Hiding Barrels in Plain Sight
Dr. G. G. Wilkins covers the old Yankee habit of hiding liquor where everybody can see it: smuggled molasses casks in colonial days, spirit jugs sunk in Bennington pickle crocks, kegs buried in hay wagons, and the funeral he held for a coffin full of jugs on the Suncook Valley Turnpike. Retired revenue man Captain Donald Vance tells how he caught a hay wagon by its ruts, a pickle-crock widow by her pickles, and a coffin by the name on its lid. Later Wilkins answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, NC, who asks about hickory ash and red oak shavings in the thump keg, and he takes apart the shake-bead proof test between strikes of 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! BARNABY! Settle down, you overstuffed sack of fleas and bad manners. That's not a deputy, it's the wind in the hemlocks. If you keep rattling that chain like a ghost in a Concord jail I'll sell you to a traveling circus, and they'll make you wear a hat. A little red one with a tassel. Think on it.
♦ Bear grunt, lower, sulky; chain settles
Wilkins: That's better. He's sulking now. Four hundred pounds of sulk, which is still smaller than the sulk the Merrimack County sheriff carries around about me.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth, swells and holds under
Wilkins: Good evening, neighbors, rascals, widows, and any revenue man who has his ear pressed to the stovepipe. 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 your host, Dr. George G. Wilkins: dentist, blacksmith, inventor, coin-stamper, and a twice-arrested man of dubious but well-documented virtue.
Wilkins: Tonight's subject is near and dear to every Yankee who ever owned something the government wanted a piece of. It's called Hiding Barrels in Plain Sight. Pickle crocks, hay wagons, and yes, friends, a coffin, and the coffin was mine, though I was not in it. I'll tell that one in its proper place. We've also got a real revenue man in the parlor tonight, so I've counted the spoons.
♪ Theme resolves with a final banjo flourish
Wilkins: Before we start, a word from the fellow who keeps the lamp oil burning here.
Announcer: Just a quick word, friends! The Flame-Flow Still, protected under United States Patent 10,561,960, is handcrafted from heavy-gauge pure copper and built for honest work and handsome show. See it at the Fort Wilkins Showroom on Route 28, or order yours at moonshinestill.com. That's moonshinestill.com!
♦ Wax crackle; a chair creaks
♪ Short fiddle sting
Wilkins: SEGMENT ONE. A History of Hiding Things From Kings and Congressmen.
Wilkins: The first thing to know is that New England men did not learn to hide barrels from Mr. Lincoln. They learned from King George, and from his grandfather before him. In 1733 Parliament passed the Molasses Act: sixpence on every gallon of foreign molasses landed in these colonies. Molasses was the mother of rum, and rum was the mother's milk of every New England seaport from Portsmouth down to Newport. So what did our honest forefathers do?
Wilkins: They lied, smuggled, and bribed, in that order and often all three before breakfast. Molasses casks came ashore marked as fish, as salt, as ballast, and as the personal luggage of sea captains who had apparently packed eleven hundred gallons of underwear. A customs man in Portsmouth took so many bribes in molasses that by the end of his career his conscience was too sticky to turn over. The Crown collected hardly a farthing on that duty for thirty years. That is the noble heritage you were born into, children of Merrimack County. Your great-granddaddy was a smuggler, and he went to church every Sunday smelling of it.
Wilkins: Now we come to our own day. Mr. Lincoln has his war to pay for, and the whiskey tax sits on our shoulders like a wet cat. The assessors want every cask gauged, every gallon counted, every still registered. So the Yankee mind turned back to its oldest trick. You don't hide a barrel in a cave, because a cave is the first place a deputy looks, and the second place a bear lives. You hide it where nobody would bother looking, because it's sitting right there being ordinary.
Wilkins: Here's the principle, which I learned pulling teeth. A man will open his mouth wide for the dentist and never once think about what's in his pockets. A revenue man is the same. He walks into your cellar looking for something suspicious, so you give him nothing but the dullest, sourest, most respectable things a Christian household owns. Pickles. Hay. Grief. Nobody searches grief, and that's the secret of the coffin. Patience. I'm getting there.
