The Canadian Border Run
Dr. G. G. Wilkins explains why a jug of Suncook Valley spirit was worth more north of the line in 1864 and 1865. The reasons are the wartime gold premium on hard Canadian silver, the Dunkin Act's dry townships and the timber camps, all made riskier by the St. Albans Raid. He also tells how he once got forty jugs past a customs man at Derby Line by pulling the fellow's rotten molar on the spot. Retired revenue officer Captain Donald Vance tells three new border stories: a whiskered 'widow' at a coffin-funeral, a tavern straddling the boundary, and a lantern decoy on a goose in the Memphremagog fog. Wilkins then answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller's question about hickory ashes and red oak shavings in the thump keg, and uses his anvil to knock down the old blue-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. Settle your carcass down, you four hundred pounds of grievance in a fur coat. That chain is forged of my own iron, and the only thing north of this window you are going tonight is a mackerel head, and it is going north into you.
♦ Bear grunts, chain drags across frozen dirt, a heavy body flops down
Wilkins: That's my boy. He hears the word Canada and gets ideas. So does every revenue man in Vermont.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth
Wilkins: Good evening, friends, neighbors, sinners, and deputies listening under false names. Welcome to Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, broadcasting from the log fortress of Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, in Pittsfield, New Hampshire, in the Year of Our Lord eighteen hundred and sixty-five. I am Dr. George G. Wilkins: dentist, blacksmith, inventor, alchemist, and the reason the Merrimack County sheriff keeps a spare pair of trousers in his saddlebag. Tonight's subject is The Canadian Border Run, a hundred and fifty miles of bad road, worse weather, and men carrying jugs north to where the money was harder and the thirst was deeper.
♪ Theme fades under crackle
Announcer: A quick word, friends! Is your fire scorching the kettle and souring the run? Then behold the Flame-Flow still, U.S. Patent 10,561,960, the copper marvel that spreads heat even and gentle as a June morning! Inspect it for yourself at moonshinestill.com. That is moonshinestill.com!
♦ Wax crackle, a log shifts in the stove
Wilkins: Now. Let me state for the record, so the gentlemen of the Bureau can sleep tonight, that making spirits to drink without a federal permit is against the law of these United States, and everything said on this program is history and education, nothing more. I state it every week, and every week Barnaby yawns.
♪ Short fiddle sting
Wilkins: SEGMENT ONE. Why in God's name would a sane Yankee haul spirit NORTH? Every schoolboy knows the honest traffic on that border runs south. Canadian whisky slides down into Vermont to dodge Mr. Lincoln's tax collector like a cat under a porch. So why would a Pittsfield man point his wagon toward Quebec?
Wilkins: Three reasons, friends. Silver, sermons, and sawdust.
Wilkins: Silver first. You all know what this war did to our money. The government printed greenbacks to pay the army, and the more they printed, the less a man in Montreal or Sherbrooke wanted to hold them. In the summer of 'sixty-four it cost near two dollars and eighty-five cents in paper to buy one gold dollar. Think on that. A greenback in Sherbrooke was worth about what a Canadian thought of a Yankee, which is to say they would take it, but they would count their spoons after.
Wilkins: But a Canadian buyer paid in hard money. Silver shillings, British half-crowns, those little bronze Canada cents they first struck in 'fifty-eight when the Province went to dollars and cents. So a jug sold for a silver dollar at Stanstead came home to Pittsfield worth very near three dollars in paper. That's no profit, friends. That's alchemy. I've spent twenty years trying to turn copper into gold, and the Treasury did it for me by ruining the paper.
♦ Coin dropped on a wooden table, rings and spins
Wilkins: Sermons second. Last year the Parliament of Canada passed the Temperance Act of 1864, which every tavern keeper from Coaticook to Three Rivers calls the Dunkin Act, after the gentleman who wrote it. It lets any county or township vote itself dry. And some of them did, especially in the Eastern Townships where the Yankee Loyalist blood runs thick and pious. Now, a dry township is just a thirsty township with a hymnal. The deacons voted Tuesday, and by Saturday their hired men were standing in the road at midnight with silver in their fists looking south like a dog looking for its master.
