Busted, By God! Whiskey, Panic, and Bad Barrels in the Far West
From the Panic of 1857 to the Pike's Peak gold rush, Dr. Alchemist G. G. Wilkins follows frontier whiskey west: Uncle Dick Wootton's free Christmas barrel of Taos Lightning at Cherry Creek, freight teamsters with gimlets and pegs, and saloon rotgut colored with burnt sugar and plug tobacco. Master coppersmith Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister brings stories of patched saloon kettles, a freight barrel with a frog in it, and a Comstock trick cup. Then the old-time moonshine distilling Q&A goes after thump keg additives and the blue-flame and bead proof myths.
In this episode
- How the Panic of 1857 and the Ohio Life failure sent gold seekers to Pike's Peak
- Uncle Dick Wootton's barrels of Taos Lightning at the 1858 Cherry Creek camps
- Taos Lightning wheat whiskey history and Simeon Turley's mill at Arroyo Hondo
- The freight teamster gimlet-and-peg trick for watering whiskey barrels on the plains
- Frontier saloon rotgut: forty-rod, tarantula juice, coffin varnish, red-eye, and Valley Tan
- Coppersmith stories: patched bullet-holed saloon kettles and a Comstock trick drinking cup
- Thump keg Q&A: hickory ashes and red oak shavings in a moonshine copper still
- Debunking the blue-flame test and bead test for checking moonshine proof
Dr. Alchemist G. G. Wilkins traces whiskey's road west, from the Panic of 1857 and the Pike's Peak rush to Uncle Dick Wootton's barrels of Taos Lightning at Cherry Creek and the gimlet-and-peg tricks that ruined freight barrels on the plains. He also tells how Barnaby the bear handled a Boston whiskey salesman. Master coppersmith Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister comes on with new stories: a cousin who patched bullet-riddled saloon kettles at Cherry Creek, a creek-watered freight barrel with a frog inside, and a trick drinking cup made for a Comstock saloonkeeper. In the last segment Wilkins answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, NC about hickory ashes and red oak shavings in the thump keg, then debunks the blue-flame and bead tests between strikes of his anvil.
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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 jilted ghost in a Concord attic. That is a drip, you moth-eaten haystack, not a dinner bell. You will get your spent corn when it is cool and not one minute sooner. And if you shove that wet snout against my window glass one more time, I will pull every tooth in your head and sell them to a widow in Epsom for a necklace. Sit. SIT, I said.
♦ A heavy thump, splintering wood, a long satisfied bear groan
Wilkins: He has sat on the kindling. That was a week of kindling. Thank you, Barnaby. Thank you kindly. May your fleas take up the Gospel.
♦ Chain drops slack, bear huffs
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth
Wilkins: Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, deacons listening with the shutters drawn, and the one revenue man I know for certain is squatting in my lilac bush with a stub of pencil and a damp backside. Welcome to Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, broadcasting from the log fortress of Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, in Pittsfield, Merrimack County, New Hampshire. I am your host, your dentist, your blacksmith, and on a bad night your priest. Tonight we turn our wagon west. Past the Hudson, past the Ohio, past the Missouri, and past good sense, to the territories where a man buys his whiskey by the shot off a plank laid over two barrels and pays for it in gold dust. Half the time there is a pinch of somebody else's dust under his fingernail. Whiskey in the Far West: saloons, panic, and bad barrels. Pour yourself something honest and sit down. Not on the kindling.
♪ Theme swells, then fades under
Announcer: A quick word, friends! Want the skill of the Fort Wilkins coppersmiths on your own parlor table? The Fort Wilkins 2-Gallon Tabletop Mini-Still, heavy-gauge pure copper, waits for you at moonshinestill.com. Once more: moonshinestill.com!
♪ Bright banjo sting
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
♪ Slow, lonesome fiddle transition under the creak of wagon wheels
Wilkins: Segment the first. To understand whiskey in the Far West, you must first understand why ten thousand sound-minded American men sold their mules' grandmothers and walked toward the sunset. The reason, as with most foolishness, was a bank.
