The Peddler Who Sold Everything
Dr. G. G. Wilkins covers the history of the Yankee peddler, from the Connecticut tin carts and the wooden nutmeg legend to Mr. Lincoln's 1862 license tax on peddlers. He then tells how Ezra Pickett of Berlin, Connecticut rolled up to Fort Wilkins to sell him everything and drove off owning less than he came with. Retired Wilkes County runner Junior Vance talks about the traveling salesmen of the Brushy Mountains: a rolling store, a Bible-and-encyclopedia man, and a knife grinder who turned informer. Wilkins answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller's question about hickory ashes and red oak shavings in the thump keg, and strikes coins on his anvil to knock down the old 'lead burns red' flame 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, you great furry sack of grievances, settle your backside down! That peddler's mule ain't on the menu, and neither is the peddler, though I grant you he smells like gravy.
♦ Bear huffs heavily, chain drags across frozen dooryard
Wilkins: There. He's laid down on the woodpile like a bishop in a feather tick. Four hundred pounds of bad manners, and I love him more than I love most of my relatives and all of my creditors.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth
Wilkins: Good evening, neighbors, sinners, and the occasional revenue man pressing his ear to the log wall. Welcome to Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, broadcasting from Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, here in Pittsfield, Merrimack County, New Hampshire. I am Dr. George G. Wilkins: tooth-puller, blacksmith, inventor, stamper of coins, and twice the honored guest of the Merrimack County sheriff.
Wilkins: Tonight's subject is one that has emptied more New England pocketbooks than whiskey, cards, and the Congregational collection plate put together. Tonight we talk about the Yankee peddler. And I'll tell you about the day a Connecticut man rolled up to my door to sell me every last thing under the sun. We call it The Peddler Who Sold Everything.
Wilkins: I'll tell you plainly before we start: making spirits to drink without a permit from the federal Treasury is against the law of the land. What you hear on this program is history, tall tales, and education. Our sponsor deals only in honest, lawful copper. Announcer, say your piece.
♪ Brief brass flourish, slightly out of tune
Announcer: A quick word, friends! Before any peddler sells you tin dressed up as copper, see the real thing: the Flame-Flow Still, United States Patent 10,561,960, in heavy-gauge pure electrolytic copper! Order today at moonshinestill.com!
♪ Fiddle sting
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
♪ Slow banjo bridge, minor key
Wilkins: SEGMENT ONE. The Tin Cart and the Wooden Nutmeg.
Wilkins: Picture a New Hampshire farm in March. Mud up to the hubs, the root cellar down to three wrinkled potatoes and a turnip that's seen things. Your wife hasn't laid eyes on a new pin, a new pan, or a new face since Thanksgiving. Then comes a jingle and a rattle down the turnpike like a church steeple falling downstairs. It's a red-painted wagon hung all over with tin cups, tin dippers, tin pails, tin lanterns, and tin pie plates, with a fellow up on the box smiling like he already owns your barn. Friends, that is the Yankee peddler.
Wilkins: The tin trade, as best anybody can tell, started with a pair of tinsmiths called the Pattison brothers, who settled in Berlin, Connecticut back in the last century. They hammered out tinware, couldn't sell it fast enough at home, and went door to door. Pretty soon half of Berlin was making tin and the other half was out on the roads selling it, from Maine to Georgia. Berlin, Connecticut has sent more smooth-talking scoundrels into the world than any town its size, Boston included, and Boston sends plenty.
Wilkins: Now, a farm wife didn't always have coin. Hard money has been scarce as hen's teeth since the war started. So the tin man would swap. He'd take your rags, your goose feathers, your hog bristles, and anything else lying in the shed. He sold the rags on to the paper mills, so the very newspaper that called him a swindler was printed on your grandmother's old drawers. That's what I call commerce.
Wilkins: And then there's the wooden nutmeg. You've heard it. A peddler whittles nutmegs out of basswood, stains them brown, and sells them to some poor woman who grates her knuckles bloody trying to spice a pudding. That's how Connecticut got called the Nutmeg State. The truth is it's mostly a legend. Some say the nutmegs were real and folks who had never grated one figured they were fake. But I'll say this: a Connecticut peddler will sell you a wooden nutmeg, and if you complain he'll sell you a wooden grater to go with it.
