Rubber Plates and Royalty Fights: Vulcanite Dentures and the Dentists' Revolt
Before vulcanized rubber, false teeth meant swaged gold, sour ivory, or Waterloo teeth pulled from dead soldiers. Then sulfur-cured rubber put dentures within a working man's reach, and the Goodyear Dental Vulcanite Company of Boston sent agents door to door to collect royalties. Civil War era moonshiner, copper still man, and country tooth-puller Dr. G. G. Wilkins tells the history from his dental chair in Pittsfield, New Hampshire, then walks through a cider brandy distilling run and the thump keg questions that come with it.
In this episode
- Vulcanite denture history: how Goodyear's sulfur-cured rubber made false teeth affordable
- Gold swaging, rotten ivory dentures, and the grim trade in Waterloo teeth
- The 1864 Cummings patent, the Goodyear Dental Vulcanite Company, and the dentists' revolt over royalties
- Exploding vulcanizers, steam pressure vessels, and mercury vermilion in pink rubber gums
- A Boston license collector meets Barnaby the pet bear
- Clara Higgins' Blue Ridge stories: Sunday teeth soaked in apple brandy, a vulcanizer hidden in an apple-butter stir-off, and persimmon brandy
- Cider brandy distilling in a copper still: why fruit mash makes heads, hearts, and tails cuts matter more
- Listener Q&A: hickory ash and red oak shavings in the thump keg
Dr. G. G. Wilkins tells the story of vulcanized rubber dentures from a country tooth-puller's chair: how sulfur-cured rubber put false teeth within a working man's reach, how the Goodyear Dental Vulcanite Company of Boston sent agents out to collect license fees and royalties from every dentist who cooked a plate, and why a man who never paid anybody willingly took it personally. He tells how a Boston license collector met Barnaby, and Blue Ridge herbalist Clara Higgins brings new mountain stories: Sunday teeth soaked in apple brandy, an unlicensed vulcanizer hidden in an apple-butter stir-off, and persimmon brandy that could pucker a plate loose. Wilkins then walks through a cider brandy run and why fruit mash makes the cuts more important, and answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, NC on hickory ash and red oak shavings in the thump keg.
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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! Settle your four hundred pounds of flea-farm down! That is not a ham, you hairy Methodist, that is the Boston mail sack. There is nothing in it but bills and a summons, and you have already eaten both of those this spring. You told me the summons had more flavor. Lie down before I pull your eyeteeth and sell them to a Concord widow for buttons.
♦ Bear huffs, chain drags heavy across rough planking, then a low grumble
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth, rising then settling under the voice
Wilkins: Good evening, neighbors, sinners, and the occasional deputy listening at the knothole. Welcome to Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, broadcasting from the log fortress of Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, in Pittsfield, Merrimack County, New Hampshire. I am your host, your tooth-puller, your blacksmith, and when the sheriff isn't looking, your apothecary of last resort. Tonight's subject is close to my heart and closer to my pocketbook: rubber teeth. Pink rubber plates, a Boston patent, and a pack of lawyers who would charge you a royalty on your dying breath if they could find out where you keep it. We call it Rubber Plates and Royalty Fights: Vulcanite Dentures and the Dentists' Revolt.
♪ Theme fades out
Wilkins: First, a quick word from the folks who keep the copper bright around here.
Announcer: A quick word, friends! The Flame-Flow Still, protected under United States Patent 10,561,960, is handcrafted from heavy-gauge pure copper and built to last a lifetime. See it at the Fort Wilkins showroom on Route 28, or order yours at moonshinestill.com!
♦ Wax crackle swells briefly
♪ Short banjo sting
Wilkins: Segment the first. The history.