Wilkins: First, the pickle crock. Every farmhouse from here to the Canada line has a row of them in the cellar: big gray salt-glazed stoneware crocks out of Bennington, Vermont, from the Norton works and their rivals, with a blue cobalt bird or a blue flower painted on the side by some potter's apprentice who had been at the cider. You pack your cucumbers in brine, lay a wooden board on top, the follower, they call it, put a stone on the board to hold the pickles under, and tie a cloth over the whole business.
Wilkins: You see where I'm headed. Sink a stoppered stoneware jug in the bottom of that crock. Pack the cucumbers around it. Pour the brine over, lay the follower on top, set the stone, tie the cloth. A deputy lifts the cloth and the brine hits him in the nose like a slap from a fishwife. He sees cucumbers. He smells vinegar and dill and maybe a hint of garlic if you're fancy. He puts the cloth back and goes upstairs to bother your wife. I keep my crocks the way a deacon keeps his opinions: brine on top, the good stuff underneath, and the lid nailed down tight.
Wilkins: One warning, and I'm dead serious about this. Use STONEWARE, properly salt-glazed and fired hard. The cheap red earthenware, the redware the country potters turn out for pennies, is often glazed with LEAD. Put spirit or vinegar or anything sharp in a lead glaze and it pulls the lead right out into your drink. Lead poisoning is a slow, ugly death: belly cramps, a blue line along the gums I've seen with my own eyes in a man's mouth, palsied hands, and a mind gone soft as a boiled turnip. I have pulled teeth out of a lead-sick man and I would rather pull them out of Barnaby.
♦ Distant bear grunt
Wilkins: He heard me. He's offended. He has excellent teeth and knows it.
Wilkins: Second, the hay wagon. In haying season every road in the Suncook Valley is crawling with wagons piled high as a church steeple, swaying like a drunk deacon. You build a little cave down in the middle of the load. Kegs go in, lashed tight, and loose hay gets forked over them. A deputy can stand and stare at a hay wagon all day and learn nothing but how hay looks. If he gets ambitious he'll jab a pitchfork into the side, which brings me to the story of Deputy Ezra Plumb, and you'll want to put the children to bed for this one.
Wilkins: Plumb was a sour, long-necked fellow with a face like a boiled ham somebody had sat on. He had it in his head that my hay wagon, parked in the dooryard here at Fort Wilkins, was carrying more than timothy and clover. He was right, God rot him. Four kegs of the finest. I was in the shop at the anvil and saw him through the window, climbing up the back of my wagon with a pitchfork, jabbing, jabbing, like a man trying to find the bottom of a pudding.
Wilkins: Now, I had parked that wagon a little careless. A fair-minded man might say I had parked it exactly the length of Barnaby's chain from Barnaby's post, plus about a foot and a half. Plumb went crawling up the back of that load with his backside in the air like a flag of truce, and the backside, friends, was hanging over the tailboard about a foot and a half into the bear's half of the county.
♦ Wax crackle swells; low remembered growl
Wilkins: Barnaby didn't growl, and that's what folks never understand about a bear. A dog barks first, out of courtesy. A bear has no courtesy. There was a sound like a wet canvas sack tearing in half, a long ripping noise, the seat of Plumb's wool trousers coming away, then his drawers, then a mouthful of what had been under the drawers. Plumb made a noise I have only heard once before, from a hog that saw the knife coming. He went straight up out of that hay like a Fourth of July rocket and came down on the far side of the wagon in the road, and from there to the Barnstead line he ran with both hands clapped over the back of himself, leaving a trail like a butchered deer down the middle of the turnpike.
Wilkins: I pulled out of Barnaby's jaws a strip of Merrimack County wool, a horn button, and what I'm fairly sure was a portion of the deputy's dignity, along with some of the meat holding it up. Barnaby chewed the rest with a thoughtful look, like a man judging a wine. Then he spat out the button. He has standards.
