The Ballad of Fort Wilkins
In the Radio Moonshine series finale, Dr. Alchemist G. G. Wilkins walks through the whole Fort Wilkins saga, from Pittsfield, New Hampshire's mill-town beginnings to colonial cider, frost-jacked applejack, and why a copper pot still makes safer moonshine than freezing ever could. Along the way you'll hear Civil War era distilling history, tall tales about Barnaby the pet bear eating a Concord gauger's maple wooden leg, and a new ballad sung by the fire. Blue Ridge slang historian Clara Higgins explains where 'forty-rod' and 'tanglefoot' come from, and Wilkins debunks the blue-flame test and talks thump keg wood shavings.
In this episode
- Pittsfield, New Hampshire history: Suncook River mills, Catamount Mountain, and the 1782 town founding
- Colonial New England cider, frost-jacked applejack, methanol, and the 'apple palsy'
- Why a copper pot still beats freeze distilling: cutting the heads off moonshine
- Barnaby the pet bear, a one-legged Concord revenue gauger, and a stolen copper worm
- Clara Higgins on Appalachian moonshine slang: where 'forty-rod' and 'tanglefoot' come from
- A peddler's broadside, a funeral hymn that moved a still, and a fiddler paid a dram a tune
- Thump keg Q&A: hickory ash and red oak shavings, plus the blue-flame proof test debunked
- An original 1860s folk ballad about Fort Wilkins, and Barnaby gets the last word
In the series finale, Dr. Alchemist G. G. Wilkins tours the whole Fort Wilkins saga. He covers Pittsfield's mill-town beginnings, colonial cider and frost-jacked applejack, a one-legged Concord gauger whose wooden leg Barnaby ate, and a cent with Wilkins's own tooth mark that came back to him from Portsmouth. He also sings verses of a new ballad about the fort. Blue Ridge slang historian Clara Higgins shares a peddler's broadside about a bear-keeping Yankee tooth-man, a funeral hymn that secretly moved a still, a fiddler who charged a dram a tune, and where 'forty-rod' and 'tanglefoot' come from. Wilkins answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller's question about hickory ash and red oak shavings in the thump keg, debunks the blue-flame test, and gives Barnaby the last word.
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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! Lie down, you four-hundred-pound sack of bad decisions. Yes, I know what night it is. You'll get your say at the end, same as every drunk at every wake in Merrimack County, and not one grunt before. Lie down, or I'll sell your hide to a Dover hatter and wear you to church.
♦ A long, sulking grunt, chain dragging across frozen dooryard, a great hairy body flopping down against the log wall
Wilkins: That's a good brute. That's my good, stinking brute.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth
Wilkins: Good evening, neighbors, sinners, and the two deputies I can hear breathing through the knothole in my east wall. This is 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. Tonight is a solemn night, friends. Tonight is the last night. We call it The Ballad of Fort Wilkins: one long farewell walk past every stump, still, scandal, and bloody britches-seat this outfit has left along the turnpike. I've got a fiddle, a full jar, a sharp-tongued Virginia lady waiting in the parlor, and a bear who has been promised the last word. God help every one of us.
Wilkins: But first, a word from the man who sells the kettles. He has been paid in advance, so he'll be loud.
♪ Brief brass-band flourish
Announcer: A quick word, friends! The Flame-Flow Still, guarded under United States Patent 10,561,960, heavy pure copper, made by honest hands! See her shine at the Fort Wilkins Showroom on Route 28, or order direct at moonshinestill.com. Remember it: moonshinestill.com!
♪ Flourish fades into wax crackle
♪ Banjo bridge, slow and rolling
Wilkins: Segment the first. Every ballad worth a penny starts with a place, so here's ours. Pittsfield was set off from Chichester and made a town in 1782, and they named it for William Pitt, the English lord who stood up in Parliament and told the King to quit kicking the colonies. Pitt never once set foot in Pittsfield, which proves the man had sense as well as principles.
