The Listener Mailbag: Telegrams, Grievances, and One Uncle's Swamp Medicine
Telegrams pour into Fort Wilkins in 1860s Pittsfield, New Hampshire, and Alchemist G. G. Wilkins answers each one with moonshine history, copper still know-how, and stories from Civil War era distilling. Find out why freeze-jacked applejack keeps its methanol and fusel oil, how potash earned America its first patent, and how his first arrest ended with a fainted sheriff halfway through a bloody tooth extraction. Appalachian herbalist Clara Higgins also shares Southern liquor slang and old mountain stories, while Barnaby the pet bear grumbles outside.
In this episode
- How potash built colonial New England and got the first U.S. patent in 1790
- Why freeze-jacked applejack keeps methanol and fusel oil and causes hangovers
- Hard cider as New England's breakfast drink, John Adams included
- The story of Wilkins's first arrest, which happened during a tooth extraction
- Clara Higgins on Southern slang for liquor and Appalachian moonshine stories
- A call-in on red oak vs white oak, and why shavings and ashes can't clean a thump keg
- Busting the blue flame test and the 'lead burns red' moonshine myth
- Heads, tails and foreshots: why proper copper still distillation makes cleaner spirits
Dr. G. G. Wilkins reads the best wires sent to the 603-471-5597 line. He covers how potash and the first U.S. patent shaped colonial New England, why freeze-jacked applejack gives a man a two-day headache, and the full and somewhat bloody story of his first arrest, which happened in the middle of an extraction. Appalachian herbalist Clara Higgins joins him to answer letters about Southern names for liquor and tells new stories: a revenue man caught out by mountain slang, a peach-brandy love letter, and a great-uncle who named each batch after a sermon. To finish, Wilkins plays the call-in tape from Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, NC, and uses the red oak versus white oak question to show why shavings and ashes can't clean a thump keg. Then he takes apart the blue flame test and the old 'lead burns red' saying, hitting a coin on his anvil after each one.
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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, you great walking fur coat, settle your carcass. That's the mailman's satchel you're chewing, not the mailman, and I'll thank you to know the difference before the federal government does. Drop it. DROP it. ... There. Good bear. Now lie down in your own filth like a Christian.
♦ Bear grunt, chain dragging through gravel, a long disgruntled sigh
Wilkins: He's sulking. He thinks every letter in that bag is a love note from a she-bear in Gilmanton. I haven't the heart to tell him they're mostly from tooth patients asking for their money back.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth, swelling then settling under
Wilkins: Good evening, neighbors, sinners, and the occasional deputy pretending to be one of either. 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, here in Pittsfield, Merrimack County, New Hampshire. I am your host, your dentist, your blacksmith, and when the moon is right, your worst influence. Tonight is mailbag night. All week you've been sending wires down the six-oh-three, four-seven-one, fifty-five ninety-seven line, and the boy at the telegraph office has hand-copied every one of them, God help his wrist. I get more mail than the Governor in Concord, and mine is better spelled and much less threatening. We'll read the best of them, I'll answer every one with more honesty than the law requires, and later I'll have a guest from the Blue Ridge of Virginia who knows more names for liquor than a Baptist knows excuses. But first, a word from the people who keep the lamp oil burning.
♪ Brief tinny parlor-piano flourish
Announcer: A QUICK WORD, friends! The Flame-Flow still, under United States Patent number 10,561,960, spreads its heat across honest copper as evenly as butter melts over a hot johnnycake: no scorching and no hot spots, just a steady, handsome run. See it at moonshinestill.com. That's moonshinestill.com!