Wilkins: August of 1857. The Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company was a grand institution with marble steps and a cashier who smelled of bay rum and confidence. The confidence went first. That company shut its doors, rotten with bad loans, and the fright ran down Wall Street like a scalded cat. Then in September the steamship Central America went down in a hurricane off the Carolinas. She took better than four hundred souls to the bottom and a mountain of California gold with them, gold the New York banks had been counting on like a drunk counts on payday. Banks failed. Mills slowed. Here in the Suncook Valley I watched good men stand at a shut mill gate holding their dinner pails with nothing in them but their hands. They called it the Panic of 1857, and panic it was.
Wilkins: Now, a man with no wages has two cures for his troubles: whiskey and a rumor. In the summer of '58 the rumor arrived. A Georgia man named Green Russell and his party washed color out of Cherry Creek where it meets the South Platte, out in the Kansas country under the Rockies. By the spring of '59 the whole hungry nation was on the move. They painted 'Pike's Peak or Bust' on their wagon covers going out. Half of them painted 'Busted, by God' on the very same canvas coming home, and that is the most honest bookkeeping ever done west of the Missouri.
Wilkins: But I will tell you who did not go bust: the man with the barrel. Christmas time of 1858, into the Cherry Creek camps rolled old Dick Wootton, Uncle Dick to the trappers, a mountain man with a beard you could lose a squirrel in. Up from Taos he came with his wagons of flour and goods, and among them barrels of Taos Lightning. The tale goes that Uncle Dick knocked the head in on a barrel and let the camp drink free for Christmas. Picture it, friends. Two hundred half-froze gold hunters with their beards iced to their shirts, crowding a barrel with tin cups like hogs at a trough. By nightfall you could not tell the snoring from the singing or the singing from the sick. One fellow is said to have proposed marriage to a mule, and the mule had the better sense and refused him.
Wilkins: Taos Lightning, for those of you raised soft on cider, was a raw wheat whiskey made down around Taos in the New Mexico country. The most famous of it came from Simeon Turley's mill at Arroyo Hondo, and he sold it to beaver trappers in the thirties and forties. It had never seen the inside of an oak barrel long enough to say good morning. Clear as spring water and twice as wicked. A trapper would drink a pint of it at rendezvous, wake up in the Yellowstone country two weeks later wearing another man's moccasins, and count himself lucky to wake at all.
♦ Wax crackle, distant ox bellow
Wilkins: Now to the barrels, and the bad ones. Whiskey for the Western camps came down the Ohio and up the Missouri by steamboat to the river towns: Leavenworth, Atchison, St. Joseph. There it was loaded on freight wagons, twenty-odd wagons to a train, ox teams plodding six weeks or more across the plains with the barrels baking by day and freezing by night. And a freight teamster, God bless his blistered hide, is a man with a thirst and a gimlet. Here is the trick, and I tell it so you may catch it, not so you may do it. He knocks a hoop up the barrel an inch with a mallet. He bores a little gimlet hole where the hoop sat. He draws off a bucket of good whiskey. He tops the barrel back up from the nearest creek, plugs the hole with a whittled peg, and taps the hoop back down over it. Snug as a deacon's secret. By the time that barrel reached Cherry Creek it had been drunk from by six teamsters and topped up from four rivers, and some of what floated in it was still alive.
Wilkins: Then the saloonkeeper gets hold of it. Now, the first saloon in a new camp was nothing but a tent, a plank across two barrels, and a man with a revolver and a bad ledger. And the saloonkeeper, finding his whiskey watered, waters it some more. Then he must put the color and the kick back in, so he reaches for his receipts. Burnt sugar for color. Plug tobacco boiled in it for bite. Red pepper so it burns going down like the real article. And from what I am told, worse things that I will not name, lest some fool out there try them. A frontier saloonkeeper could stretch one barrel of whiskey into three and a half barrels of regret.