♦ Barnaby grunts outside, chain clinks once
Wilkins: Barnaby agrees. He ate a wooden nutmeg once, and two days later it came out the far end looking better than it went in.
Wilkins: Then came the clock men. When Eli Terry and the other Connecticut clockmakers started turning out cheap shelf clocks by the cartload, the peddlers spread them across the country. Many a farmhouse in this valley heard its first tick off a peddler's wagon. And if you want to know how those fellows talked, read Judge Haliburton's book The Clockmaker. It came out in 1836, all about a Yankee peddler named Sam Slick. Sam's whole trick was 'soft sawder and human natur'. He'd flatter the wife, admire the baby, and leave the clock on the mantel 'just to try,' knowing nobody would ever let it go once they'd heard it tick. Sam Slick called it soft sawder. In Pittsfield we call it lying with a clean collar on.
Wilkins: Last, Mr. Lincoln got his fingers in it. His Revenue Act of 1862 put a federal license on half the trades in the Union, and peddlers were among them. The fee went up with how a man traveled: on foot, one horse, two horses, and on up. So Mr. Lincoln charged a peddler by the horse, which means the only honest creature in the whole outfit was the one paying the tax.
♪ Banjo flourish
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
♪ Driving fiddle reel, quick tempo
Wilkins: SEGMENT TWO. Ezra Pickett Comes to Fort Wilkins.
Wilkins: Now for the story you came for. This was last October, apples in, frost on the pumpkins. Up the turnpike from Epsom comes a wagon painted red as a harlot's garter, pulled by a mule called Deuteronomy. Up on the box sat Mister Ezra Pickett of Berlin, Connecticut. Ezra had a face like a boiled ham somebody sat on in church, a beaver hat with a dent in it the size of a cannonball, and a laugh like a pump handle that needs grease.
Wilkins: Ezra climbed down and started selling before his boots touched the mud. 'Doctor Wilkins! Heard of you clear down to Hartford! A man of science needs science goods!' And out of that wagon came everything God and Connecticut ever made. Tin pans. Clocks. Corset stays. Darning needles. Dr. Somebody's Vegetable Elixir, good for consumption, croup, and grief. A patent apple-parer. A box of horehound candy that had seen two presidents. He offered to sharpen my wife's scissors, and I told him she sharpens her tongue on me every morning and charges nothing.
Wilkins: Then he brought out a still. A tin still. Shiny as a new dime, with a worm coiled up like a sleeping blacksnake. 'Pure as heaven, Doctor, and half the price of copper.' I put my eye right up to the seams, and friends, it was lead solder, gray and fat as the belly of a dead perch. I told him, 'Mister Pickett, a worm soldered with lead is a coffin you drink out of on the installment plan.'
Wilkins: Now, a peddler who smells a 'no' doesn't quit. He gets cheaper. Down came the tin still. Down came the clock. Down came the corset stays, and he swore up and down they'd make a woman's figure 'like an hourglass.' I said my wife's figure is already an hourglass, the kind where all the sand's settled to the bottom, and if she ever hears me say so on this program you will be attending my funeral.
Wilkins: So I bargained. First I asked him, sweet as you please, to show me his federal peddler's license. Ezra went pale as a boiled egg. His license was for one horse, and Deuteronomy, God love her, is a mule. Mule or horse, Mr. Lincoln's men would've had something to say about it. That softened him. Then I saw he was chewing on the right side only and wincing on the left. I said, 'Ezra, you've got a lower molar in there rotted black as a Concord chimney, and it'll be in your jaw till Christmas or till I take it out.'
♦ Clink of steel forceps lifted from a tray
Wilkins: I sat him in my chair and gave him a tin cup of something warm to steady his nerve. I put the forceps on that molar, braced my knee in his lap, and pulled. It came out with a sound like a boot pulling out of a cow pond, and it brought along a string of something green that I won't describe in front of the ladies. Well, I will a little: it looked like a pickled caterpillar that had died of shame. Ezra hollered loud enough to stop the Suncook flowing, and Barnaby hollered back out of sympathy.