♦ Wilkins pours from a jar into a tin cup
Wilkins: The Suncook River runs straight through the middle of town, dropping fast enough to turn a wheel, and so the valley filled up with mills. Sawmills screaming through pine, gristmills grinding corn, and the cotton mill whose bell gets the poor girls out of bed before the Lord Himself is up. Catamount Mountain hunches over the whole business. It was named for the wild cats that used to scream up there at night, until the farmers shot every catamount on Catamount Mountain and had to make do with me.
Wilkins: And before there was ever a still in this valley, there was a cider press. Mark me. Old New England ran on cider the way a mill runs on water. Every farm put up barrels of it in the fall. The deacon drank it, the hired boy drank it, and Mr. John Adams himself wrote that he liked a tankard of it of a morning. The man helped write the Declaration with apple on his breath, and nobody complained of the spelling.
Wilkins: Now here's the dark verse of the ballad. When a Yankee farmer wanted his cider stronger and had no copper, he'd 'jack' it. He'd roll the barrel out into a January night, let the water freeze into a cake of ice, and pour off the strong brown liquor that wouldn't freeze. Applejack. Sounds clever, and it is clever, the way a man stealing his own horse is clever.
Wilkins: Freezing only takes the water out. It takes out nothing else. Every bad thing in that cider stays and gets crowded closer together, like Baptists in a leaky boat. Apples are worse than corn for it, too, because the pectin that makes apple jelly set breaks down into wood alcohol, methanol, during the ferment. Jack keeps all of it. That's why the old men who drank it all winter got what they called the apple palsy: shaking hands, headaches like a mule kicking at a barn door, and faces gone red as a boiled beet.
Wilkins: I knew a fellow down in Barnstead, old Ezra, who jacked his cider every winter for forty years. By the end he had a nose like a strawberry left out in the rain and a temper like the hornets that ate it. His hands shook so bad he could thread a needle only by holding it still and shaking the thread at it.
♦ Barnaby snorts outside
Wilkins: Yes, Barnaby, you knew Ezra. Barnaby licked the man's boots once, and the boots got drunk.
Wilkins: A copper pot still is what changed it. With a still, a man can do what the frost can't. He can catch the first poisonous spirit off the top and throw it away. That right there, friends, is the whole reason a fellow like me built a still-house instead of a frost-yard. And I built this fort of hemlock logs a foot thick, so a revenue man who knocks bruises his knuckles before he can bruise my business.
Wilkins: Now, I promised you a ballad. I wrote it myself on the back of a tooth-pulling bill that nobody paid. Fiddle, if you please.
♪ Mountain fiddle strikes up a slow waltz-time ballad tune, banjo picking under it
Wilkins: (singing, rough and loud) Oh, come all you Suncook drinkers, and gather round the jar, / I'll sing of hemlock timbers and a tooth-man's copper star, / He'd pull your aching molar, and he'd pour you something strong, / And the bear outside the window grunted every chorus long.
Wilkins: (singing) So it's drip, drip, drip in the jar, boys, and the fire burning low, / There's a bear upon the chain, boys, and the law can come and go.
♦ Barnaby grunts, nearly on the beat
Wilkins: He's no Jenny Lind, but he keeps time.
♪ Ballad tune fades
♪ Banjo bridge, quicker
Wilkins: Segment the second, legends and outlaws, and tonight the outlaw is mostly me. You've heard about my two visits with the Merrimack sheriff. I'll not tell those again. I'll only say that both times I put on my good coat, and both times the coat came home cleaner than the court.
Wilkins: No, tonight I'll tell you the stories I've been too much of a gentleman to tell till now. Which is to say, I was waiting till it was too late to get sued.
Wilkins: There was a gauger out of Concord. One leg flesh, one leg maple wood, strapped on at the knee with harness leather. He decided he'd sneak up on Fort Wilkins after dark, figuring a one-legged man is a quiet man. He was not. He went thump-shuffle, thump-shuffle up the turnpike like a drunk drummer looking for his regiment.