Wilkins: Pull your chair close and keep your mouth shut, which is advice I give my patients and nobody ever takes. Before we come to rubber, you have to understand what a set of false teeth was in this country before the war. If you were rich, you had a gold plate. A dentist, a man like me, took a plaster cast of your gums, poured a metal die from it, and hammered a sheet of gold over that die with a mallet and a counter-die until it fit the roof of your mouth like a glove fits a hand. Swaging, we call it. I have swaged gold on my own anvil. It takes patience, it takes a good eye, and it takes more money than a mill hand at Pittsfield sees in half a year. So the working man went toothless, gummed his salt pork, and whistled his esses like a teakettle.
Wilkins: If you weren't rich but you were vain, you had ivory. Carved hippopotamus tusk, walrus, sometimes bone from God knows what. Now ivory is a sponge. It soaks up everything you put in your mouth, and in a few months it goes sour. I mean sour. Ivory teeth turned so foul that a man's wife could smell him coming up the lane before she heard him, which in some marriages in this valley was considered a mercy. I had a patient in Barnstead, an old drover, whose ivory set had gone so green and rank that when I pulled it out of his mouth a fly landed on it, took one sniff, and fell over dead on my bench. I buried the fly. I did not bury the teeth, because he hadn't paid me yet.
Wilkins: Then there's the grisly business. The teeth themselves, the fronts set into those plates, very often came out of dead men's heads. After Waterloo in 1815 the scavengers went over that field with pliers before the bodies were cold, and Europe's dentists bought those teeth by the barrel. They called them Waterloo teeth, and fine ladies in London chewed their mutton with the smiles of dead Frenchmen and dead Englishmen alike. I have heard tell, and I believe it, that the same trade went on after some of our own battles. A tooth-puller with a sack walking among the boys at the edge of a field, working in the dark. I've pulled more teeth than any man in Merrimack County, and I will tell you the sound of a molar coming out of a dead jaw is different. A live tooth fights you and crackles at the root. A dead one comes out with a soft little sigh, like it's glad to be leaving. I knew a man who did that work. He drank till he died, and that's no sermon, it's just what happened.
♦ Wax crackle, distant chain rattle
Wilkins: Now. Rubber. Charles Goodyear, the Connecticut man, spent years trying to make India rubber behave. Raw rubber is a fickle thing. It goes soft and sticky as molasses in August and cracks like old pie crust in January. The story goes that he got rubber mixed with sulfur onto a hot stove and found it had cured, firm and springy and stable. Charles Goodyear dropped rubber on a hot stove and invented an industry. I dropped a jar on a hot stove and invented a new set of eyebrows. He patented the cure in 1844. Then, and mark this, he died in 1860 owing a mountain of debt. The man who made rubber useful died broke. Remember that, because the men who came after him did not.
Wilkins: His brother Nelson Goodyear took it further. Cook rubber with a great deal more sulfur, long and hot, and it doesn't stay springy. It goes hard as horn, black or brown, and you can file it, carve it, and polish it. Hard rubber, vulcanite, ebonite, whichever you like. Nelson patented that in 1851. And somewhere along the way some bright fellow noticed that if you pack soft rubber into a plaster mould of a man's gums, with porcelain teeth set in it, and cook it under steam, you get a denture plate that fits snug, holds the teeth fast, doesn't go sour like ivory, and costs a fraction of gold.
Wilkins: The cooking is done in a vulcanizer. Think of an iron or copper pot with a lid bolted down tight, water inside, fire under it, cooking the flask with the rubber at steam pressure for hours. Most dentists who make plates now have one in the back room, hissing away like a cat on a stove lid. And here is something every dentist should know. A vulcanizer is a pressure vessel. Screw it down too tight, let the gauge or the safety valve fail, walk away from it, and it bursts. I know of an office in Manchester where the lid went through the ceiling and they found it in the room above, in a lady's sewing basket. She was not in the room at the time, praise God, or they'd have found her in the attic. A vulcanizer and a sheriff are alike: both are full of hot air and sulfur, and both will blow up in your face if you screw them down too tight.
