The General's Rye: George Washington's Distillery at Mount Vernon
George Washington marched 13,000 militiamen against the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794. Three years later he was running copper pot stills at Mount Vernon, and by 1799 his still-house made nearly 11,000 gallons of rye whiskey, which put it among the largest distilleries in America. Alchemist G. G. Wilkins tells the history of Washington's rye from 1860s Pittsfield, New Hampshire, and names the six enslaved distillers who actually ran the stills, with moonshine runner stories and distilling advice along the way.
In this episode
- The Whiskey Rebellion of 1794, Alexander Hamilton's whiskey excise tax, and Washington leading the militia
- How Scottish farm manager James Anderson got Washington into commercial whiskey distilling in 1797
- Mount Vernon's stone still-house on Dogue Run: five copper pot stills beside the gristmill
- Washington's rye mash bill: 60% rye, 35% corn, 5% malted barley
- Hanson, Peter, Nat, Daniel, James, and Timothy: the six enslaved men who ran the distillery
- Wilkes County moonshine runner Junior Vance on a fake Washington jug, a rye mash that foamed over, and a preacher who talked a load past a roadblock
- Thump keg listener question: hickory ashes and red oak shavings, answered straight
- Busting the myth of George Washington's wooden teeth, plus fruit brandy, unaged white whiskey, and Mount Vernon in the Civil War
Dr. Alchemist G. G. Wilkins tells how George Washington marched an army against the Whiskey Rebels in 1794 and three years later went into the whiskey trade himself. By 1799 his Mount Vernon still-house was making nearly 11,000 gallons of rye, worked by six enslaved men named in the estate records. Retired Wilkes County runner Junior Vance tells new stories about a fake 'Washington jug', a rye mash that foamed over, and a preacher who talked a load past a roadblock. Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller's call about hickory ashes and red oak shavings in the thump keg gets a straight answer, and Wilkins knocks down the myth of Washington's wooden teeth from behind his own dentist's chair.
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Full episode transcript
♦ Audible wax cylinder surface crackle, slow drip of clear distillate into a glass jar
♦ Barnaby the black bear grunting and chain clinking outside log cabin window
Wilkins: Barnaby. Barnaby! Settle down, you four-hundred-pound sack of sin. You got into the rye sacks at sunup, ate the better part of a bushel, and you've been breaking wind out that window like the Fifth New Hampshire firing by volleys. Lie down before the listeners think I'm broadcasting from a tannery.
♦ Bear huffs, chain drags across frozen dirt, a long low groan
Wilkins: There. He's laid down on his chain and he's giving me the look of a Congregational deacon who just found out the collection plate went to the tavern. Strike it up, boys.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth
Wilkins: Good evening, neighbors, sinners, and the two or three Merrimack County deputies I know are crouched by their receiving horns taking notes. You are listening 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. I am your host, your tooth-puller, your blacksmith, and if the sheriff asks, your Sunday school teacher. Tonight we take up the most famous distiller this republic ever turned out, and it pains me to say he isn't me. He's the Father of His Country, General George Washington, who spent his last years on God's earth making rye whiskey on the banks of the Potomac by the barrel and the wagonload. That's right, friends. The man on your three-cent stamp was a moonshiner with a permit. Before we pull that tooth, a word from the folks who keep the lamps lit in this log pile.
♪ Banjo vamp under
Announcer: A quick word, friends! Every great distiller needs honest copper, and the Flame-Flow Still, protected under United States Patent 10,561,960, is made from the heaviest, purest copper a craftsman ever put to the flame! See it at moonshinestill.com, that's moonshinestill.com, or call at the Fort Wilkins showroom on Route 28!
♪ Banjo flourish, out
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
♪ A slow Scotch fiddle air, mournful and sweet
Wilkins: Segment the first. The History. That fiddle air is for a Scotsman, and you'll meet him directly. But first you have to understand how much whiskey George Washington hated before he loved it, because I enjoy a hypocrite the way Barnaby enjoys a ham hock, slowly and with my eyes closed.