Wilkins: Now the man had been out sugaring all week, and that maple leg had soaked up sap and syrup until it smelled like a pancake breakfast. To Barnaby, the fellow was a walking flapjack. The bear came up off the frost without a sound. Barnaby can move quiet as a debt. He took that wooden leg in his jaws at the knee strap and gave it one shake. I heard the buckles pop, ping, ping, like a banjo string snapping, and then a long tearing sound, like a wet bedsheet ripped on a nail. That was the trousers.
♦ Wilkins slaps the table, laughing
Wilkins: The gauger went down on his back in my dooryard, and Barnaby lay down on the spot and chewed that leg like a turkey drumstick on Thanksgiving. Crunch, crunch, and maple splinters flying out of the sides of his mouth like sawdust off a buzz saw. The gauger got up on his one good leg to hop away, and Barnaby, still chewing, reached out lazy as you please and took one more bite, out of the seat of the man. A piece of hindquarter about the size and shape of a Boston cracker.
Wilkins: I'm a doctor. I have my oath. I brought the man inside, laid him face-down across my anvil bench, poured spirit on him, and he hollered so loud the cows in Barnstead quit giving milk for a week. I stitched him with silk thread and charged him fifty cents for the stitching and another dime for not laughing, and I am still owed the dime. Then he hopped home to Concord on a hoe handle. Barnaby kept the leg. He still sucks on it when the weather turns, like an old man with his pipe.
Wilkins: Then there was the tinker from Epsom. Every man in Epsom envies my worm. Forty feet of coiled copper, polished, handsome, and it has never once failed to deliver under pressure.
♦ Wax crackle; a pause
Wilkins: I'm talking about my condenser, you filthy-minded heathens. Mostly.
Wilkins: This tinker crept up one moonless night with a bag and a pair of tin snips, meaning to cut my worm loose and carry it home. He forgot the chain. Or he figured the chain went the other way. Barnaby didn't bite him. Barnaby did something worse. He sat on him. Four hundred pounds of bear set down on that tinker's chest like a church bell come down from the steeple, and stayed there, from midnight to breakfast, scratching his own belly and looking at the stars.
Wilkins: Every breath the man took came out in a little squeak, like a church organ with a mouse in the bellows. Squeak. Squeak. All night long. And from pure terror the Epsom man emptied himself of every meal since Thanksgiving, by both exits the Almighty provided. When I came out at dawn with the coffee, Barnaby got up and stretched, and that tinker was lying in a perfect bear-shaped print in the frost, flat as a pressed flower and twice as fragrant. He never did take my worm. He took up the Temperance Pledge instead, and I'm told he's miserable.
Wilkins: One more, and then the lady. You know I strike my name on coins at the anvil, G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. What you don't know is that years back I stamped a fat copper large cent and bit it, the way any sensible man tests copper, and left a dent from my left eyetooth right across Liberty's cheek. Three years after, I'm down in Portsmouth buying oysters off a cart, and the oysterman hands me my change, and there's my own name looking up at me, and there's my own bite on her face.
Wilkins: That cent had been to the sea and back. It smelled of fish and tar and sailors' pockets. A coin that comes home is like a bad husband: worn thinner, smelling of the sea, and pretending it never left. I keep it in my vest pocket now. I'll be buried with it, so whoever digs me up will know who I was and that I paid my way.
♪ Fiddle sting
Wilkins: Now. We have come down to the end of the road, and on the last night a man wants good company. All the way from the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, by rail and by stage and, I'm told, one bad night in a Hartford hotel, please welcome the mountain herbalist and keeper of every word a drinking man ever coined, Miss Clara Higgins.
♦ Parlor door creaks, boots on plank floor, chair scraping
Clara: Doctor Wilkins. I've come six hundred miles to see a bear, and the first thing I see is you.
Wilkins: Clara, you've got a tongue like a fresh-honed razor and I've got a face like an old strop, so we'll get along. Sit down. Have a jar.