Wilkins: The pink color of those gums, the pretty part that makes a plate look like healthy meat? Much of it is vermilion. Vermilion is mercuric sulfide. That's quicksilver, friends. An alchemist knows his cinnabar, and I have always thought it a strange joke that we put the alchemist's red mercury into the mouths of the poor and call it progress.
Wilkins: But it was progress, I'll grant you. For the first time a farmer, a mill girl, a widow, a teamster could afford a whole set of teeth. I've seen women walk out of my chair and cry at their own reflection in the shine of my forceps. I've seen an old man bite into an apple for the first time in eleven years and sit in my yard weeping with juice running down his chin while Barnaby watched him like a cat watching a crippled robin. That's what rubber did. And that's exactly when the lawyers showed up.
♪ Low ominous fiddle drone
Wilkins: A Boston dentist, Dr. John A. Cummings, had applied in the fifties for a patent on the vulcanite denture plate itself. The Patent Office turned him down, more than once as I hear it. He kept at it, and in 1864, with the country bleeding to death in the war, they finally granted it. The rights went to an outfit calling itself the Goodyear Dental Vulcanite Company. Goodyear's name, mind you, on a company he never lived to see. And that company sent out word to every dentist in the Union: you have been making rubber plates; you will now buy a license from us, every year, and pay us a royalty on every set you make. From what I'm told, the price depends on how fat your waistcoat looks to their agent.
Wilkins: Their treasurer, the man whose name is on the letters, is a Mr. Josiah Bacon of Boston. Bacon. No man ever had a name that made Barnaby's mouth water faster. Mr. Bacon and his agents ride the rails and the stage roads with ledgers and lawyers' letters, walking into country dental offices and asking to see the vulcanizer, the way a revenue man asks to see the cellar.
Wilkins: And the dentists have revolted. Not with muskets, though I'd sell tickets. With meetings. With resolutions. With dental societies passing the hat for court costs and swearing they'll fight the patent, saying rubber was known, vulcanizing was known, the whole notion was in the air, and no Boston man can own the inside of every American mouth. The Goodyear Company wants a royalty on every mouth in America. I have known Concord widows less particular about what goes into a man's mouth, and a good deal less greedy about it.
Wilkins: Now you'll ask me, Doctor, where do you stand? Friends, I've paid the Merrimack County sheriff twice, and both times at the end of a writ. I pay Mr. Lincoln's revenue men the way a bear pays for honey. I have never in my life paid a man for the privilege of doing work with my own two hands in my own shop with my own fire. A Boston patent lawyer is the only creature on God's earth that can charge you rent on your own mouth and send you a bill for the echo. So you can guess how I took it when Boston came calling. Which brings us to our next segment.
♪ Banjo sting, quick and jaunty
♦ Wax crackle
Wilkins: Segment the second. Legends, outlaws, and one very foolish clerk.
Wilkins: Last October, on a raw, gray morning with the maples bare and the Suncook running high, a little man in a Boston coat came up the turnpike in a hired buggy. Thin as a rake handle, spectacles, a carpetbag, and a sample case. His name was Pettengill, and he introduced himself as a representative of the Goodyear Dental Vulcanite Company. He said it like a bishop says amen. He had a ledger with my name in it. Somebody in Concord, some licensed tooth-carpenter with a grudge, had told him Wilkins of Pittsfield was cooking rubber plates without a license.
Wilkins: I said, Mr. Pettengill, that iron pot in my back room is a bean cooker. He said, Doctor, there is a denture flask in it. I said those are very special beans. He opened his ledger and told me I owed a license fee and back royalties on every plate I'd made since 1864, and he wanted to inspect my books. I said I'd keep my books where I keep my morals, which is nowhere a Boston man can find them.
Wilkins: Now here's where his education begins. Mr. Pettengill had set his sample case down on the chopping block in the dooryard. In that case were a dozen display sets, the company's finest, pink vulcanite gums and porcelain teeth all grinning in a row on velvet, to show country dentists what licensed work looks like. And the chopping block, as every regular listener knows, sits just inside the reach of Barnaby's chain.