Wilkins: Deputy Ezra Plumb went into my hay wagon a lawman and came out of it a lesson in anatomy, with less trousers than he started with and a good deal less of what the trousers had been holding. I sewed him up myself, gratis, because I am a physician of the mouth and have no objection to the other end when the fee is good will. Fourteen stitches, laced like a boot, and he cussed me through every one. Barnaby took that deputy's seat clean off, and to this day Plumb stands through every church service, every county meeting, and his own wedding supper. The kegs never moved an inch.
♪ Brief banjo run
Wilkins: SEGMENT TWO. Legends, Outlaws, and the Coffin of Uncle Absalom.
Wilkins: I promised you a coffin. Here it is.
Wilkins: Since this war began, coffins have been coming home on every train. Our boys fall in Virginia, the embalmers get to them, and the families pay to have them sent home by rail, boxed up in pine or in one of those iron Fisk burial cases, the metallic ones Almond Fisk patented back in '48 that look like a fat man in a suit of armor. A hearse on the road is a common sight now, God help us all. And here's the one thing every Christian in New England knows: you don't stop a funeral. You don't open a coffin. You take your hat off, you stand by the road, and you look at your boots till it's gone by.
Wilkins: So I built one. I'm a blacksmith; I can build anything. Six feet of good white pine, black paint, a brass handle on each side, and on the lid a little tin plate I punched myself: ABSALOM WILKINS, AGED 71, GONE TO HIS REWARD. There never was an Absalom Wilkins. I made him up whole, gave him a bad knee and a grudge against Baptists so he'd feel real to me. Inside I packed two dozen stoneware jugs in sawdust, tight as teeth in a young man's jaw.
Wilkins: We set out on a gray morning from Fort Wilkins down the turnpike toward Pittsfield center, with the hearse borrowed from a man in Barnstead who asked no questions, four hired mourners in black crepe at a quarter dollar apiece, and me walking behind in my good coat with a handkerchief to my eye, sobbing like a widow at a will-reading. Every farmer on the road took off his hat. Women crossed themselves who weren't even Catholic. A deputy on a gray mare, the sheriff's own man, pulled up alongside and said Doctor, I am sorry for your loss. I said thank you, he was a good man, he had a weak bladder and a strong opinion on the tariff. The deputy said amen.
Wilkins: Then the hearse wheel went down into a frost heave on the turnpike, one of those spring holes that swallow a wagon up to the hub, and the whole coffin LURCHED. Out of the box came a long, sloshing, gurgling noise, glug, glug, gloooorp, like a drunkard's stomach at four in the morning.
♦ Wax crackle; a muffled liquid slosh
Wilkins: Silence on the road. The deputy turned the color of new cheese. The four hired mourners stopped mourning. I didn't stop for a second. I lifted my handkerchief and said, in my most tender voice, Poor Uncle Absalom. That's his final digestion, gentlemen. The undertaker warned me. He went to his Maker with a full plate of beans. Two of the old widows by the fence nodded, because they had known an Absalom, maybe not mine, but one just like him.
Wilkins: The deputy put his hand over his mouth, said he had urgent business in Epsom, and spurred that mare so hard she left a horseshoe in the road. I picked it up and nailed it over my door, and it's still there. That coffin went through Pittsfield center at a dignified walk, past the mills and the meetinghouse, and was the only Wilkins in history to go through Pittsfield center without owing anybody money.
♦ Bear grunt, approving
Wilkins: And now, friends, a guest who has been on the far side of every trick I've just told you about. He spent near thirty years in the federal revenue service, out of Manchester, chasing copper and kegs through the White Mountains and the Green. They say he'd shake an honest still-maker's hand and kick a poisoner's still to pieces in the same afternoon. Please welcome to Fort Wilkins, and keep your feet clear of the bear's chain, Captain Donald Vance.