♪ Theme banjo picks back up briefly, then fades
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, paper envelopes rustling
Wilkins: Segment the first, a little history out of the mailbag. First wire comes from Hezekiah Platt, up in Barnstead on the Suncook Lakes. Hezekiah writes: 'Doctor, my grandfather says New Hampshire was built on potash before it was ever built on cider. Is he an old fool?' Hezekiah, he's old and he may be a fool, but on this point he's right as rain. When our forefathers came up the Suncook and the Merrimack they had more trees than sense and no money at all. So they cut the forest, piled it up, and burned it. Whole hillsides, burning for days. You could see the smoke from Catamount Hill to Gilmanton. Then they shoveled the ash into hoppers, poured water through it, caught the lye that dripped out, and boiled it down in great iron kettles until they had a gray cake at the bottom. Pot ash. That's where the word comes from, Hezekiah: ash, in a pot. They hauled it down to Portsmouth and Boston, and it went off to England for soap and glass. Our forefathers burned down half of New Hampshire to make soap, and judging by the deputies I've met, none of that soap ever reached Merrimack County.
♦ Barnaby snorts outside
Wilkins: And here's one for your grandfather to chew on. When Congress first passed a law to hand out patents, in 1790, the very first patent of these United States went to a man named Samuel Hopkins, for a better way of making potash and pearl ash. Signed by George Washington's own hand. Not a cannon, not a clock: ash. The young Republic's first great invention was a cleverer way to boil a burnt tree. Remember that the next time a Concord lawyer tells you this country was built on grand ideas.
Wilkins: Next wire. The Widow Prudence Locke of Epsom writes: 'Dear Doctor Wilkins, my late husband drank hard cider every morning of his life and lived to eighty-one. My pastor says it was the devil's breakfast. Who is right?' Well, Widow Locke, first, my condolences on the loss of your husband and on the continued health of your pastor. Hard cider was the table drink of New England from the first Pilgrim apple onward. Children drank it weak, farmers drank it strong, and preachers drank it in the cellar where the congregation couldn't count the mugs. Old John Adams himself, a Massachusetts man and no drunkard, is written down as taking a tankard of hard cider most mornings of his life. John Adams took hard cider for breakfast and helped found a nation. I take it for breakfast and have barely founded a fence. Your husband was in fine company, Widow. Tell your pastor that if cider was the devil's breakfast, the devil signed the Declaration of Independence.
♦ Envelope tearing
Wilkins: Now here's a sharper one, from Jotham Card down in Loudon. Jotham writes: 'Doctor, why is it called applejack, and why does it give me a headache that lasts till Thursday?' Jotham, those are the same question, and I'm glad you asked it before you went blind. The old way of making applejack was called jacking. You take your hard cider in December, set the barrel out in the yard, and let the frost do the work. Water freezes before spirit does, so every morning you knock out the ice and throw it away, and what's left in the bottom gets stronger and stronger. No fire, no copper, no still. A lazy man's brandy. And there's the trouble, Jotham. When you run cider through a proper still, you throw away the first poison drippings, the foreshots and the heads, and you set aside the oily tails at the end. When you freeze-jack, you throw away nothing but water. Every bit of methanol, every drop of that greasy fusel oil, stays in the barrel and gets more concentrated by the week. Freeze-jacked applejack gives you a headache that arrives Tuesday, unpacks its trunk, and takes the spare room until Friday. It isn't the devil, Jotham. It's arithmetic.
Wilkins: And so nobody misunderstands why I tell you all this: making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of these United States, and everything said on this program is history and education. I say it every week, and every week Barnaby yawns.
♦ Bear yawn, enormous and wet, chain clinking
♪ Short fiddle sting, sly and rising
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Wilkins: Segment the second: legends, outlaws, and the occasional fool. A good many of you wrote in about my own troubles with the law, so let's get that out of the way. Obadiah Fenn of Chichester asks: 'Doctor, everybody talks about your second arrest. What in thunder happened the first time?' Obadiah, I'll tell you, because the county already knows and the county can't spell.
Wilkins: It was hot as a smithy's apron. I had Asa Bickford in my chair, a hog farmer from out past the mills on the Suncook, with a lower molar so rotten you could smell it from the turnpike. Black as a stovepipe and loose as a Concord promise. I'd got the forceps seated, braced my boot against the arm of the chair, and Asa was gripping a jar of the medicinal in both fists like it was the Gospel. Right then the door opens and in comes the Merrimack County sheriff with a warrant in one hand and his belly in the other. 'George Wilkins, I'm here to arrest you for the unlawful sale of ardent spirits.' I didn't even turn round. I said, 'Sheriff, you may have my wrists once I've finished with this man's molar, because a half-pulled tooth is the only thing in New Hampshire crueler than a tax.'
