Moonshine Names Around the World
Why does half the world call its liquor 'water of life' and the other half call it 'burnt'? Alchemist G. G. Wilkins runs through the history of moonshine names from his 1860s Pittsfield, New Hampshire still-house: Irish poitin, Gaelic usquebaugh, aguardiente, Barbados kill-devil, Hawaiian okolehao and Taos lightning. Coppersmith Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister talks about repairing copper stills from around the world, and a North Carolina caller's thump keg questions lead to the end of two old distilling myths.
In this episode
- Where moonshine names come from: poitin, usquebaugh, whiskey, brandy and aguardiente
- Aqua vitae, eau-de-vie, akvavit and okowita: why so many countries call spirits 'water of life'
- Kill-devil and rumbullion: rum in the Barbados sugar islands
- Okolehao, Hawaii's ti root spirit distilled in iron whaler try-pots
- Taos lightning, rotgut, coffin varnish and forty-rod: American frontier slang for whiskey
- Copper still repair: cutting a lead patch out of an Irish poitin pot
- Sealing a Portuguese beaked alembic with rye-flour paste
- Thump keg tips with hickory ashes and red oak, plus the truth about the blue-flame test and the 'made by moonlight' story
Dr. G. G. Wilkins takes a tour of what the world calls its spirit, from Irish poitin and Highland mountain dew to aguardiente, okolehao, kill-devil and Taos lightning, and finds that half the planet calls its liquor 'water of life' and the other half calls it 'burnt.' Coppersmith Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister tells about cutting the lead out of a Donegal widow's poitin pot, sealing a Portuguese whaler's beaked alembic with rye-flour paste, and engraving a pot with so many liquor names that he ran out of copper. Wilkins then plays the voicemail from Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, NC, about hickory ashes and red oak shavings in the thump keg, and knocks down the 'made by moonlight' story and 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! Barnaby, settle your hairy carcass down! You smell like a wet Baptist who fell in a tannery vat, so sit down before I sell you to Concord as a fur coat with opinions. Lord. Four hundred pounds of appetite and not one ounce of manners.
♦ Bear grunt, softer, chain settles
Wilkins: That's better. Now hush while I talk to decent folk.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth, swelling then settling under the voice
Wilkins: Good evening, you thirsty sinners and respectable hypocrites. 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: dentist, blacksmith, inventor, and the most-warranted man between Epsom and Barnstead. Tonight we take a trip around the whole globe without leaving my chair, because tonight we talk about names. Poitin, mountain dew, aguardiente, kill-devil, Taos lightning, coffin varnish. Every country with a kettle and a grudge against the tax collector has a name for the clear stuff, and I mean to give you every one I can say sober and a few I can only say after.
♪ Theme fades out
Announcer: A quick word, friends! Want true Fort Wilkins coppersmithing small enough for your own table? Try the Fort Wilkins 2-Gallon Tabletop Mini-Still, pure spun copper and hand-riveted handles, for two hundred eighty-nine dollars. Look for it at moonshinestill.com. That's moonshinestill.com!
♦ Wax crackle, a log shifts in the stove
Wilkins: Segment the first. History. Pull your chairs in.
Wilkins: Start with the Irish, since they started with most of the trouble. Over in the old country they call it poitin. Poteen, if you've got a Yankee tongue. It comes from the Irish word pota, a pot, so poitin is just 'the little pot stuff.' In 1661 the English Crown put an excise on Irish spirits, and from that day every licensed distillery made 'whiskey' and every honest farmer up a bog made poitin. The name means outlaw the way 'deacon' means hypocrite. You don't have to say it out loud. Everybody knows.
Wilkins: Then you get to the Latin, and the doctors and monks. They called distilled spirit aqua vitae, water of life. Now watch this. The Irish and the Highland Scots said the same thing in Gaelic: uisce beatha, usquebaugh. Say usquebaugh three times drunk and it wears down to 'whiskey.' The French say eau-de-vie, water of life. The Swedes and Danes say akvavit, water of life. The Poles say okowita, water of life. Half of Christendom has been toasting its own health with this stuff for five hundred years and burying its uncles at forty-six.
Wilkins: The other half took the honest view. The Dutch said brandewijn, burnt wine, and we shortened it to brandy. The Swedes have brannvin, burnt wine. The Spanish and Portuguese say aguardiente, burning water. So half the world calls it water of life and the other half calls it burnt, and any man who has drunk both kinds can tell you they are both right.
