When the Sheriff Was a Customer
Dr. Alchemist G. G. Wilkins tells the law's best-kept secret: in the Suncook Valley, the county sheriff was often the best customer a still-house had. He covers the town liquor agents under New Hampshire's 1855 law, the fee-paid county deputy, the Portland Rum Riot, a rookie deputy who learned about Barnaby the hard way, and a county treasury that filled up with Wilkins-stamped coins. Retired revenue officer Captain Donald Vance tells new stories of sheriff's tabs chalked on barn doors, a jailer who drank the evidence, an undercover meeting in a moonshine line, and a sheriff whose lead colic tipped off a dangerous still. Wilkins also answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, NC, about hickory ashes and red oak shavings in the thump keg, and debunks the 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! Settle your carcass, you overgrown hearth rug. That's the high sheriff's buggy you hear on the turnpike, and he isn't here to arrest anybody. He's here to shop. Lie down!
♦ Bear huffs, chain drags across frozen planks, a heavy body thuds down against the log wall
Wilkins: Four hundred pounds of bad manners, and he still won't eat a lawman who pays cash. There's a philosophy in that bear somewhere, though mostly what's in him is mutton and spite.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth
Wilkins: Good evening, friends, neighbors, sinners, and you sheriff's deputies listening with your hats pulled low. 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, Merrimack County, New Hampshire. I am your host, Dr. George G. Wilkins: tooth-puller, blacksmith, inventor, coin-stamper, and twice a guest of the county's hospitality.
Wilkins: Tonight's subject is one the courthouse would rather I kept behind my teeth, and I've pulled enough teeth to know what happens to things kept back there. They rot. So I'll say it plain: When the Sheriff Was a Customer. It's the law's best-kept secret, the back-window trade and the weekly jar for 'the wife's rheumatism.'
Wilkins: The usual sermon before the hymn: making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is illegal under United States law, and everything on this program is for historical and educational purposes only. If you want to break the law, go do it in Concord, where they're used to it.
♪ Theme swells, then fades under
Announcer: A quick word, friends! The Flame-Flow copper still, United States Patent 10,561,960, spreads the heat as even as a Sunday sermon and twice as warm! See it now at moonshinestill.com. That's moonshinestill.com!
♪ Short banjo sting
♦ Wax crackle, a log shifts in the stove
Wilkins: Segment the first: history, the dry and dusty kind. I'll wet it some.
Wilkins: When New Hampshire went dry in 1855, the law didn't make liquor disappear. It made liquor respectable. Every town could appoint a liquor agent, a sober-faced fellow with a ledger who sold spirits legally for 'medicinal, mechanical, and chemical purposes.' Overnight the whole Granite State came down with a mysterious ailment. Men who'd never coughed in their lives came down Main Street hacking like a sawmill with a broken belt. Deacons got the rheumatism. Selectmen got the gout. One man in Barnstead claimed his horse had the ague and needed a quart a week, and the agent wrote it down, because the law said 'medicinal' and didn't say for whom.
Wilkins: Now, who enforced the dry law on the country stills? The county sheriff and his deputies. And here's the first piece of the secret, the part they don't teach in the Academy at Gilmanton. A sheriff in these parts didn't draw a fat salary the way a Boston banker draws breath. He and his deputies lived largely on fees: so much for serving a writ, so much for an arrest, so much for hauling a debtor before the justice. A man on fees is a merchant, friends, and a merchant goes where the money is.
Wilkins: A sheriff on fees will chase a debtor over three townships for a quarter-dollar writ, but he won't cross the road to raid a still that sells him a jar for the same quarter. Arithmetic is the only religion that never splits into factions.
Wilkins: Then came the war, and Mr. Lincoln's Revenue Act in 1862, and the federal whiskey tax on top of the state's dry law. But that federal tax was assessed and collected by federal men: assessors, collectors, deputy collectors with their ledgers and their sour little mouths. The county sheriff wasn't one of them. He owed the federal collector's ledger exactly nothing. So picture our Merrimack County sheriff in 1865. The state says no liquor except medicinal. The federal government says pay two dollars a gallon. And the sheriff says, 'Well, my rheumatism says one quart, Thursday, back window.'
