner, the kind who doesn't know. He went home and built a copper worm, and two years later he sent me a letter saying nobody had had a bellyache since.
Wilkins: That is a story every man with a hammer should hear. Lead has no place in a still, friends, not in the worm, not in the solder, not anywhere. Captain, before we break, give me one thing you learned about a dance that no revenue man knew.
Captain: Watch the grandmothers, Doctor. The young men drink and the young women court, but the grandmothers sit by the wall and see everything. The one grandmother who never gets up to dance is sitting on the jug.
Wilkins: Ha! That is the truest thing ever said in this cabin. Captain Donald Vance of Manchester, thank you, sir. Stay put. Barnaby has taken a liking to you, and I would hate for you to leave by the window.
Captain: I'll stay put, Doctor. Your bear and I have an understanding. He doesn't look at me and I don't look at him.
♪ Fiddle and banjo flourish into the ad break
Announcer: Ladies and gentlemen! Step up, step up, and hear me plain! Do you love the honest work of an American craftsman? Do you admire a vessel built to last a lifetime and then some? Then look no further than Moonshine Stills, proud home of the Flame-Flow Still, the flagship of the line, protected under United States Patent number 10,561,960! It is made of heavy-gauge, high-purity electrolytic copper, the brightest and cleanest copper there is, joined with precision CNC-machined brass unions that seal tight and true! The Flame-Flow is designed to maximize convective circulation and deliver unmatched purity for your essential oils, your herbal tinctures, and your traditional distillation demonstrations! It will not rattle! It will not shirk! It will gleam on your bench like a new-minted cent! The price is eight hundred ninety-nine dollars, and worth every one! Come and see it with your own eyes at the showroom at Fort Wilkins on Route 28 in Pittsfield, New Hampshire! Or order your setup direct at moonshinestill.com! That is moonshinestill.com, and go straight to the Flame-Flow at https://moonshinestill.com/products/flame-flow-copper-still! Once more, friends: moonshinestill.com! The Flame-Flow Still. Pure copper, patented, and proudly American!
♪ Brass-band flourish on a parlor piano, then the banjo theme returns
Wilkins: Segment the third. Copper and the craft.
Wilkins: The Husking Punch I filled that churn with was mostly cider and maple sugar and a fair pour of apple brandy. So tonight let me give you the whole process the way I would teach an apprentice, start to finish, and let me tell you plainly where it can kill you. Once more for the deputies: making drinking spirits without a federal permit is unlawful, and this is history and learning.
Wilkins: Start with the mash. For a harvest mash of about ten gallons, I take eight gallons of good water and bring it to the boil. I stir in ten pounds of cracked corn and keep it cooking, stirring so it don't scorch, until it is thick as porridge. Then I let it cool down to about a hundred and fifty degrees by the Fahrenheit glass. Get yourself a glass. A finger is a liar. At that heat I stir in two pounds of crushed malted barley.
Wilkins: Here is why. Corn is starch, and yeast cannot eat starch. The malted barley carries the ferments, the diastase the chemists call it, that turn corn starch into sugar. Hold it warm near that heat for an hour or so, and taste it. It goes sweet as a girl's promise. Then cool it to about eighty degrees, no warmer, or you will cook the yeast. Pitch your yeast and cover it loose with a cloth. Do not seal it, because it is going to breathe. Five days to a week later the bubbling slows and the cap falls, and you have a sour, beery wash.
Wilkins: Now the still. I want copper wherever the vapor goes: the cap, the column if you run one, and the worm especially. Copper does its cleaning of the sulfur stink best in the vapor, where hot spirit vapor rubs against bright metal. A copper pot with a pewter or lead worm is a gentleman in a fine coat with no trousers. Lead has no place anywhere in it, as the Captain just told you.
Wilkins: Never seal a still tight. Some fool will paste flour dough on every joint and stopper the outlet to keep the steam in, and the pressure builds and the whole thing bursts like a boiler on a Mississippi packet. Keep the worm open to the air at the end. Keep cool water running through your condenser the entire run, because if the water stops, raw vapor goes out the worm and into the room. Then all it takes is a lantern, and you are the next story somebody tells on the radio.
Wilkins: Fire. Heat low and steady. Bring it up slow. If you rush it, the cuts come mixed together like a Barnstead brawl. And never leave a still over a fire unattended, not to take a leak, not to kiss a widow, not even if the bear is loose. Keep your receiving jars well away from any open flame, because spirit vapor comes off those jars.
Wilkins: Here is my trick for cuts. Set out a row of small jars, two dozen at least, numbered in chalk. Collect the run jar by jar and never in one big crock. One big crock mixes your poison in with your profit, and you cannot unmix it.
Wilkins: The first liquid out of the worm is the foreshots. On a ten-gallon wash I throw out at least the first pint, and more is no sin. That is where most of the wood alcohol comes, the methanol, which will blind you and kill you. Not a sip, not a rinse, not a toothache cure. Pour it out.
Wilkins: Then come the heads. They smell sharp, like a cobbler's glue pot or the varnish on a new coffin, and a man who drinks them will have his own sole fall off by Tuesday. Those jars go aside. Then the hearts: clean, sweet, smelling of the grain, smooth on the tongue. That is what you are working for. Then the tails come on, oily, heavy, smelling like a wet sheep that has been washing dishes. You'll see the oil slick on the surface when you add water. Those jars go aside too, and some men throw them back into the next run.