Wilkins: Go back to 1791. The young republic is broke as a Hooksett fiddler. Mr. Alexander Hamilton, the Treasury man, a fellow so clever he could pick your pocket and charge you for the lesson, puts an excise tax on distilled spirits. Now out in western Pennsylvania, past the mountains, a farmer couldn't haul his grain to market without it rotting on the wagon. So he did the sensible thing. He boiled it down into whiskey, which keeps forever, rides easy, and gets more cheerful with every mile. Whiskey was money out there. You paid the parson in it, you paid the doctor in it, and when you died they likely washed you in it.
Wilkins: So when Hamilton's collectors came over the ridges with their ledgers, those Monongahela boys met them with tar, feathers, and a fine sense of theater. They'd strip a revenue man to his hide, paint him in hot pine tar till he blistered and screamed, roll him in goose down, and set him on the road home looking like a Christmas chicken that had sinned. One collector had his house burned. By 1794 it was outright rebellion. The Whiskey Rebellion, they called it.
Wilkins: And what did President Washington do? He called up near thirteen thousand militiamen and rode out at the head of them, the only President ever to lead an army in the field while sitting in office. Thirteen thousand men marched over the Alleghenies to stamp out whiskey, and the rebellion melted like lard on a stove lid. There was no grand battle. Two men were convicted of treason, and Washington pardoned the both of them. He was a gentleman even when he was a bully.
♦ Wilkins sets a tin cup down hard on a plank table
Wilkins: Now hold that picture in your mind. Three years later, in 1797, the old General retires from the presidency, goes home to Mount Vernon, and his farm manager, a canny Scotsman named James Anderson who'd learned his trade in the old country, says to him, General, you've got a gristmill, you've got grain, you've got water. You'd make a fortune in whiskey. And the man who marched thirteen thousand bayonets against whiskey says, well now, tell me more. I call that a conversion worthy of a camp meeting. He marched over the mountains to stamp out whiskey and went home to make more of it than the whole rebellion put together.
Wilkins: They started with two stills that spring of 1797. Before long they had five copper pot stills going in a stone still-house about seventy-five feet long and thirty wide, set right beside his gristmill on Dogue Run, so the grain went from millstone to mash tub without a wagon in between. That's the cleverest thing about it, and I've studied it like a man studies his neighbor's wife: grain, water, mill, and still, all in one place.
Wilkins: And the recipe, which you distillers call the mash bill, was near sixty parts rye, thirty-five parts corn, and five parts malted barley. Rye for the pepper and the bite, corn for the sweetness and the body, barley malt to do the converting. That's a Potomac rye, friends, and a good one.
Wilkins: In 1799 that still-house turned out nearly eleven thousand gallons of whiskey and cleared him about seven thousand five hundred dollars, which made it one of the biggest distilleries in America. Most of it went out white and unaged, common whiskey for the Alexandria merchants, but some was run again to make it finer, and some was flavored, cinnamon among other things, for the gentry who liked their liquor to taste like a pie. They made brandy too, from apples, peaches, and persimmons. Persimmon brandy! I've eaten a green persimmon, and it turned my mouth inside out like a woolen sock. I'd have paid to watch the first man who tried to ferment one.
Wilkins: And he paid his excise. Washington paid the federal tax on his own stills like an honest man, and that's the last time anybody in this trade did it on purpose. The only thing the Father of His Country could not do was tell a lie, and the only thing I can't do is tell the truth to a deputy, so between the two of us we make one honest man.
♪ Fiddle drops to a single low sustained note
Wilkins: Now I'll tell you the part the Fourth of July speechmakers leave out, and I'll tell it straight, because I respect the craft and the men who did it. The hands that ran those stills were not Washington's. The plantation records name six enslaved men who worked that distillery: Hanson, Peter, Nat, Daniel, James, and Timothy, under Anderson's son John. They hauled the grain, stoked the fires, mashed the tubs, and made the cuts in heat that would cook a ham. They got no wages and no glory. Any man who tells this story and leaves them out is lying by omission, and I've told plenty of lies on this program, but I won't tell that one. Those six made that whiskey, and they were master hands at it.
Wilkins: Now the sad finish. December of 1799, the General catches a putrid throat after riding out in the sleet. His physicians gather round and do what physicians did back then, which is bleed him. They bled him like a Thanksgiving hog, pint after pint, a good share of all the blood in his body, to cure a sore throat. Speaking as a medical man of a kind, that's like putting out a chimney fire by burning down the house. He was dead in a day. His best year at the still was his last year above ground.