Wilkins: And the West, God love it, named every one of those poisons honestly. Forty-rod, because forty rods was how far a man could walk after a glass, and those were the optimists. Tarantula juice, because it bit back, crawled up your leg in the night, and left you afraid of the dark corners of your own trousers. Coffin varnish. Tanglefoot. Red-eye. And out in the Utah country there was a home-run whiskey they called Valley Tan, after the local tanned leather, and they say it put a shine on a man's insides that matched the shine on his boots.
Wilkins: I knew a fellow from Barnstead who went out in '59, God rest him. He wrote his brother that he drank a dollar's worth of tarantula juice in a tent at Cherry Creek. He spent the night on his knees in the snow behind it, bringing up everything he had eaten since Ohio and some things he could not account for. Among them, he swore, was a button he had swallowed as a boy. He came home in '61 with no gold, no front teeth, and a stomach that would not stand a cup of weak tea without filing a complaint. I pulled his back molars myself, and they were stained the color of a saddle. That is the Far West in a jar, friends: hope going out, tobacco juice coming back.
♪ Fiddle transition, quicker, with a stomp of boots
♦ Wax crackle
Wilkins: Segment the second, where we talk of legends, outlaws, and fools, and I count myself among all three. You might think the West's bad whiskey stayed out West. You would be wrong. Last autumn a whiskey drummer came up the Turnpike from Boston. He had a checked waistcoat, a sample case, and a mustache waxed so stiff you could have picked a lock with it. He was peddling what he called Genuine Western Rectified Red-Eye, as served in the finest saloons of the Territories, to every tavern between Concord and Pittsfield. And he stopped at Fort Wilkins, God help him, to sell me some.
Wilkins: I uncorked a sample. Friends, I have smelled the inside of a dead man's boot and the breath of a selectman after a town supper, and this was worse than both married together. Plug tobacco. Red pepper. Burnt sugar. And underneath, a sharp varnish stink that told me the man who ran it never knew where his heads stopped. I said so. The drummer looked at my copper pot, the one I hammered with these two hands, and he said, and I quote him, 'That is a nice old kettle, for a country boy.'
♦ Barnaby grunts outside, chain tightens
Wilkins: Barnaby heard him. Barnaby has been called many things, but he has never let a man insult my copper. The drummer turned to go, set his sample case down by the woodpile to fix his hat, and that was the last thing he ever did on his own schedule. Barnaby came off the end of that chain like a cannonball off a barge. He took the sample case in his jaws and shook it like a terrier with a rat. Twelve bottles burst at once. It sounded like a church window going in a hailstorm, and the whole yard stank of tobacco and pepper. Then he went for the drummer. He caught the man's coattails, and the coattails tore with the sound of a wet bedsheet ripping in a high wind. A good piece of the gentleman's backside went with them, about the size of a Sunday pork chop, and the drummer screamed a high G I have not heard since the Pittsfield choir lost its last soprano.
Wilkins: And then, friends, the bear licked up the red-eye off the stones. Licked it right up. He stood there a moment with his ears going back, and I could see the pepper working through him. Then Barnaby opened his great jaws and gave the whole mess back, a gallon of bear-warmed Western Rectified, all over the drummer where he lay. That is the only honest review that whiskey ever got. Even the bear would not keep it down.
Wilkins: The fellow cracked a front tooth on my doorstep in his hurry, and I pulled it for him free of charge, which is more charity than Boston ever showed New Hampshire. He left Pittsfield with half a tail on his coat and half a backside under it, and I am told he now sits sideways in church. The county sheriff came round the next week asking whether my bear had assaulted a commercial traveler. I told him the bear had only assaulted the whiskey, and the traveler happened to be standing in it. The sheriff wrote that down, and then he could not find his way back to his horse. The sheriff of Merrimack County could not track a bear through fresh snow if the bear was dragging a church bell.