Clara: I'll have a thimble. Mama raised me to drink with my eyes open and my purse shut.
Wilkins: Wise woman. Now, Clara, tonight's the Ballad of Fort Wilkins, and you told me before we went on that you'd heard of this place before you ever got on the train.
Clara: I did, and it like to scared me to death. The spring after the surrender, there came a Yankee tin peddler up our holler in Floyd County. Little feller with a cart that rattled like a skeleton falling down the stairs, pots and pans and needles and penny ballads printed on paper thin as onion skin. He was singing one out loud to sell it. It was called 'The Tooth-Man and His Bear.'
Wilkins: Ha! That's not mine. Somebody stole my ballad before I wrote it.
Clara: Well, they stole it pretty rough. In the peddler's version you pulled a man's tooth with a pair of blacksmith tongs, and then your bear ate the tooth, and then the bear ate the man, and then you sold the bear's leavings for tobacco.
Wilkins: Three of those four are lies. I'll not say which.
Clara: Mama traded that peddler two eggs for it and pasted it up inside the lid of the flour bin. Every time I went to make biscuits, there was a woodcut of a big black bear grinning at me, and a skinny man with a beard and a jar. I'm sorry to say the woodcut flattered you.
Wilkins: It's a hard thing, Clara, to be outdone in handsomeness by a block of carved cherry wood.
Clara: Now I'll tell you how songs move a still back home, because a ballad's a useful thing in the mountains. When my great-uncle Amos died, God rest him, he left a still running up on Pine Creek and a revenue man sniffing around the county the very same week. Well, the whole family had to go to the burying, and so did half the county, and so did that revenue man, to see who'd cry hardest over a moonshiner.
Wilkins: A revenue man who sings hymns at a moonshiner's funeral is either a Christian or a fool, and generally both.
Clara: He was both, and he sang loud. Now, our church lines out the hymns. The song leader sings a line, and everybody sings it back after him. Old Brother Tolley was leading 'Wondrous Love.' And right in the middle he lines out, clear as a bell: 'Go move the kettle to the laurel hollow, O my soul.'
Wilkins: (laughing) He did not.
Clara: And the whole congregation sang it straight back at him like it was Scripture! 'Go move the kettle to the laurel hollow, O my soul!' Revenue man in the back pew, hat in his hands, singing it with tears on his face. My cousins slipped out the side door before the dirt was on the coffin, and by sundown that still was three ridges over in the laurel, steam and all. That revenue man went home and told his wife it was the most moving service he'd ever been to.
Wilkins: And so it was. It moved a whole still.
Clara: Now music's never free in the mountains, either. There was a fiddler down our way named Dock Roop, and Dock charged a dram a tune. Not money. A dram. One Saturday dance they kept hollering for 'Sally Goodin,' and he played it, and they paid him, and they hollered again, and he played it again, and by midnight he'd played 'Sally Goodin' maybe forty times and drunk maybe forty drams.
Wilkins: A fiddler who plays for whiskey is the only workingman whose wages get better the worse he does the job.
Clara: About sunup Dock leaned back to hit the high note and went clean off the end of the porch, backwards, into the hog lot. And Doctor, he never stopped bowing. Lay there flat on his back in the mud with a sow sniffing his ear, sawing away at 'Sally Goodin' to the sky. The dancers just came down off the porch and finished the set around him in the yard.
Wilkins: That's an artist. I've had patients faint in my chair with half a molar out, and none of them ever had the decency to keep playing.
Clara: Now you asked me about the words. Folks always ask me about panther's breath and white lightning, but my granny's favorites were the uglier ones. 'Forty-rod,' now. Granny said that was whiskey so mean it'd drop a man before he walked forty rods from the jug. That's about two hundred and twenty yards, and she swore she'd measured it once on Uncle Pete.
Wilkins: She paced it off behind him?