Wilkins: The distillery passed out of his hands, and around 1814 the building burned. Nothing left but stone and ashes. And in 1858 a South Carolina lady named Ann Pamela Cunningham and her Mount Vernon Ladies' Association bought the old estate to save it from rot, and all through this late war, Blue and Gray alike walked those grounds with their weapons laid aside. Neutral ground, they called it. I'd like to think a few of those soldiers stood where the still-house used to be and took off their hats. Then likely went looking for a drink.
♪ Fiddle resolves, fades
♦ Barnaby grunts, chain rattles
Wilkins: Barnaby agrees. Barnaby always agrees when there's a mention of a drink.
♪ Rollicking banjo breakdown, then under
Wilkins: Segment the second. Legends, Outlaws, and Runners. And since we're talking about the General, let me tell you about the last man who tried to sell me George Washington's whiskey.
Wilkins: This was last October. A Concord huckster comes rattling up the turnpike in a painted wagon, a long-jawed fellow with a waxed mustache and a waistcoat the color of a bad liver. He's got a dozen stoneware jugs with paper labels pasted on, done up in a fine copperplate hand: General Washington's Private Rye, Laid Down at Mount Vernon. Five dollars the jug. He swears they came up from a Virginia cellar, smuggled out under the noses of Mr. Lincoln's army.
Wilkins: Well, I pull the cob and take a nip. Friends, it tasted like a cobbler had soaked his boots in turpentine, chewed tobacco over it, and then said a prayer for it to be drinkable. There wasn't a grain of rye in it. It was burnt sugar, pepper sauce, and spite. I tell him so, and he gets indignant, and then he tries to pay for a jar of my own honest goods with a Confederate ten-dollar note. A Confederate note! In Pittsfield! In 1865! I'd sooner take payment in Barnaby's leavings, which at least you can spread on a garden.
♦ Distant chain clink
Wilkins: Now the huckster, being a man of poor judgment, decides to leave without paying and takes his shortcut past the still-house window. Right past Barnaby. Barnaby had been asleep in the sun like a pile of wet coats, and he comes off the ground in one motion, faster than you'd credit a creature that size, and gets that man by the seat of his trousers. There was a noise, friends, like a sail ripping off a Portsmouth schooner in a gale. Barnaby shook his head the way a dog shakes a rat, and the huckster went one way and his trouser seat went the other, along with a fair patch of the hide underneath. He hollered in a key I've only heard from a man getting a lower molar pulled without whiskey. He left Pittsfield running down Route 28 showing more moon than a Methodist ever shows on purpose, leaving a trail of buttons and a few red drops all the way to the Barnstead line.
Wilkins: Barnaby chewed that wool for an hour like it was saltwater taffy and then threw it up on my boots, which I took as a fair review of the man's character. And in the wagon the fellow left behind, I found a brass slug he'd been passing off as a silver dollar. So I took it to my anvil, set my punch, and struck it.
♦ steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., right across the counterfeit eagle. It's nailed over my still-house door this minute as a warning to frauds. If you're coming to Fort Wilkins to lie to me, at least have the decency to do it with real money.
♪ Banjo flourish
Wilkins: Now. I've got a guest tonight from down in the Carolina mountains, a man who knows rye, knows roads, and knows deputies the way I know molars, which is by how they come loose. He ran whiskey out of Wilkes County, North Carolina, and if you put him on a mountain road and a sheriff behind him, you'd best not blink. Welcome to Fort Wilkins, Mr. Junior Vance.
Junior: Thank you, Doctor. Mighty fine of you to have me. I'll say this, I've been in a lot of rough places, but I never sat in a cabin with a bear breathing on the window glass. He's fogging it up like a widow at a funeral.
Wilkins: He's smelling you, Junior. You smell like Carolina rye and road dust, and to Barnaby that's the scent of supper with a story attached. Now. We've been talking about General Washington's rye. Your people down in the Brushy Mountains, did they have their own tales about the General's whiskey?
