The Revenuer Hall of Fame
Moonshiner and alchemist Dr. G. G. Wilkins breaks his own oath and opens a Hall of Fame for the cleverest revenuers in history, striking a copper coin on his anvil for each one. He covers Robert Burns the exciseman poet, Thomas Paine the gauger, a tax collector tarred and feathered in the Whiskey Rebellion, and the Civil War tax commissioners who built the IRS, then a New Hampshire deputy who worked out his copper still just by counting his woodpile. Herbalist Clara Higgins brings Appalachian moonshine legends, and Barnaby the bear tells a grisly tale about a paid informer.
In this episode
- Robert Burns as a Scottish excise gauger and the capture of the smuggling ship Rosamond
- Thomas Paine's career as an excise officer and The Case of the Officers of Excise
- Whiskey Rebellion history: tax collector Robert Johnson tarred and feathered, and Bower Hill burned
- Internal Revenue Act of 1862 and Civil War whiskey tax commissioners George Boutwell and Edward Rollins
- How a Gilmanton revenuer worked out a hidden moonshine still from cordwood and corn purchases
- Appalachian moonshine legends: drunk hogs, a revenuer dressed as a tin peddler, a licensed persimmon brandy still
- Thump keg wood explained: hickory ashes vs red oak in a copper pot still
- The spoon-flame proof test debunked, plus why it's unsafe for testing moonshine
Dr. G. G. Wilkins does something he swore he never would and opens a Hall of Fame for the cleverest tax men in history. He strikes a commemorative coin on his anvil for each one: Robert Burns the gauger, Thomas Paine the excise officer, a collector tarred during the Whiskey Rebellion, Commissioners Boutwell and Rollins, and a Gilmanton deputy who worked out Wilkins's still from his woodpile, with a gruesome Barnaby tale about a paid informer for contrast. Blue Ridge herbalist Clara Higgins brings new mountain stories of a gauger who tracked stills by following drunk hogs, a revenuer dressed as a tin peddler, and a one-armed Union veteran who turned a widow's persimmon still into a licensed business. Wilkins also answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller's voicemail about hickory ashes and red oak in the thump keg, and debunks the spoon-flame test.
▶ Listen in the Radio Moonshine app
Full episode transcript
♦ Audible wax cylinder surface crackle, slow drip of clear distillate into a glass jar
♦ Barnaby the black bear grunting and chain clinking outside log cabin window
Wilkins: Barnaby. BARNABY. Settle your great hairy carcass down. That is a recording machine, not a deputy, and you cannot eat it. You ate the last broom I leaned against that window and passed it by Thursday, bristles first, and you narrated the whole business to the moon all night long.
♦ Bear huffs, chain drags across frozen dooryard dirt, a heavy body flops down
Wilkins: There. Lie down on your dignity, what is left of it.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth
Wilkins: Good evening, ladies, gentlemen, and Baptists. 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, New Hampshire, where the copper is bright, the fire is low, and the bear is fed, mostly. Tonight I do a thing I swore on my mother's forceps I would never do. Tonight I praise the revenue man.
♦ Barnaby groans long and low through the window
Wilkins: The bear objects. Noted. But hear me, Barnaby: a dull revenue man is a toothache, and a clever one is a game of chess played with your liberty for the pawns. A good adversary deserves a monument. So tonight we open the Revenuer Hall of Fame, and for every man inducted I will strike a large cent on my anvil with my own punch, G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., and hang it on the wall of honor beside my diploma and my bail receipts.
Wilkins: But first, a word from the fellow who keeps the lamp oil paid for.
Announcer: A quick word, friends! The Flame-Flow Still, protected under United States Patent 10,561,960, is hand-built of heavy-gauge pure copper for herbal tinctures, essential oils, and honest demonstrations. See it at moonshinestill.com!