♦ Door latch, heavy boots on plank floor, chair scraped back
Captain: Evening, Doctor. Evening, everybody listening. I'll say this for your bear. He looked at me through that window like I was a pork roast with a badge on it.
Wilkins: He's a fine judge of character, Captain. That's high praise. He looks at most revenue men like a pork roast WITHOUT the badge, which is worse, since the badge is the only part with a little iron in it. Sit down. Now, I've told the folks how we hide our barrels. You were the fellow trying to FIND them. Tell me, how do you catch a hay wagon? Hay is hay.
Captain: Hay is hay, Doctor, but a barrel is a barrel, and a barrel is HEAVY. A full liquor barrel holds thirty-one, thirty-two gallons and weighs better than two hundred and fifty pounds. Loose hay looks like a mountain and weighs next to nothing. A man can put the whole Bible on a hay wagon, but he can't make it weigh like hay.
Wilkins: So you weighed it? Did you carry a scale on your saddle?
Captain: I read the road, Doctor. One March up in Vermont, with mud season starting, I'm sitting my horse outside a village I won't name, because some of those folks are still alive and still mad. A hay wagon goes by. First thing wrong: it's March. Farmers in March are buying hay or eking out the last of it in the mow. This wagon is headed INTO farm country, carrying hay to people who've got hay. That's like carrying coals to Newcastle or sermons to a Presbyterian.
Wilkins: Ha! Go on.
Captain: Second thing wrong: the ruts. That wagon was cutting into the mud three fingers deeper than any hay load I ever saw, and I've seen plenty. Third: the team. Two good Morgans, lathered white on level ground, blowing like they'd pulled a church up a hill. A Morgan horse will haul hay all day and whistle a tune. These two were praying.
Wilkins: The horses ratted him out. There's no loyalty in a horse.
Captain: None at all, Doctor, and that's why I liked them. I rode up and asked the driver, polite, where he was taking the hay. He said to his brother-in-law. I asked where his brother-in-law lived. He pointed one way, then he thought about it and pointed the other way. That's when I got down with my own fork. About four feet in, the tines hit oak and rang like a bell. There was a little cave in there built like a beaver lodge, six kegs lashed with rope, and on top of the kegs, so help me, a hymnbook. I asked him what the hymnbook was for. He said, in case he got caught, so he'd have something to read in jail.
Wilkins: A man of foresight! I'd hire him. So what did you do with him?
Captain: Took the kegs, let him keep the hymnbook. Told him to take up hymn number forty-two, which was 'Am I a Soldier of the Cross.' He said he'd rather be a soldier of anything than a farmer who'd lost six kegs.
Wilkins: Now, Captain, I must ask you about pickles. I hear you've got opinions.
Captain: I've got a grudge, Doctor, and her name was the widow of Rutland County. Forty crocks of bread-and-butter pickles in her cellar. Bennington stoneware, blue birds on every one, lined up like the Grand Army on parade. She was a little thing, white hair, wire spectacles, sweet as maple sugar. She brought me down there by lamplight and said Look all you like, Captain, it's only pickles. I'm a poor widow. Pickles are all I have.
Wilkins: Oh, I know this kind of widow. A widow who says it's only pickles is a widow with a still behind the woodshed and a lawyer in Montpelier.
Captain: Exactly so. I lifted the first cloth, and there's the follower board, the stone, and on top, three cucumbers. Big, crooked, warty ones, one bent like a fishhook. Fine. Next crock: three cucumbers, one bent like a fishhook. Next crock: same three cucumbers. Doctor, I watched the fishhook pickle travel the full length of that cellar ahead of me. She was moving them! While I bent over one crock, she'd fish the pickles out of the last one and drop them in the next one down the line, like a card sharp working a shell game.
Wilkins: The same three pickles! Forty crocks and one family of cucumbers doing all the work!