Junior: Lord, did they. My great-uncle Ottis kept a stoneware jug on the fireboard, brown glaze, cracked handle, and he swore on his mama's grave that jug had come off a flatboat straight from Mount Vernon with the General's own rye in it. Said his granddaddy got it trading hides on the Yadkin. Every Fourth of July the whole holler would come up to Ottis's porch, he'd pour a thimble apiece out of that jug, which he kept topping up, mind you, and we'd all stand and toast George Washington. Grown men cried. One year a fellow fired a squirrel rifle off in celebration and shot the bell off Ottis's dinner triangle.
Wilkins: A sacred relic. Like a splinter of the true cross, only you can drink it.
Junior: That's how Ottis treated it. Well, Ottis passed, God rest him, and we're cleaning out the house, and my cousin Wade turns that jug upside down. Right there on the bottom is a North Carolina potter's stamp with the year 1858 pressed in it.
Wilkins: Eighteen fifty-eight! The General had been in the ground fifty-nine years!
Junior: Fifty-nine years. Either that jug's a fraud or it's the most patriotic miracle ever to come out of Carolina. Wade said maybe the General's ghost had it made special. My aunt said Ottis had been filling it out of the creek still for thirty years and making us salute his own liquor. Which is the most Ottis thing I ever heard, and I respect him more for it.
Wilkins: A man who can make a whole holler stand and salute his moonshine is a statesman, Junior. He belonged in Congress, and that's the worst thing I can say about any man.
♦ Barnaby snorts
Wilkins: Now tell me about rye itself, because the General's mash was mostly rye, and rye is a contrary grain. Did you ever run a pure rye mash?
Junior: Once. Exactly once, Doctor. I was a young buck, thought I knew everything. Everybody told me rye's sticky, rye's foamy, cut it with corn. And I said, well, George Washington made rye, I'll make rye. Set up four barrels in a cold holler under a rock ledge, all rye, filled clean to the brim like a fool.
Wilkins: Filled to the brim. I can hear the disaster coming like a deputy's horse.
Junior: Come back three days later and it looked like every barrel had gone mad dog. Foam boiling up out the top, sliding down the sides like the froth off a hydrophobic hound, thick as wallpaper paste, piled up on the ground in drifts. And sitting square in the middle of one of those drifts was a possum. He'd come for a lick of the sweet and got glued in so tight all you could see was his eyes and his pink nose, wiggling. He looked like a deacon fell into the communion jelly.
Wilkins: Did you rescue the creature?
Junior: Took me and a stick and a bucket of creek water twenty minutes to work him loose. Foam stuck to him like tar. He went off up the holler stiff as a board, every hair stood straight out, and he hissed at me over his shoulder like I'd done it to him personal. Lost near half the mash on the ground. After that I cut my rye with corn every time and left a good hand's width at the top of the barrel. Rye'll teach you humility, Doctor. That and a possum.
Wilkins: The General's boys knew it too. That's why they put corn in with it. Even the Father of His Country bowed to a foaming barrel. Now, Junior, you hauled whiskey under the noses of the law. Did you ever hide a load in some holy fashion?
Junior: Doctor, I hauled a load in the Bible. Near enough anyhow. There was a little church outside Hickory needed new hymnals, and a preacher there who wasn't against a nip for his rheumatism. So we made a deal. I'd haul his hymnals up from the depot, and about a third of those hymnals had the middles cut out with a pocketknife and a pint jar of rye set down inside, snug as a baby in a cradle. Preacher rode with me in his collar.
Wilkins: A preacher riding shotgun on a whiskey load. I've never been so proud of the cloth.
Junior: Well, we come round a bend and there's deputies across the road with a lantern. Deputy leans in, sniffs, and says, what you hauling, son? I say hymnals. He says, show me. Grabs one off the top and opens it, and Doctor, that was one of the hollow ones. There's a pint of rye staring up at him from the Book of Psalms.
Wilkins: Lord have mercy.
Junior: The deputy's looking at the jar. I'm looking at the deputy. And that preacher leans over cool as spring water, puts his finger on the page, and reads out loud, Psalm one hundred and four, verse fifteen: and wine that maketh glad the heart of man. Then he says, brother, this is a sacramental shipment, and if you seize it you'll answer to a higher sheriff than yours. That deputy shut the book soft as a coffin lid, handed it back, and said, you all have a blessed evening.
Wilkins: He opened a hymnal looking for sin and found a pint, which is the most honest thing anybody ever found in a church in Catawba County.
