The Women Behind the Stills
Long before any bearded moonshiner fired up a copper still, women invented the tools of distilling. Mary the Prophetess came up with the water bath in Alexandria, stillroom housewives ran their limbecks, and Helen Cumming of Speyside raised a red flag so her neighbors could hide their whisky stills from the excisemen. From his 1860s log cabin in Pittsfield, New Hampshire, Dr. G. G. Wilkins honors the women of distilling history, while Barnaby the pet bear tears the trousers off a revenue man.
In this episode
- Mary the Prophetess of Alexandria, the tribikos still, and the bain-marie water bath
- Why a water bath keeps distilling heat gentle and stops mash from scorching
- Stillroom housewives, limbeck stills, and the history of the word alembic
- Martha Washington's family recipe book of distilled waters and cordials
- Medieval alewives and brewsters, the women who brewed England's ale
- Helen Cumming of Cardow, Speyside, and the red-flag warning against excisemen
- Coppersmith Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister on the women who taught him
- Call-in: hickory ashes and red oak in the thump keg, and the blue-flame test debunked
Dr. G. G. Wilkins honors the women who made spirits over the centuries: Mary the Prophetess of Alexandria and her water bath, the stillroom housewives with their limbecks, the alewives and brewsters, and Helen Cumming of Speyside, who waved a red flag to warn her neighbors when the excisemen came. Master coppersmith Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister tells new stories about the women who taught him, hired him, and caught his mistakes, and Wilkins tells of Barnaby tearing the trousers off a revenue man. In the call-in segment Wilkins answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, NC, about hickory ashes and red oak shavings in the thump keg, then strikes a coin on his anvil to knock down 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, quit rattling that chain like a Baptist rattling a collection tin! Settle your hairy carcass down. Nobody is coming up the turnpike tonight except the moths and the Widow Bickford's goat, and you already ate half the goat. Lie down. Good bear. Ugly bear. Lie down.
♦ Bear grumbles, chain settles with a heavy clank
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth, swelling then settling under
Wilkins: Good evening, neighbors, sinners, and the four or five honest people listening. This is Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, coming to you from the log walls of Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, in Pittsfield, Merrimack County, New Hampshire. I am your host, Dr. George G. Wilkins: dentist, blacksmith, inventor, coin-puncher, tooth-yanker, still-tender, twice a guest of the Merrimack County sheriff, and once, regrettably, the godfather of a mule. Tonight's subject is a long overdue debt. We are talking about The Women Behind the Stills. Every woman in history who ever made a decent spirit had to stand behind some fool man who took the credit, and in this house, that fool is me. Tonight we pay it back with interest.
♪ Theme flourishes and fades
Announcer: A quick word, friends! Is your still held together with flour paste and hope? Seal it right with Heavy-Duty Sanitary Tri-Clamp Ferrules and Gaskets from Moonshine Stills, only thirty-four dollars and ninety-five cents! See them at moonshinestill.com. That is moonshinestill.com!
♦ Wax crackle, fire popping in a stove
♪ Low fiddle sting, a slow minor reel
Wilkins: Segment the first. History. Sit close to the stove.
Wilkins: Now, when most men picture a stillhouse, they picture some big-bearded jackass like myself, sleeves rolled, stinking of mash and pipe smoke, fighting with a copper pot. But let me tell you where this craft was born, because it was not born with a beard. Around the year three hundred after Our Lord, a Greek alchemist from Egypt named Zosimos of Panopolis wrote down the work of a woman who came before him: Mary the Prophetess of Alexandria, called by some Maria the Jewess. Zosimos credits her with the tribikos, a still with three copper arms that ran the vapor off into three separate flasks, and with the water bath. That is a pot of hot water with your working vessel set inside it, so it heats gently and never scorches. The French still call it the bain-marie, Mary's bath, and every cook in Paris uses it for custard without knowing they are honoring an alchemist. Mary of Alexandria invented the water bath three hundred years after Christ, and I have met men in Barnstead who still have not found one.
Wilkins: And why does the water bath matter? Because water, at our elevation and near enough, will not get hotter than its own boiling, about two hundred and twelve degrees by Mr. Fahrenheit's scale, no matter how much you curse it or how many logs you throw on. Put your flowers, herbs, or tender mash in a vessel sitting in that bath, and you cannot burn them. A gentle, steady fire is the first secret of all good distilling, and a woman wrote it down before Rome had finished falling over.