Wilkins: Sawdust third. The timber camps. Up the Connecticut past Colebrook, along the Saint Francis, up toward the Magog country, there are camps of two and three hundred choppers. They come out of the woods in spring with a winter's wages, and they smell like pitch, wet wool, and the inside of a boot that has been on a man's foot since Michaelmas. Those men pay what you ask and don't ask what's in it, which is exactly why a decent maker has to be careful what's in it. I'll come back to that, because I've seen what bad spirit does to a lumberman, and it's uglier than anything Barnaby ever did.
Wilkins: Now let me tell you why the run got harder this past year. Last October, the nineteenth of October, 1864, a pack of Confederate raiders who'd been loafing in Canada rode down into Saint Albans, Vermont, with revolvers under their coats and robbed three banks in broad daylight. Took near two hundred thousand dollars and tried to burn the town on their way out. Nobody in Washington had thought of Vermont as a war front until that afternoon.
Wilkins: After that the whole northern line went stiff as a dead deacon. Soldiers at the crossings, customs men doubled, and come December the government demanded passports from anybody coming down out of Canada. Passports! For a man driving a load of potatoes from Stanstead to Derby Line, a walk you can do between sneezes. They lifted that rule this spring, thank Providence, but the border's still crawling with blue coats who think every wagon is full of rebels. Most of them are only full of rye.
Wilkins: And where IS the line, exactly? Well. That's a fine question, and for a long time nobody could answer it. Up at the very top of this state, past Pittsburg, where the Connecticut is a creek you can spit across, the settlers got so tired of the two countries arguing over whose they were that in 1832 they declared themselves a nation. The Republic of Indian Stream. Their own constitution, their own assembly, their own militia of about forty men and a cow. They declared themselves a nation because nobody could prove they weren't, which is the same legal theory I use on my tax assessments.
♦ Wilkins chuckles, wheezes
Wilkins: New Hampshire marched the militia up in 'thirty-five and that was the end of the Republic. Then Mr. Webster and Lord Ashburton settled the line in 1842, and in the forties the boundary commissioners went through the woods setting cast-iron posts along it, every one of them heavy as a sin and rusting like one. I've stood beside one in a blackfly cloud so thick I couldn't tell which country was biting me.
Wilkins: And here's a bit of trade law worth knowing. Since 'fifty-four we've had the Reciprocity Treaty with the British provinces. Timber, grain, fish, potash, all cross that line free of duty. But distilled spirits? Not on the list. Spirits pay. Or are SUPPOSED to pay. And this March, Congress gave notice the whole treaty dies next March. So the customs men are fussier than ever, and the honest traders are swearing in two languages.
Wilkins: The road, for those of you planning nothing whatsoever: out of Pittsfield north to Gilmanton Iron Works, up past the Lake to Meredith and Plymouth, up the Pemigewasset through Franconia Notch under the Old Man of the Mountain, who has watched more jugs go by than any bartender alive and never once said a word to the sheriff. Then Littleton, across the river into Vermont, up the valley to Derby Line, and Stanstead sitting right on top of it like a cat on a warm stove. Six days in good weather. In mud season, a lifetime.
♪ Banjo bridge, a jaunty run
Wilkins: SEGMENT TWO. Legends, outlaws, and the occasional dentist.
Wilkins: In the fall of 'sixty-four I made the run myself. Forty jugs in straw, packed in four stout crates, and on every crate I stenciled in my best black paint: PORCELAIN TEETH, PHILADELPHIA, FRAGILE. Every word a lie except Fragile.
Wilkins: On the top of the first crate, nested right in the straw where any nosy man would look, I set a quart jar. And in that jar were teeth. Real ones. A year's worth of my pulling. Molars with the roots still on, roots like little forked parsnips, brown and black, some still wearing a scrap of gum like a ragged collar, and a few that had come out of mouths I'd rather not name. They'd been sitting in the jar all summer, friends. You shake that jar and it sounds like a hailstorm on a coffin lid and smells like a privy at a camp meeting.
Wilkins: So I roll up to the crossing at Derby Line, and out comes a customs man, big lad, red whiskers, a jaw on him swollen up like he'd got a crabapple stuck in his cheek. He says, What's in the crates. I say, Teeth, sir, and I hand him the jar. He pops the lid. I watched the color leave that man's face like a cat leaving a bath. And then I saw how he was holding his jaw.
Wilkins: I said, Officer, how long has that left lower molar been killing you? He said, Since Lammas. And his breath could have stripped the varnish off a church pew. That molar was rotten enough to vote Democrat.