Junior: The preacher kept that hymnal till the day he died. Pint and all. Said it was the only book that ever saved a soul and a load in the same night.
Wilkins: Last question, Junior, and it's about the drinking end. How did your people tell a good rye from a bad one, before any fancy proofing glass?
Junior: My granny. Mean as a snake, bless her, and she had a nose like a bloodhound. She'd take one drop of rye on her palm, rub her hands together quick like she was warming them, cup them over her nose, and take a long draw. If it was good, she'd say it smelled like black pepper and fresh bread out the oven. If it smelled like glue or wet dog, she'd walk out the door without a word and pour the whole jar on the ant hill. Them ants were the drunkest ants in Wilkes County. Some years you could watch them walk in circles.
Wilkins: Black pepper and fresh bread. That's rye talking, Junior, and that's the very smell the General's still-house would've had. Your granny had the nose of a master distiller, and I suspect the temper of one.
Junior: She'd have liked you, Doctor. She'd have hated your bear.
Wilkins: Everybody hates my bear, Junior. That's his whole job. Junior Vance, of Wilkes County, North Carolina, ladies and gentlemen. Stay put, Junior, we'll pour you a cup after the business.
♦ Barnaby grunts long and low
♪ Banjo flourish to break
♪ Lively patent-medicine show calliope and banjo, under
Announcer: Step right up, friends, and lend me your ears! General Washington ran five copper stills on the Potomac, and he never once trusted his craft to cheap tin or junkyard metal. Neither should you! If you appreciate authentic American craftsmanship, look no further than Moonshine Stills, proud home of the Flame-Flow Still, protected under United States Patent 10,561,960! It's engineered from heavy-gauge, high-purity electrolytic copper, refined bright and clean, with precision CNC-machined brass unions that fit tight and true. The Flame-Flow is designed to maximize convective circulation, so the heat rolls evenly through the pot and gives you unmatched purity for essential oils, herbal tinctures, and traditional distillation demonstrations. Your whole Flame-Flow flagship setup costs just eight hundred ninety-nine dollars! Order yours today at moonshinestill.com. That's moonshinestill.com, or go straight to moonshinestill.com/products/flame-flow-copper-still! Or come see it gleam with your own eyes at the Fort Wilkins Showroom on Route 28 in Pittsfield, New Hampshire. Don't wait, friends. Go to moonshinestill.com today!
♪ Calliope flourish, out
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
♪ Low, steady fiddle drone with the soft ring of a hammer on copper
Wilkins: Segment the third. Copper and the Craft. Now let's step into the Mount Vernon still-house in our minds and make a rye the way a Potomac distiller would, explained the way an alchemist explains it, which is with more swearing than a schoolmaster would allow. A reminder before we light the fire: making spirits to drink without a federal permit breaks the law of these United States, and everything I tell you on this program is history and education, nothing more. The General had his permit. You get yours.
Wilkins: Step one, the grain. You grind your rye, corn, and barley malt coarse, about like cornmeal for johnnycake. The General's boys did it at the mill next door. Step two, you cook the corn first, because corn is the stubborn one. You stir it into water near the boil and keep it there till it goes thick and smooth as hasty pudding. Then you let it cool some and stir in the rye, which doesn't want as much heat. Mind me here: rye mash is thick and sticky as a horse's lip. Stir it like your soul depends on it, or it'll scorch to the bottom and you'll have whiskey that tastes like a burnt church.
Wilkins: Step three, the malt. That five parts of barley malt is the alchemy in the whole affair. Malt carries what the learned men call diastase, the ferment that turns starch into sugar. But it's delicate as a parson's reputation, and if you throw it into mash that's too hot you scald it dead and nothing converts. So you let the mash cool till you can hold a finger in it for a moment without hollering, then stir in the malt and let it rest. The mash goes from thick paste to sweet, thin gruel right under your paddle, and if that isn't transmutation I've never seen it.
Wilkins: Step four, you cool it further, down to about blood-warm, and only then pitch in your yeast. Many an old hand adds backset too, which is the soured spent liquor from the last run. That's what sour mash means. It sours the new batch so the bad bacteria can't take hold, and it keeps one batch tasting like the last. Then you leave it in open tubs, and you remember Junior's possum. Rye foams like a mad dog. Leave headroom. In three to five days the bubbling quiets, it tastes sour and dry, and you've got a wash of a few parts in the hundred of spirit. It's a weak, sour beer, and no man alive would drink it for pleasure, though I have seen Barnaby try.