Captain: The hardest-working pickles in New England. I finally got down past the board on one and found nothing but a stoppered jug of spirit sitting in the brine, no pickle at all. Every crock the same. Thirty-eight jugs and three tired cucumbers. I took the jugs and left her the pickles, and she said, Captain, you've ruined a poor widow. I said Ma'am, you've got more nerve than the Army of the Potomac. She gave me a jar of real pickles for the ride home, and they were the best I ever ate. I wrote that in my report too.
Wilkins: A revenue man who'll search a widow's pickle crocks would search his own mother's apron pocket, and I mean that as the highest compliment the trade can give. Captain, you've searched more coffins than an undertaker with a gambling problem, I'd guess. Did you ever open one?
Captain: Once. And I've thought about it every Sunday since. Green Mountains, up near the Canada line, a funeral procession on a back road. Folks with their hats off, a minister in front with his Bible, a plain pine box on a farm wagon. I took my hat off like a Christian. And then I noticed things, the way you do.
Wilkins: The pallbearers were smiling.
Captain: The pallbearers were smiling, Doctor. One of them was whistling. I've been to plenty of funerals and I never heard anybody whistle 'Old Dan Tucker' behind the coffin. And when I rode up close enough to read the little plate on the lid, it said: J. B. CORN, ESQUIRE.
Wilkins: John Barleycorn! Ha! They put his name right on it! The cheek of it!
Captain: I asked the minister, gentle as a lamb, whether the late Mister Corn had been a member of his flock. He said, oh yes, a very old family in the county, everyone loved him. I asked how he died. The minister said, and I'll swear to it, Captain, he was taken by the authorities.
Wilkins: He confessed it in a eulogy!
Captain: I followed them up to the burying ground. I sang the hymn with them, because a man ought to. Then I looked down in the grave, and it was two feet deep. You can't bury a Christian in two feet of Vermont. You can barely bury a potato in it. You only dig two feet if you mean to dig it up again Tuesday. So with the minister's permission, which he gave in a voice like a dying goose, I lifted the lid.
Wilkins: And?
Captain: Eleven stoneware jugs in sawdust, laid head to foot like a family of sleeping children. Not a bone in it. I wrote in my report: Deceased found to be spirits only; spirits departed into custody. My superior in Manchester framed it and hung it over his desk.
Wilkins: Captain, you're a credit to a disreputable profession. One more and I'll let you go back to the bear. What's the worst lie a man ever told you about a barrel?
Captain: Down on the Connecticut River, a fellow with a cask marked VINEGAR. He swore up and down it was cider vinegar, from his own trees, aged three years. I said, all right, prove it. He dipped a tin cup, looked me square in the eye, and drank the whole thing straight down without blinking.
Wilkins: Oh, the brave soul.
Captain: He kept that straight face, Doctor, kept it, and kept it, while his eyes filled up like rain barrels and his ears went red as a rooster's comb. And then he said, very quiet, Captain, I'll be honest. If it was vinegar I'd have gone down easier. I've respected that man ever since. I didn't respect his cask, I took it, but I respected him.
Wilkins: Captain Donald Vance, retired from the revenue service, and if Barnaby bites you on the way out, don't take it personal. He bites everybody with a pension. Thank you, sir.
Captain: Thank you, Doctor. Keep your crocks honest.
♦ Boots, door latch, faint bear grunt and chain clink
♪ Bright patent-medicine fanfare, banjo and fiddle
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♪ Fanfare ends on a fiddle flourish
♦ Wax crackle; drip into jar
Wilkins: SEGMENT THREE. Copper and the Craft: What Your Hiding Place Does to Your Spirit.
Wilkins: Now let me put on my alchemist's apron. That's a leather one with burn holes in it the shape of most of the states in the Union. Every trick I've told you tonight has a cost, and the cost comes out in the flavor and the safety of what you hid. A good spirit is like a good tooth. Treat it badly and it'll rot, and it'll ache and fester the whole time it's doing it.
Wilkins: Start at the beginning, with the mash. You take your grain, corn or rye, cracked coarse, cook it in water, let it cool to about blood-warm, pitch your yeast, and let it work for some days in a warm spot, with plenty of air moving in the room for the gas it gives off. When it stops bubbling and goes still and sour-smelling, you've got a wash, a thin beer of a few percent strength. That goes into the copper pot.