♦ Bear grunt, chain snapping taut
Wilkins: Barnaby doesn't care about patents. Barnaby cares about anything that smells like it's been in a human mouth, because in his experience that's where the gravy goes. He came off that woodpile like a black avalanche. One paw took the case, lid and all. The velvet went one way, the teeth went the other, and Mr. Pettengill went straight up in the air like a Methodist at a camp meeting who's just seen the Holy Ghost and didn't care for it.
Wilkins: And neighbors, the noise. Hard rubber under a bear's jaws doesn't snap like a stick. It pops and crackles like hickory nuts in a fire. Barnaby sat down on his great hairy rump and ate those plates one after another, crunch, pop, crackle, with porcelain teeth shooting out the sides of his mouth like grapeshot, pinging off my woodshed and the buggy wheel. One front tooth hit Mr. Pettengill in the forehead and stuck there a moment like a third eye. The horse bolted halfway to Barnstead. Mr. Pettengill tried to rescue the last set, the best one, gold springs and all, and Barnaby took his coat-tail clean off, and a good share of his trousers with it, from the belt to the back of the knee. That Boston man stood in my dooryard with his pale hindquarters to the October wind, holding a ledger over the important parts, explaining to me in a very high voice the penalties for infringement.
Wilkins: I'm a fair man. I went to my anvil, set a copper cent on it, put my punch to it, G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., and struck it once. I handed it to him and said: there's your royalty, Mr. Pettengill. It's the only coin in New Hampshire that's already been taxed by a blacksmith. He took it. I'll say this for the Boston breed: they never turn down a penny.
Wilkins: It doesn't end there. Three days later Barnaby passed that set of company dentures onto the woodpile, near whole, pink gums polished bright as a baby's cheek by the journey, porcelain teeth grinning up out of the steaming pile like a deacon at a church supper. I took a stick, fished it out, scrubbed it in lye, and hung it on a nail over my shop door with a sign reading Licensed by Barnaby. It hangs there still. Patients ask about it. I tell them it's the only set of teeth in Merrimack County that's been all the way through the system and come out the other end honest.
Wilkins: The company sent me a letter after. I gave it to Barnaby. He's the only one in the family who reads Boston mail.
♦ Distant bear grunt, as if in agreement
Wilkins: Well. I promised you a guest, and she's come a long, rough way up from the Blue Ridge of Virginia, through a country that's still picking itself up out of the ashes. She's an herbalist, a keeper of the old mountain words, and she knows more about fruit brandy than any man I've met with a beard. Please welcome Miss Clara Higgins.
Clara: Well, thank you kindly, Doctor. And I'll say this before anything else: I have never in my life been introduced by a man who just finished describing a bear's backside.
Wilkins: You're in New Hampshire now, Miss Higgins. Everything here is introduced that way, including the governor.
Clara: I believe it. Your bear looked me over through the window like I was the Sunday ham.
Wilkins: He's a judge of quality. Now, I've been talking rubber teeth all night. Tell me, how do your mountain people take to store-bought teeth?
Clara: Oh, Lord. Up our way they call them store teeth, or Sunday teeth, because most folks only put 'em in for preaching, funerals, and courting, and some of the old men can't tell those three apart. The rest of the week they sit in a cup on the mantel watching the family like a portrait of a dead uncle.
Wilkins: A cup of what, if I may ask?
Clara: That depends on the household, Doctor. My granny's cousin, Aunt Tildy Ballard, kept hers overnight in a jar of apple brandy. Said it kept 'em sweet and killed whatever was living on 'em. Now her husband Amos was a man who'd drink the vinegar off a pickle. One morning before daylight he comes down with the shakes, finds a jar of good apple on the mantel, and tips it up and drains it dry in one go. He gets to the bottom, and there's Aunt Tildy's teeth, pink and grinning right up at him through the glass.
Wilkins: Oh, that's cruel. That's beautiful.
Clara: He said they winked at him. He swore off liquor right there on the hearthstone, a solemn oath before God and the dog.