♪ Short fiddle sting
♪ Banjo roll fades under
Wilkins: Segment the first, the history. The tax man is older than the still. There was an excise on drink before there was a Pittsfield, and the gauger with his rod has been walking into cellars since Queen Elizabeth was making faces at the Spanish. Folks around here say revenooer like they are spitting out a bad tooth. But some of these fellows were men of genius, men of sand, and in two cases men of letters. I will not insult them by pretending otherwise.
Wilkins: First inductee. Robert Burns. Yes, that Burns, the ploughman poet of Ayrshire, the man who gave the whole world 'Auld Lang Syne' to bawl at New Year. From 1789 until he died in 1796, Rabbie Burns was a gauger of His Majesty's Excise in the Dumfries district, riding something like two hundred miles a week on a horse, poking his rod into the casks of tavern keepers who had bought him drinks the night before.
Wilkins: And he wrote a song, 'The Deil's Awa wi' th' Exciseman,' about the Devil dancing off down the road with the exciseman and all the town cheering. He wrote it while he WAS the exciseman. That is the most Scotch piece of bookkeeping ever done on this earth.
Wilkins: But give the man his due. In 1792 a smuggling schooner called the Rosamond ran aground in the Solway Firth, and Burns was among the officers who waded out through cold muck up to the waist, under the noses of men who would happily have shot him, and took her. The story goes he bought some of her little cannon at the auction afterward and tried to ship them to the revolutionaries in France, and the Excise Board had some very sharp words with him about whose side a King's officer is supposed to be on. A poet, a gauger, and a gunrunner. Barnaby, fetch me a cent.
♦ Wilkins sets coin on anvil, raises hammer
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Robert Burns. Inducted.
♦ Barnaby grunts, chain clinks
Wilkins: Second inductee. Thomas Paine. The firebrand of 'Common Sense,' the man whose pamphlet set the colonies on fire, began as an English excise officer, gauging beer and spirits in the little towns. And in 1765 they sacked him for 'stamping.' That is the trade's word for writing in your book that you inspected goods you never laid eyes on. Paine was dismissed for stamping. I have been stamping for years and nobody has sacked me but the county, and they keep handing me back.
Wilkins: They took him on again, and in 1772 he wrote 'The Case of the Officers of Excise,' begging Parliament to raise the pay of the poor gaugers, because a man paid starvation wages to guard a river of gin will soon have his hand out to every brewer on his route. He was right. Parliament did nothing, and in 1774 he was dismissed again, and he sailed to Philadelphia, and you know the rest. King George lost a whole continent partly because he would not give his tax men a raise. Remember that, Mr. Lincoln.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Thomas Paine. Inducted.
Wilkins: Third inductee, and this one is for courage, not cleverness. Robert Johnson, federal collector of the whiskey excise for Washington and Allegheny counties in western Pennsylvania. September of 1791, the Whiskey Rebellion was just warming up, and a gang of men dressed up in women's frocks and lampblack caught him at Pigeon Creek, cut off his hair, stripped him, tarred him, feathered him, and turned him loose in the woods.
Wilkins: Now people think the tarring is the punishment. It is not. The punishment is getting it OFF. Pine tar does not let go of a man. They work it off you with turpentine and lard and a dull knife, and the turpentine finds every place the skin is broken and lights it like a fuse, and you lose your eyebrows, the hair off your arms, and the hair of certain districts a gentleman does not name at supper. And Johnson went back to work. Later on, in July of 1794, a mob burned down Bower Hill, the fine house of the inspector, General John Neville. Those men collected a tax that nobody wanted to pay, in country where a pistol is cheaper than a lawyer. I do not love the tax. I tip my hat to the nerve.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Robert Johnson. Inducted, with feathers.