♦ Wilkins pours from a jar into a tin cup
Wilkins: Don't think it was only New Hampshire. Over in Portland, Maine, in June of 1855, the great prohibition man himself, Mayor Neal Dow, the father of the Maine Law, turned out to have a stock of liquor laid by for the city's medicinal agency. Word got out, a crowd gathered at the agency, the militia was called, and they fired into the crowd and killed a man. Neal Dow was later acquitted of illegally holding the liquor, mind you. But the lesson was plain to every Yankee with a nose: even the cathedral of temperance kept a cellar.
Wilkins: Neal Dow hated liquor so much he kept a warehouse full of it, the way a parson keeps a sermon on sin: close at hand and well studied.
Wilkins: Now let me tell you about our own high sheriff. I won't give his true name. He's past caring, but his grandchildren aren't, and I've pulled teeth from two of them. Call him Sheriff Crabtree. Every Thursday after dark his buggy would stop on the turnpike, a quarter mile short of my gate. He'd walk the rest of the way, three knocks on the back shutter and a cough like a goose choking on a button. And he'd say, every single week, 'Doctor, the wife's rheumatism is something terrible.'
Wilkins: The sheriff's wife had rheumatism so bad she needed a quart a week, and she'd been in the burying ground up the hill two years. That's devotion to a prescription. I never asked. A doctor has his oath, and a moonshiner has a better one: keep your mouth shut and your jar full.
♦ Barnaby grunts, chain clinks
Wilkins: Yes, Barnaby, I'm coming to your part. Settle.
Wilkins: There was a new deputy, fresh from Epsom, green as spring willow and twice as bendy. Nobody told him the Thursday arrangement. One drizzly March night he decided to make his name by raiding Fort Wilkins alone, at midnight, with a lantern, a pistol, and the brains of a fence post that had been struck by lightning. He came over the woodpile on the north side, exactly where Barnaby keeps his bedroom.
Wilkins: Now, a bear asleep in March isn't a bear in a good humor. Barnaby came up out of that straw like a cannonball fired backward. I heard it from my bed: first the lantern glass breaking, then a sound like a wet bedsheet tearing lengthwise. That was the deputy's trousers. Then a second tearing sound, shorter and juicier. That was a strip of the deputy's hindquarter about the width of my hand and the length of a cucumber. The pistol went off into my rain barrel, and the barrel leaked for a week, and the deputy screamed in a key I've only otherwise heard from a pig at a church supper.
Wilkins: Barnaby opened that deputy's trousers like a Christmas parcel, and what was inside was nothing anybody wanted for Christmas.
Wilkins: The boy went up the big sugar maple by the gate faster than sap in April and stayed there till dawn, bleeding down the bark and calling for his mother, the Lord, and the Governor, in that order. Barnaby sat under the tree and chewed the trouser seat like a man working a plug of tobacco, spitting out buttons one at a time. Tick. Tick. Tick. On the frozen ground.
Wilkins: The deputy said he spent the night in the maple keeping watch. The maple said otherwise, and so did the bark under it.
Wilkins: And who comes up the road at sunrise, a day early because the 'rheumatism' was acting up? The high sheriff himself. He looks up at his deputy in the tree, bare to the breeze, and looks down at Barnaby with a mouthful of county-issue wool. And he says, as calm as a hymn, 'Doctor, I'll take my usual, and I'll take that young man down when your bear has finished his breakfast.' Then he docked the boy a day's fees for 'conducting unauthorized business on a Thursday customer's premises.' I put a poultice of pine tar and spirits on that boy's hindquarter myself. Charged him nothing. He limped for a month and never once came over my woodpile again.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin, ringing off the anvil
Wilkins: Hear that? That's the other half of the secret. The sheriff paid in hard coin, coppers and the odd half-dime, and every coin that crossed my anvil got my mark: G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. Now follow that penny, friends. Sheriff pays me. I pay the blacksmith in Barnstead, or the grain man, or my own tax bill to the town. Round it goes. Come spring, the county treasurer is counting tax receipts, and what does he find in the county's own strongbox? A double handful of coppers stamped with my name.
Wilkins: My coppers went into the sheriff's pocket, out to the tax collector, and back into the county treasury, so in a manner of speaking Merrimack County has been my business partner since the war. I've written to Concord asking for my share of the dividend. They haven't answered. Bad manners runs in government like rot runs in a back molar.