♦ Wax crackle; Wilkins lowers his voice
Wilkins: So I sat him on the crate. On my forty jugs. Got my forceps out of my coat, I never travel without them, and had him tilt his head back against the wagon wheel. Took hold. Rocked her once to the cheek, once to the tongue. And there is a sound a deep rotten molar makes coming out, friends, a long wet crack, like a green branch breaking in a mud puddle, and then a sort of pop, like a cork out of a jug that hasn't been opened since Jackson. He let out a howl they heard in Stanstead. Blood ran down into those red whiskers until he looked like he'd been eating a deer raw. The root came out the size of a parsnip and twice as ugly. He spat a mouthful into the snow, steaming, and I handed him a rag soaked from my medicinal flask to bite on.
Wilkins: He waved me through holding his jaw with one hand and saluting with the other. Paid me in gratitude, which is the only currency worse than greenbacks. Never looked in the crates. Why would he? He'd already seen the teeth.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: That's a Canada cent of 1858 I just counterstamped G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., from the silver and bronze that run brought home. I keep one on my watch chain to remind me the Queen's money is good money when a Yankee's done the work for it.
Wilkins: Now, a story about Barnaby, since he's lying out there sulking. Two summers ago a buyer's agent came down from Montreal, all sideburns and a yellow waistcoat, to take thirty gallons for a hotel trade. We weighed and counted. He paid. And when he'd gone out to his wagon I counted again, and the son of a bitch had short-paid me by eleven dollars, slipped a stack of folded paper in among the silver like a cardsharp.
Wilkins: Now, he'd parked his wagon a touch close to the window. And Barnaby's chain is a touch longer than most folks reckon. The Montreal man bent over to tighten the tailgate chain, presenting to the world a broad, fine, yellow-checked backside, and Barnaby took that offer like a Christian takes communion.
♦ Bear roars, fabric rips, man screams
Wilkins: I heard the tear from the forge. Like a sail splitting in a gale. Barnaby ate the seat out of his trousers and a fair bit of the upholstery under it. When that man turned around, his drawers were hanging off him in ribbons, and one of his cheeks, his lower ones I mean, had four long red furrows plowed into it like a cornfield in May. Barnaby sat down on the grass, chewed thoughtfully, and spat out the man's wallet, because even a bear knows a short-counter's money is no good.
Wilkins: I picked up the wallet, took my eleven dollars out of it, and handed back the rest along with a jar of salve. That man rode all the way to Sherbrooke standing in his stirrups like a man saluting a flag only he could see. I'm told he does business by letter now.
♪ Fiddle flourish
Wilkins: Now. I've got a guest by the stove tonight I'd normally shoot on sight. He's spent twenty-eight years on the side of the law, riding the customs lines and the revenue roads from the White Mountains clear across the Green Mountains, and he's here as a guest, so Barnaby's under orders. From Manchester, New Hampshire, please welcome Captain Donald Vance. Captain, sit there, that chair has only been bled on twice.
Captain: Doctor Wilkins. I've heard about you for years, and every word of it made me want to come up here with a warrant and a sandwich.
Wilkins: You'll get the sandwich. Captain, the border. What was it like working that line?
Captain: Cold, Doctor. Cold and crooked. That line runs through barns, through bedrooms, through the middle of lakes. Men up there don't think of it as a border. They think of it as a price difference.
Wilkins: Tell me the best trick you ever saw.
Captain: Funerals. Derby Line, about ten years back, December. Four men in black carrying a pine coffin, a minister reading out of a book, and a widow behind them, heavily veiled, weeping into a handkerchief fit to break your heart. They were bound across to a churchyard in Stanstead, they said. The deceased had family there.
Wilkins: Of course he did.
Captain: Now, I'm a respectful man. I took my hat off. But that coffin was going down the hill toward the crossing, and when the front pallbearers tipped it on the grade, I heard it. Glug. Like a cow drinking at a trough.
Wilkins: [laughing] Oh, Lord.
Captain: I said, Gentlemen, I'd like to pay my respects to the deceased. And the widow cried out, he was a temperance man, Captain, let him rest! I said, Madam, then he is the first temperance man I ever met who was forty gallons of rye from the neck down. And I lifted the lid.
Wilkins: And?
Captain: Ten stoneware jugs nested in sawdust and a pillow on top so he'd look comfortable. Then the widow lifted her veil to give me a piece of her mind, and she had the most magnificent set of whiskers I ever saw on a grieving woman. Red as a fox. Chewing tobacco.