♪ Solemn fiddle phrase, then lightens
Wilkins: Now to our own day. When Congress passed the Internal Revenue Act in July of 1862, there was no bureau to run it. No clerks, no forms, no assessors, not so much as a pencil. The man handed the job was George S. Boutwell of Groton, Massachusetts, former governor of the Bay State and the first Commissioner of Internal Revenue. In a matter of months he carved the country into districts, appointed assessors and collectors, printed forms by the ton, and had the whole machine squeezing money out of us to pay for the war. Boutwell built a bureau out of nothing, which is what I do with a bushel of corn, except his product gives everybody a headache by law.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: George Boutwell. Inducted. And this year, eighteen sixty-five, the Commissioner's chair went to Edward A. Rollins, a New Hampshire man, a former Speaker of our own House at Concord. A Granite man collecting from Granite men. That is like hiring a fox to audit the henhouse and having him find out he is related to every hen. Mr. Rollins knows every trick in this state, because he grew up watching his uncles do them. I am sure of that, because everybody's uncle did them.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Edward Rollins. Inducted, provisionally, pending his conduct toward me personally.
♦ Barnaby snorts
♪ Quick banjo transition, galloping
Wilkins: Segment the second. Legends, outlaws, and the occasional honest lawman. I have to tell you about the cleverest revenue man ever to trouble Fort Wilkins, and he never once set foot past my bear. Moses Ladd, deputy collector, out of Gilmanton. A lean man with spectacles and a cough, built like a hay rake with a conscience.
Wilkins: Now most deputies come up the turnpike with a warrant and a swagger, and they meet Barnaby, and then they meet the Suncook River, and that is the end of their investigation. Not Ladd. Ladd sat in a buggy across the road every Tuesday for eleven weeks, eating a cold biscuit, looking at my woodpile. He counted my cordwood. He knew a man heating a tooth-pulling parlor and a forge burns so much a week, and he knew what was left over. Then he rode down to the grist mill by the river and asked the miller how much cracked corn Dr. Wilkins was buying, and he did the sums.
Wilkins: One morning he knocks on my gate, careful to stand well out of reach of the chain, and says, 'Doctor, by my figuring you are burning a cord and a half more than a dentist has any business burning, and you are buying enough corn to fatten every hog in Merrimack County, and I do not see one hog. Either you have a still or you have the hungriest bear in the Republic.' I said, 'Mr. Ladd, I have both.' And he wrote it down. He gauged my still by my woodpile. I learned that day that arithmetic is crueler than any bear.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Moses Ladd. Inducted. Fair, polite, and the only man in this county who ever beat me with a pencil.
♪ Low, ominous bowed bass note
Wilkins: Now, every Hall of Fame needs a cellar, and in mine I keep the Hall of Shame. That is not for revenue men. Revenue men do a job. It is for the paid informer, the sneak who sells his neighbors for a cut of the fine. And the lowest one I ever saw was a fellow called Ziba Hutchins, of no fixed address and fewer fixed principles.
Wilkins: Ziba decided he would collect the informer's reward on Fort Wilkins, and being too cheap to bribe the bear and too stupid to fear him, he came over my back fence at two in the morning with a lantern and a grudge. He left with neither, and short about a pound of himself.
♦ Barnaby lets out a low, satisfied rumble
Wilkins: Yes, you remember. Barnaby was asleep under the still-house window like a heap of wet buffalo robes, and Ziba stepped right on the end of his chain. I heard it from my bed. First the chain going taut with a sound like a ship's cable. Then a cough, Barnaby's cough, deep down, the sort that comes out of a cellar. Then the lantern went over and the light went sideways across the snow, and I saw a shape like a church organ stand up on its hind legs.
Wilkins: Ziba ran. Ziba was a fine runner for about four strides, until the bear got hold of his coattails, and then the seat of his trousers, and then what was in the seat of his trousers. There was a sound like a wet canvas sack being torn down the seam, and a shriek that started out a man's voice and finished somewhere around a tea kettle. Barnaby gave his head a shake, the way a dog shakes a rat, and Ziba went flying one way and a good portion of his hindquarters went the other.