♦ Bear roars, chain snaps taut against the log wall
Wilkins: When the smoke cleared, here's how the ledger stood. I took the tooth as a down payment, and that was the first thing he sold me all day that was genuine. I charged him a dollar for the pulling, a quarter for the tin cup, and fifty cents for 'consultation regarding federal licensing.' He paid me back in goods: the patent apple-parer, a gross of darning needles, two tin lanterns, and the horehound candy, which I fed to Barnaby. For his change I gave him three large cents with my mark struck square across Lady Liberty's forehead: G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. So Ezra rolled in selling everything and walked out of Pittsfield selling nothing but sympathy, and he couldn't get a cent for that either. His lead-soldered still went in my scrap pile, where it belongs. I hammered it into a bucket for horse feed, and the horse ain't happy about it.
Wilkins: A peddler's pack is like a bridegroom's promises: it looks full as a Thanksgiving goose on the road in, and there's a great deal less in it once you get it home and open it.
Wilkins: Ezra wasn't my worst peddler, though. The worst was a lightning-rod man. Called himself Professor Amos Quackenbush, of Lowell, Mass. Thin as a rake handle, with a voice like a church organ with one pipe stuck. He told me Fort Wilkins was 'a tinderbox awaiting the wrath of the heavens,' and before I could tell him to go to hell, he'd set a ladder against my still-house and climbed onto the roof with an iron rod and a hammer.
Wilkins: Now that put him right over Barnaby's corner of the dooryard, and his coattails were hanging down off the eave like a dinner napkin. Barnaby stood up on his hind legs. Seven feet of bear, friends. He caught those coattails in his teeth and gave them one honest, Christian tug.
♦ Long rip of heavy wool cloth, followed by a hollow thud
Wilkins: The professor came off that roof like a sack of seed potatoes. He hit the manure pile, which saved his life and cost him his dignity. Barnaby rolled him over twice, sniffing him the way a man reads a newspaper. Then he found the horehound drops in the professor's waistcoat, got excited, and took the top of his left ear off as neat as a deacon biting a radish. There was a little pop and a squeal like a pig going under the gate, and blood everywhere. Then Barnaby sat on him. Four hundred pounds. You could hear all the air leave that man like the bellows on my forge giving its last breath. And all the while the bear was licking horehound syrup out of the professor's whiskers like a hound licking a skillet.
Wilkins: I got the bear off with a ham hock and a broom handle. I stitched the professor's ear with silk thread right there on the chopping block and charged him two dollars. His rod I chained to Barnaby's post, and Barnaby's scratched his back on it every day since. A lightning rod on a bear's chain is the only lightning rod I ever saw earn its keep.
♦ Barnaby grunts contentedly, chain clinks
Wilkins: Speaking of men who've traveled a long, hard road, I've got a guest tonight who came a far piece to sit by my stove. He's from North Wilkesboro, in the Brushy Mountains of North Carolina, and he knows more about men who sell things off a road than any man living. Mister Junior Vance, welcome to Fort Wilkins.
Junior: Thank you, Doc. I'll say this, your bear looked at me coming in like I was a pork chop that owed him money.
Wilkins: He looks at everybody that way, Junior. He looked at the Bishop of New Hampshire that way, and the Bishop deserved it. Now, tonight it's peddlers. Your people back in the Brushies must've had their share of men selling off a wagon.
Junior: Doc, we had more traveling men than we had roads. The one I learned the most from was a rolling store. That's a grocery store on wheels, like a peddler's wagon only bigger. Fella named Mister Odell drove it through every holler in Wilkes County, selling flour, coffee, snuff, lamp oil, and stick candy. Most folks didn't have cash money, so he took eggs and live chickens instead. He'd hang the chicken crates off the back.
Wilkins: Same as the tin men taking rags. Go on.
Junior: I rode with him when I was eleven, twelve years old. One evening he says, 'Junior, you hear that?' And I don't hear a thing but chickens. He says, 'That's right. Forty hens squawking is the best muffler God ever made.' He had me pack the jars down under the chicken crates in sawdust, so even if a jar clinked, nobody on earth could hear it over the hens. Sheriff stopped us one time on the Boone road, put his head in the back, and a rooster bit him on the nose. He backed out bleeding, said 'Y'all go on,' and never looked under one crate.
Wilkins: A rooster deputized by the moonshiners. I respect that bird more than half the magistrates in Merrimack County. What became of him?
Junior: We ate him that Sunday. Wasn't nothing personal.