♦ Copper lid clanks, a fire crackles under a pot
Wilkins: Step five, the stilling. Into the copper pot goes the wash. You run it once, slow, to strip out the spirit, and what comes over is low wines, cloudy and rough. Then you run the low wines again, slower still, and this second run is where a distiller earns his keep. Here come the cuts, and I'll ask you to listen like your eyesight depends on it, because it does.
Wilkins: First off the worm come the foreshots, a small dribble at the start that smells sharp and solvent, like a glue pot left on a hot stove. That's where the methanol rides, the wood spirit that blinds and kills. Every drop of it goes on the ground or in the lamp. Not in a cup, not in your liniment, not in a sick man's mouth. Next come the heads, still harsh, smelling of a shoemaker's paste and green apples, and you set them aside, never to drink. Then the hearts, friends, the hearts! Clean and sweet, and on a rye that's the black pepper and fresh bread Junior's granny went sniffing for. That's your whiskey. And last the tails, oily and dull, smelling of wet dog and old porridge, which you save to run again another day. A man's still isn't judged by the size of his pot but by whether he can keep the fire low and steady all night, and that's advice for more than distilling.
Wilkins: Now why copper? Because it's an active metal. The sulfur stinks that rise off a sour mash, the rotten-egg reek and the boiled-cabbage fug, take hold of the copper as the vapor goes by and stay behind as a dark film on the metal. Iron or tin won't do that work. That's why Anderson built five copper pots and not five iron kettles, and it's why you scrub your copper bright after every run, so it keeps doing its job.
Wilkins: And a word on fire, because the General's stills were fired straight with cordwood and that is a dangerous trade. Spirit vapor is heavier than air. It creeps along the floor like a snake looking for a firebox, and when it finds one, whoomp, there goes your eyebrows, your still-house, and possibly your mortal soul. Never leave a running still alone, not to fetch a pipe, not to visit the outhouse, not for the President himself. Keep the fire low and steady. Never clamp a still shut tight, because a sealed pot under fire builds pressure till it bursts like a Rebel shell. Keep a bucket of sand and a wet wool blanket close, because water splashed on burning spirit can carry the flames across the floor, and sand and wool smother them. I've seen a still-house in Epsom go up in the time it takes to say the Lord's Prayer, and the owner only got as far as Thy kingdom come.
♪ Fiddle drone resolves
♦ Drip into jar
♪ Jaunty jaw harp and banjo, under
Wilkins: Segment the fourth. Myths, Slang, and the Listener Line. We've got a recorded call on the cylinder from the Carolina mountains, Junior's own country. Let's hear it.
♦ Cylinder needle drops, hiss and pop of a recorded message
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 ends with a click
Wilkins: That's Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina. Junior, you know the Millers?
Junior: Doctor, every holler in Wilkes has got a Miller and a man named Rabbit. Usually he earned it running from something.
Wilkins: Well, Rabbit, here's the plain truth, so set down and pour yourself a cup. Your uncle is half right in the way a stopped clock is half right, which is twice a day and by accident. Let's take the ashes first. Hickory ash is mostly potash, and potash is what your granny leached for lye to make soap. It's an alkali. Throw it in the thump keg and it might knock down a little of the sour acid that rides up out of a mash, and it'll surely make your liquor taste like you licked the washtub. But it does nothing at all about the methanol and the harsh heads. Those boil off early and come over first whatever you've thrown in the keg. The only cure in all creation is to catch the foreshots and heads in a separate jar and throw them away.
♦ steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: That's one coin for the truth. Ash in a thump keg is like a hat on a hog, Rabbit. It changes how it looks and does nothing about what's underneath.
Wilkins: Now the red oak, and this is a good one. You know why no cooper worth his adze makes a whiskey barrel from red oak? Because red oak leaks. Its pores run open end to end. You can take a stick of red oak, put one end in a bucket of soapsuds, blow in the other, and bubbles come out the bottom. White oak has its pores plugged up natural with little growths the wood men call tyloses, so it holds liquor tight. Red oak in a whiskey barrel holds liquor about as well as a Concord alderman holds a secret.