Wilkins: Jump ahead to old England and the colonies, the sixteen and seventeen hundreds. Every proper house of any size had a stillroom, and who kept it? The lady of the house, or her maid. She ran a small still called a limbeck. That is just alembic worn down by country mouths, and alembic came into our language by way of the Arabic al-anbiq, which came from an older Greek word for a cup. In that room she made rose water for the face, mint water for the gut, cordial waters for the heart, and a good deal more for the long winter evenings, and she wrote every method down in her own hand in a stillroom book, or receipt book. A stillroom wife could distill rose water, set a bone, and keep accounts, while her husband's main skill was falling asleep with his boots on.
Wilkins: Here is one for the patriots. Mrs. Martha Washington, the General's own lady, owned a family recipe book in manuscript, handed down through the women of her family, full of distilled waters and cordials. In seventeen and ninety-nine she gave it to her granddaughter Nelly Custis. So the Father of Our Country had in his house a book of distilling written and kept by women, and I am confident he did not write a word of it. He was busy crossing rivers in the cold while the ladies sat by the fire and did the useful work.
Wilkins: Go back further still, to old England in the Middle Ages, and the ale was brewed by women. Alewives, they called them, and brewsters, and brewster was the feminine form of brewer, the way spinster was a woman who spins. The good wives of England brewed the ale and the men drank it and called it their idea, which is the whole history of government in one sentence.
♦ Bear snorts outside, chain drags
Wilkins: Yes, Barnaby, I am getting to the Scots. He likes the Scots, they smell of oats. In the Speyside country of Scotland, in the early years of this century, a farm wife named Helen Cumming and her husband John worked a farm called Cardow, and they made whisky. The excise men hunted Speyside the way a hound hunts a ham bone. Now, the old tale goes that whenever Helen saw the excise officers come over the hill, she ran a red flag up over the farm, and every still in the glen went into the bracken, under the hay, and down the well. And when the officers knocked on her door, she took them into her kitchen and fed them, and they sat full of scones and tea while the whole valley hid its copper. Helen Cumming fed the excisemen scones while her neighbors hid every still in the glen. That is the only time in history a tax collector was ever paid in pastry to look the other way, and it worked better than gold. Their place was licensed in eighteen and twenty-four, and they say she lived a good long time. I raise my jar to her.
♦ Glass jar lifted, a small clink
Wilkins: And here in New England, the women never quit the trade, they only changed hats. Many a widow in this country got the tavern license or the retailer's license after her husband died, because the selectmen would sooner license a widow than pay to feed her out of the town poor fund. She kept his business going, and very often kept it going better than he had, since she had the habit of being sober during business hours. My own Aunt Thankful, on my mother's side, kept a tavern near the Suncook. She could take a man's tooth out, put his shoulder back in, and brandy his pride all before breakfast, and her late husband, God rest him, was afraid of her until the day he died and some time after. It was Aunt Thankful who first showed me that you set your worm tub in the shade so the water stays cold. Every trick I have that is worth anything, I got from a woman, and every trick I have that is worth nothing, I made up myself.
♪ Fiddle reel swells and fades
♦ Wax crackle, door creak, boots on a plank floor
Wilkins: Segment the second. Outlaws, runners, and the ladies who outwitted them all.
Wilkins: The Rebellion we just come out of was a great war for many things, and one of them was smuggling. On both sides, there were women caught carrying quinine, morphine, letters, and worse through the picket lines, sewn into false linings and stashed under hoop skirts, because what young private wants to be the man to lift the hem of a colonel's widow? A hoop skirt in 1863 could hide two pints of whiskey, a ham, a Bible, and a small Episcopalian, and the provost guard never once got up the nerve to look.
Wilkins: Here in Merrimack County we had our share of that. And I will say a word about a certain lawman's missus, whom I shall not name for the sake of my liver and his pistol. The sheriff arrested me twice and his missus bought cordial from me three times, so the household is still one up on me. She called it tonic for her nerves. Having met her husband, I believe her.
