Kegs in the Current: Smuggling by River on the Suncook and the Merrimack
In 1865 Pittsfield, New Hampshire, Alchemist G. G. Wilkins tells the history of moonshine and rum smuggling on the Suncook and Merrimack rivers. You'll hear about Middlesex Canal boatmen sucking the monkey through a straw, salt-weighted kegs that sank and then floated back up on schedule, and hollowed pine logs hiding jugs of spirits in the spring log drives. Wilkes County runner Junior Vance adds three river moonshine tales, and Wilkins explains why still-houses sat beside cold brooks and how copper still distilling really works, from the run to the cuts to the thump keg.
In this episode
- Merrimack River boating history: the Middlesex Canal, setting poles and Concord canal boats
- Sucking the monkey: how boatmen drank rum from casks through a straw and refilled them with river water
- Salt-weighted sunk kegs, spring freshets and hollowed logs that carried spirits on the log drives
- Junior Vance's Wilkes County moonshine stories: the Yadkin River, the Reddies River baptism and the Kerr Scott reservoir
- Why still-houses sat beside cold brooks: condenser water and the copper worm
- Walking through a moonshine run: heads, hearts and tails cuts in copper still distilling
- Thump keg Q&A: hickory ashes, lye, porous red oak and the gunpowder proof myth
- Civil War-era New Hampshire history, river tokens and Barnaby the pet black bear
Dr. Alchemist G. G. Wilkins tells the history of Merrimack River boating, from the Middlesex Canal boatmen who drank from casks through a straw to the salt-weighted kegs that sank and then rose at a set eddy, and the logs hollowed out to carry spirits on the spring drives. Retired Wilkes County runner Junior Vance tells three new river stories: paddling quart jars across the Yadkin with a coal shovel, a jar that came up during a baptism in the Reddies River, and an uncle's copper worm drowned under the new Kerr Scott reservoir. Wilkins explains why still-houses sat beside cold brooks, walks through the run and the cuts, and answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller's question about hickory ashes and red oak in the thump keg by explaining lye, porous red oak and the gunpowder proof myth.
▶ Listen in the Radio Moonshine app
Full episode transcript
♦ Audible wax cylinder surface crackle, slow drip of clear distillate into a glass jar
♦ Barnaby the black bear grunting and chain clinking outside log cabin window
Wilkins: Barnaby! Barnaby, settle your carcass down! That is a muskrat in the eddy, not a revenue man, though I grant you the family resemblance is powerful. Both of them are wet, whiskered, and hunting for something that ain't theirs. Lie down, you four-hundred-pound sack of bad decisions.
♦ Bear huffs, chain drags across the planks, a heavy thud as Barnaby flops down
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth
Wilkins: Good evening, neighbors, sinners, and every gentleman of the Treasury hiding in my woodpile with a pencil. This is Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, coming to you from the log fortress of Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, in Pittsfield, Merrimack County, New Hampshire. I am your host, your dentist, your blacksmith, and on occasion your bad influence. Tonight we go down to the water. Our subject is Smuggling by River: the Suncook, the old Merrimack, and the flatboat crews who could pole a cask of rum forty miles upstream and drink half of it on the way without the owner ever finding out. Pour yourself something honest and sit close to the stove.
♪ Theme fades under a soft fiddle drone
Announcer: A quick word, friends! Is your still held together with flour paste and prayer? Shop Moonshine Stills for Heavy-Duty Sanitary Tri-Clamp Ferrules and Gaskets, and see the famous Flame-Flow still, U.S. Patent 10,561,960, built of heavy-gauge pure electrolytic copper. Go to moonshinestill.com today!
♪ Brief banjo sting
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Wilkins: SEGMENT ONE. The River Road Nobody Taxed.
Wilkins: Before a single rail was laid in this state, the Merrimack River was the turnpike, the post road, and the tavern all in one. She starts at Franklin, where the Pemigewasset comes down out of the mountains and meets the Winnipesaukee coming out of the lake. Then she runs south past Concord, over the great Amoskeag Falls at Manchester, past Nashua and Lowell, and out to the salt at Newburyport. Our own little Suncook comes down past Pittsfield and Barnstead, gathers up every mill-dam's worth of grudges along the way, and empties into the Merrimack at Suncook village, between Pembroke and Allenstown.