♦ Wax crackle, a low chuckle from Wilkins
Wilkins: The fool decided to be helpful. Wanted to watch, to be sure I wasn't fetching a pistol out of Asa's mouth. So I handed him the lantern and told him to hold it close. I rocked that molar once and it creaked like a barn door in January. Rocked it twice and the roots let go with a sound like somebody yanking a carrot out of wet clay, and a spurt of blood and pus, black as tar and twice as rank, came up out of that hole and landed square across the sheriff's waistcoat. Asa hollered. The sheriff went white, then green, then the color of a dead trout's belly, and down he went like a felled hemlock, lantern and all. I stamped out the fire on my floorboards, packed Asa's jaw with lint, poured him a dram to rinse, and then looked down at the law of Merrimack County lying on my floor with his eyes rolled back and Asa's tooth stuck in his whiskers. The sheriff fainted at the first squirt of blood and I had to arrest myself. I was firm but fair. I hitched my own wagon, loaded the sheriff into the back like a sack of meal, and drove him to the courthouse myself. The clerk asked which one of us was the prisoner. I said, 'The one who's awake.'
♦ Barnaby grunts twice, as if in approval
Wilkins: Now, Ransom Pike up in Northwood writes in and asks the question I get more than any other: 'Doctor, has Barnaby ever actually caught anybody?' Ransom, you shouldn't have asked, and I'm going to answer anyway. Close the children's ears and open the windows.
Wilkins: It was a black, moonless night in late October, the kind where the wind comes down off Catamount and rattles the shakes. A drifter, not a deputy, a plain thief out of Manchester with a sack over his shoulder and no sense at all, decided the still-house at Fort Wilkins was easy picking. He came round the back in his stocking feet so I wouldn't hear him. I didn't hear him. Barnaby did. A bear's hearing is wasted on a bear; he can hear a jar of honey being thought about in the next township. That thief got one leg over the sill of the still-house window, and Barnaby came out of the dark at the end of his chain like a locomotive made of hair. I heard it from my bed. First a sort of a wet crunch, like somebody stepping on a basket of green apples. Then a scream that went up so high it stopped being a man's voice and turned into a teakettle. Barnaby had him by the calf, and he shook him like a terrier shakes a rat. Back and forth, back and forth, and with every shake there was a slap, the man's head against the logs, slap, slap, until I got out there with a lantern and a ham bone in my nightshirt.
♦ Chain rattles hard, a deep bear huff
Wilkins: By lantern light the man's trousers were in shreds and his calf was laid open from the knee to the ankle, white tendon showing like the strings on a fiddle and blood running down into his stocking. Barnaby let go only when the ham bone came within a yard of his nose. The fellow crawled off into my cedar hedge and wept like a widow. I sewed him up on my kitchen table with silk thread and a darning needle. Thirty-one stitches, by candle, with him biting a strap and calling me names his mother never taught him. In the morning I sent him off down Route 28 on a borrowed crutch with a bill for the stitching that he has never paid. His trousers are still in the cedar where Barnaby threw them, and the crows have refused to nest there out of decency. I'll add, Ransom, that no man in his right mind should keep a bear, and I'm not offering myself as proof of a right mind.
♪ Banjo roll, warm and lively, a welcome
Wilkins: And now, friends, a guest who traveled up from the mountains of Virginia over roads that would make a mule pray. She's an herbalist of the old Blue Ridge, a historian of the old mountain talk, and she's agreed to help me with the letters tonight because, frankly, half of them are about the South and I've never been farther south than Lowell. Please welcome Miss Clara Higgins. Clara, welcome to Fort Wilkins.
Clara: Doctor, thank you. I have been in your parlor ten minutes, I've been sniffed by a bear through a window, and I've seen a man's molar in a pickle jar on your mantel. I've been to camp meetings that were less of a revival.