♦ Workshop door creaks open, boots on plank floor
Wilkins: Now, here to keep me honest, or at least to keep me from lying about metal, is the finest pair of hands in the Suncook Valley. He hammers pots and swan necks in the Fort Wilkins foundry, and his anvil rings truer than most preachers. Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister. Sit down, Silas, but mind the chair. Barnaby sat in it last winter and it has leaned to the left ever since, like a Concord newspaper.
Silas: Evening, Doctor. Evening, everybody. I'll stand a minute, if it's the same to you. I've seen that chair.
Wilkins: A wise man. Now, Silas, tonight we are talking about the Far West, and I know for a fact your family has whiskey stories from out there that would curl a Quaker's beard.
Silas: We do, Doctor. My cousin Ephraim McAllister went out to the Cherry Creek diggings in the spring of '59. He packed a pan and a pick and a roll of coppersmith's tools, because his mother told him he'd starve without a trade. Inside of a month he'd sold the pan.
Wilkins: No gold in the creek?
Silas: Plenty of gold in the creek, Doctor. But the money was in the arguments. Every saloon in those camps had a copper kettle or a worm somewhere in the back, and every saloon had a man who settled his bill with a pistol. Ephraim wrote home that one saloonkeeper on the Auraria side dragged a copper kettle into his tent. It had been shot through eleven times in a single quarrel over a card game. Eleven. Somebody had used it for cover.
Wilkins: And what did the cover look like after?
Silas: Like a cheese grater, sir. The saloonkeeper asked Ephraim what he'd charge. Ephraim said a dollar a hole. And the man looked at it a long time and asked whether there was a discount for the ones that went in and out the same side.
Wilkins: [laughing] Spoken like a true merchant of the territories. Now, Silas, a man listening might wonder why you'd patch a shot-up kettle at all. Why not throw it on the dung heap and buy iron?
Silas: Because copper forgives you, Doctor, and iron doesn't. Copper's soft. It's ductile, it gives. A ball hits it and mostly punches a clean hole, or dents it in a cup shape. Cast iron, now, you hit that cold and it cracks clean across, and there's no mending that out on the plains. With copper, Ephraim could dress the hole with a file, hammer a little copper plug or patch to fit, and close it with silver solder. Never lead. He was strict on that. A kettle full of lead patches is a kettle that'll poison every man who drinks from it.
Wilkins: Hear that, listeners. A coppersmith's sermon in four words: never lead, never. Did Ephraim keep any souvenirs of that holy work?
Silas: One. When he took that kettle apart, one ball was still stuck in the copper, wedged in the seam like a tick on a dog. He pried it out, hammered it flat on his little anvil, and kept it in his vest. When he came home in '62 he gave it to my father, and we set it as the head of a rivet on a pot in our shop. It's on there yet, a little gray lead button among all that red copper. Not touching any spirit, mind. It's on the outside of a handle bracket, where nobody drinks from it.
Wilkins: A bullet turned to honest work. That is more than I can say for most men who fire them. Now, the barrels, Silas. Tonight's an evening of bad barrels. You've had your hands on one.
Silas: I have, Doctor. Now, I'm a coppersmith, not a cooper.
Wilkins: One letter of difference and a whole world of sawdust.
Silas: That's about right. But two summers ago there was an auction of freight goods down in Concord, and in the lot was a whiskey barrel that had come back east from Leavenworth. It was empty, they said, some freighter's leftovers. I bought it for the hoops, because good iron hoops are worth having. And when I got it home and went to knock the hoops off, I found under the third hoop from the top a neat little gimlet hole, plugged with a whittled pine peg.
Wilkins: The very trick I spoke of! The teamster's toll!