♪ Banjo transition, a quick mountain fiddle run
Wilkins: Segment the second: legends, outlaws, and runners. I've got a man in the chair tonight who has stood on the other side of the law's front door, and from what I hear he's seen what goes out the back. He spent twenty-eight years as a federal revenue officer chasing copper through the White Mountains and the Green, out of Manchester, and he's never once tried to arrest my bear. Wise man. Please welcome Captain Donald Vance.
Captain: Thank you, Doctor. I'll say up front I kept my boots well clear of that woodpile coming in. I've read your bear's reputation, and I've no wish to be the second chapter.
Wilkins: Captain, you have the face of a man who has read a thousand warrants, and the belly of a man who sampled the evidence on half of them.
Captain: [deep laugh] Half? Doctor, you insult my diligence. Somebody has to establish what the stuff is. A revenue man who won't taste the evidence is like a parson who won't read the Book: he can preach, but he can't swear to it.
Wilkins: Tonight's topic is the sheriff as customer. You were a federal man. Did the county lawmen hide their thirst from you, or flaunt it?
Captain: Doctor, they hid it about as well as a hog hides in a parlor. I'll give you the first one that taught me. Early in my service I was up a back hollow in the hill country on a tip. Old fellow had a tidy pot, clean copper, not a speck of trouble in it. Painted on the inside of his barn door, in chalk, was a tally board, neat as a schoolmaster's. Every customer had a little picture instead of a name, a fish, a hat, a wagon wheel, and the marks under each. And under a five-pointed star, the county sheriff's badge drawn plain as day, were three years of chalk marks. Not one crossed off as paid.
Wilkins: Three years! I'd have sent the bear to collect.
Captain: I asked him the same. 'Uncle, that star hasn't paid you a penny since the war started.' And he leaned on his shovel and said, 'No, Captain, and he hasn't raided me since the war started neither. Cheapest insurance in the county.' I couldn't argue the arithmetic.
Wilkins: A sheriff's tab is the only debt in New England that gets smaller the longer you don't collect it.
Captain: That old man understood it better than any banker in Manchester. Every jar the sheriff drank on credit was another chain on the sheriff's own leg.
Wilkins: Did you ever see a county man caught red-handed with his own evidence?
Captain: Red-handed and red-nosed. A county jailer, a fellow with a grand mustache and no ambition below it, arrested a distiller one Saturday and seized twelve jars. Now, the jail had two cells. One held the prisoner. The other held the evidence, because the strongroom was full of the town's seed corn. Somewhere in the night, the jailer decided the evidence needed guarding more closely, so he moved the jars into the prisoner's cell.
Wilkins: Oh, Lord.
Captain: Doctor, I arrived Monday at dawn to take the case. Four jars were empty. The prisoner was asleep on the cot with his boots off. The night jailer was sitting on the floor of the open cell in his stocking feet, and the two of them had been singing 'Tenting on the Old Camp Ground' together till the rooster gave up and joined in. The jailer stood up, saluted me with an empty jar, and said, 'Captain, I can report the evidence was in no danger whatever from outside parties.'
Wilkins: That jailer kept the evidence so safe that nobody will ever find it again, not even with a stomach pump. What did you do?
Captain: I wrote 'eight jars' on my report and 'four jars evaporated in custody.' The magistrate read it, looked over his spectacles at the jailer, and said, 'Remarkably warm weather for April.' Everybody in that courtroom knew. Nobody said a word.
♦ Wilkins pours into the Captain's cup
Wilkins: You must have gone among them in disguise sometimes. A revenue man walking up a hollow in his brass buttons is about as welcome as a cholera wagon.
Captain: Many times. Once I put on a gray coat and a farmer's hat and joined the line of buyers on a Saturday evening at a still over in the Green Mountains. Line of eight or nine men, all with their own jugs, nobody looking at anybody, like a line at the confession box. And the man in front of me turned his head, and Doctor, it was a United States deputy marshal I knew well, in his Sunday coat, with a gallon jug under his arm and a sprig of mint in his buttonhole like he was going courting.
Wilkins: [laughing] Two lawmen in one moonshine line is not a coincidence. It's a convention.