Wilkins: Now the fire. LOW. Steady. I can't say it loud enough. Spirit vapor is a ghost that wants to become a fire, and every joint in your still must be tight. No open flame where vapor can reach it, no lamp hanging over the worm, no pipe smoking by the condenser. I knew a man in Loudon who lit his pipe beside a leaking union and was buried in two places.
Wilkins: And why copper? Because sulfur rides up out of the mash in the vapor, the stink of rotten eggs and old cabbage, and copper takes hold of it and holds it fast on its own skin, so it doesn't pass into your jar. That's why a copper pot gives you sweet spirit and an iron kettle gives you a mouthful of the Devil's armpit. Keep the copper bright and scrubbed after every run, or it can't do its work.
Wilkins: Now, THE CUTS, which are the whole art. I run into small jars, not one big jug, and I number every jar with a grease pencil on the glass, one, two, three, so I can sniff and judge each one apart from its neighbors. The first trickle off the still is the foreshots. Sharp, nail-varnish, solvent smell, and THAT GOES ON THE GROUND, every drop, never in a mouth. Then the heads, still hot and harsh, smelling of glue and green apples. Those get set aside, not drunk. Then the hearts come on, smooth and sweet and clean, smelling of the grain. That's the spirit you made all this trouble for. Then the tails, oily and wet-dog and cardboard, and those get set aside for another run. The one and only way to keep the poison out of your jar is to make those cuts, and make them honest. Ash won't do it, prayer won't do it, a pretty pickle crock won't do it.
Wilkins: Now, back to hiding things. The pickle crock: salt-glazed stoneware, fired hard, from a pottery that knows its business, and a well-stoppered jug inside it. Keep the brine OUT of your spirit; a leaky stopper makes a pickle-flavored whiskey that tastes like a sailor's boot. And again, never redware with a lead glaze. That glaze is a slow murderer in a pretty dress.
Wilkins: The hay wagon: keep the kegs from rubbing and from the sun, because a keg that cooks in August sweats and leaks, and dusty hay gets into the bung. The coffin: never, EVER store spirit in raw pine. Pine is full of pitch and turpentine, and it'll make your spirit taste like a Maine lumber camp's underwear. My coffin carried JUGS, sealed stoneware, and the sawdust was only padding. A pine coffin flavors spirit about as well as a pine coffin flavors a dead man, which is to say nobody who's tried it has come back to complain.
Wilkins: And a vinegar barrel? Scrub it, scald it, and think twice. The sourness lives in the wood like a grudge. Low-strength spirit put in a vinegar cask can turn sour on you, and then you've smuggled a barrel of salad dressing past the sheriff at great personal risk. My friends, I have done it, and I have never felt so foolish.
Wilkins: Now remember: everything on this program is history and education only. Under United States law it is illegal to make distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit. I'm a twice-arrested man. Learn from me the way you'd learn from a man with seven fingers about the dangers of a buzz saw.
♦ Bear grunt
♪ Fiddle sting
Wilkins: SEGMENT FOUR. Myths, Slang, and the Call-In Line.
Wilkins: We've got a recorded message on the wax from a listener a fair way south of here. Let's crank it up.
♦ Phonograph crank turning, needle drop, heavy hiss
Wilkins: This is Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina. He asks: 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, hiss stops
Wilkins: Rabbit, my long-eared friend in the Carolina hills, your uncle is half right, and that's the most dangerous way to be right. Let me split him down the middle like a cord of birch.
Wilkins: The ash first. Up here, all through my granddaddy's day, New England farmers burned hardwood, leached the ashes in a barrel with water, and boiled the lye down to potash and pearl ash. They sold it by the wagonload to the soap-makers and the glass works. You know what that tells you? Wood ash is LYE. It's the makings of SOAP. Toss a fistful of hickory ash into a hot thump keg and you've made a lye bath. It'll foam and froth and maybe puke over into your worm, and it'll do nothing for your bad heads. Cletus, putting hickory ash in your thump keg is like putting lye soap in your coffee: it will foam, it will froth, and it will do nothing at all for your morals.