Wilkins: Now, here is the history. In 1803 the gentlemen of Boston opened the Middlesex Canal, about twenty-seven miles of ditch running from the Merrimack at Chelmsford clear to Charlestown, by Boston. Then they cut locks and side canals around the falls at Amoskeag, Hooksett, and Bow, and by about 1815 a canal boat could come all the way up to Concord. Boston was a river trip away from the Granite State, and the Granite State has been regretting it ever since.
♦ Water lapping against a wooden hull, a pole thunking into a gravel bottom
Wilkins: Picture the boats. Long, narrow flat-bottomed things, seventy-odd feet long and about nine wide, built like a coffin for a giant who was lying on his back. Going upstream, two or three men walked the running boards with long setting poles. They jammed the iron end into the river bottom, put a shoulder to the knob of the pole, and pushed the boat ahead step by step. When the wind blew fair, they ran up a square sail and sat on the cargo looking pleased with themselves. A Merrimack boatman will push a seventy-foot boat up the river with one pole and then can't find his own front door with both hands.
Wilkins: Down the river went lumber, Concord granite, potash, and cordwood. Up the river came salt, molasses, iron, dry goods, and rum. Barrels and barrels of Medford and Boston rum, perfectly legal, consigned to honest Concord merchants. And there began the trouble, because a boat crew with three days of hard poling and a hold full of rum is the most dangerous combination in nature, saving only a deputy with a new warrant and nothing to do on a Saturday.
Wilkins: The boatmen had a practice they called sucking the monkey. It's old sailors' talk. A man would take a gimlet and bore a hole no bigger than a pea in the side of a cask, down low where the hoop hides it. Then he'd stick in a goose quill or a rye straw and draw on it like a calf on its mother until his eyes watered. When he'd had his fill, he tapped in a little whittled peg, smeared it with tar, and passed the straw to his partner. And so a cask of rum that left Boston at ninety proof would turn up in Concord at about forty, and the Lord only knows whether the river or the crew drank the difference, but I know which one was singing. The boatmen called it sucking the monkey, the merchants called it evaporation, and the river called it a fine excuse to raise its own level, because what came out of the cask they replaced with a dipper of Merrimack water. I have tasted that rum. It had a body like a drowned cat and a finish like the bottom of a well.
♦ Wilkins chuckles, a cork pulled, a short pour
Wilkins: But the railroad came, damn its iron heart. The Boston and Lowell line in 1835, then the Concord Railroad in 1842, and the freight ran off the river and onto the cars. By about 1851 the Middlesex Canal had stopped carrying regular boats, and now its locks sit full of frogs and the opinions of old men. So tonight, in this year of our Lord 1865, river smuggling in these parts ain't a fleet. It's a craft. It's small boats, single kegs, the spring freshet, and the log drives. And I have stood on the bank and watched every trick of it.
Wilkins: First trick, the sunk keg. The English smugglers down on the Channel coast invented this one. They'd sink their brandy tubs offshore, tied to a stone, and come back at night with a grappling iron they called a creeper to fish them up. They called that sowing a crop. Our Merrimack men improved on it. Instead of a stone, a man would lash a canvas sack of coarse salt to the keg and sink it in a quiet eddy above the Hooksett falls. Out on the bank, nothing. A revenue man could sit there with a spyglass until his backside took root. But river water dissolves salt, and in two or three days, depending on how cold the water ran, the salt was gone and up came the keg, bobbing like an apple at a Harvest Home. A sunk keg weighted with salt is the only honest thing in Merrimack County that keeps its appointment.
Wilkins: Second trick, the freshet. Every April the snow lets go in the hills and the Suncook comes down brown and roaring and full of every dead pine, drowned fence post, and lost sheep from Gilmanton to the Merrimack. Into that mess a man drops his kegs, wrapped in bark so they look like stumps. Now, the Suncook is too skinny for a flatboat and too rocky for a sermon, but a keg goes down it like a Concord lawyer goes down a list of billable hours: fast, noisy, and banging into everything on the way. Down at the mouth a cousin waits in a skiff with a pike pole, plucking stumps out of the current and getting suspicious looks from every man who thinks it's a strange time of year to be collecting firewood.