Wilkins: That molar belonged to a selectman, and it's the most useful thing he ever contributed to Pittsfield. Now, Clara, Mercy Tuttle of Gilmanton Iron Works has written in, and she wants to know what you Southern folk call the stuff when you're not calling it by its Christian name.
Clara: Oh, Mercy, honey, it depends on how bad it is. Good liquor gets a pet name, and bad liquor gets a curse. If it's raw and mean we call it rot-gut, or bust-head, because that's what it does. Pop-skull, same idea, only louder. Tangle-leg is what you drink when you want to dance and your feet have other plans. And then there's forty-rod.
Wilkins: Forty-rod. I've heard that one in Concord taverns.
Clara: You'd hear it anywhere there's a fool and a jug. The story goes that forty-rod is so wicked a man can drink it at the tavern door and drop dead before he's walked forty rods down the road. In my granddaddy's county they swore a tinker once tested it. Drank a cup and started walking, and the whole porch came out to count his steps. They say he made it thirty-nine rods and a half, sat down in a ditch, and announced he'd been robbed.
Wilkins: Robbed of half a rod. That's a man who knows his rights. Now, I'm told mountain slang has caught a revenue man or two.
Clara: Caught one clean, Doctor. This was over in Patrick County, after the war ended. A revenue man came up the hollow dressed as a peddler, with a mule loaded with tin pans, clanking like a church bell falling down a well. Fine coat, soft hands, boots that had never seen a hog lot. Folks suspected him, but you can't run a man off for having soft hands, else half the preachers in Virginia would be homeless. So Aunt Lettie Bowman, who was near seventy and sharp as a briar, walked up to his mule and said, sweet as molasses, 'Mister, I'll trade you for a pan if you've got a dram of bust-head on you.' And that revenue man, God bless him, dug in his saddlebag and held out a packet of headache powders.
Wilkins: Ha! Headache powders!
Clara: Headache powders! The whole hollow knew in one breath. Aunt Lettie took the powders, thanked him kindly, and said, 'You'll need these more than me before sundown.' He was gone by noon, Doctor. Left two pans behind. She cooked in 'em for twenty years and called them her government cookware.
Wilkins: A revenue man in a peddler's coat is like a goose in a bonnet: it fools nobody but the goose. Now here's one from Lemuel Haskett in Concord who is, and I quote, 'a young man of feeling.' He asks: 'Has liquor ever helped a man in matters of courtship?' Clara, I'll leave that to you, because my only courtship advice involves forceps.
Clara: Oh, Lemuel, I've got one for you. My great-grandmother's sister, Delphy, lived up near Floyd courthouse. A boy from across the ridge was sweet on her, but he was so shy he couldn't say good morning to a chicken. So he wrote her a letter, the only letter he ever wrote in his life, and gave it to the post rider. That same post rider was carrying a quart jug of peach brandy in the same saddlebag. Halfway up the mountain his horse shied at a rattlesnake, the jug broke, and that letter rode the rest of the way soaking in peach brandy like a fruitcake.
Wilkins: Pickled courtship. The best kind.
Clara: Delphy got it, and the ink had run till you could only read about every third word. But it smelled like summer orchards and strong drink. She read it once and couldn't make sense of it. She read it twice, and by then the fumes had got to her a little, and she said it was the most romantic thing she'd ever been sent. Married him that September. She kept that letter in her Bible for fifty years, and she always told folks it was the only letter she'd ever gotten that improved with a second reading.
Wilkins: Improved with a second reading, which is more than I can say for the Book of Leviticus or the Merrimack County tax rolls. Lemuel, there's your answer: don't drink the brandy, pour it on the letter. Clara, one more. Tabitha Rowe, in the mill tenements down by the river here in Pittsfield, writes: 'Was there ever a moonshiner who was also a churchgoer?' And I have to say, Tabitha, I've looked at the pews and I think the answer is all of them.