Wilkins: Ha! Nothing in business ever is. Now, did any of these traveling men ever come out ahead of you in a trade?
Junior: Once. A fella come through selling encyclopedias, Doc. Big leather books, gold letters on the spine, every bit of knowledge in the world. He wanted a case of jars real bad, and he didn't have the money, so he offered me a whole set of encyclopedias. Well, I'm young and dumb, so I take it. Get home, and the set runs A through M. That's all he had. Rest of the alphabet was gone.
Wilkins: Half an education for a whole case of liquor.
Junior: That's right. To this day I can tell you all about aardvarks and the Mississippi River, and I never learned a lick past the letter M. Don't ask me nothing about the ocean, zebras, or the Pope.
Wilkins: Junior, I'll tell you, that puts you two letters ahead of the Merrimack County sheriff. He made it as far as K and quit, said he didn't trust a letter that kicks.
Junior: [laughing] Well, Doc, not every traveling man was a salesman, either. Some of 'em was spies. We had a knife grinder come through one summer, pedaling one of them grindstones on a little cart. Real friendly. Sharpened Mama's butcher knife for free, which was the first lie. No grinder in North Carolina ever did a thing for free.
Wilkins: A free favor from a stranger is a hook with the worm still on it.
Junior: Yes sir. He kept asking where a man could buy 'a little something for the rheumatism.' So my cousin and me sold him a jar. Sealed it up nice and proper, and charged him full price. Except it was branch water out of the creek behind the barn, with a pinch of creek sand for color. Turned out he was a revenue informer. Couple weeks later the lawyer showed my cousin the man's report, and it said the evidence 'tested as creek.'
Wilkins: Ha! A revenue informer who tests branch water and calls it evidence ought to be promoted to the Board of Health. Did he ever come back?
Junior: He come back through once and sharpened every knife in the county trying to make friends. We let him. Best edges we ever had.
Wilkins: Last one, Junior. Did you ever meet a lightning-rod man? I've told my story. I want yours.
Junior: Oh, we had one. Fella tried to sell a widow woman up on Moravian Creek rods for her henhouse. Told her lightning would cook every hen she owned. She was about seventy-five and mean as a wet cat. She let him put up three rods, and then he gave her the bill, and it was robbery. She didn't say a word. She walked out with a ball of baling twine, pulled every one of them rods down, tied 'em in a bundle, and hung it from his mule's harness like a dinner bell. That mule went down the mountain clanging like a fire wagon, the fella running after it hollering, and she stood on the porch hollering after him, 'Now you're grounded!'
Wilkins: God bless that woman. Junior Vance of North Wilkesboro, you've earned your seat by the stove and a ham bone if Barnaby don't get to it first. Stay with us, friends.
Junior: Thank you, Doc. Keep that bear on the short chain.
♪ Banjo and fiddle trade a quick break
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
♪ Bright brass band vamp, medicine-show tempo
Announcer: AD BREAK! Step right up, ladies and gentlemen, step right up! You've just heard what a peddler's tin can do: lead solder at the seams and lies in the bargain! Now hear about the real thing! If you appreciate authentic American craftsmanship, look no further than Moonshine Stills, proud home of the Flame-Flow Still, our flagship, protected under United States Patent 10,561,960! It's built of heavy-gauge, high-purity electrolytic copper. No tin, no lead, no wooden nutmegs! It's joined with precision CNC-machined brass unions, tight as a deacon's purse! The Flame-Flow is designed to maximize convective circulation and deliver unmatched purity for essential oils, herbal tinctures, and traditional distillation demonstrations! Handcrafted pure copper for eight hundred ninety-nine dollars, an heirloom your grandchildren will fight over! Visit moonshinestill.com, that's moonshinestill.com, or go straight to https://moonshinestill.com/products/flame-flow-copper-still! Or stop by the showroom at Fort Wilkins on Route 28 in Pittsfield, New Hampshire, and admire the bear from a sensible distance! Once more, friends: order your Flame-Flow Still today at moonshinestill.com!
♪ Brass band finish with cymbal crash
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
♪ Low, warm fiddle drone
Wilkins: SEGMENT THREE. Copper, Mash, and Cuts: Why I Wouldn't Take Ezra's Tin.