Wilkins: How long did it hold?
Clara: Nine days. Granny said it was the longest nine days in the history of Floyd County, and Aunt Tildy said it was the best brandy that set of teeth ever had.
Wilkins: Did the vulcanite company ever trouble your mountains? I'd think a Boston man in the Blue Ridge would stand out like a parson in a cathouse.
Clara: Doctor! Well, yes he would. After the surrender a few agents came poking south, and we had a traveling tooth-man, a fellow named Rufus Shell, who made plates for half the hollows around. He had no license and didn't want one. So in the fall, when the women put up apple butter, Rufus would set his little vulcanizer down inside a big copper apple-butter kettle at the stir-off, right in the middle of the fire with the apple butter bubbling round it, and cook his plates there.
Wilkins: Inside the apple butter? Lord, that's smuggling with a spoon.
Clara: And one October a company man come walking up the hollow with his ledger, sniffing. Now vulcanizing stinks of burnt sulfur, you know that. So the women just kept stirring that long paddle, round and round, and singing hymns as loud as they could, and when he asked about the smell, old Mrs. Akers looked him in the eye and said, why, that's just the Devil passing through the hollow, sir, he comes every fall about this time. He looked around at all those women, the fire and the brimstone smell, and I believe he half took her at her word. He left before supper.
Wilkins: And the apple butter?
Clara: Folks said that batch had a little bite to it. Nobody complained. Nobody up there complains about anything with a bite to it.
Wilkins: Now, you collect the old words. Have your people got any names for shine that come from the dental arts?
Clara: Oh, a few. Liquor strong enough to loosen a man's store teeth, they call that plate-popper. You'd hear an old fellow say, that's plate-popper, son, hold onto your Sundays. The weak, watered stuff, sorry liquor somebody's trying to stretch, they call gum-wash. Good for rinsing and not much else.
Wilkins: Plate-popper. I'm stealing it. I'll pay you no royalty.
Clara: I'd expect nothing less from a man who pays his license fees to a bear.
Wilkins: Ha! Tell me about persimmons. I know you study the old persimmon brandy.
Clara: I do. Now a persimmon is a wicked little fruit. Ripe after a frost, it's sweet as honey. Unripe, it'll pucker your whole mouth like you bit into a green crabapple dipped in alum. There was an old brandy man on the Buffalo Mountain side, Ezekiel Pruitt, who wore a full set of store teeth, and he judged his fruit by biting it with them. If that persimmon was green enough to draw his gums up so tight that his plate dropped right out into his hand, the fruit wasn't ready, and it stayed on the tree for another frost.
Wilkins: A dental instrument of precision.
Clara: Never wrong, he said. Folks would see him walking the orchard spitting his teeth out into his palm and putting them back, over and over, like a man counting money.
Wilkins: Now tell me true. During the war, the South got cut off from a great deal. Was there rubber for plates down there?
Clara: Precious little, the way my people tell it. The blockade pinched off everything, and a dentist couldn't get rubber for love nor money. My great-uncle Josiah was handy with a knife, and our preacher, Brother Wiley, had lost his whole bottom row and couldn't preach a sermon without spitting on the front pew. So Uncle Josiah whittled him a lower plate out of dogwood. Hard as iron, dogwood is. Boiled it in lard, polished it, set some of the preacher's own old teeth into it with pegs.
Wilkins: A wooden plate. Lord, I've seen them in the old museums.
Clara: That plate held up through four funerals and a whole revival. Then one Sunday Brother Wiley was leading Amazing Grace, and he reached for the high note on that wretch like me, and the dogwood split right down the middle with a crack you could hear in the back row. Half the plate went down the aisle, and the Simmons boy caught it like a fly ball.
Wilkins: And the sermon?
Clara: He finished it gumming every word, and they said it was the most humble sermon he ever preached.
Wilkins: Miss Higgins, you're a treasure and a menace, and the menace is the part I like. Stay with us. We'll be back after this word, and then we'll talk copper.