Clara: She paced it off and then stepped over him. Then there's 'tanglefoot.' That's liquor that ties a man's feet up in knots while his mouth keeps right on walking. Granddaddy would come home tanglefooted and he'd tell the whole history of the Mexican War to the fence post while his boots argued over which one went first.
Wilkins: We've got the same words up here. We just say them slower and with less teeth. A Pittsfield man drunk on forty-rod doesn't tangle his feet. He just leans on the hitching post and calls it business.
Clara: Doctor, before I leave you, I wrote you something on the train. A verse for your ballad. The peddler's version's got no women in it, and that ain't right.
Wilkins: Fiddle! Give the lady the tune.
♪ Fiddle and banjo return with the ballad melody, a little brighter
Clara: (singing, high and clear) There came a Blue Ridge woman, rode six hundred miles by rail, / To see the bear of Pittsfield and to hear the tooth-man's tale, / She found the bear a gentleman, as sober as a judge, / But the tooth-man was the beast, boys, and he wouldn't pay his fudge.
Wilkins: (singing along, off key) So it's drip, drip, drip in the jar, boys, and the fire burning low,
Clara: (singing) There's a bear upon the chain, boys,
Wilkins and Clara: (singing together) And the law can come and go!
♦ Barnaby grunts twice, approvingly
Wilkins: Clara Higgins, ladies and gentlemen. Fudge doesn't even rhyme with judge proper, and I've never been happier to be slandered.
Clara: It rhymes in Virginia, Doctor. Most everything does after the second jar.
♪ Ballad tune resolves
♪ Brass flourish, a patent-medicine wagon bell clanging
Announcer: Step up, step closer, friends of the fire and the copper! Has your old kettle gone green as a frog's belly? Does she leak, does she hiss, does she shame you in front of company? Then hear me now! Moonshine Stills, proud home of the Flame-Flow Still, the Flagship of the whole line, protected under United States Patent 10,561,960! She's made of heavy-gauge, high-purity electrolytic copper, refined bright and clean, joined with precision machine-cut brass unions that hold tight as a banker's fist! Her shape is built to keep the heat rolling and circling for the greatest purity, whether you're drawing fragrant essential oils, preparing herbal tinctures, or putting on a traditional distillation demonstration for the townsfolk! Handcrafted American work, friends, the real article, for eight hundred ninety-nine dollars! Visit moonshinestill.com/products/flame-flow-copper-still this very day! Or call at the Fort Wilkins Showroom on Route 28 in Pittsfield, New Hampshire, and lay your own hand on her! Once more for the folks in the back: moonshinestill.com/products/flame-flow-copper-still! The Flame-Flow Still. Pure copper, honest craft, and nothing to hide!
♦ Wagon bell clangs twice
Wilkins: The Flame-Flow is the only thing on Route 28 shinier than the sheriff's excuses.
♪ Flourish fades
♦ Wood fire crackling under a copper pot, a low simmering hiss
Wilkins: Segment the third: copper and the craft. This is the last time I'll teach it on this program, so I'll go slow and I'll go honest. First the lawful part, and I mean it: making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the laws of the United States, and what I tell you here is history and instruction for curiosity's sake. Now, the run.
Wilkins: Since we started tonight with cider, we'll finish with cider. You press your apples, sound ones and not rotten, and let the juice work in a clean barrel with the bung loosely stopped so the gas can get out. It'll foam and grumble a week or two and then go quiet and dry. That's your wash. It's only a few parts in a hundred spirit, no stronger than a hard cider ought to be.
Wilkins: You charge the pot with it. Never fill her more than about three parts in four, because cider foams when it boils and you don't want froth climbing up into your cap and puking down the worm. Lid on, joints sealed with a flour paste, but mark me, the vapor path must always be open from pot to worm to jar. A still is never sealed shut. Plug that line with a wad of pomace and the pressure builds until the pot splits open like a hog's bladder at a slaughtering, and it'll scald you down to the soul.