♦ Wilkins pours from a jar into a tin cup, a long satisfied slurp
Wilkins: Italians take what's left after the wine press, the skins and the seeds and whatever the treaders' feet left behind, and distill it into grappa. Yes, friend, you are drinking a peasant's toenail broth, and you'll pay a Boston man's price for it. Over in the Balkans they make rakia out of any fruit that falls off a tree, and slivovitz from plums. Those fellows have fought the Turk for four hundred years on plum brandy, and I don't know if the brandy made them brave or just made them too stiff to run.
Wilkins: Down in the sugar islands in the last century, the Barbados planters boiled up the skimmings and molasses and got a spirit so hot they called it kill-devil. Some say 'rum' comes from rumbullion, which meant a brawl, an uproar, a tavern fight with the furniture involved. Kill-devil to start the evening, rumbullion to end it. Now there's a name that's honest.
Wilkins: Way off in the Sandwich Islands, out in the Pacific, men distilled the root of the ti plant around 1790 and called it okolehao. I'm told it means 'iron bottom,' after the iron try-pots from the whalers they used as stills. Iron bottom. I've had nights like that. You have too. Don't lie to me, I can see your face from Pittsfield.
Wilkins: Out west, before the Mexicans lost New Mexico, the beaver trappers bought a raw wheat whiskey called Taos lightning. It came down out of the mountains like a mule kicking. A trapper would swap a winter's pelts for a keg of it and wake up in April with no pelts, no keg, a Ute wife, and a powerful wish to die.
Wilkins: And here at home, gentlemen, we Yankees name the stuff after what it does to us. Rotgut. Bust-head. Coffin varnish. Tangle-leg, because you'll walk like a crab. Forty-rod, because it drops a man at forty rods. I have sold stuff that dropped him right at my counter and saved him the walk. The Irish named it after the pot, the Scots named it after the dew, and the Yankees named it after whatever it did to them the next morning.
♦ Bear chain rattles, low grumble
Wilkins: Barnaby says he calls it 'the stuff the deputy dropped.' Quiet, you.
♪ Short banjo bridge, a minor-key turn
Wilkins: Segment the second. Outlaws, legends, and a craftsman who keeps me honest. Before he comes in, I owe you a story, since the subject is names and men who come hunting for them.
Wilkins: Last summer a bitters peddler came up the turnpike from Concord. A brass-buttoned, oil-haired, one-legged fraud with a cart painted 'PROFESSOR HOLLISTER'S ARABIAN ELIXIR.' His Arabian Elixir was creek water, gentian root, and about a third rotgut he'd bought off some sharper in Hooksett. He'd heard I made better, and he came to steal my recipe, so he could put my spirit in his bottles under his made-up Arabian name. Snuck round back of the still-house at dusk with a notebook and a pencil.
Wilkins: Now, Barnaby's chain reaches exactly as far as Barnaby needs it to. The Professor stepped one stride too close, on his wooden leg, a good turned piece of ash with a brass ferrule on the end. Barnaby took that peg the way you'd take a corncob. I heard it from inside, over the drip of the worm. Crunch, crunch, then a wet splintering noise like a barrel stave giving way in a fire. The Professor is screaming in about three languages, none of them Arabian, and hanging on to my rain barrel while my bear eats him from the knee down. Barnaby chewed that leg down to the brass and spat the ferrule out like a cherry pit. It rang off my anvil, ping. I keep it on the mantel.
Wilkins: Well, a man with one leg and no dignity moves faster than a deputy with two legs and a pension. The Professor hopped, I swear on my tongs, every yard of the way to Barnstead, preaching temperance as he went. I hear he now sells a temperance tonic, and it's the same creek water, minus my recipe and plus a crutch.
♦ Wilkins laughs, a wheezing cackle; the cylinder crackles
Wilkins: Now. A man who knows what pot holds what name. He hammers the copper here at the Fort Wilkins foundry, and he's never once let me cut a corner, which is why I keep him and why I'm poor. Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister, come sit by the stove.
Silas: Evening, Doctor. Evening, folks. Mind if I move the jar? You've got it sitting on my hat.
Wilkins: The jar outranks the hat in this house. Silas, tonight we're talking names. I know you've had every nation in New England through your shop door at some time, carrying some pot with some foreign name on it.