♦ Bear grunt, louder, then a low growl
Wilkins: And yes, Barnaby has his own chapter, and since he is grumbling I will tell it. Last October a revenue man come up Route 28 on a hired gray mare, with a brand-new wool frock coat, brass buttons, and a face like a boiled parsnip. He had his papers out and his nose in the air, and he did not see the chain. He stepped over it. Neighbors, you do not step over Barnaby's chain. Barnaby rose up off that woodpile like a black thundercloud with breakfast on its mind, took hold of the man's trouser seat in his jaws, and gave one long, thoughtful pull. I heard it from the forge. It was a sound like a wet shingle tearing off a barn roof in a nor'easter, slow, then all at once. Barnaby took hold of that revenue man's trouser seat and peeled it off with that sound, and the man ran a mile down Route 28 with his naked hindquarters shining like a harvest moon, his coattails flapping behind him like two crows fighting over a pie. The fellow was so white back there that two Pittsfield farmers set their almanacs by him and planted their turnips. He never touched his mare. She came home on her own and has been happy with me since. And Barnaby chewed that piece of government wool for three days and then threw up the buttons on my porch in the shape of a small eagle. I nailed them over the door for good luck. The government owes me for a mare, and I owe the government for a pair of trousers, and we have agreed in silence to call it even.
Wilkins: Now, I have a guest tonight, a man who knows more about copper than a penny knows about pockets. He hammers pots, swan necks, and everything else in the copper line here at the Fort Wilkins foundry, and his seams are tighter than a Concord banker's purse strings. Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Silas McAllister, called Hacksaw, though not to his face before supper. Silas, welcome to the fire.
♦ Chair scrapes, a heavy man sits, a jar is set down
Silas: Thank you, Doctor. I'll take the chair. Not the jar, not yet. I have a pot to planish in the morning.
Wilkins: A sober man on my program. Barnaby, look, it's a curiosity. Silas, tonight's subject is women behind the stills. Now you are a man who learned his trade at the anvil. Tell me true, was it all men who taught you?
Silas: No sir, and a fool would say so. The first person who ever told me my work was no good was a woman, and she was right.
Wilkins: That's how it goes with all of us. Tell it.
Silas: When I was a young apprentice, the Widow Lovejoy over in Gilmanton ordered a small copper pot with a water jacket, a water-bath still the way the old stillroom ladies made them, for her rose water and her peppermint water. I built it. Proud as a rooster. Brought it to her kitchen, she set it on the stove, ran the steam up, put her ear right down to the lid seam, and said, 'It hums.' I said, ma'am, it's tight. She said, 'It hums, Mr. McAllister. A tight seam is quiet. A humming seam is a seam thinking about leaking.' And she sent it back.
Wilkins: Sent it back! Did she pay the cartage?
Silas: She did not. I went over that seam, hammered it down, re-bedded it, and brought it back. She listened again. 'Still hums.' Back it went a second time. Third time I sat right down in her kitchen with my own ear on the lid and the steam up, and Doctor, I'll be damned if I didn't hear it. A little thin whistle, like a mosquito at a church window. One rivet not seated. I fixed it then and there, and she listened, and she nodded, and she gave me a slice of mince pie and the money. I have listened to every seam since. Never trusted my eye over my ear again.
Wilkins: That is the whole craft right there, folks. A woman with an ear can do better than a man with a hammer. If a woman sings a lullaby to a copper still, it is either a very fine still or a very long widowhood, but if she listens to one, mind what she says.
Silas: Funny you mention the lullaby, Doctor. I'll get to that.
Wilkins: Oh, he's got more. Hold on, Barnaby, the man's warming up. Who taught you your patterns? Cutting a swan neck is a black art.
Silas: My mother.
Wilkins: Your mother!
Silas: She was a dressmaker in town. When I first had to cut the cone for a swan neck, the tapered piece that rises off the pot, I made a mess of three good sheets of copper. Wasted near a week's pay. She watched me cuss at it a while and then got out her dressmaking paper and her big black shears. She said, 'Silas, this is a bonnet brim. It's a cone that's been cut off at the top. You lay it out from a center point, swing your two arcs with a string, and mark off the length of the edge.' And she cut me a paper pattern in about the time it takes to say it. Laid it on the copper, I traced it, I cut it, and it rolled up and met itself like it had been born that way.