Wilkins: I have been to a great many Pittsfield funerals, Captain, and some of those widows came close.
Captain: I made the four pallbearers carry it all the way back to the customs house, on foot, uphill, in the snow, with the minister still reading. Half a mile. They begged to set it down. I told them a dead man deserves dignity.
Wilkins: Now tell them about the line houses.
Captain: Line houses. Doctor, there are buildings on that border built right square on top of it on purpose. Front door in Vermont, back door in Canada. There was a tavern up near the Quebec line, run by a fellow I'll call Amos, because that was his name and he's long gone. Amos had a chalk stripe painted across his barroom floor where the surveyors swore the line ran. The bar sat on the Canadian side. The cellar door sat on the Vermont side.
Wilkins: A tidy arrangement.
Captain: Every time I walked in, Amos would smile and slide the jug across that chalk line with the toe of his boot. Into Canada. I'd step toward it, and if a Canadian officer walked in behind me, he'd slide it back. All evening. That jug crossed so many times the floorboards had a customs record.
Wilkins: And you couldn't touch him?
Captain: Not while he stood behind his bar. So I sat. I bought a cider, on the Canadian side, all legal, and I drank it slow. Three hours. Four. Amos had been sampling his own goods, and a man who's been sampling has needs. And Amos's privy, Doctor, stood out back about thirty feet. In Vermont.
Wilkins: [howling] No.
Captain: I waited until he was settled, and I opened that privy door and arrested him in the name of the United States. Caught him with his trousers down in the Republic.
Wilkins: Which is how most men get caught in a republic, Captain.
Captain: He asked if he could finish first. I'm not a monster. I let him.
Wilkins: Now I've heard you once lost a man on Lake Memphremagog.
Captain: I never lost him. I never had him. That lake runs thirty miles long and straddles the line, and in the fall the fog lies on it thick as wool. One night I got word a boat would be crossing north with a load. I got in a rowboat with a deputy, and sure enough, out in the fog, there's a lantern. Swinging. Moving slow, steady, north.
Wilkins: And you rowed.
Captain: Doctor, I rowed till my hands bled. The deputy bailed. That lantern led us around that lake like a will-o'-the-wisp in a fairy story, never closer, never farther. Six hours. At dawn the fog lifted and we pulled up alongside it. It was a shingle raft, three feet square, with a pole, and the lantern tied to the pole, and lashed underneath it, a dead goose. Wind in the goose's wings had been pushing that raft the whole night.
Wilkins: The goose was the sail!
Captain: And pinned to the goose with a fishhook was a note, nicely written. Bonne nuit, Capitaine. The real boat had gone south along the east shore the minute we started rowing.
Wilkins: You rowed six hours to arrest a goose.
Captain: And the goose had the better lawyer. I took him home and my wife roasted him. I counted it a partial victory.
Wilkins: Captain, you've made me laugh three times and I haven't had to pull a tooth to do it. But tell me a serious one. You saw the bad side of this trade.
Captain: I did, Doctor. A timber camp up past the Connecticut lakes, maybe 1855. The cook got sick. Belly cramps that doubled him up, what they called the colic. Then his hands started shaking, wrists going limp so he couldn't hold the ladle. Two choppers the same. I traced the spirit they were drinking to a fellow who'd sold it in cheap red earthenware crocks. Lead-glazed. You put strong spirit in a lead-glazed crock and leave it to stand, and the lead comes out of the glaze and into the drink.
Wilkins: Painter's colic. The lead palsy. I've seen it in men who grind white lead.
Captain: The same. I confiscated every crock he had and broke them in the road with an axe. He asked what he was supposed to keep his spirit in. I said, salt-glazed stoneware, like your grandfather did, you damn fool, and he'd still have customers who could hold a fork.
Wilkins: Amen to that, Captain. Stoneware or glass, nothing else. Captain Donald Vance, thank you, sir. Barnaby, the Captain is leaving now and you will NOT follow him.
♦ Bear grunts, chain rattles once and goes still
Captain: Doctor, it's been a pleasure. If I were still riding, I'd be back with that warrant.
Wilkins: And I'd be back with the forceps.
♪ Patent-medicine brass and banjo fanfare, crackling
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♪ Fanfare stings and fades into crackle
Wilkins: That man could sell a feather bed to a porcupine.