Silas: That's so. The mills have filled Manchester with all sorts. Copper doesn't care what language you curse it in. I'll tell you the first one that comes to mind. Two winters back a widow from Donegal came in. She worked the looms at the Amoskeag. She had a sea trunk, and under her wedding linens, wrapped like a christened baby, was her late husband's poitin pot. Little thing, maybe eight gallons, the bottom hammered in some cabin in the hills over there.
Wilkins: Smuggled across the whole Atlantic under her bridal sheets. That's devotion, or the worst-kept secret in steerage.
Silas: She wanted it mended. Her man had patched a split along the bottom seam with lead, near a pound of it, smeared on like butter. I told her straight, ma'am, I won't put a hand to it with that lead in it. Lead and spirit are a poor marriage. I cut the whole patch out with snips and a cold chisel, dressed the edges, and riveted in a good copper piece, peened tight. I tested it with water and it held.
Wilkins: And what did she pay you, a song and a candle for the saints?
Silas: A loaf of soda bread a week for a month, and a curse on the excisemen of Ireland. It took her ten minutes to say and named every one of them back to Cromwell. I never heard better. I'd put it on a plate if I could.
Wilkins: There's your poitin, folks. Even the name of the pot is smuggled. What else came through that door?
Silas: A Portuguese cooper off the whale ships at New Bedford. He brought an alembic of a shape I'd never seen. It had a beaked head, Moorish style, like a heron leaning over a pond. He made aguardiente in it from whatever fruit was cheap. He told me the word alembic comes from the Arabic, al-anbiq, from the Moors who held Spain and Portugal. Then he showed me something I'd never been taught. He sealed the joints between the head and the pot with a paste of rye flour and water, pressed in like putty. When the still warms, the paste bakes hard and tight.
Wilkins: Bread dough holding the steam. Sounds like witchcraft.
Silas: It's old practice, Doctor. It's the honest kind of seal and goes back centuries. No solder, no poison, and when the run's done you knock it off and feed it to the hens. I learned more from that Portuguese in an afternoon than from some smiths in a year. He also drank my coffee and said it was a crime against God, which I'll allow.
Wilkins: Now what about our own Scots-Irish? Londonderry folk, just down the road. They brought the potato to this colony in 1719, and I'd wager the potato wasn't the only thing in their trunks.
Silas: I knew a fellow out Londonderry way. Farmer. His granddad came over with the first families. He called his spirit 'mountain dew,' the old Highland name, though the only mountain near him is a manure pile. He ran a worm tub, a coil in a barrel of cold water, and he ran it ice cold out of the brook, with a short iron pipe from the pot to the coil and not much copper anywhere. His dew smelled like boiled turnip and a wet dog.
Wilkins: That's sulfur, friends, riding right through. Not enough copper to grab it.
Silas: That's it exactly. I made him a copper vapor chamber to sit between the pot and the worm, more bright copper for the vapor to touch. The next run came out sweet. He named it after my mother-in-law.
Wilkins: As an honor, or a warning?
Silas: He said it was the first thing out of Londonderry that didn't bite. My mother-in-law hasn't spoken to him since, which proves him wrong.
♦ Wilkins slaps his knee, the stool creaks
Wilkins: One more, Silas, then I'll let you get back to work you're actually paid for.
Silas: A tavern keeper in Concord ordered a new pot and wanted every name for liquor he knew engraved around the shoulder. Whiskey, brandy, usquebaugh, poteen, rum, aqua vitae, he'd made a list. I lettered small and careful and went round and round, and when I got to 'kill-devil,' I ran out of copper.
Wilkins: Ran out of copper at kill-devil. That's exactly where I run out of money.
Silas: He said it was the right place to stop, since that's where every evening ends at his tavern anyway.
Wilkins: Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister, folks. Stay put, Silas, you'll want to hear this next part, since it's your work being bragged about.
♪ Banjo flourish into a brisk parlor-piano vamp
Announcer: Ladies and gentlemen, step closer! You've heard Silas McAllister tell how a true still is built. No lead, no tinker's patches, just honest copper. Now, would you like that same Fort Wilkins skill in a size that sits on your own kitchen table? Behold the Fort Wilkins 2-Gallon Tabletop Mini-Still! A compact alembic of heavy-gauge, 20-ounce spun pure electrolytic copper, bright as a new cent, with hand-riveted handles that won't come off in your hand and quick-connect cooling lines that fit together faster than a deacon's excuse. It's the finest thing going for distilling botanical waters, fragrant floral oils, rosewater and lavender, and for parlor demonstrations that will shut up your know-it-all brother-in-law. All for two hundred eighty-nine dollars! See it with your own eyes at the showroom at Fort Wilkins on Route 28 in Pittsfield, New Hampshire, or visit moonshinestill.com/products/tabletop-alembic. Once more, so you remember it: moonshinestill.com/products/tabletop-alembic. The Fort Wilkins Tabletop Alembic. Small pot, honest copper, and it'll outlast you!