Wilkins: Third trick, my favorite, and the one that needs the most nerve: the pine coffin. On the log drives, when the lumbermen float the winter's cut down the river, a sly man takes a pine log, splits it lengthwise with wedges, gouges out the heart with an adze and a hot iron, beds two or three stone jugs inside in sawdust, then pins the halves back together with hardwood trunnels and smears the seam with pitch and mud. Then he rolls it in among a thousand other logs. What revenue man can search a log drive? You would have to inspect every stick in the Merrimack. The river drivers ride those logs, dancing on them in spiked boots over white water with their peaveys. That's the hooked tool a Maine blacksmith named Joseph Peavey worked up at Stillwater in 1858, and every driver on this river had one inside two years. A river driver will dance on a moving log over white water and then fall flat on his face on a dry dance floor. But he always knew which log was heavy. He'd steer that one into the eddy at the Suncook landing like a mother hen herding a chick.
♪ Short fiddle bridge with antique warmth
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Wilkins: SEGMENT TWO. River Rats, Rivals, and a Bear With Good Instincts.
Wilkins: Now, my own dealings with the river. Every spring when the drive comes past the Suncook landing, I stand on the bank with a pocket full of coin. Copper cents, old half-dimes, whatever I have scraped off the counter. The night before, I take every one of them to my anvil, set my steel punch, and strike them.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. That's a river token. I throw them to the drivers as they come past riding the logs, and any man who brings one to Fort Wilkins gets one jar of hard cider and a tooth looked at, free of charge. Half of them catch the coin in their teeth. Those are the ones who end up needing the free tooth looked at. I count it good business. The cider brings them in and the molars pay the bill.
Wilkins: But where there's a river there's a river rat, and the worst of them in my years was a fellow named Ephraim Tuttle, a long, damp, sallow-faced creature with a nose like a rudder and morals to match. Ephraim had worked out that I kept a few kegs cooling in the eddy below my still-house, tied off on a line to a stake under the bank. One night in May, with the peepers screaming fit to wake the dead, Ephraim came creeping along the bank in his stocking feet, carrying his boots so they wouldn't squelch. He found my line, hauled up a keg, and then, the greedy fool, decided to come see what else was cooking. He crept right up under the still-house window.
♦ Chain clinks once, softly
Wilkins: Now, Barnaby lives at that window. Barnaby was asleep. Barnaby sleeps like a dead bishop, flat on his back with his paws folded and his belly up to the stars. Ephraim did not see him. Ephraim stepped right onto Barnaby's belly in the dark, and Barnaby let out a sound I can only compare to a church organ falling down a well.
♦ A deep, rising bear roar, a man's high shriek
Wilkins: Ephraim ran. He was fast, I'll give him that, but Barnaby's chain is thirty feet and a bear can cover thirty feet faster than a sinner can say his prayers. Barnaby took him by the seat of his trousers. I heard the cloth go like a sail splitting in a gale. Then Ephraim was running in one direction and the back half of his trousers was going in the other, in Barnaby's mouth, and there was a long, terrible stretch of white Tuttle hide shining in the moonlight like a bald hill in the snow. He went into the Suncook up to his neck in May water, which is about the temperature of a widow's pity, and he came up spitting and swearing in two languages, one of them English. He left behind one boot, one trouser leg, my own keg, and a good deal of his fear, which I had to shovel off the path come morning. Barnaby chewed that boot for three days, and I believe it was the first time anything belonging to Ephraim Tuttle was ever worth the effort. Ephraim left Fort Wilkins with one boot, one trouser leg, and a brand-new opinion about bears, and he walks sideways past my window to this very day.
♦ Barnaby gives a satisfied grunt
Wilkins: Yes, yes, you were very brave. Hush. Now then. We have a guest tonight from far down south, a man who has run more spirits over more rough country than I've pulled teeth, and that is saying a mortal great deal. Out of the Brushy Mountains of Wilkes County, North Carolina, please welcome Mr. Junior Vance. Junior, sit down by the stove and mind the bear.
Junior: Doctor, I've been run off by dogs, deputies, and one mean preacher's wife, but this here's the first time I ever sat ten foot from a bear on purpose. He's looking at my boots.