Wilkins: Fire low. I say it every week and I'll say it on my deathbed. A slow fire gives you a slow, clean drip you can read. A roaring fire smears everything together, heads and hearts and tails all in one jar, like a lazy man's laundry.
♦ Slow drip of clear distillate into a glass jar
Wilkins: Now she's coming. Line up your jars, little ones, and number them in chalk. The first drops are the foreshots. Off an apple run especially, with all that pectin, there's wood alcohol in those first drops, and it'll blind you or kill you. Throw them out. I pour mine on the stump by the woodpile, and nothing has grown on that stump since Buchanan was President. Better to throw away too much than one spoonful too little.
Wilkins: Next come the heads. Smell, don't taste. The heads smell like a cobbler's glue pot and a shellac can had a quarrel and both of them lost. Sharp. They bite the inside of your nose. They're poison too, and they go out with the foreshots. Then, jar by jar, that sharpness drops away and you smell apples, sweet and round, like a September orchard with the sun on it. That's the hearts. That's what all the work is for.
Wilkins: Keep going, jar after jar, and the smell goes soft and greasy. That's tails. Tails smell like a wet sheep that fell asleep in a damp cellar and dreamed of turnips. They feel slick between your fingers. Set the tails aside, out of the hearts. Thrifty men save them and run them again with the next charge.
Wilkins: Now, why copper and not iron or tin? Because a ferment throws off sulfur stink, rotten eggs and old cabbage. When that vapor touches bright copper, the sulfur takes hold of the metal and stays there as a dark crust, and the spirit runs on clean without it. That's alchemy, friends, real alchemy: the base metal takes the curse so the spirit goes free. But only bright copper does the work, so you scrub your pot after every run, and none of that black and green crust ever goes in a jar.
Wilkins: How strong is it? You've heard the word 'proof.' The English, so the story goes, used to soak a pinch of gunpowder in spirit and put a match to it. If the powder still caught, the spirit was proved strong enough. Weak spirit soaked the powder and it fizzled, and the seller got a beating. In 1818 the English government took up a brass instrument called the Sikes hydrometer and made it the law for measuring strength. It floats higher or lower in the spirit, and it's a good deal safer than gunpowder in a room full of alcohol.
Wilkins: Which brings me to fire, my last sermon. Alcohol vapor is heavier than air. It doesn't rise like smoke. It creeps along the floor like a cat after cream, and if there's a lantern on the floor or a firebox door open, it'll find it. I've seen a still-house in Loudon go up so fast the man inside came out with no eyebrows, no hair on his arms, and his boots still burning, and he thanked God on his knees in the snow, as well he should. Keep your joints tight. Keep a bucket of water and a wet blanket handy. Never leave a running still alone, not even for a pretty woman or a dying uncle. Uncles can wait. Fire can't.
♦ Fire settles, drip continues
♪ Banjo bridge
♦ Heavy anvil set on a stump, punch and hammer laid on iron
Wilkins: Segment the fourth: myths, slang, and the mail. We got a message, cut onto a cylinder and carried up from the Carolinas at great expense, the man's voice coming through the brass horn. Roll it.
♦ Phonograph cylinder hiss, needle scratch
Wilkins: (reading the label) Mr. Cletus Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, called Rabbit by those that love him. Let's hear him.
♦ Faint recorded voice under the crackle
Wilkins: Rabbit 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 a chemist and half a liar, which makes him a whole Carolinian. Here's the honest answer, in two parts.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Part one, the ash. Hickory ash is potash. It's the same stuff your granny leached through a hopper to make lye for soap. It's alkaline, it's strong, and it will sour-kill a little of the vinegar sharpness in a run, the way a pinch of saleratus takes the bite out of sour milk. That much is true. But the heads, the bad part with the wood alcohol in it, don't care a fig for lye. They boil off early regardless, and the only way to get them out is to catch them in the first jars and throw them away. Rabbit, ash in a thump keg is like whitewash on a privy: it changes the color, not the contents. And if your uncle overdoes it, he'll get spirit that tastes of soap and washes his mouth out for all his sins.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Part two, the red oak. Now that's flavor, not cleaning. Oak's full of tannin, the same stuff that tans a hide, and hot vapor through oak shavings pulls out color and a woody, puckery taste. Makes raw spirit look like it's been sleeping in a barrel. Red oak shavings in a doubler make the spirit look older, which is what a rouge pot does for a widow, and it fools about as many men. It doesn't touch the heads. Red oak's open-grained and leaky besides, which is why the coopers favor white oak.