♪ Vamp ends on a bright chord
♦ Wax crackle, drip into jar resumes
Wilkins: Segment the third. Copper and the craft. Silas, keep me honest.
Wilkins: Every name I gave you tonight comes out of one of two machines. The old one is the pot still, the kind the Irish named their poitin after. You charge it, fire it, run it, empty it, clean it, and do it again. It works in batches, like a dentist working one mouth at a time. The new machine is the column still, a tall thing that runs continuous so long as you feed it. Here's the joke. The man who patented the best of them, in 1830, was Aeneas Coffey, an Irishman who had been an excise officer in Dublin. He spent his days hunting poitin pots in the bogs and then went and built a better still himself. An exciseman inventing the column still is like a parson inventing a faster way to sin. Useful, but you wonder about his Sundays.
Silas: And the Scots, after their Excise Act in the twenties, put a locked brass and glass box on the licensed stills. A spirit safe, they call it. The stillman watches the spirit run through it and can test it, but he can't take any out. The exciseman holds the key.
Wilkins: The Scots built a locked brass box so the stillman could look at his own spirit and never touch it, which is how I have been courting since I was nineteen.
Wilkins: Now, the method, the old Highland way, for the history and your education. You take malted barley, barley that's been wetted, let to sprout, and dried. Crack it in the mill. You mash it in hot water, and here's where fools go wrong. You don't boil it. Hold it at a hundred and fifty to a hundred fifty-five degrees on Fahrenheit's glass. That's the heat where the malt's own ferments turn the starch to sugar. Pour boiling water on it and you've killed the very thing that does the work, like pulling a tooth by hitting the patient over the head. Hold it there an hour or so, stirring, then draw off the sweet liquor, the wort. Cool it to blood-warm or under, pitch in your yeast, and let it work three or four days in a warm room with good air, until it stops talking.
Silas: Now you have your wash. Weak stuff. Beer, really.
Wilkins: Then the first run, the stripping run, which the Scots call the low wines. You run the wash through the pot and get a cloudy spirit about a quarter or a third strong. Then the second run, the spirit run, and here is where a man shows whether he is a distiller or a murderer.
Wilkins: The first thing off the worm is the foreshots, and after that the heads. That's where the wood spirit gathers, what the chemists call methyl, along with the solvent stinks. It smells like a varnish shop or nail polish. Pour it out. On the ground, in the fire, I don't care where, but never in a jar, and never down a man's neck. That's how blind men are made, and dead ones. Next come the hearts, sweet and clean. Taste it on your tongue, smell it in your palm, and keep that. Last come the tails, oily and dull, smelling like wet cardboard and a dog's bed. The big Scots houses call those feints and put them back into the next charge. A small man sets them aside, and he never, ever keeps the foreshots or the heads, whatever the Scots do with their feints.
Silas: And the copper, Doctor. Tell them about the Londonderry fellow's turnip.
Wilkins: Right. A worm tub gives the vapor less copper to touch than other condensers do. So if you run it cold with an iron pipe in front of it, the sulfur, the rotten-egg and cabbage stink, comes straight through with nothing to catch it. Copper grabs that sulfur and holds it on its face. More bright copper the vapor touches, the sweeter the spirit. That's why Silas put that chamber on, and that's why there's no iron, no lead, and no pewter in any still this foundry builds. A worm tub run too cold with no copper gives you spirit that smells like a Methodist's root cellar in March.
Wilkins: And about the fire. Spirit vapor burns. A still-house goes up quicker than a widow's reputation. Seal your joints tight, the rye paste our Portuguese friend taught Silas does fine. Keep the place aired. Never leave a lit still to go piss, flirt, or argue politics. And keep a bucket of water and a sack of sand by the door. I've buried men who thought they'd be gone just a minute.
Silas: And keep the copper clean after every run, or it can't do its job.
Wilkins: Amen. Silas, thank you, go hammer something.