♦ Knuckles rap on a copper pot, deep ringing tone
Wilkins: Hear that? That's copper talking. Tin talks like a pie plate falling down the cellar stairs. Copper talks like a church bell. Now let me tell you how a run goes at Fort Wilkins, start to finish, as it was done in my day, for history and for learning.
Wilkins: First, the mash. My corn-and-malt mash goes like this. Take your cracked corn and cook it in clean water, stirring so it don't scorch. Scorched mash makes whiskey that tastes like a burned-down Baptist church. When the corn's cooked soft, let it cool down to about a hundred and fifty degrees, a heat you can't hold your finger in for a count of five. Then stir in your malted barley. The malt turns the corn starch to sugar, and it's real alchemy, the same as turning lead to gold except it works. Let it sit and convert. Then cool it again, down to about blood-warm, about how warm a baby's bath should be, and pitch in the yeast. Cover it against flies, and give it four to seven days. It'll bubble, belch, and stink like a tannery wedding. What you get is a weak, sour beer we call the wash. It's nothing to brag about yet. The still does the rest.
Wilkins: Now, while that mash works, it breathes out a heavy gas that'll smother you, so give your fermenting room air. I've known a man to go down into a mash cellar and never come up talking.
Wilkins: Second, the copper, and here's why I turned down Ezra. When the wash boils, the vapor comes up carrying sulfur stinks. You know the smell: rotten eggs, cabbage left over from Tuesday. Copper grabs that sulfur and holds it on the metal, so the stink never reaches the jar. But here's what most fellows don't know: the copper that does the work is the copper the vapor touches. That's the helmet, the neck, and the worm, where the steam rubs against the metal on its way to the cold water. Copper sitting down under the liquid in the pot does far less. So if a man tells you he's got a copper pot with a tin top and a tin worm, he's saved his money on the very parts that clean the spirit. And never, ever lead solder. A worm soldered with lead will give you the shakes, then the gripes, then a nice pine box.
Wilkins: And keep that copper bright. Between runs, I take a paste of vinegar and salt to the tarnish. It fizzes a little and the copper comes up pink as a new baby's bottom. Then rinse it thorough with clean water, so you ain't making salty vinegar whiskey next time.
Wilkins: Third, the fire, and I'll be dead serious. Spirit vapor is heavier than air. If a joint leaks, that vapor doesn't rise up polite like smoke. It creeps along the floor like a cat, settles in the low corners, and goes looking for your fire. I've seen the floorboards catch from a leak six feet off from the furnace. Low, steady heat. Tight joints. A good draft through the house. Never walk off and leave a still running. A still-house without a draft is a church without a back door: sooner or later somebody's going to meet his Maker sooner than planned.
Wilkins: Fourth, and most important: the cuts. When she starts dripping, the first bit off the worm is the foreshots. It smells like a varnish shop, sharp enough to make your eyes water, and it goes straight on the ground. Not in a cup, not on a tooth, and nowhere near your mother-in-law, no matter how you feel about her. Next come the heads, still harsh and solvent-smelling, and they go aside too, in their own jar. Then the hearts come, sweet and clean, smelling of corn and bread. That's what a man works for. Last come the tails. The spirit gets thin and oily, smells like a wet dog, and leaves a slick on the jar. Those go aside to run again another day. Change jars often. Small jars, many of them, so you can smell your way through the run honest, and not by guesswork.
Wilkins: No tin, no peddler's elixir, and no wooden nutmeg will save a man from a dishonest cut. Copper cleans the sulfur. Only the man at the worm can make the cuts honest.
♪ Fiddle resolves on a warm chord
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
♪ Playful banjo pluck
Wilkins: SEGMENT FOUR. The Mailbag, the Myth, and the Anvil.
Wilkins: We got a voice on the wax tonight, brought all the way north by the post rider, and he's been cussing the roads the whole way. It's from Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, practically a neighbor of Junior's. Let's hear him.
♦ Needle drop, heavy crackle, faint hiss of an old cylinder
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?
♦ Needle lifts off cylinder
Wilkins: Rabbit, that is a fine question, and your uncle ain't entirely a fool. He's about two-thirds a fool, which in North Carolina gets you elected.