Captain: We looked at each other. Neither of us said one blessed word. He bought his gallon, I bought my quart, and we walked off in opposite directions like two cats who'd met in a henhouse. Next morning he led the raid himself, smart as a drum major. And in his report, which I read with my own eyes, the marshal listed among the suspects 'a stranger in a gray coat, of large build and suspicious manner.' He meant me, Doctor. I've been a suspect in my own investigation, and I've never been prouder of a description.
Wilkins: 'Suspicious manner.' He's got your measure. Now, Captain, you were known for leaving the clean old-timers be and coming down hard on the poisoners. Did a sheriff ever help you with that?
Captain: One did, and not on purpose. I'll tell it because it matters. There was a county sheriff, a big jolly man, who bought from one particular distiller for years. Clean stuff, good copper. Then one autumn that distiller's worm sprang a leak, and instead of sending for a coppersmith he patched it himself with lead solder off an old roof flashing.
Wilkins: Damn his eyes.
Captain: The sheriff kept drinking his usual. By Christmas he had a belly cramp that doubled him over like a jackknife, his bowels were locked up tight as a bank vault, and he had a taste of tin in his mouth he couldn't wash out. His wrists started to droop so he could barely hold the reins. The doctor in town called it lead colic, painter's colic, the same sickness that takes house painters and type-founders. And the sheriff, bless him, came to me privately, white as flour, and said, 'Captain, I'll not tell you where I buy my medicine. But if you were to look at a certain worm in a certain hollow, you might save some poor fool's life.'
Wilkins: The sheriff's belly turned informer.
Captain: That sheriff's belly was the best informant I ever had. We found the lead patch shining like a dollar on the inside of the coil. I broke that worm up with my own boot heel. The distiller cried like a widow, but he got the message. Lead has no business anywhere in a still. Not in the worm, not in the joints, not in the cap. It doesn't burn off and it doesn't wash out. It just waits in a man's bones.
Wilkins: Lead in a worm is like a lawyer at a wedding: it'll show up quiet and you'll pay for it the rest of your life. Captain, you came here to tell stories, and you've told one that might keep a fool alive. Last question. Did you ever arrest a man you'd bought from?
Captain: [long pause] Doctor, a gentleman doesn't answer that on the record. Ask me again when the cylinder stops turning.
Wilkins: That's an answer, and an honest one, and that's rarer in your line than a clean worm. Captain Donald Vance, thank you, sir. You're welcome at Fort Wilkins any Thursday, back window, three knocks and a cough.
Captain: I'll bring my own gray coat.
♪ Fiddle flourish into a lively ragtime-flavored banjo vamp
Announcer: Ladies and gentlemen, step right up! Do you know the secret that kept the high sheriff of Merrimack County coming back every Thursday night? It wasn't the bear. It was the hearts, friends, the clean, sweet middle of the run, cut by a man who knew his business! Now you can learn that business from the source with the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Master Distilling Course, presented by Fort Wilkins Academy! Master the thermodynamics of vapor, the art of cuts, and the deep history of American spirits in eight full weeks! Over thirty hours of detailed modules, blueprints drawn for heavy-gauge pure electrolytic copper, and live question sessions with master distillers, coppersmiths, and historians. No guesswork, no lead, no swamp medicine! All for just one hundred ninety-nine dollars! See the copper with your own eyes at the showroom at Fort Wilkins on Route 28 in Pittsfield, New Hampshire. Enroll today at fortwilkins.com/course, or visit moonshinestill.com/course! Once more for the folks in the back: fortwilkins.com/course, or moonshinestill.com/course! Seats fill faster than a sheriff's cup!
♪ Banjo vamp ends on a bright chord
♦ Wax crackle, fire popping in stove, a slow drip into a jar
Wilkins: Segment the third: copper and the craft. This is where I put away the jokes, mostly, and talk like a man whose eyebrows have grown back three times.
Wilkins: The sheriff never came for my worst jar. He came for my best, and the best starts long before the fire. It starts with the mash. For a corn whiskey the old way: cracked corn, cooked in water until it's a thick porridge. Corn is starch, and yeast can't eat starch any more than Barnaby can eat a hymnal, though God knows he's tried. You need malt, barley sprouted and dried, because malt carries the diastase, the ferment that turns starch to sugar.