Wilkins: He has developed a taste for footwear. Keep your feet under the chair and you'll keep your feet. Now, Junior, tonight it's rivers. I know you came up running roads, but you can't tell me a Wilkes County man never got his britches wet hauling. You've got the Yadkin running right through your country.
Junior: Doc, the Yadkin is the only thing in Wilkes County older and muddier than my granddaddy. And yes sir, I got wet. I'll tell you one I ain't ever told on the radio. There was a night I had forty quarts to get across the river and over to a fella waiting on the far side. Now, there's a bridge, and normally you just cross the bridge like a Christian. But I pull up to the top of the rise with my lights off, and there's a car sitting at the far end of that bridge with nobody getting out of it. When you see a car parked at a bridge at two in the morning with nobody necking in it, that's the law.
Wilkins: A man parked at a bridge in the dark with no woman in the car is up to no good or no fun, and either way you don't want to meet him.
Junior: That's gospel. So I backed down, went a mile downriver to a fella's place I knew, and borrowed his johnboat off the bank. Little flat-bottom thing, about like one of your canal boats if one of your canal boats got sick and shrunk up. He had a motor, but a motor on that river at night sounds like a hornet in a coffee can, they'd hear it in Elkin. So I couldn't find his paddle in the dark, and the only thing in the bottom of that boat was a coal shovel.
Wilkins: A coal shovel.
Junior: A coal shovel, Doc. I paddled forty quarts across the Yadkin River in four trips with a coal shovel. Ten quarts a trip in a tow sack, quiet as I could, scoop, scoop, scoop. And on the fourth trip, right out in the middle, here comes a light. Somebody on the bank with a big lantern, swinging it out over the water. So I lay down flat in the bottom of that johnboat with my face in about two inches of river and I let her drift. I figured I'm a log. I'm the most innocent pine log ever floated through Wilkes County.
Wilkins: Did it work?
Junior: It worked fine on the law. That light went right over me and kept on going. What didn't work was there's a longnose gar in that river about as long as your bear, and he come up alongside to see what kind of log I was. Bumped right up against my elbow, cold and slick, with them teeth. I liked to come out of my skin. Just laid there and let that gar nose me like a hound smelling a stranger, and I never made a sound. Prettiest thing I ever did in my life and nobody saw it but a fish.
Wilkins: Junior paddled with a coal shovel, which is the only time in history a shovel got a man out of a hole instead of digging him into one. And if a revenue man can't tell a smuggler from a pine log, I say give the log a badge. It would do the job with more dignity.
Junior: Now here's one that's gonna get me in trouble with my mama in heaven. There's a river runs into the Yadkin right at North Wilkesboro called the Reddies River, and on it there's a swimming hole, deep and green, where the young'uns go in summer. I had me a trick there. I'd tie quart jars on a trotline, like you'd set for catfish, hooks all took off, jar tied on every few foot by the neck, and sink that line across the bottom of the hole with a rock at each end. Cool as a springhouse down there. Nobody'd ever look. Fella wants a quart, he pays me in town, I tell him which bush the line's tied off to.
Wilkins: A cellar with the fish for a lock. I approve.
Junior: Well. What I didn't keep up with was that a little church up the road had took to doing their baptizing in that same hole. Sunday morning, whole congregation on the bank singing Shall We Gather at the River, preacher out in the water up to his waist in his white shirt. And they bring out this big ol' boy, a sawmill hand, been drunk since Easter and finally decided to get right. Preacher says, I baptize you in the name of the Father, and so forth, and lays him back under. And that big boy's foot hooks my trotline.
Wilkins: Oh, no.
Junior: Oh, yes sir. He comes up out of that water a new creature, coughing and blinking, and the Lord has seen fit to put in his right hand a quart jar of the clearest liquor in Wilkes County. He's holding it up over his head, kind of astonished. And half that congregation hollered Amen and called it a sign, and the other half said it was the Devil's work, and the preacher took it off him and said he'd see to its proper disposal. He saw to its proper disposal over about the next two weeks, I heard.
Wilkins: That convert came up out of the river holding a quart jar, and I cannot think of a plainer sign that he had been saved, and saved something for later. A preacher who confiscates a jar and disposes of it personally is a man of real sacrifice, Junior. He took that sin upon himself, one swallow at a time.