Wilkins: Let's start with the ash. New Hampshire knows hardwood ash better than any place on God's earth. When this valley was first cleared, every town had an ashery. The farmers burned whole forests, hauled the ashes in, and leached them in barrels into lye. Then they boiled the lye down in great iron kettles to make potash, and refined it further to pearlash. We shipped that out for soap, for glass, and for biscuits, since pearlash was a rising agent before the baking powder men came along. Potash made New Hampshire soap, glass, and biscuits, and it never once made a bad head into a good one.
Wilkins: Here's why, Rabbit. Ash is lye waiting for water. It's caustic. It'll burn your hands and blind your eyes. Toss it in a hot keg and you've made yourself soapy, bitter, burning trouble. And it does nothing to the heads, because the heads are already in the vapor before the ash ever wakes up. The only way to be shed of the heads is to catch them in their own jar and set them aside. That's done at the worm, not in the keg.
Wilkins: Now the red oak. There your uncle's half right, but about the wrong thing. Oak soaked in spirit for a long time does give color and a woody, vanilla flavor. That's what a barrel does over months and years. A handful of shavings boiling in a thump keg for one afternoon gives you a whisper of that flavor and fixes nothing. Rabbit, your uncle is welcome to put red oak in his thump keg if he wants his whiskey to taste like a schoolhouse floor.
Wilkins: But I'll give the old-timers this much. I hear the Tennessee men drip their new whiskey slow as molasses through tall vats of sugar-maple charcoal to mellow it. That's real. But mark it well: that's charcoal, and finished spirit going through it slow. It isn't ashes thrown into a boiling keg. The charcoal men understood something real, and your uncle is copying it with the wrong materials in the wrong place.
Wilkins: So your answer, Rabbit: ash is swamp medicine and a hazard besides. Shavings are flavor, not cure. Honest cuts are the only cure. Shout out to Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina. Tell your uncle Doc Wilkins says he's welcome at Fort Wilkins any time, and to bring his own ashes so I can make soap out of them and wash his mouth with it.
♦ Barnaby grunts, chain rattles
Wilkins: Now, while I've got the anvil warm, let's bust an old lie. Peddlers sold this one by the bottle: little 'testing vials' to see whether your whiskey was safe. You've heard the old jingle: 'Lead burns red and makes you dead.' The idea is you pour a spoonful in a dish, set it alight, and if the flame burns blue you're safe, but if it burns red there's lead in it and you'd best say your prayers.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: That's one lie, struck dead. Flame color is a poor judge of what's in a man's whiskey. What you see depends on the strength, the light in the room, the spoon, and whatever's burning off the dish.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: That's two. A spirit can burn as blue as a June sky and still be carrying poison from a lead-soldered worm. Lead don't announce itself with a bonfire. And some of the worst stuff in a bad run burns so pale you can hardly see the flame at all.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin, ringing long
Wilkins: And that's three, struck with G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., square across Liberty's chin, so you'll remember it. The only real test is good, clean, lead-free equipment and honest cuts made by a sober man. Lead burns red and makes you dead, the old men say, and my grandfather said it too, right up until his funeral, which was paid for in lead-soldered whiskey. A peddler's guarantee is worth exactly the weight of the paper, and less if it's raining.
♪ Banjo tag
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Announcer: A quick word before we part, friends! No lead, no tin, no peddler's tricks: just the Flame-Flow Still, U.S. Patent 10,561,960, handcrafted of pure electrolytic copper. See it and order it at moonshinestill.com!
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme returns, softer
Wilkins: SIGN-OFF. Well, neighbors, the lamp's burning low, Barnaby's snoring like a sawmill with the gout, and Junior's asleep in my rocker dreaming of the letter N. If tonight's talk of copper, mash, and honest cuts has got you itching to learn the craft right, the whole history and science of it without peddler's nonsense, sign up for the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. I'll teach you mash, metal, fire, and cuts the way a smith teaches an apprentice: plain, honest, and with every finger still on your hands at the end.
Wilkins: My thanks to Junior Vance of North Wilkesboro, to Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller and his uncle with the ashes, and to Mister Ezra Pickett of Berlin, Connecticut, wherever he and Deuteronomy are tonight. Ezra, if your left jaw aches, it's healing. If your pocketbook aches, that'll never heal.
Wilkins: 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
♦ Wax cylinder crackle fades to silence