Wilkins: When I got out there with a lamp, the bear was sitting back on his haunches, spitting out a mouthful of wool, buttons, and informer the way a gentleman sends back a bad oyster. The snow looked like somebody had dropped a crock of beet pickles. And Ziba was face down, howling to the stars, bottom in the air, with two half moons out that night, and one of them was a good deal smaller than it had been at supper.
Wilkins: Well, I am a doctor of a kind. I hauled him into the kitchen, laid him belly down on the table among the bread crumbs, and stitched him up with waxed harness thread and a sail needle by lamplight, while he sang 'Rock of Ages' in three different keys, none of them the Lord's. Eleven stitches, and a scar shaped like Lake Winnipesaukee. He sat sideways in church for the rest of his life, and he never informed on a living soul again. That is how you end an informer, friends, one stitch at a time.
♦ Barnaby grunts, chain clinks
Wilkins: No coin for Ziba. I would not waste good copper.
♪ Banjo flourish, warm and bright
Wilkins: Now, my guest tonight came all the long way from the Blue Ridge of Virginia, by the cars, by the stage, and by a mule whose opinions she will tell you about later. She is a mountain herbalist and a scholar of every crooked word the hills ever made up. Please welcome Miss Clara Higgins.
Clara: Well, Doctor, thank you kindly. I have to say your bear looked me over through that window like I was a ham on a Sunday table.
Wilkins: You should take it as a compliment. He never looks at the Concord delegation that way. He thinks they are underdone.
Clara: I believe that.
Wilkins: Clara, tonight we are honoring the cleverest revenue men. Now, in Virginia the law and the mountain are not exactly courting. Who do the hills down there give grudging respect to?
Clara: Oh, there's a man my great-granddaddy would talk about till the fire went out. Absalom Trigg, a gauger in Rockbridge County. Now Mr. Trigg never once went looking for a still. He went looking for hogs.
Wilkins: Hogs.
Clara: Hogs. You see, after a run, folks throw the spent mash out to the hogs, and the hogs eat that sour slop and get themselves just as drunk as a deacon at a wake. So Mr. Trigg would set on a fence rail of an evening and watch. And when he saw a sow come down out of the laurel walking like a sailor home from port, singing a little, falling into the branch and getting up offended, he would just follow her backtrail up the mountain, and sure as sunrise there was the copper.
Wilkins: Ha! The pig gives up the whole operation.
Clara: He called the hogs 'the only honest witnesses in the county.'
Wilkins: Well, he's right. Hogs are the only witnesses in Virginia who cannot be bribed, because they've already been paid in mash.
Clara: And Granddaddy said folks got so they'd pen their hogs up tight after a run, and then Mr. Trigg took to following the chickens.
Wilkins: A drunk chicken. Lord, I'd pay a dime to see a drunk chicken try to cross the turnpike.
Clara: Doctor, I've seen it. It goes about as well as a Congressman trying to cross a question.
♦ Wilkins slaps the table, laughing
Wilkins: Now you know the slang, Clara. What did your people call a revenue man when he was close by?
Clara: My granny had her own word. She called him a 'cold-supper man.'
Wilkins: Cold supper. Why?
Clara: Because when word went round that one was in the hollow, nobody in the whole cove would light a cookstove. Not a single fire. Smoke curling up off a ridge on a still morning is the plainest signboard in the world, and a sharp gauger can't tell a supper fire from a still fire till he walks up to it. So everybody ate cold corn pone and buttermilk for a week, and the children cried, and the old men cussed, and the gauger sat on the ridge watching for smoke that never came.
Wilkins: So the revenue man starved a whole hollow without ever touching their larder.
Clara: And they'd say, when somebody was mean and stingy, 'Why, he's a regular cold-supper man.' You'd hear it about a preacher who preached too long or a husband who wouldn't buy his wife a new bonnet.
Wilkins: I've known a few cold-supper husbands. I've pulled their teeth, and I charged them double for the pleasure.
Clara: Good for you.
Wilkins: Tell me about somebody who fooled the mountain the other way round.