Wilkins: A swan neck is cut just like a bonnet brim, Silas says, which explains why my stills look so fashionable and my hats leak.
Silas: I still have those shears. Use them on paper every time I lay out a new neck. Nobody else in the shop is allowed to touch them. A man borrowed them once to cut a harness strap and I didn't speak to him till Easter.
Wilkins: Quite right. A dressmaker's shears are a holy object. Cut paper with them and they'll last forever; cut leather with them and your mother's ghost will haunt you to the grave. Now, Silas, tell the people about Mrs. Drowne. I've heard pieces of this in the tavern and I want the whole sordid business on the record.
Silas: Mrs. Hepzibah Drowne kept a tavern up in Northwood. Particular woman. Hair pulled back so tight her eyebrows sat about an inch higher than God put them.
Wilkins: Ha! I know the look. She could open a jar with that face.
Silas: She ordered a pot from me. When I delivered it, she would not take it out to the shed. She had me fill it to the brim with well water, then she had her man hang it on a beam over her parlor, over her best rag rug, a braided one her grandmother made. And she said, 'Come back tomorrow at noon.'
Wilkins: Over the rug. That's a hanging judge.
Silas: I come back at noon. Pot's full, looks fine. She takes me by the elbow and points at the rug. One spot. About the size of a shilling. One drip, Doctor, all night long. Off a bottom seam where I'd hurried the last rivet.
Wilkins: What did she do?
Silas: She took the price of the rug cleaning, and some for her grief, right off my pay. And she was right to. I fixed the seam and hung it again myself, over my own floor, and it never dripped again. Since that day every pot that leaves this foundry hangs full of water overnight before it goes. We call it the Drowne test.
Wilkins: Mrs. Drowne charged Silas for one drip on her rug. I have had deputies drip on my rug for years and never got a cent from the county. Now. The lullaby. You promised the lullaby.
♦ Silas chuckles, a low rumble
Silas: There was a widow from Barnstead who came to the foundry a couple of springs back with her late husband's still. It had a dent in the shoulder big as a fist where he'd dropped it off a ledge, and she wanted it beat out and made right. Now, there were men on that road who'd have liked to know what she was carrying. So she'd laid the pot in a baby's cradle, a big old pine cradle on rockers, tucked a patchwork quilt around it, set a little knitted bonnet on top of the cap, and drove it all the way down in her wagon.
Wilkins: A bonnet. On a still.
Silas: And every time she passed a farmhouse, she rocked the cradle with one hand and sang 'Hush, my dear, lie still and slumber' good and loud. People waved at her. One woman ran out with a jar of preserves for the baby.
Wilkins: Ha! The poor still got a better welcome on that road than I ever did. Did you fix her dent?
Silas: Beat it out from the inside on the stake, annealed it, planished it smooth. She stood over me the whole time. When I was done she ran her palm over the shoulder, slow, like you'd feel a horse's leg, and said, 'Now he'd not know it.' Meaning her husband. Then she tucked the still back in the cradle and sang it all the way home.
Wilkins: Well, that's the sweetest thing ever said in this foundry, and I'll ruin it now so nobody gets weepy: I hope that still got a better night's sleep than I do, with Barnaby snoring like a sawmill under my window.
♦ Bear grunt, as if offended
Wilkins: Silas McAllister, thank you kindly. Stay by the stove, we'll want your opinion on the copper.
Silas: I'll stay. I'll take that jar now, Doctor. Half a finger.
Wilkins: Half a finger it is. Watch him, folks. A temperate man is like a bear on a chain: he's fine right up until he isn't.
♪ Banjo roll, bright and quick, then fades
♦ Wax crackle, a cash drawer bell
Announcer: Ladies and gentlemen, hear me! How many good runs have gone bad from one small leak? A wisp of vapor at the joint, a hiss you never heard, and your whole stillhouse fills with fumes that can catch fire! Never again trust a smear of flour paste or a hose clamp that slips. Moonshine Stills brings you Heavy-Duty Sanitary Tri-Clamp Ferrules and Gaskets, precision fittings in 304 stainless steel and copper that seat true and seal tight! Heavy-gauge ferrules, food-grade PTFE gaskets that will not taint your spirit, and quick-release stainless wing clamps that open and close with one twist of the hand. Pressure-tested and precision-milled to stay airtight for a lifetime! They match perfectly with heavy-gauge pure electrolytic copper stills hammered right here at Fort Wilkins. Only thirty-four dollars and ninety-five cents! Visit the showroom at Fort Wilkins on Route 28 in Pittsfield, New Hampshire, or go to moonshinestill.com/products/tri-clamp-fittings. Once more, friends: moonshinestill.com/products/tri-clamp-fittings. Shop Hardware at moonshinestill.com, and stop that leak today!