♪ Slow fiddle, minor key, warm
Wilkins: SEGMENT THREE. Copper and the Craft. Tonight I want to talk about spirit made to travel. A jug you're hauling a hundred and fifty miles to a man paying in silver had better be honest, because a Canadian buyer doesn't haggle with his mouth. He haggles with an instrument.
Wilkins: First the mash, and I'll give you the bones of an old rye-and-corn mash the way my uncle in Barnstead did it. For a forty-gallon tub: a bushel of cracked corn cooked soft in boiling water until it's like porridge, stirring so it don't scorch to the bottom. Let it cool. And here's where the fools go wrong: corn starch is not sugar, and the yeast can't eat it. You need malt, barley sprouted and dried, for the virtue in it that turns starch to sweetness. You stir in about a peck of ground malt and a peck of rye when the mash cools to about one hundred fifty degrees by the thermometer. Too hot and you kill the malt's virtue. Too cold and it sulks. Hold it there an hour and taste. It goes from flour-paste to sweet.
Wilkins: Then cool it all the way down to blood warm, ninety degrees or under, pitch your yeast, cover it with a cloth, and keep the room aired out. Four to six days it bubbles and talks to itself like a Ladies' Aid meeting. When it goes quiet and tastes sour-dry instead of sweet, that's your wash.
Wilkins: Now the run. You strip it once, fast, to pull the spirit out of the wash, and then you run that low wine a second time, slow, low fire, and this is where the craft lives. Mind the fire. Alcohol vapor is a ghost that wants to burn, and it runs along the floor looking for your stove. Keep the receiving jar well away from any flame. Keep a bucket of sand and a wet blanket within reach. I have seen a man's eyebrows go up the flue, and they never came back down.
Wilkins: As she starts to drip, the very first of it is the foreshots. You throw that out. Every drop. Then come the heads, and you will know them by your nose: sharp, like varnish, like the glue pot in a cabinetmaker's shop. That's the poison end, the wood spirit and its cousins, and it goes in the waste. It does not go in a jug, it does not go to Canada, it does not go to a timber camp, and you do not save a little for your brother-in-law, no matter what he did at Thanksgiving.
Wilkins: Then the smell softens and goes sweet, like warm bread and grain in the sun. That's the hearts. That's what you keep. Then, as the run goes on, it turns flat and wet and oily, like damp wool socks on the stove, and the strength falls off. That's the tails, and you set them aside. A good maker makes his cuts with his nose, his tongue on the back of his hand, and his patience. The man in a hurry ruins the jug.
Wilkins: And copper. Now, here's a thing the old men won't tell you. People think the copper does its work because the POT is copper. But the sulfur, that rotten-egg, burnt-rubber stink, gets scrubbed where the hot VAPOR touches the metal. The helmet, the arm, the worm. Open up a working helmet after a season and you'll see a black bloom inside. That bloom is the copper taking the sulfur on its own shoulders like a martyr. Scrub it clean with vinegar and a little salt, rinse it till the water runs sweet, and it goes back to work bright.
Wilkins: Now, the buyer at Stanstead. He doesn't take your word for proof. He pulls out a Sikes hydrometer, the British legal instrument, little brass float with weights, and drops it in. And here's the rub. In 1848 our Congress said proof spirit is half alcohol. Fifty percent. But British proof, what the Canadians use, is about fifty-seven percent. So your proud Yankee one hundred proof reads only eighty-seven and a half British proof. Many a Pittsfield man got to Stanstead swearing he'd been robbed, when all he'd been was out-arithmeticked.
Wilkins: A Canadian measures proof with a Sikes hydrometer and a Yankee measures it with his eyebrows, and only one of them grows back.
Wilkins: And the vessel. You heard the Captain. Salt-glazed stoneware, the gray kind with the orange-peel skin and a blue flower brushed on it, or glass. Never the shiny red earthenware with the lead glaze. Putting spirit in a lead-glazed crock is like asking a revenue man to guard your henhouse: the trouble is already inside the walls. Cork it tight, wax the cork, and pack it in straw.
Wilkins: One last bit of natural philosophy for the teamsters. A gallon of hundred-proof spirit weighs a bit under eight pounds, lighter than a gallon of water, because alcohol is lighter than water. So forty gallons of spirit is lighter than forty gallons of cider, and your horse knows it even if the sheriff doesn't. I'll say it once more: everything here is for history and learning. Mr. Lincoln's men want their permit, and Barnaby wants his supper.