Clara: Tabitha, I'll tell you about my great-uncle Ambrose. Ambrose never missed a Sunday. Sat in the front pew and nodded at every word. Folks thought he was devout. Turns out he was taking notes. Every batch he ran that week, he named after that Sunday's sermon. So out of the same hollow you could buy a jug of 'Wages of Sin,' a jug of 'Jonah's Whale,' and one batch I'm told was strong enough to strip varnish, called 'The Fiery Furnace.'
Wilkins: Uncle Ambrose sold 'Wages of Sin' by the quart, and for once the wages were paid promptly. Did the preacher ever find out?
Clara: Found out in a month. Rode right up the hollow, red in the face, and Ambrose thought he was finished. The preacher got down off his horse, looked at the jugs lined up on the shelf, and said, 'Ambrose, I'll take a jug of Lot's Wife.' Ambrose asked him why that one. And the preacher said, 'Because it's the first time in eleven years anybody has listened to that sermon all the way through.'
♦ Wilkins slaps the table, laughing; Barnaby grunts outside
Wilkins: Clara, before we go to the pitchman, I'm told your family knows the old ways of doctoring. Is there a story with some blood in it? My listeners get restless without blood.
Clara: There's one my great-grandmother told on herself. A distiller named Jubal came stumbling down out of the laurel with a fishhook clean through his eyelid. He'd been casting for trout in the creek below his still, hooked a bush, yanked, and the hook came flying back. Barb all the way through the lid, Doctor, and his eye swelling shut behind it. Great-grandmother set him on a stump, heated a hairpin red in the cook fire, and told him to hold still. Jubal said he'd hold still if he could hold his jug, so he took a long pull of his own make and started singing 'Barbara Allen' to steady himself. All of it, every verse. She cut the barb off with tin snips and worked the shank back out with that hot hairpin, slow, while he sang. There was a little hiss when the pin touched the wet, and blood ran down his cheek like he was crying red. He never flinched once. Got to the last verse, where the rose and the briar grow together over the graves, and she pulled it out right on the last word.
Wilkins: A man who'll sing all of 'Barbara Allen' with a hook through his eyelid is a man I'd hire to sit in my dental chair as an example to the cowards. Clara Higgins, stay put by the stove. We'll have more of you shortly. Friends, the pitchman's warming up.
♪ Brisk, bright medicine-show fiddle and drum fanfare
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, a crowd murmur as at a county fair
Announcer: Ladies and gentlemen, step up close! Do you love the gleam of fine copper but haven't the barn to keep a great kettle? Have you longed for the precision of the Fort Wilkins coppersmiths, the hands that answer to the Alchemist himself, in a size that will sit on your own kitchen table? Then I have the article for you: the Fort Wilkins Two-Gallon Tabletop Mini-Still, a compact alembic of pure copper! It's spun from heavy-gauge, twenty-ounce copper of the purest electrolytic refinement, so there's no lead and no rubbish, nothing but honest metal. It has hand-riveted handles that will outlast your grandchildren's grandchildren, and quick-connect cooling lines that set up faster than a deacon's excuse! It's the premier choice for distilling botanical waters, drawing out essential floral oils of rose and lavender, and putting on countertop demonstrations that will make your neighbors gasp and your mother-in-law fall silent at last! All this for two hundred eighty-nine dollars, friends: two hundred eighty-nine dollars for a lifetime of copper craftsmanship. Come see it with your own eyes in the showroom at Fort Wilkins on Route 28 in Pittsfield, New Hampshire, where the bear is chained and the prices are not! Or explore Tabletop Stills at moonshinestill.com, at the address moonshinestill.com/products/tabletop-alembic. Once more, so it sticks like pitch to a pine tree: explore Tabletop Stills at moonshinestill.com, that's https://moonshinestill.com/products/tabletop-alembic, and get your Fort Wilkins Two-Gallon Tabletop Alembic available today!
♪ Fanfare resolves with a cymbal crash
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, the fire popping in the stove
Wilkins: Segment the third: copper and the craft. The mailbag is full of you wanting to know the how of it. A Mr. Silvanus Drake of Gilmanton writes: 'Doctor, I have more apples than I have pigs to eat them. Tell me plain how an old-time apple brandy is made.' Silvanus, I'll tell you plain, as history, and you'll keep in mind the warning I give every week about the federal permit.