Silas: Thank you, Doctor. Folks, good night. Watch your seams.
♦ Door creaks open and shut; Barnaby grunts at the departing footsteps
♪ Fiddle reel bridge, slowing
Wilkins: Segment the fourth. Myths, slang, and the listener line. We've got a tape from down south, and it came a long way for this. Roll it.
♦ Recording hiss, a hollow tinny click
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?
♦ Tape click off, wax crackle
Wilkins: Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina! Rabbit, I love you, and I love your uncle, and I'll take your uncle's ashes apart one shovelful at a time.
Wilkins: Hickory ashes. Soak hickory ash in water and what you get is lye. Strong, slippery, caustic lye. Every farm wife in New England has made it in an ash hopper for soap, and down your way they use it to hull corn into hominy. It'll take the skin off your hands and blind you if it splashes. Rabbit, your uncle's hickory ash would make fine soap, and some of the men who drink his liquor could use it. But it doesn't touch the heads. The heads come off first in the run because they boil easiest, and the only way to be rid of them is to catch them in a separate jar and pour them out. Ashes, prayer, or a horseshoe over the door won't do it.
Wilkins: Now the red oak. Here's something your uncle doesn't know. Ask a cooper. Red oak is so open in the grain you can blow pipe smoke through a stave of it. The coopers use it for slack barrels that hold nails, flour, and apples. For whiskey, cider, or anything wet, they use white oak, tight cooperage. Red oak leaks so bad that a barrel of it holds whiskey about as well as a Concord alderman holds a secret.
Wilkins: Here's where your uncle isn't all swamp, though. The old boys did put things in the thump keg. A bushel of apples, a few peaches, a handful of oak chips. The vapor bubbles through it and picks up taste and color. That's flavoring, Rabbit, like seasoning a stew. It doesn't clean the stew. A rotten ham is still rotten with sage on it. So tell your uncle the old-timers were right that it changed the liquor and wrong that it fixed the liquor. Then give him my regards and a sharp kick, gentle, in the fond spot.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: There's a G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. struck in your honor, Rabbit. Wilkesboro, North Carolina, and Pittsfield, New Hampshire, both on one cent. Long may you hop.
Wilkins: And now let's knock down two myths that fit tonight. First, the name 'moonshine.' Every fool at the Pittsfield store says it's called that because you can only make it by the light of the moon. Nonsense. If you could make spirit only by moonlight, every still in New Hampshire would go broke from November clouds. In old England 'moonshine' meant foolish talk, empty nonsense. Then it came to mean the brandy smugglers ran ashore at night on the south coast. The Wiltshire men got caught raking a pond for hidden kegs and told the excisemen they were raking for the moon's reflection. Moonrakers, they've been called ever since. The name came from the dark and the lie, not from any magic in the moon.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Second myth. The blue flame. Every tavern know-it-all pours a spoonful, puts a match to it, and says 'blue flame, she's safe.' Wood spirit burns blue too, pale blue, near invisible. A spoon on fire tells you the stuff burns. It does not tell you whether it'll blind you. Lighting a spoonful to test it is like judging a man's honesty by how bright his teeth are. I've pulled the teeth of some very shiny liars. The cuts are what make it safe, and only the cuts.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin, one final ringing strike
♪ Banjo and fiddle return, slow and warm
Announcer: A quick word before we part! The Fort Wilkins 2-Gallon Tabletop Alembic, pure electrolytic copper, hand-riveted, quick-connect cooling, two hundred eighty-nine dollars. Visit moonshinestill.com today. That's moonshinestill.com!
Wilkins: Friends, if tonight gave you a taste for how the old craft was done, how the old masters mashed and cut and kept the copper bright, then send for the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. History, copper, the chemistry of the cuts, and all of it taught straight, the way the Portuguese taught Silas and the bear taught that peddler. Everything on this program is for history and learning. Making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against United States law, so mind it.
Wilkins: Poitin, usquebaugh, aguardiente, okolehao, kill-devil, Taos lightning, forty-rod. Every name is a nation talking about the same pot and the same tax man. Barnaby speaks every language in this episode, provided the word is 'ham.' Thank you to Silas McAllister, to Rabbit Miller down in Wilkesboro, and to every one of you scoundrels listening from the Suncook to the sea.
Wilkins: Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.
♦ Bear grunt and final drip into jar
♪ Theme closes on a last banjo strum, fading into wax cylinder crackle