Clara: Well, there's the tin peddler. Now this was a deputy collector, and he come through our part of the Blue Ridge in a wagon all hung with tinware, pots and dippers and pie safes and a whole string of funnels, jingling like a sleigh full of brides. He had the patter, too. He'd hold up a funnel and say, 'Ma'am, for canning your peaches.' And he'd sell it.
Wilkins: And?
Clara: And he wrote down every woman who bought a big tin funnel. Or four of them. Or a whole sack of jug corks. Any woman who said she needed a two-gallon funnel for peaches. My granny said there's not that many peaches in Virginia.
Wilkins: Any man who buys four funnels is either a distiller or married to a woman with remarkable thirsts, and that peddler wrote down both.
Clara: He did! And a month later he came back up the same road, but this time no tin wagon. A warrant, two deputies, and a little notebook. He took up two of my cousins.
Wilkins: Did the family hate him?
Clara: Hate him, yes, for about a season. But here's the joke of it. His tinware was the best ever sold in that county. We had one of his funnels in our kitchen for forty years. My mama strained milk through it. Every time she poured, she said, 'Well, God bless that lying peddler, he made a decent funnel.'
Wilkins: That is the highest praise the mountains give. Arrest my kin, but make a decent funnel.
♦ Barnaby grunts approvingly through the window
Wilkins: He agrees. Barnaby respects craftsmanship, mostly in hams.
Wilkins: Now Clara, you came up here with one more story, and you told me in the dooryard it was the one that mattered.
Clara: Yes, sir. It's about my great-great-grandmother, a widow, right after the war, in 1866. The farm was burned out, her husband was dead at Petersburg, and the only thing that hadn't been carried off was a little copper pot and a persimmon tree that bore like it was sorry for her. So she made persimmon brandy and sold it quiet to keep the children in shoes.
Wilkins: And the government came calling.
Clara: A collector. A Union man. One arm, the left sleeve pinned up. He'd lost it at Antietam, he said. He walks up her lane, and she's standing in the doorway with a churn dasher like it's a musket, and she says, 'You'll take that pot over my body.' And he looks at her, looks at the children, looks at the pot, and says, 'Ma'am, I don't want your pot. I want your name in my book.'
Wilkins: Huh.
Clara: He sat down at her table and showed her how to register, how to keep the gauge, how much the tax came to, and where she could pay it in the county seat. Told her that a legal pot can't be taken from her by anybody, not by him and not by the next fellow. And then she gave him persimmon pudding, because what else do you do, and he ate three helpings with a one-armed spoon and said it was better than his mother's, which a Yankee won't ever say.
Wilkins: That is a revenue man.
Clara: She ran that little still legal for years. Paid every penny. And when that collector came by to gauge, she always made him pudding. Granny said that was the war ending in our kitchen, one bowl at a time.
Wilkins: Well. I will strike a coin for that man and I will not crack a joke about it.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: To the one-armed collector, whose name the hills forgot and the pudding remembers. Inducted.
♦ Long quiet beat, wax crackle, then a single drip into the jar
Wilkins: Clara Higgins, thank you. Stay by the stove. Do not feed the bear, he has had his informer for the year.
Clara: I'll keep my fingers in my pockets, Doctor.
♪ Brisk patent-medicine march on banjo and cornet
♦ Wax crackle, then a snare roll
Announcer: Step right up, friends of the Suncook Valley, step right up! Are you weary of patched kettles, dented pots, and metal of unknown pedigree that leaves your herbal tinctures tasting like a blacksmith's apron? If you appreciate authentic American craftsmanship, look no further than Moonshine Stills, proud home of the Flame-Flow Still, the flagship of the fleet, protected under United States Patent 10,561,960! Built of heavy-gauge, high-purity electrolytic copper, refined until it shines like a deacon's collection plate on Easter morning! Precision-machined brass unions that seal tight, true, and handsome! Engineered to maximize convective circulation, for unmatched purity in essential oils, herbal tinctures, and traditional distillation demonstrations! Hand-built, gleaming, and yours for eight hundred ninety-nine dollars, a lifetime of craft for less than a good horse and none of the feed bill! See it, friends, at https://moonshinestill.com/products/flame-flow-copper-still, or come lay your own hands on that copper at the showroom at Fort Wilkins, on Route 28 in Pittsfield, New Hampshire. Mind the bear! Once more for the folks in the back: https://moonshinestill.com/products/flame-flow-copper-still. The Flame-Flow Still. Copper you can trust!