Silas: Same one. So I pulled the peg, and there was still a few inches of something sloshing in the bottom. I knocked the head in to see. Out floated a frog, Doctor. A drowned green frog, pale as a boiled onion, with his little legs stretched out behind him like he'd died swimming the breaststroke.
Wilkins: God rest him.
Silas: That barrel had been topped up from a Kansas creek, and the frog came in with the creek. I keep that peg on a nail over my bench. When a young fellow comes to learn the trade, I hand him a barrel and tell him to count the hoops and look under every one. Most of them never think to. The ones who do, I keep.
Wilkins: A frog in a whiskey barrel is the only creature who ever drowned happy in Kansas creek water. Now, Silas, one more. I am told your father once made a cup.
Silas: [chuckles] He did. This was after the silver strike in the Washoe country, the Comstock. A saloonkeeper from Virginia City came east on business, a big man with a diamond in his shirt the size of a hazelnut. He came to my father and asked for a fancy copper drinking cup, bright outside, with his initials engraved on it. And he wanted it made, as he put it, a little shallow.
Wilkins: Shallow how?
Silas: A sealed false bottom, Doctor. Looked like a full cup, held about half a shot. In those Comstock saloons, when a miner struck color he'd stand the house a round, and the saloonkeeper was expected to drink with him. This fellow meant to drink with every one of them and pour himself cold tea in that cup, so he'd go home sober and rich while the miners went home drunk and poor. My father near threw him out. But the man paid in silver coin, and it was a hard winter.
Wilkins: A saloonkeeper who drinks tea out of a whiskey cup is the only man in the territory who goes home sober and rich, and that is why they hang men out there. Did it work?
Silas: For about a year. Then, the way he told it in a letter, a big Cornish hard-rock miner borrowed the cup for a toast. He was used to heavy work and he felt right off it was light. He held it up to the lamp, rapped the bottom with his knuckle, and heard it ring hollow. My father said the letter came in a shaky hand. Said the cup ended up nailed above the bar with a sign under it, and the saloonkeeper ended up nailed to his own bed for a month with what the doctor called contusions of the dignity.
Wilkins: [roaring] Contusions of the dignity! I have treated a few of those myself, usually with pliers. Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister, ladies and gentlemen. Stay on a while, Silas, and don't sit in the chair.
Silas: Wasn't going to, Doctor.
♪ Brisk banjo flourish into a medicine-show drum roll
♦ Wax crackle, a hand bell rung twice
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♪ Drum roll ends on a cymbal crash and a banjo sting
♦ Wax crackle, fire popping under a copper pot
♪ Low, warm fiddle under
Wilkins: Segment the third: Copper and the Craft. First, the plain law, which I deliver with my hand on my heart and the other hand on my wallet: making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is illegal under United States law. Everything said on this program is for history and learning only. Now, since we have spent the evening on Western barrels gone wrong, let me tell you how it is done right from mash to barrel, so you will know a bad thing when one is set before you.
Wilkins: Step one, the mash. A good corn mash in these parts goes about like this. Take cracked corn and bring it up in clean water to a boil, then let it cook down into a thick porridge. Let it fall back to about a hundred and fifty degrees by the thermometer, then stir in malted barley, about one part to every four or five of corn. The malt carries the ferments that turn starch into sugar, and you hold it warm and stir it a good hour. Then let the whole pot cool below ninety degrees. Hotter than that and you will boil your yeast alive like a lobster. Pitch your yeast, cover it loose so the gas may escape, and keep it warm and airy. In a few days the bubbling stops and you have a sour, beery wash.
Wilkins: A note on mashes, since a fool told me last week that corn is more dangerous than apples. It is the other way about. Grain mashes make little of the poisonous wood spirit, what the chemists call methanol. Fruit mashes, with their pectin, make more of it. Neither one excuses you from the cuts. Not ever.