Wilkins: Now the red oak shavings. That part's got a grain of sense in it, a grain only. Oak wood soaked in hot spirit gives up tannin, color, and that dry, woody, vanilla-ish taste you get from a barrel. So a handful of shavings in the doubler will tint your spirit and flavor it a little, like a hurry-up barrel. That's flavoring, Rabbit. It doesn't clean a thing. Your uncle's red oak shavings will give the spirit a fine color, Rabbit, the same way a coat of paint gives a barn a fine color, and it doesn't change a single rotten board underneath.
Wilkins: As for the bad heads, there's only one cure, same as I said a minute ago: you watch your jars, you smell them, and you throw away the foreshots and set aside the heads. You can't wish them out, and you can't burn them out with ashes.
Wilkins: Here's a true story for your uncle. In '59 a fellow in Chichester, half a day's walk from here, read in some almanac that ash cleans spirit. He dumped half a bucket of fireplace ash into his doubler. Damned thing boiled up like a mad dog's mouth, blew the cap clean off, and painted his whole still-house with gray soapy foam, him included. He came into my office the next morning to have a tooth looked at, and Rabbit, he was so clean he squeaked. His wife said it was the first bath he'd had since Mr. Buchanan was President. His spirit still tasted like fish glue.
Wilkins: So that coin's for you, Rabbit.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: There. A big copper cent, fresh-struck at my anvil with G. G. WILKINS / PITTSFIELD N.H., and I'm putting it aside in a jar marked with your name. Shout-out to Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, and tell your uncle that the swamp medicine is welcome in my office anytime. I just won't let him near my still.
Wilkins: Now, while the anvil is warm, a myth of my own to bust. It's the BEAD. Every old boy at every county fair does it. He picks up a jar, gives it a shake, holds it to the light, and watches the bubbles. Big bubbles that sit up and stay a while? He says it's strong. Little ones that pop quick? He says it's weak. And then he says, with great authority, and it's clean, too.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: The bead is a rough guess at strength and nothing more. A cold jar beads different from a warm one. Sugar or oil in the spirit changes it. And it tells you NOTHING about whether there's poison in the jar. Bad heads bead just as pretty as good hearts. Shaking a jar to judge the bead is like judging a man's honesty by the way he tips his hat. Any rascal in Merrimack County can tip a hat, and I have tipped mine to three sheriffs.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: I have pulled teeth that told me more about a man's drinking than any bead in any jar ever did. Judge your spirit by honest cuts, by your nose, and by a hydrometer if you can get one, and leave the jar-shaking to the county fair and the fiddlers.
♪ Banjo picks up softly
Wilkins: One more word from our friend before we close up shop.
Announcer: One quick word, folks! Handcrafted heavy-gauge copper and U.S. Patent 10,561,960: that's the Flame-Flow Still. See it at the Fort Wilkins Showroom on Route 28, or order it today at moonshinestill.com. That's moonshinestill.com!
♦ Wax crackle; drip into jar
Wilkins: Well, friends, the lamp's burning low, the bear is snoring, and my coffin has gone back into the shed to wait for the next dear departed who needs a ride. Before you go: if you want to learn all this proper, the copper, the cuts, the mash, the history, and how to keep your craft clean and your neck out of the noose, sign up for the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. I'll teach you everything except how to keep a bear, and I only leave that part out because the last student who asked is still being fitted for a wooden leg.
Wilkins: Thanks to Captain Donald Vance for coming up from Manchester and keeping his hands to himself, and to Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller down in Wilkesboro for a fine question. And one more time, it's for history and education, and you need a federal permit to make spirits for drinking. Don't make me come down there with my forceps.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme returns, warm and slow
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, then silence