Junior: That's what my uncle said. And speaking of my uncle, here's my last one. He had him a still back up a hollow above Wilkesboro, right next to the Yadkin, the best spot in the county, cold spring running right out of the hill. Copper pot his daddy made. Then the government come along, the Army Engineers, and said they were gonna dam the Yadkin to stop the flooding, and they built that big dam up there and filled it up around 'bout '62, and called it the Kerr Scott reservoir. And that whole hollow went under. Still and all. My uncle had to move off, and he wasn't sore about the house. He was sore about the copper.
Wilkins: The Army drowned his still. That is the first time the federal government ever confiscated a man's apparatus by putting a lake on top of it.
Junior: And it's still down there, Doc. Bass fishermen out on that lake, every once in a while one of 'em snags something heavy, and he hauls and hauls and up comes about three foot of copper coil, all green, with mud running out of it. They take it to the bait shop and ask what it is, and the old men just grin and say, that's a Wilkes County fishing lure, son. Throw it back.
Wilkins: The government drowned a whole valley to make a lake, and the only thing it caught was your uncle's still, which is about the usual return on a government project. Junior Vance, you are a credit to the river and a disgrace to the law, and I mean both as a compliment. Stay by the stove, keep your feet tucked, and we'll be back to you.
Junior: Yes sir. Tell your bear I'm sorry about my boots. They're the only ones I got.
♪ Banjo bridge, quick and bright
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Announcer: LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, PRAY ATTENTION! Have you ever stood beside your apparatus and smelled that sharp, sweet whiff of vapor creeping out where it has no business being? Friend, that is the smell of money leaking and danger walking! Throw away your flour paste! Throw away your slipping hose clamps! Moonshine Stills now offers Heavy-Duty Sanitary Tri-Clamp Ferrules and Gaskets, precision 304 stainless and copper hybrid fittings! Heavy-gauge Tri-Clamp sanitary ferrules! Food-grade PTFE gaskets! Quick-release stainless wing clamps that snap tight by hand! Every one pressure-tested and precision-milled for a lifetime of airtight reliability, made to marry up with stills of heavy-gauge pure electrolytic copper. Just thirty-four dollars and ninety-five cents! See them with your own two eyes at the showroom at Fort Wilkins on Route 28 in Pittsfield, New Hampshire, or order this very night at moonshinestill.com, at the address https://moonshinestill.com/products/tri-clamp-fittings. Once more, friends: https://moonshinestill.com/products/tri-clamp-fittings! Shop hardware at moonshinestill.com, and never risk a vapor leak again!
♪ Patent-medicine brass flourish, fades
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Wilkins: SEGMENT THREE. Copper, Cold Water, and the Cut.
Wilkins: Junior's uncle had his still beside a cold spring, and that was no accident. Go look at any old still-house from here to the Brushy Mountains and you'll find it squatting beside a brook like a toad beside a puddle. People will tell you it's for hiding, and that's partly so, but the true reason is cold water. A still only does half its work in the pot. The other half happens in the worm, the long copper coil where the hot vapor turns back into liquid. If that coil runs warm, the vapor goes right out the end as steam and you have distilled your whole run into the sky.
Wilkins: So you set your worm in a tub or barrel and feed it with brook water, and here is the trick the old men knew without knowing why. You let the cold water in at the bottom of the tub and let the warm water spill out at the top. Heated water rises, so it carries itself up and away, and the cold water stays down low around the bottom of the coil, where your spirit comes out. Do it backwards and you're warming your spirit on the way out. Do it right and the brook does your work for free. A river is a fine road for kegs, but a cold brook is the finest servant a distiller ever had.
Wilkins: Now, let me walk you through a run in plain words, the way it was done in these hills. First you make your wash. Cracked corn cooked in water, cooled down until you can hold your hand in it comfortably, and then the yeast goes in. Or apples, ground and pressed, if you're a Suncook Valley man. Then you leave it to work in a warm, airy place. It bubbles and heaves and the grain rides up in a cap on top. When it quits working, the cap falls back and the wash goes still and sour, and that's your sign it's ready.