Wilkins: Step two, the run. Charge your copper pot, never more than about three parts full, and set the fire gentle. Low fire, friends. A mad fire pukes the mash up the neck and runs your cuts together like paint in a rainstorm. And hear me twice on this: never, ever seal a still shut while it is heating. The vapor must always have its open road to the worm. Stop that road with a plug of wet meal or a jammed cap, and the pressure builds until the pot splits or the cap flies off. I have seen a still head go through a shed roof. It took most of the man's eyebrows with it, and I picked copper out of his scalp with tweezers by lamplight. Never leave a lit still to go to dinner, to the privy, or to court. Keep a bucket of sand or a heavy wet sack beside you to smother a spirit fire, because alcohol vapor catches like dry hay.
♦ Slow drip of distillate into a glass jar
Wilkins: Step three, the cuts, which are the whole of the craft. The first trickle is the foreshots. A rule many careful hands go by is to throw out at least the first five fluid ounces from every five gallons of wash, and more is better than less. Down the hole with it. Do not drink it, do not rub your gums with it, do not give it to a sheriff, however tempting. Then come the heads. You will know them by the nose: sharp, like varnish, like a glue pot in a coffin shop. Catch them apart in their own jar and keep them well away from the good. Then the hearts come, clean and sweet, smelling of the grain, smooth on the back of the hand. That is your spirit. Last come the tails. The smell goes flat, like wet cardboard or a dog that has been in the river. The spirit runs oily and thin. Set them aside.
Wilkins: And here is a little test you will never hear from a Western saloonkeeper. Take a spoonful of your hearts and cut it with clean water. If it goes milky and cloudy like a pond in March, you have let in too much of the oily tails, and you made your cut too late. The water shows up those fusel oils plain as a pig on a parlor rug. Good hearts cut with water stay clear as a choirboy's conscience. Mind you, a cloudy glass tells you about your tails. It tells you nothing about your heads, and nothing about safety. Only your nose and your heads jar do that.
Wilkins: Now, the copper. Silas, tell them where the work gets done.
Silas: Where the vapor touches, Doctor. Copper takes up the stinking sulfur out of the vapor, but it can only do it where the hot vapor actually rubs against it: in the pot head, in the arm running over, and in the worm. That's why those parts go dark first, while the outside of the pot stays bright as a new cent. A man who scrubs only the outside of his still, so it shines for company, has it backwards. Scrub the dark parts. That's where the copper earns its keep.
Wilkins: Like a dentist who polishes the front teeth and lets the back molars rot. And step four, the barrel. Silas, you are no cooper, but you know oak.
Silas: Enough to buy it right. A whiskey barrel wants white oak. White oak has little growths inside the grain, like corks plugging the pores, so it holds liquid tight. Red oak hasn't got them. It's so open in the grain that a man can put his lips on one end of a red oak stick and blow bubbles out the other end in a dish of water. You make a barrel of red oak and your whiskey walks out through the staves.
Wilkins: Red oak makes a fine barrel if you want your whiskey to walk out of it on its own legs. The barrel is charred inside, and that char and the oak behind it give the spirit its color and soften it over seasons. That color must be earned by time and good wood, not boiled into the stuff with burnt sugar and plug tobacco in a tent at Cherry Creek.
♪ Fiddle rises, then transitions to a jaunty banjo
♦ Wax crackle
Wilkins: Segment the fourth: myths, slang, and the listener line. We have a call from a long way south, so let us roll the cylinder.
♦ Cylinder hiss and a click, faint scratch of the recording
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 as the cylinder stops
Wilkins: Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina! Wilkes County, where they say the creeks run so thick with mash that the trout swim sideways and vote twice. Rabbit, I respect your uncle, so let me take his medicine apart gently, like a tooth with long roots.