♪ March ends with a cymbal crash
♪ Slow, warm fiddle under
♦ Wax crackle, the hiss of a banked forge fire
Wilkins: Segment the third, copper and the craft. Tonight I'll teach it the way the best gauger in the world would read it, because a good revenue man knows the art better than half the men he catches. Before anything else, plain as a hammer: federal law in this Republic forbids distilling spirits to drink without a permit. A legal distiller registers his still and keeps his books, the same way Clara's great-great-grandmother did. What I tell you is history and the science of the thing.
Wilkins: Step one, the mash. You cook your grain, cracked corn or rye, in water, and let it cool to blood-warm before you pitch the yeast, because hot mash kills yeast as surely as a wet match. Then let it work for days. A gauger knows a fermenting room by its smell, sour and bready, and by the bubbling, which is carbon dioxide. That gas creeps along a floor and pools in low places, so keep the room open and aired.
Wilkins: Step two, the run. Many old hands run twice. The first run, the stripping run, pulls the spirit out of the wash quick and rough and gives you what they call low wines. The second run, the spirit run, you take slow and careful, and that's where the craft is.
Wilkins: Step three, the fire. Low, steady, never a roaring blaze under a pot full of alcohol vapor. Every joint tight, and never an open flame anywhere a leak might find it. This is where copper earns its keep. Copper carries heat about five times better than iron, so the fire spreads even across the bottom of the pot instead of scorching the mash in one spot. A scorched mash tastes like a burnt boot, and no amount of praying fixes it.
Wilkins: Step four, the cuts, and listen close, because this is life and death and not a matter of taste. Ethanol boils at about a hundred and seventy-three degrees, water at two hundred and twelve, and methanol, the wood spirit, at about one hundred and forty-nine. So the first things off the still are the lightest and nastiest: the foreshots, which carry methanol and the sharp, solvent-smelling stuff, and right after them the heads, which smell like glue and nail varnish on a hot day. Every drop of foreshots goes out. Never drunk, never sold, never used to rinse a sore tooth. The heads go out too, or into a separate jar for a careful man to judge.
Wilkins: Then come the hearts, sweet and clean, and that is your spirit. Last come the tails, oily and wet-dog smelling, which are set aside. The wise distiller catches his run in a row of small jars, numbered, so he can smell each one and make the cut by nose and patience, not by greed. A greedy cut is how a man goes blind. I've seen it. I don't joke about it.
Wilkins: Step five, the gauge. Here is where the revenue man shows his learning. He measures proof with a hydrometer, a glass float with a scale on the stem, and the strong spirit lets it sink deeper. But the reading changes with temperature, so the honest gauger puts a thermometer in the jar and corrects every reading. A gauger who forgets his thermometer is like a dentist who forgets which side hurts.
Wilkins: And the metal: copper sweetens the spirit, as we've said on other nights, and it must be kept bright and clean. And never in your life let lead into a still. No lead solder, no salvaged junk. A gauger who finds a lead-patched still doesn't need to fine the man, because the Almighty will do it for him, slowly.
♦ Barnaby grunts, chain clinks
Wilkins: Barnaby has his own rule for cuts: he eats the heads, the hearts, and the tails of whatever comes over the fence, and he has never once been sick, which tells you a bear is not a distiller and you should not take his advice.
♪ Fiddle bridge, playful
♦ Wax crackle, then the click and whir of a tape machine
Wilkins: Segment the fourth, myths, slang, and the mailbag. We've got a voice on the call-in line, recorded and carried up from the Carolinas. Roll it, boy.