Wilkins: Here's the trick. Let your cooked corn cool to about one hundred fifty degrees by the thermometer, somewhere between one hundred forty-eight and one hundred fifty-eight, and stir in your ground malt. Hold it there, covered and warm, and in an hour or so that gluey porridge goes thin and sweet. That's conversion. Then let it cool further, to about blood-warm, before you pitch your yeast. Pitch it hot and you'll kill it dead. A mash that's too hot for yeast is like a widow too hot for a parson: the work stops, and nobody gets converted.
Wilkins: It works three to seven days, bubbling and grumbling, and a cap of grain rises and falls. Mind your ventilation. That bubbling is carbonic gas, and in a shut room it'll put a man down quieter than chloroform. The old Kentucky men add backset, the soured spent liquid from the last run, to the new mash. That's your sour mash. It turns the mash a little acid, keeps the spoilage bugs at bay, and holds the character steady from batch to batch. When the bubbling stops and the wash tastes dry and sour instead of sweet, it's ready for the still. It's a weak beer, a few parts in a hundred spirit, no more.
Wilkins: Now the copper. Why copper and not iron, and Lord help us, not lead? You heard the Captain on lead. Copper is the alchemist's metal. It grabs the stinking sulfur out of the vapor where the hot vapor touches it, and that means the cap, the vapor arm, and the worm above all. Your pot can be the handsomest copper in Merrimack County, but if your vapor runs through an iron pipe you've wasted half your metal's virtue. Keep it bright and keep it scrubbed. A green crust is a lazy man's signature.
Wilkins: Fire low. I'll say it again so the deputies in the back can write it down: fire low. A hard boil smears your run together like a drunk man's signature. A low, steady fire lets the spirit come off in its proper order. And keep every joint tight, because alcohol vapor is flammable as a Know-Nothing's temper. A leak near an open flame has burned more still-houses in New England than every sheriff put together. Water handy, door open, and never leave a running still alone.
Wilkins: Now the cuts. Draw the spirit off in small jars, numbered, one after another, like teeth on a dentist's tray.
Wilkins: First come the foreshots, the very first little bit. Sharp, solvent-smelling, like varnish and a hospital. That's where the wood spirit gathers, the methanol, the blinding poison. Throw it out. All of it. Foreshots are for cleaning harness buckles and frightening Democrats, and I wouldn't use them on either if I respected the buckle.
Wilkins: Next come the heads. Still harsh, still hot in the nose, fruity in a bad way, like a pear left in a pocket. They carry more of the same harsh volatiles. They go out too. A man who keeps his heads to stretch his jars is the man whose customers wake up with a skull full of hornets, or worse.
Wilkins: Then come the hearts. You'll know them by the nose. Clean, sweet, the smell of the grain coming back to you like an old friend. This is the sheriff's jar. This is what kept the high sheriff of Merrimack County walking a quarter mile in the dark every Thursday for six years.
Wilkins: Last come the tails. Oily, wet-dog, cardboard-tasting, a film on the jar. Set them aside. Some men run them again with the next batch. You don't sell them, and you surely don't sell them to a sheriff, because a sheriff with a bad belly is a sheriff with a grudge.
Wilkins: One more piece of honesty, because I respect my listeners more than I respect my own reputation. Making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is illegal under United States law, and all of this is history and education. I've told you the old way so you understand it, the way I'd tell you how a tooth-key cracks a jaw. Knowing isn't the same as doing.
♦ Barnaby grunts long and low
Wilkins: Barnaby agrees. He's more law-abiding than I am, mostly because no court can afford the muzzle.
♪ Banjo picking softly, a mountain fiddle drone
Wilkins: Segment the fourth: myths, slang, and the mailbag. Well, not a mailbag tonight. A talking cylinder came up from the Carolinas, sent by post with a note that says 'Do Not Let the Bear Lick It.' Let's give it a crank.
♦ Phonograph crank winding, a hiss and crackle, faint background of a rural porch with crickets
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 fades out
Wilkins: That's Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, a long way from the Suncook, and a mighty good question for a man named after a creature that's mostly ears. Rabbit, let's take your uncle's two remedies one at a time, like molars.