Wilkins: Step one: the apples. Grind them to pomace, press out the juice, and let it go hard in a clean barrel in a cool cellar. Not a cold one. Yeast is lazy in the cold. In a few weeks the sweet juice turns to a hard cider of a few parts in a hundred spirit. That's your wash. Step two: the stripping run. Into the copper pot it goes, a slow fire underneath, and you run it off fast and coarse to pull the spirit out of the water. What comes out is called low wines, cloudy and rough. Step three: the spirit run. Low wines back in the pot, and now slow, slow, slow. A low fire. This is where a distiller earns his name or loses his eyesight.
Wilkins: First comes the foreshots, a small sharp splash that smells like a cobbler's glue pot. Throw it out. Every drop. Then come the heads, still harsh, smelling of solvent and nail polish... of varnish, I mean, and hot pear. Those go too, into the waste or onto the fire-starter pile, never down any man's gullet. Then the hearts, sweet and clean and smelling of the orchard. That's the brandy. And last come the tails, wet-dog and oily, which you set aside to run again another day.
Clara: Doctor, folks back home say apple and peach are worse for the heads than corn. Is that just talk?
Wilkins: It's chemistry, Clara, and you've earned your supper by asking it. Fruit is full of pectin, the same stuff that sets your jelly. In the fermenting, that pectin breaks down and gives off methanol, the wood spirit, the stuff that blinds. Corn hasn't nearly as much pectin. So a fruit brandy will carry more of the poison up front than a grain spirit, and that means the fruit man must be stricter with his cuts than the corn man. No greed at the front of the run. A greedy brandy-maker ends up a blind brandy-maker.
Clara: Granny used to say the devil drinks first, and you let him.
Wilkins: Your granny should have been a chemist. Now, Silvanus, the vessel. The old alchemists called it an alembic, and the word has a long road behind it. From the Greek ambix, a cup, to the Arabic al-anbiq, through the laboratories of the Moors, into Latin, and finally to a log shed in Pittsfield. My rival over in Barnstead calls his still an alembic too, which is a fine Greek word for a dented bean-pot with ambitions.
♦ Knuckles rap on hollow copper; a deep, resonant ring
Wilkins: Hear that? That's why it's copper. It carries the heat even, it bends to a hammer, and it eats the sulfur stink out of the vapor before it ever reaches the worm. Clara, what's the first thing your people do after a run?
Clara: Scrub it out before supper, or Granny would scrub you.
Wilkins: Same here. Now a last word on fire, because one gentleman, a Mr. Ira Sanborn of Northwood, writes that his cousin's still-house burned flat and he doesn't know why. Ira, here's why. Spirit vapor is heavier than air. It doesn't rise politely like chimney smoke. It creeps along the floorboards like a cat after cream, low and quiet, and when it finds the open fire box, it lights. Whoosh. So you keep the shed well aired, you keep every joint tight, and you never, ever walk off from a running still to go eat pie. More still-houses have burned for pie than for any revenue man.
♪ Fiddle bridge, playful and rough
♦ Wax cylinder crackle; a hand-cranked tape-machine click
Wilkins: Segment the fourth: myths, slang, and the call-in tape. We've a recording on the wax from the call-in line, sent all the way from the Carolina hills. Roll it, boy.
♦ Hiss and pop of a playback cylinder, faint wind
Wilkins: That's a gentleman named Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, and here's his question, which I'll read off the transcription, since the cylinder has more crackle than 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?'