♪ Brass sting, quick parlor-piano flourish
♦ Wax crackle, coals shifting, a slow drip into a jar
Wilkins: Segment the third. Copper and the craft. Now, before a word of method: making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against United States law. This program is for history and education only. I am telling you how the old women did it so you will understand what they knew, not so you can blow up your woodshed and blame me at the inquest.
Wilkins: Let's walk it through the way a stillroom wife might, start to finish. First, the wash. Before anything sees a still, it is fermented. Grain cooked and cooled, or fruit crushed, or honey and water, mixed with yeast and left in a clean vessel in a warm room till it bubbles itself out, and it's a weak beer or wine of a few parts in a hundred spirit. Keep that room aired, because the fermenting gives off a gas that will smother a man with no warning at all.
Wilkins: Second, the heat. And here we bow to Mary of Alexandria. A low, steady fire. The ladies of the stillroom used the water bath for their flower waters, so nothing ever scorched, and a scorched charge is a ruined charge that tastes like the inside of a burnt boot. For grain you need a direct fire, but you keep it low and you stir the mash so it doesn't stick and burn on the bottom. Hot and fast makes bad spirit and bad funerals.
Wilkins: Third, the copper. Silas, tell them where the copper earns its keep.
Silas: In the vapor path, Doctor. The sulfur stink comes up with the vapor, and the copper takes it out where the hot vapor touches bright metal, mostly in the helmet, the neck, and the line arm. That's why I'll argue a man into his grave about copper in the top of the still. A copper pot with a cheap neck is a fine coat with no buttons.
Wilkins: And bright is the word. Clean it after every run. Mrs. Drowne would have it no other way.
Silas: And no lead anywhere. No lead solder, no old salvaged pipe. Silver solder or a good tight mechanical joint.
Wilkins: Fourth, the run itself, and listen close, because this is where people die. The first spirit to come off the worm is the foreshots. You catch it in a separate vessel and you throw it out. It is not for drinking, not for tasting, not for your mother-in-law, not even for the revenue man. It carries the methanol, the wood spirit, that blinds and kills. After the foreshots come the heads, sharp and solvent-smelling like a varnish pot, and you set those aside too. Then come the hearts, sweet and clean, and that is the good spirit. Last come the tails, oily and dull, smelling of wet dog and old dishwater, and those you set aside to run again another day. The old stillroom wives changed their receiving glasses by nose and by patience, many small jars in a row, and never by greed. Greed is what makes a man keep the heads.
Wilkins: Fifth, the fire, again, because I am a bore about it. Alcohol vapor catches fire faster than gossip in a Pittsfield sewing circle. Keep your joints tight, give yourself plenty of fresh air, never leave a running still unwatched, and don't let open flame get near where vapor can gather. The Widow Lovejoy's ear on that humming seam was no fussiness. It was the difference between rose water and a funeral.
Wilkins: Sixth, and last, scour your copper when the run is done. Rinse, scrub, dry. A stillroom wife would no more leave her limbeck dirty than leave her baby in the snow, and a Barnstead widow would sing it a lullaby.
♦ Coal pops, distant bear yawn
♪ Slow fiddle air, bittersweet, fades under
Wilkins: Segment the fourth. Myths, slang, and the call-in line. Silas, hand me that tape cylinder there, careful, it is wax, not a cucumber.
♦ Wax cylinder being set on a machine, crank winding, hiss
Wilkins: This one comes down from the Carolina hills. Let's hear him.
♦ Phonograph playback, thin and distant, surface hiss
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?
♦ Playback ends, crank winds down
Wilkins: Cletus Rabbit Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina! Rabbit, I salute you and your uncle both, and I mean to give you something new to argue about at supper.