Wilkins: First, hickory ash. What is ash? It's lye. It's potash. It's what your grandmother leached through a barrel of straw to make lye soap, and what the old women use to slip the hulls off corn for hominy. Throw a scoop of that into a hot thump keg and you get foam, a soapy, slimy boil-up that can puke straight over into your worm and spoil the whole run. Will it clean your heads out? No sir. The methanol and the harsh stuff in the heads boil off early because of what they are, and no shovel of ash changes that. The only cure for bad heads is cutting them off and throwing them away.
Wilkins: Rabbit, ash in a thump keg is lye, and lye is what your grandmother made soap from. If you want to wash your mouth out, there are cheaper ways than ruining a run.
Wilkins: Now, your uncle isn't entirely a liar, and I'll give him credit. Down in Lincoln County, Tennessee, they burn sugar maple to charcoal and drip their new spirit through it after it's made, slow, through a tall vat. Charcoal used that way does smooth the spirit some. But that's charcoal, Rabbit, not ash, and it goes on after the still, not in the boiler. Your uncle heard the right hymn and sang it in the wrong church.
Wilkins: Second, red oak shavings. Oak gives color, tannin, a bit of vanilla and spice, the same as a barrel does. It flavors. It doesn't clean. And red oak in particular is a poor choice. Any cooper on the Merrimack will tell you red oak is open-pored clear through. Put spirit in a red oak barrel and it weeps out the staves like a widow at a will-reading. White oak has its pores plugged up natural, so white oak makes the barrels. Red oak leaks so bad a cooper calls it a sieve with ambitions.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: That one's for your uncle, Rabbit. A Wilkins-stamped copper, PITTSFIELD N.H., and you tell him it's payment in full for an honest try and a wrong answer.
Wilkins: While I've got the anvil warm, here's another myth: the blue flame. Some fool tips a spoonful of spirit in a saucer, puts a match to it, sees a pretty blue flame, and declares it safe. Friends, methanol burns blue too, a pale blue so faint you can hardly see it in daylight. A blue flame tells you the stuff will burn. It doesn't tell you whether it'll blind you.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: The blue-flame test is like judging a man's honesty by the color of his necktie. Some of the bluest flames I ever saw belonged to scoundrels. Make your cuts, throw out your foreshots and heads, and keep your parlor tricks for the county fair.
Wilkins: And a little slang, since the sheriff's been our theme. In the Suncook Valley, 'Thursday rheumatism' meant any lawman's thirst, and 'the back-window sacrament' meant the jar passed through the shutter. If a man said his deputy had 'gone up the maple,' he meant the fellow had stuck his nose where Barnaby could reach it. Use them freely. I won't charge for them.
Wilkins: Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, thank you for your question. Give your uncle my regards, and tell him to keep his ashes for soap and his oak for barrels. You're a credit to the Carolina hills, son. Mind the deputies, and mind your ears.
♪ Fiddle and banjo ease into the closing theme, low and warm
Announcer: One more quick word! The Flame-Flow copper still, United States Patent 10,561,960, gives you an even heat and a clean run, and a fire low and honest! See it today at moonshinestill.com. That's moonshinestill.com!
♦ Wax crackle, distant chain clink
Wilkins: Well, friends, that's the law's best-kept secret, kept no longer. The sheriff was a customer. The jailer guarded the evidence clear down to the bottom of the jar. The marshal stood in line with his Sunday mint. And Merrimack County's own treasury has been paying its bills with my pennies for years. The law is men, and men get thirsty, and a thirsty man appreciates a clean cut more than a fine sermon.
Wilkins: If you want to learn the craft right, the history, the copper, the cuts, the whole honest business, enroll in the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Master Distilling Course from Fort Wilkins Academy. Eight weeks, one hundred ninety-nine dollars, at fortwilkins.com/course or moonshinestill.com/course. If the sheriff ever comes to enroll, I'll seat him in the back row next to Barnaby, and we'll see who learns the cuts quicker.
Wilkins: My thanks to Captain Donald Vance, the finest suspect in a gray coat ever to walk a Green Mountain hollow, and to Rabbit Miller down in Wilkesboro. Remember: what you heard tonight is history and education, and the law is the law, even when it's drinking.
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