Wilkins: So Rabbit, your uncle isn't making swamp medicine. He's making swamp cosmetics. Shout out to Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina. Keep your ears long and your cuts honest, son.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Now, since it's the last night, I'll kill one more myth, and it's the prettiest one there is: the blue flame. You've seen it at every tavern. Some sharp fellow pours a spoonful of shine, puts a match to it, and says, 'Burns blue, she's good. Burns yellow, she's poisoned.' And everybody nods like he's read it in the Bible.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Rubbish. Wood alcohol, the stuff that blinds you, burns with a pale blue flame too, much like good spirit does. The flame can't tell them apart, so it can't tell you a thing about whether a jar will kill you. The blue flame test is a fortune teller with a candle: very pretty, very sure of itself, and very wrong about your future. I lit a spoonful once for a Gilmanton deacon to prove a point. He leaned in close to admire it and set his whiskers afire, and that blue flame lied to both of us. He came out of it looking like a singed chicken at a church supper. Lighting spirit indoors is how barns burn down. Don't do it. The only test that keeps you alive is honest cuts at the still.
♦ Final steel punch clangs on copper coin, the coin rings as it drops into a tin dish
Wilkins: There. One last coin. G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., struck on the last night. Whoever finds it, buy a round and lie about me kindly.
♪ Ballad melody returns, slow, fiddle alone
Wilkins: Here we are, friends, at the far end of the turnpike. Before I let the bear speak, one more from the kettle man.
♪ Short brass flourish
Announcer: Before you go, friends! Take home the Flame-Flow Still, United States Patent 10,561,960, heavy pure electrolytic copper built to last a lifetime! Order today at moonshinestill.com, or visit Fort Wilkins on Route 28. That's moonshinestill.com!
♪ Flourish fades into fiddle
Wilkins: And for those of you who want the long lesson and not just my bragging, the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course goes on teaching after I've gone quiet. It covers the history, the copper, the cuts, the fire safety, and the law, all set down plain so you'll learn it right. Inquire at the Fort Wilkins Showroom on Route 28. Learn the old craft honest, and learn first what the law allows you to do with it.
Wilkins: (singing, soft over the fiddle) Now the fire is burning lower and the jar is nearly full, / And the tooth-man's hung his forceps up beside the hammer's pull, / But if you pass by Pittsfield when the Suncook moon is round, / You can hear a bear a-grunting, and a drip, and no other sound.
Wilkins: Thank you, Clara Higgins, for riding north to slander me in rhyme. Thank you, Rabbit Miller, and give your uncle my love and my soap recipe. Thank you, deputies at the knothole. Your feet must be froze solid by now. And thank you, every one of you, for drinking with old Wilkins all these weeks.
Wilkins: Barnaby. Come up to the window. Come on, you great hairy sinner. You've eaten a gauger's leg, sat on a tinker, and outlived better men than me. Barnaby has had more last words than a dying senator, and every one of them was 'ham.' Here's the last word. It's yours. Say your piece.
♦ Chain clinks taut, heavy paws on the log sill, bear breath fogging the window glass
Barnaby: (a long, deep, rumbling grunt that rattles the window glass, ending in a satisfied huff)
Wilkins: (quietly) Well said, old friend. Couldn't have put it better myself, and Lord knows I tried for years.
♪ Fiddle and banjo swell one last time on the ballad chorus, then thin to a single string
Wilkins: Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.
♦ Bear grunt and final drip into jar
♦ Wax cylinder crackle runs out to silence