Wilkins: Sit with your jars in the morning, in daylight, with a clear nose and no tobacco. Smell each one. Rub a drop between your palms and smell your hands after. You'll find the line where the heads end and the hearts begin, and a man who is honest with himself will always cut a jar too late rather than a jar too early.
Wilkins: And when the run is done, clean your copper. Rinse it hot, scrub it bright, and don't let any of that green crust live in your worm. A dull still is a lazy still, and a lazy still lets the stink through.
♦ Wax crackle; distant bear grunt
♪ Brief banjo interlude
Wilkins: Segment the fourth. Myths, slang, and the listener cylinder. We've had a recording come by post all the way from the Carolina hills. I'll wind it up and let it speak for itself.
♦ Wax cylinder crank turning, a hiss, then a scratchy, distant voice
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 ending, click
Wilkins: Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina! Rabbit, your voice traveled seven hundred miles to get here, and I want you to know you arrived in better shape than Asa Kimball's ear. Let me take your uncle's two medicines one at a time, because each one has a little truth in it and a whole barn of nonsense.
Wilkins: The hickory ashes first. Wood ash is alkaline. It is what our grandmothers leached in an ash hopper to make lye for soap, and what the potash works shipped out of these hills by the barrel. Throw ash into a thump keg and you make the water in it alkaline. That might take the edge off a little sourness and soap up a little of the oil in it. That's the whole of it. It does nothing at all to methanol. Methanol is a light vapor that comes early in the run, and no ash in any keg will hold it back. Ashes in a thump keg will clean your spirit the way a hat on a hog will make him a deacon.
Wilkins: Now the red oak shavings. Rabbit, take a stick of red oak about a foot long, put one end in your mouth, put the other end in a glass of water, and blow. You'll see bubbles. Red oak has open pores, end to end, which is why no cooper worth his adze ever makes a tight barrel from it. You use white oak for barrels. So red oak leaks so bad you can blow smoke through a stick of it, and your uncle wants it to hold back poison.
Wilkins: What oak shavings will do is put color and tannin into the spirit, a brown tint and a dry bite, so young, raw spirit looks and tastes like something that sat in a barrel for years. That isn't cleaning, Rabbit, that is face paint. A painted-up bad head is still a bad head.
Wilkins: Here is a thing your uncle may not know. If he was running fruit, apples or peaches or pears, there is more methanol in that than in a corn mash. It comes from the pectin in the fruit, the same stuff that sets your grandmother's jelly. So a fruit man has to be stricter with his foreshots and heads, never looser. The only cure for bad heads is the cut: watch the run, collect it in small jars, and throw the first of it away.
Wilkins: So Rabbit, God bless your uncle. He means well, and he's carrying on an old custom, and old customs are half of what makes life worth the trouble. But tell him from me: ashes are for soap, red oak is for firewood, and heads are for the ground. You're a fine listener, Cletus, and the next time you come up the Suncook Valley there's a chair by my anvil for you, a safe distance from the bear.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: There. That strike is for a myth I want driven into the ground once and for all, the blue flame. You've all seen it. A man pours a spoonful of spirit on the table, puts a match to it, and it burns blue. 'See there, she's clean!' And if it burns yellow or red, he says it's poison and there's lead in it.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Nonsense! The flame of a spirit, any spirit, is pale blue because spirit burns clean. Wood alcohol, methanol, the stuff that blinds a man, burns pale blue too, near invisible in daylight. A flame cannot tell the difference. As for yellow, put a pinch of salt or a bit of dust on that table and you'll get yellow from that. A blue flame tells you the spirit will burn, which you knew, and nothing about whether it will kill you, which is what you wanted to know.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: The same goes for the shake test, where you shake the jar and watch the bead. The bead tells you roughly how strong the spirit is, nothing more. Strength isn't safety. A strong jar of heads will bead like a pearl necklace and send you to your grave wearing it. The only guards you have are an honest still made of the right metal and an honest cut. Everything else is parlor tricks.
♪ Banjo theme returns softly
Wilkins: One more word from my sponsor, and then I must go see to the bear.
Announcer: A quick word, friends! The Flame-Flow Still, United States Patent 10,561,960, is handcrafted heavy-gauge pure copper and as honest as a New Hampshire Sunday! Order yours today at moonshinestill.com, or call at the showroom at Fort Wilkins on Route 28 in Pittsfield! Once more: moonshinestill.com!
♪ Fiddle and banjo theme swelling warmly
Wilkins: Well, friends, that is the Barn Dance Brawl of '64. Asa Kimball still wears his hair long over the left side. Obadiah Fogg still gums his supper, because I would not fit him for a set of teeth on principle. Lemuel Hoyt still has the bloodstains in his fiddle and swears it plays sweeter for them. The widow Sanborn married a Gilmanton man the next spring, and she churns better butter than ever. Barnaby, God help him, still remembers the taste of that churn.
Wilkins: If you'd like to learn this craft properly, with every cut, every safety rule, and the plain truth about copper and fire, enroll in the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. It will teach you to read a run jar by jar and keep lead and folly out of your work, all for history and learning, and within the law of the land. My thanks to Captain Donald Vance of Manchester, the best-danced revenue man in New England, and to Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina. Give your uncle my regards and tell him to throw his ashes on the garden.
Wilkins: Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.
♦ Bear grunt and final drip into jar
♦ Wax cylinder crackle fades to silence