Wilkins: First, the hickory ashes. Hardwood ash is mostly potash. My grandfather boiled it down in iron kettles right here in Merrimack County and shipped it to Boston for soap-making and glass. Potash is lye, a strong alkali, the sort of thing that will take the skin off your knuckles if you stir it bare-handed. Some old distillers did put a pinch of lime or ash into a mash that had gone too sour, to sweeten it back so the yeast would work. That much has some reason in it. But tossed into a thump keg, ash does not hunt out your heads. It does not grab the wood spirit and drag it to the bottom. The light, harsh stuff comes over early in the run no matter what is sitting in the keg, and the only cure is to catch it in the heads jar and throw it out.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Second, the red oak shavings, and here your uncle is half right about something, though not the thing he thinks. Oak in spirit gives color and tannin and a woody taste, quick as you like. A handful of shavings will make a raw spirit look and taste like it has been resting in a barrel for a year. Many a Western saloonkeeper did much the same to fake his age. But it is paint, Rabbit, not soap. It changes how the stuff looks and tastes and cleans not one drop of it. Cletus, your uncle's red oak shavings are rouge on a corpse: the color is lovely and the patient is still dead. And as Silas told us, red oak is the leakiest oak God ever grew. That is why no cooper with his wits makes a whiskey barrel of it.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: So, Rabbit, here is the verdict from Fort Wilkins. Your uncle's ashes are old habit, his shavings are face paint, and his heads are still in the jar until he has the sense to pour them out. Good cuts, low fire, clean copper. That is the medicine, and it has never once come from a swamp. My warmest regards to you, Cletus Miller, and to all of Wilkesboro. Write again, and tell your uncle a dentist in New Hampshire says his heart is in the right place even if his ashes are not.
Wilkins: Now, since the West is the land of tall claims, let me knock down two old myths that came back from the territories in every returning gold hunter's saddlebag.
Wilkins: Myth the first: the blue flame. Every saloon from Leavenworth to Placerville has a man who will pour a splash of whiskey in a spoon, set a match to it, and declare that a blue flame means it is pure and a red or yellow flame means lead. Hogwash and horse apples. A blue flame proves only that the liquor will burn, and so will your barn, your beard, and a Merrimack deputy's reputation. Flame color cannot honestly tell you whether there is lead or poison in your spirit. Men have drunk poisoned whiskey that burned blue as a June sky.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Myth the second: the bead. A man shakes his jar, holds it to the light, and watches the bubbles. Big beads that hold a while mean strong whiskey, so he says, and therefore good whiskey. Now, the bead does give a rough notion of proof, the way a wink gives you a rough notion of a woman's mind: roughly, and at your own risk. But it tells you nothing whatever about whether the heads were cut out. Shake a bottle for the bead and trust it with your life, and you will be beaded proper at your own wake.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin, then a soft clink as the stamped coin drops into a tin
Wilkins: There. One fresh large cent, stamped G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., for every lie we have laid to rest tonight. Silas, the last one is yours for your trouble.
Silas: I'll take it, Doctor. Copper ought to go to a coppersmith.
♪ Theme banjo returns softly under
Announcer: A quick word before we part, friends! Bring the Fort Wilkins coppersmiths' skill home on a size for your sideboard. The Fort Wilkins 2-Gallon Tabletop Mini-Still, pure copper, built for botanical waters and floral oils. Find it now at moonshinestill.com!
♦ Wax crackle
Wilkins: My thanks to Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister, to the frog in that Leavenworth barrel, to Ephraim's eleven bullet holes, and to a Boston drummer who now sits sideways. If tonight's talk of cuts and copper has set your mind to learning the craft properly, from history and good sense, then sign on for the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. I will teach you the history, the metal, the mash, the cuts, and the law, and I will roast you something terrible while I do it. Inquire at the showroom at Fort Wilkins on Route 28 in Pittsfield, or by post, and mind you write legibly. Barnaby eats the illegible letters.
♦ Barnaby grunts, chain clinks
Wilkins: Yes, yes, you may have your corn now, you great hairy sinner. It has cooled.
Wilkins: Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.
♦ Bear grunt and final drip into jar
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme rises, then fades into wax cylinder crackle