Wilkins: So red oak shavings in a thump keg will put tannin into your spirit, a bitter pucker and a brownish color, and I'll wager that's where the notion came from. A man tastes something darker and rougher and says, well, it's been cleaned, it tastes like medicine. It isn't cleaned, Rabbit. It's disguised. It's a bad run wearing its Sunday coat. You could pour the darkest red-oak liquor in Carolina and every drop of methanol you failed to cut would still be in there. Make your cuts honest, and you won't need any swamp medicine at all.
♦ steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: That's two coins. Rabbit Miller of Wilkesboro, you get a counterstamped copper cent from my anvil, G. G. WILKINS PITTSFIELD N.H., and a hearty shout from Fort Wilkins to you and your uncle. Tell him I respect any man who'd throw half the woodpile in his thump keg trying to do right. He's just a few jars of heads short of doing it properly.
Junior: Rabbit, you tell your uncle Junior Vance said the Doctor's right, and if he gives you any lip, come see me.
♪ Jaw harp sting
Wilkins: Now one more myth, and this one sticks in my craw as a tooth-puller. Every schoolchild in this land will swear to you George Washington had wooden teeth. Wooden teeth! Friends, the General never had a wooden tooth in his head. If he had, a Mount Vernon woodpecker would have ended the Revolution.
♦ steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: The truth's stranger. By the time he swore the oath in 1789 he had one natural tooth left in his mouth, one lonely stump. His dentures were made by his dentist, John Greenwood, from human teeth, cow teeth, and hippopotamus ivory, set in a lead base and sprung with metal springs so they'd snap shut. Hippopotamus! I've pulled teeth from men so ugly the teeth were glad to leave, but I never once pulled a hippopotamus. Those plates were so heavy and so springy that he had to clamp his jaw shut to keep them in, which is why he looks so sour in every portrait. He wasn't stern, friends. He was holding his teeth in.
Wilkins: And there's another tooth story, a darker one. In 1784 the General's own ledger records a payment to enslaved people for nine teeth, most likely pulled to go into his dentures. I've pulled teeth by the thousand and never once from a man who wasn't free to say no. Think on that the next time somebody tells you a cherry tree story.
♦ steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: The wood stain on those old dentures was just age and port wine soaking into the ivory cracks. The General liked his Madeira, and his teeth showed it. So did mine, before Barnaby knocked two out in an argument over a mutton bone.
♦ Barnaby grunts, offended
Wilkins: He knows what he did. The sheriff of Merrimack County has more teeth than brains, and he still comes up short on teeth.
♪ Banjo flourish
♪ Banjo vamp under
Announcer: One more quick word, friends! Make your copper honest like the General's! The Flame-Flow Still, United States Patent 10,561,960, heavy-gauge pure electrolytic copper, is waiting for you at moonshinestill.com. That's moonshinestill.com, or the Fort Wilkins showroom on Route 28 in Pittsfield!
♪ Banjo flourish, out
♪ Theme returns, soft and slow, parlor banjo and mountain fiddle with antique warmth
Wilkins: That's the night's pour, friends. We marched with the General against the Whiskey Rebels and stood in his still-house on Dogue Run. We gave honor to Hanson, Peter, Nat, Daniel, James, and Timothy, who made that rye with their own hands. We learned from Junior Vance that a foaming rye will glue a possum and a hymnal can save a load. And we told Rabbit Miller's uncle that ash and red oak make a whiskey look cured without curing it. My thanks to you, Junior.
Junior: Thank you, Doctor. And thank Barnaby for not eating me. I'd tip my hat to him, but I'm not getting that close.
Wilkins: Wise man. Now, if you want to learn the craft proper, the history, the copper, the mash, and above all the honest cuts that keep a man's eyes in his head, enroll in the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. I'll teach you to read the run by nose and eye, keep your fire safe, and respect the law while you're at it, which the General did and I mostly didn't. Inquire at the Fort Wilkins showroom on Route 28 in Pittsfield. Bring your curiosity and leave your hickory ash at home.
♦ Barnaby shifts, chain clinks softly
Wilkins: Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.
♦ Bear grunt and final drip into jar
♪ Theme swells and fades into wax cylinder crackle
♦ Wax cylinder surface crackle, fading to silence