Wilkins: Second, you charge the still. Strain off the wash and put it in the pot, and here's the first rule of safety: never fill the pot to the brim. Leave a good quarter of it empty. A full pot will foam up when it heats, and that foam climbs right up the neck and pukes mash into the worm. Now your worm is plugged, the pressure has nowhere to go, and the joints let go, and now you have hot, burning vapor spraying over an open fire. I've seen a still-house in Barnstead go up exactly that way, and the man inside came out with no eyebrows and a new religion.
Wilkins: Which brings me to the second rule. A still must never be sealed tight. It must always stay open to the air through the end of the worm. A man who seals his still airtight is not a distiller. He is building his own artillery and aiming it at his own trousers. And while we're on joints: the old-timers stuck their heads and necks together with a paste of rye meal or flour and water. They called it slobber. Flour paste on a still joint holds about as long as a deputy's oath, and leaks in about the same places. It dries, it cracks, and alcohol vapor creeps out and finds your fire. Proper fitted joints, kept tight, and a fire kept low and steady and never left alone. That is how you keep your roof over your head.
Wilkins: Third, the run itself, and the cuts. You bring the heat up slow. The first drops out of the worm are the foreshots. They are sharp and stinging and smell like varnish and a cobbler's glue pot, and they carry the worst of the poison, the wood spirit, the methanol, the stuff that blinds and kills. You throw them out. Every drop, and a good deal more than you think, because a frightened distiller lives longer than a stingy one. Then come the heads, still harsh and solvent-smelling, and those go aside too. Never drink them, never sell them, never rub them on a baby's gums. Then the hearts, clean and sweet. That is your spirit. And at last the tails, oily and dull, smelling of wet dog and boiled grain, which you set aside to run again another day.
Wilkins: Here is the craftsman's trick that separates the masters from the men who just make a guess. You don't catch the run in one big crock. You catch it in a row of small jars, numbered with a bit of chalk, one after another. Then you go down the row and smell each jar, and taste the ones you trust, with a drop rubbed between your palms to bring up the smell. Only then do you decide where your cuts fall, and you pour the good jars together. A cut made jar by jar is an honest cut, and a cut made by guessing is how a man ends up spending the rest of his life feeling his way along the wall.
Wilkins: Now, a word for the alchemist in me. Copper. You know it cleans the sulfur stink out of the vapor. But mind where it does that work. It happens where the vapor touches the metal: up in the head, along the neck, and down the worm. I've seen a fool with a handsome copper kettle and a neck of iron pipe and a worm of tin wondering why his spirit smells like a burnt boot. The kettle only holds the soup. The copper needs to be in the vapor's path, bright and clean, to do its alchemy. And one more time, so nobody in Merrimack County mistakes me for a lawyer's witness: 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.
♪ Fiddle bridge, low and warm
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Wilkins: SEGMENT FOUR. The Call-In Tape and a Myth on the Anvil.
Wilkins: We've had a message come up the line from down in Junior's country. Let's hear it.
♦ Tape hiss, a click, distant crackle
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?
♦ Click, tape hiss ends
Wilkins: Cletus Rabbit Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina! Junior, do you know this man?
Junior: Doc, there's a Miller under every rock in Wilkes County, and half of 'em are named Rabbit. But I'd bet a dollar I've outrun his uncle.
Wilkins: Well, Rabbit, your uncle ain't the first man to swear by it, and he won't be the last. Let me give you two plain pieces of farm learning, one for the hickory and one for the oak.
Wilkins: The hickory ashes first. Every farm wife in New Hampshire knows what you get when you pour water through wood ashes. You get lye. Our grandmothers ran water through a hopper of hardwood ashes and caught the brown drippings to boil with lard into soft soap. This whole state used to ship potash and pearlash to Boston by the boatload, down that same Merrimack I was telling you about. So when your uncle throws hickory ashes into his thump keg, he's not cleaning the spirit. He is making lye, and lye meeting the oils in a run turns them toward soap. Rabbit, ashes in a thump keg will not clean your spirit, but give it a week and you can bathe a hog in it.
Wilkins: Now the red oak. Any cooper on the Merrimack will tell you this. Take a short piece of red oak stave, put one end in your mouth, and blow, and the smoke from your pipe will come out the other end. Red oak's grain is full of open little tubes. White oak's tubes are plugged up inside with growths the learned men call tyloses, and that's why every barrel that ever held water, cider, or whiskey worth its salt was made of white oak. Red oak leaks so bad you can blow pipe smoke clean through a stave, which makes it the only wood in New England that is more full of wind than a Concord legislator. Red oak shavings in a thump keg will give the spirit some color and a woody, bitter taste. That is flavor, not cleansing.