Wilkins: Rabbit, your uncle may be no chemist, but he's a fine cook. Ash and oak shavings make an excellent seasoning for a story. Let me take them one at a time. First, the red oak. Any cooper in Merrimack County will tell you that you can't build a whiskey barrel out of red oak. Its grain is so open that a boy can put his lips to one end of a stave and blow bubbles out the other. White oak's pores are plugged up inside by little natural growths the coopers call tyloses, and so white oak holds spirit and red oak leaks it. Red oak holds spirit the way a Concord politician holds a secret: you can blow straight through it and hear the whistle from Epsom.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Now, oak shavings of any kind dropped into a spirit will hand it some tannin, some color, a bit of woody flavor, a quick counterfeit of barrel aging. It'll look older. It will not be cleaner. Shavings don't fish methanol out of anything. Second, the hickory ash. Hickory ash is potash, Rabbit, the same lye our forefathers boiled in their kettles. It's strong alkali, and I'll grant your uncle this much: country folk did use lye and ash to sweeten all sorts of sour kitchen work, and I'd wager that's where the notion was born. But a thump keg doesn't care how sweet you make it. Methanol boils out early in the run whether the keg is full of ash, oak, or Bible pages. The only way to get the bad heads out is the cuts: throw out the foreshots, throw out the heads, and keep only the hearts. Everything else is ceremony.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Rabbit, thank you for writing in from Wilkesboro. A shout to you, to your uncle, and to every Carolina hollow that keeps the old tales going, even the wrong ones, because a wrong tale told well is still a pleasure, so long as nobody drinks it. Now, since we're in the myth-busting trade, here's one from Jedediah Coffin of Gilmanton: 'Doctor, my father says you can tell if liquor's safe by setting a spoonful afire. If it burns blue, it's good.' Jedediah, your father is about half right, which in a test of poison is the same as all wrong. Yes, good spirit burns blue. So does methanol, a pale, clear blue you can hardly see by daylight. The flame tells you it will burn. That's all it tells you. A blue flame proves a spirit will burn, and so will my barn, and I don't drink my barn either.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: And while we're at it, the old saying: 'Lead burns red, and red means dead.' I learned that as a boy from an old cooper in Barnstead who swore by it. Folks, a spoonful of flame can't reliably tell you whether lead is in your liquor. The color of a flame changes with the spoon, the wick, the light, and what you had for supper. The only sure guard against lead is to keep lead out of the still in the first place: no lead solder, no salvaged junk metal, nothing but honest copper and proper joints. The man who taught me 'red means dead' later died of something entirely different, which I take as a final argument against his method.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin; a ringing hum as it fades
Wilkins: One more for the road. Little Hannah Batchelder, whose father works the cotton mill on the Suncook, writes: 'Mister Wilkins, why do you hit pennies with a hammer?' Hannah, I stamp my name on them, G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., so that wherever that coin goes, to Boston or Baltimore or the bottom of a sheriff's pocket, somebody looks at it and says, there's a man up in New Hampshire who was here first. And because I like the noise. I've been married to my anvil longer than most men stay married to their wives, and she has never once asked where I was all night, because she was there.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
♪ Parlor piano flourish
Announcer: A QUICK WORD before we part, friends! Ask for the Flame-Flow still, United States Patent 10,561,960, with even heat, a steady run, and copper made the way the Alchemist likes it. Visit moonshinestill.com today. That's moonshinestill.com!
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme returns, soft and warm
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, fire settling in the stove
Wilkins: That's the mailbag emptied, neighbors, all but the letter from a gentleman in Concord who called me a menace to public morals, which I've framed and hung over the privy. My thanks to Miss Clara Higgins, who came all the way from the Blue Ridge to sit by my stove and outtalk me, which no woman in Merrimack County has managed since my mother.
Clara: Doctor, it's been a pleasure. Tell Barnaby I forgive him for eating my bonnet.
Wilkins: He doesn't want forgiveness, Clara. He wants the ribbons. Now, if you want the real craft, the history, the copper, the cuts, the fire, and every hard lesson I learned the painful way so you needn't, then enroll in the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. It teaches the old art the honest way, with the law in mind and the safety first: what to keep, what to throw out, and how to keep your shed from burning to the ground over a slice of pie. Keep sending your wires to the six-oh-three, four-seven-one, fifty-five ninety-seven line, and I'll keep reading them, so long as the telegraph boy's wrist holds out.
Wilkins: And remember, this program is history and education only. Making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of these United States. 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