Wilkins: Let's take the red oak first. Ask any cooper in Merrimack County what he builds a whiskey barrel out of and he'll say white oak. Why? Because the pores in white oak are stopped up by little growths the wood makes, so it holds liquid tight. Red oak hasn't got them. Red oak is so open in the grain that you can put one end of a stick in your mouth and blow pipe smoke out the other. I've seen it done at the Pittsfield fair for a wager. Rabbit, your uncle's red oak leaks worse than a Concord alderman after his third glass of punch. Now, what do oak shavings do in spirit? They'll color it some and lend it tannin and a woody taste, the way a barrel does, given time. That's flavor, not medicine. They don't take out the methanol and they don't make a bad cut good.
Wilkins: Now the hickory ash. Hardwood ash is full of potash, and this country used to send shiploads of potash and pearlash to England from New England asheries. Soak ash in water and you get lye. Lye is what my Aunt Thankful used to make soap. Hickory ash in the thump keg makes lye water, and lye is what we use to make soap. Drinking it will not save your soul, but it will clean your liver the way a scrub brush cleans a hog. It is caustic, and it has no business near anything a man drinks.
Silas: I'll add one thing, Doctor. A thump keg redistills the vapor, it doesn't strain it. The foreshots and heads come out first, ash or no ash, oak or no oak. Your nose and your jars are the only things that separate them.
Wilkins: There you have it from the man with the shears. Rabbit, your uncle isn't a liar, he's a flavorer. Tell him the shavings belong in a barrel and the ashes belong in a soap kettle, and the heads belong on the ground behind the woodshed where nobody, man nor bear, can lap them up. God bless Wilkesboro, God bless the Miller family, and tell your uncle he owes the Moonshine program a jar of his best hearts for the education.
♦ Wilkins sets a coin on the anvil, lifts a hammer
Wilkins: And now, a myth to strike down, and I'll strike a coin on it. The blue flame. Every jug-trader from here to Tennessee will pour a spoonful, put a match to it, and if it burns blue he says, 'Pure and safe, friend!' Rubbish.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: The wood spirit, the methanol, the poison you are afraid of, burns with a pale blue flame, near the same as good spirit. A spoonful of foreshots burns blue and pretty as a sapphire and will blind you all the same. Burning a spoonful of liquor to check for poison is like asking a horse thief whether he is honest. He will burn a pretty blue and lie straight to your face. And the old saying that lead in the spirit shows up as a red or yellow flame is just as unreliable. The only way to keep poison out of the jar is to keep lead out of the still and make honest cuts. My blue flame was so perfect once that a Methodist deacon fell to his knees and called it the Holy Ghost, and two hours later he was calling it something else from the outhouse.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin, a second strike
Wilkins: There. One more large cent stamped G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. I'll give it to the first lady who comes up Route 28 and tells me something about distilling I don't already know. That's no wager, it's a sure thing. I'll lose that penny by Thursday.
Silas: Tuesday, Doctor.
Wilkins: Tuesday, he says. Bless him. And let me tell you, I pulled a tooth from a revenue man last spring, and it was the first thing the government ever gave back to me.
♪ Banjo and fiddle return, gentle
Announcer: A quick word before we part! Tighten every joint on your still with Heavy-Duty Sanitary Tri-Clamp Ferrules and Gaskets, only thirty-four dollars and ninety-five cents, from Moonshine Stills. Shop hardware at moonshinestill.com. That is moonshinestill.com!
♦ Wax crackle, fire low, a drip into a jar
Wilkins: Friends, if tonight stirred something in you, and I don't mean the cider, then take up the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. You'll learn the history, the copper, the mash, the cuts and why they matter, and fire safety, taught the honest way, with the law kept in mind and every word of it for education. Inquire at moonshinestill.com. I'll teach you everything Aunt Thankful taught me, except her mince pie, which went into the ground with her and is the greatest loss this valley has ever suffered.
Wilkins: My thanks to Silas McAllister and his mother's shears, to Cletus Rabbit Miller down in Wilkesboro, and to every woman who ever stood at a still while some man took the bow: Mary of Alexandria, the stillroom wives, the alewives, Helen Cumming and her red flag, the Widow Lovejoy and her ear, Mrs. Drowne and her rug, and the Barnstead widow singing to her cradle. You did the work. We only did the 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