Wilkins: And it's true, Rabbit, that some of your mountain men load the thump keg with fruit, or a dipper of fresh mash, to put a little flavor into the run. That's a matter of taste, and I won't quarrel with it. But here is the iron law, and I'll say it as plain as a hammer. Nothing you put in that doubler, ash nor oak nor apple nor a prayer book, takes out the methanol. The only thing that saves your eyes is throwing out the foreshots and heads at the pot. Your uncle wasn't exactly making swamp medicine, but he was cleaning the outside of the jug and calling it a bath.
Junior: My granddaddy put a dead copperhead in his once. Said it gave it bite.
Wilkins: Your granddaddy should have been arrested for cruelty to the snake.
Wilkins: Now, while we're throwing old stories on the fire, here's tonight's myth, and I want my anvil for it.
♦ Coins rattling in a tin, a punch set on the anvil
Wilkins: The myth goes like this. You can prove whiskey is good by pouring it on gunpowder and lighting it. If the powder still burns, the spirit is proved, and that is why we say proof. Well, the history is half right. The old British excise men really did wet gunpowder with spirit and touch it off, and if it burned the spirit was called proved. A hundred proof on that old British scale is about fifty-seven parts alcohol in a hundred. But here's the lie in it.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: The gunpowder tells you the spirit is strong. That's all it tells you. It can't tell you whether you made your cuts. A jar of pure foreshots, full of wood spirit enough to blind a regiment, would set your powder going as handsome as a Fourth of July. Strong and safe are two different words, and gunpowder only knows the one.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: And second, if you have ever carried a horn of black powder into a still-house with a fire going and vapor in the air, you've no need to test your whiskey. The Lord will test you. If gunpowder proved whiskey, every revenue man in Merrimack County would have been blown to the moon long ago, and I would have sold tickets to watch.
♦ Final ringing strike of steel punch on copper coin
Wilkins: There. One fresh coin. G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., struck tonight in honor of Cletus Rabbit Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina. Rabbit, that coin's yours, and it's good for one jar of cider and one free molar inspection if you ever make it up the Suncook Valley Turnpike. Give your uncle my regards, and tell him to keep his ashes for the soap kettle. My anvil has struck more honest marks than the Merrimack County courthouse has handed down, and my anvil has never once asked me for a bribe.
♦ Barnaby grunts approvingly, chain clinks
Wilkins: Junior Vance, any last word to the folks before you go back south?
Junior: Just this, Doc. Rivers'll carry anything you give 'em, but they don't ever give it back the way you sent it. Ask my uncle's still.
Wilkins: Spoken like a philosopher, or at least like a man who's sat in a lot of wet boats. Thank you, Junior.
♪ Banjo bridge, brief
Announcer: Another quick word, friends! Make your joints as honest as your cuts. Heavy-Duty Sanitary Tri-Clamp Ferrules and Gaskets, just thirty-four ninety-five, and the mighty Flame-Flow still, U.S. Patent 10,561,960. Visit the showroom at Fort Wilkins on Route 28, or go to moonshinestill.com!
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Wilkins: SIGN-OFF.
Wilkins: Neighbors, if tonight put the itch in you to learn the craft properly, what copper wants, what the fire wants, and how to make a cut you'd stake your own eyesight on, then sign up for the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. I teach it the way I pull a tooth: straight, honest, and with no pretending it won't sting a little. You'll learn metallurgy, fermentation, cuts, and above all safety, so you never become one of the stories I tell on this program. Inquire at Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, or at moonshinestill.com.
Wilkins: My thanks to Junior Vance of Wilkes County, to Rabbit Miller for his question, to Ephraim Tuttle for his boot, and to Barnaby, who has spent the whole broadcast staring at Junior's feet with an expression I can only call romantic. To every boatman who ever sucked the monkey on the Merrimack and topped it off with river water: the river has forgiven you. The merchants never will.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme returns with antique warmth
Wilkins: Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.
♦ Bear grunt and final drip into jar
♦ Wax cylinder crackle fades to silence