♪ Banjo, playful
♦ Wax crackle, a stoneware jug clunks on a table
Wilkins: SEGMENT FOUR. Myths, slang, and the post. This week a wax speaking-cylinder came all the way up from the Carolinas, packed in cotton like a Christmas goose, and I cranked it up on the machine. Here it is.
♦ Cylinder hiss, faint and tinny, a man clears his throat
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 clicks off
Wilkins: Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina! Rabbit, Wilkesboro and Wilkins share a name and a weakness, and only one of us is ashamed of it, and it isn't me. I'm glad a Carolina man is mailing the North anything but trouble this year. God bless you and your uncle both.
Wilkins: Now, the hickory ashes. Rabbit, every boy up here knows what hardwood ash is, because our grandfathers burned half of New Hampshire to make it. Ash is mostly potash. The old settlers cut and burned whole forests, leached the ashes, boiled the lye down in iron kettles, and shipped potash barrels to England by the thousand to make soap and glass. It's a strong alkali. It'll eat the skin off your knuckles.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: So what does ash do in a thump keg? It'll sweeten a sour backing a little, the way a pinch of soda tames a sour stomach. It'll also foam, and soap up, and make your keg puke. But your bad heads aren't sour, Rabbit. They're light. They boil off early, and an alkali doesn't grab them, doesn't change them, doesn't hold them back. Your uncle's ashes would make a fine bar of soap, and after a night at his thump keg he'll need one.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Now the red oak shavings. Your uncle's half right about oak, and wrong about the half that matters. Oak does give spirit color and that tannin bite, but only when the spirit SITS in it, in a barrel, for a long while. In a thump keg, the color and tannin stay in the keg's water. They don't boil over. What comes out the worm is near as clear as what went in. A little smell, maybe. Some old boys put apples or peaches in the doubler for flavor, and that's a fair trick. But nothing gets cleaned.
Wilkins: And RED oak? Any cooper in Pittsfield will laugh you out of his shop. Red oak is all open pipes inside, and white oak has little plugs in its pores that hold liquid in. That's why every spirit barrel ever coopered is white oak. Red oak holds spirit the way a Concord politician holds a secret: it weeps through every pore by Tuesday.
Wilkins: So the true answer, Rabbit, is the one with no magic in it. Bad heads are cleaned out by cutting them out. You catch them in a separate jar, you smell the varnish, and you pour them away. Ash and shavings are a show for the neighbors.
Wilkins: And since I've got the anvil warm, let me hammer one more myth flat. The blue flame test. Every tavern from here to Stanstead has a man who pours a spoonful of spirit on the bar, puts a lucifer to it, and says, burns blue, it's good, burns yellow, it's weak, and burns red, well. Lead burns red and makes you dead.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Hogwash. A blue flame tells you one thing: the spirit's strong enough to burn. That's all. Wood spirit, the poison in your heads, burns with a pale blue flame too, faint enough you can hardly see it by daylight. So a jug full of heads passes that test like a choirboy. And lead? I wouldn't trust a spoon-flame to find lead any more than I'd trust a deacon to find his own sins. A blue flame proves your spirit will burn, and so will your barn, and neither one proves you'll live till breakfast.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin, ring fades
Wilkins: Honest cuts. Clean copper. Stoneware. That's the whole catechism. Rabbit, write again, and give your uncle my regards and a bar of soap.
Announcer: One more quick word, friends! Before you plan your next run, look over the Flame-Flow still, U.S. Patent 10,561,960, built to give you even, gentle heat from first drip to last! See the whole line and all the fittings at moonshinestill.com. Once more, moonshinestill.com!
♪ Theme returns, slow and warm
Wilkins: SIGN-OFF. If tonight's cuts, cooking and copper have made you curious, and if you want to learn the craft from the man who learned it the hard way, sign up for the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. I'll teach you to read your nose, keep your fire honest, mind your copper, and understand the law, which is to say, I'll teach you what not to do and why. Every lesson for history and education, and no bears included.
Wilkins: My thanks to Captain Donald Vance for coming up from Manchester and leaving with all his parts. My thanks to Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro. And my thanks to every man who ever drove a load up through Franconia Notch in the dark, paid in Queen Victoria's silver and came home richer than the Treasury meant him to be.
Wilkins: Barnaby, say goodnight.
♦ Bear grunts, chain shifts
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