♦ Telephone-line hiss, faint wind
Wilkins: That's Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, and he asks: '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 is half right, which in Wilkes County is a full professorship.
♦ Wilkins sets coin on anvil
Wilkins: Here's the true part. Wood ash is potash, the same stuff your grandmother boiled with grease to make lye soap. It's alkaline, and if a charge has soured, the ash neutralizes some of the acid and takes the sharp vinegar edge off the taste. So the old-timer drops a scoop in, tastes a gentler spirit, and swears he's worked a miracle. And red oak shavings put tannin in it, and color, and a woody taste, like a quick little rest in a barrel. Folks have always flavored their thump kegs with fruit and wood and whatever was handy.
Wilkins: Here's the lie part, and it's the part that kills. Neither ash nor oak touches the methanol. Not one drop. The poison comes over early in the run and is cut away by a man with jars and a nose, and that is the only way. Red oak in the thump keg is like a bow tie on a pig: it improves the look and does nothing for the pig. And I'll tell you a true thing. When I was a young man apprenticed at the forge, there was an old fellow on the Barnstead road who swore by ashes the way your uncle does. He shoveled them in so heavy one night that his thump keg foamed up like a mad dog's mouth, blew the cap, and sprayed gray mud all over his barn. He spent a week scrubbing ash paste off the rafters and said it was the cleanest the barn had been since Jackson was President. That's all the cleaning ashes ever did.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Rabbit Miller of Wilkesboro, that coin's for you. Tell your uncle he keeps the ash for soap and the oak for the barrel, and he leaves the cuts to an honest nose. And give Wilkes County my compliments. Your hills have produced more fast runners than the Union cavalry.
♦ Barnaby huffs
Wilkins: Now tonight's myth, and it's a revenue man's myth as much as a moonshiner's: the spoon test. A fellow pours a spoon of spirit, sets a match to it, and says, 'Burns blue, it's safe. Burns red, there's lead, and lead makes you dead.' I've heard gaugers do it in front of a jury like a magician pulling a rabbit, no offense to Cletus.
♦ Wilkins sets coin on anvil, raises hammer
Wilkins: It's nonsense. Methanol and ethanol both burn with a pale, near-invisible blue flame. You cannot see the poison in the fire. A spoon of deadly heads burns as pretty and blue as a spoon of honest hearts. And the red flame for lead is no proper test of anything. You could have lead in it and see no red, or red from something else entirely. Burning a spoonful to test it is the same kind of genius as sniffing a bear's breath to see if he's hungry.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Same for the bead. Shake a jar, watch the bubbles, and if they're big and last you've got strength. It tells you roughly the proof and nothing more. The bead is a weather report, not a sermon. It tells you how strong the wind is and nothing about your salvation. A hydrometer for proof, clean metal for safety, honest cuts for life. That's the whole catechism.
♪ Fiddle eases in
Announcer: One more quick word! For herbal tinctures and essential oils, trust the Flame-Flow Still, United States Patent 10,561,960, in heavy-gauge pure copper. Order at moonshinestill.com or visit the Fort Wilkins showroom!
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme returns, slow
Wilkins: That's the hour, friends. The wall of honor shines tonight: Burns, Paine, Johnson, Boutwell, Rollins, Moses Ladd and his woodpile, Clara's hog-chasing Mr. Trigg, the tin peddler, and the one-armed man who ate pudding. And down in the cellar, one Ziba Hutchins, who still sits sideways.
Wilkins: My thanks to Clara Higgins of the Blue Ridge, to Rabbit Miller of Wilkesboro, and to every revenue man who ever beat a moonshiner with brains instead of an axe. If you want to learn the craft the way it should be learned, legal, careful, and proper, write for the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. I teach the mash, the metal, the fire, and the cuts, the same lessons I've given you tonight plus the ones too long for the cylinder. No bear included.
♦ Barnaby grunts, offended
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