Clara: I'll be here, Doctor. I'll keep an eye on your bear.
Wilkins: Keep both eyes on him. He's already got one on you.
♪ Bright, rollicking banjo vamp, patent-medicine-show flavor
♦ Wax crackle, a drum roll on a wooden box
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♪ Banjo flourish and button ending
♦ Wax crackle, slow drip into jar
Wilkins: Segment the third. Copper and the craft.
Wilkins: Here is something I want you to chew on, with whatever teeth God or Boston has left you. In the vulcanizer we cook sulfur into the rubber on purpose. Sulfur is what turns the sticky gum into a hard plate. In the still we fight sulfur every step of the way, and copper is our soldier. Same element, two crafts, opposite intentions. A good alchemist knows that a thing is neither medicine nor poison by itself. It depends where you put it and what you want from it.
Wilkins: Since we're talking Blue Ridge persimmons and New England apples tonight, I'll walk you through the old Yankee way of making apple brandy from cider, the way our grandfathers did it in this valley before anybody planted a field of corn worth the name. And I'll say plain, as I always do, that making distilled spirits to drink without a federal permit is against the law of the United States, and all of this is history and education only. I've been arrested twice. Take it from a man who knows the inside of the county jail: the mattress is worse than my bear.
Wilkins: Step one. The cider. You press ripe apples, a good mix of sweet and sharp, and run the juice into clean barrels in a cool cellar. The wild yeast on the apple skins will start it working on its own, or you can pitch a cup of good working cider from last year. It'll bubble and froth for two to four weeks. Keep the cellar aired, mind, because fermenting barrels breathe out a gas that gathers low and can lay a man down. When it stops working and goes still and dry, you siphon it off the dregs, the lees, so you don't burn them in the pot.
Wilkins: Step two. Charging the pot. You fill your copper pot partway, never to the brim. Leave headroom. If you fill it to the neck, the cider foams up when it boils, comes up the column and into the vapor line, and pukes into your worm. That clogs the line and sends you a mess of hot sour foam where your spirit should be. Leave the room, friends. A pot still is like a preacher's wife: give it space or it'll boil over in public.
Wilkins: And here's the main lesson of tonight, where the vulcanizer and the still part company. A vulcanizer is screwed shut on purpose to build pressure. A still must never be sealed. The path from the pot, up the cap, through the arm, and down the worm to the condenser has to stay open, so the vapor always has somewhere to go. Stop it up with a wad of rag, a kinked worm, or a puke of mash, and you've built a bomb out of a kettle. I've seen a pot cap blow off and take a man's ear with it, clean as a razor, and the ear landed in the mash tub, and he fished it out and wanted to know if I could sew it back. I'm a dentist. I told him I could make him a vulcanite one in pink, and he'd need a license.
Wilkins: Step three. The fire and the cuts. You bring the heat up slow. Low fire. The first drops that come off the worm are the foreshots, and those you throw out, every one. Don't drink them, don't rub them on your gums, don't give them to your enemies, though I've been tempted. Then come the heads, which smell sharp and stinging, like varnish, turpentine, and shoemaker's glue. Those go too, set aside away from the drinking jars. And here's why it matters more for apple and persimmon than for corn: fruit carries a substance in its flesh and skins, the stuff that makes jelly set, and in the mash it breaks down into wood alcohol, methyl spirit. So a fruit mash makes more of the poison than a grain mash does, and it comes off early, in those first cuts. A fruit brandy man who gets greedy with his early jars is a man who's going to go blind or go dead, and I've seen both.
Wilkins: After the heads come the hearts, the good, clean middle of the run. Soft on the nose, sweet with apple, warm going down. You catch it in small jars, one after another, and you nose each jar, because the change from heads to hearts and hearts to tails doesn't ring a bell. It creeps. When the spirit starts smelling of wet dog, old dishrag, and boiled cabbage leaves, and feels oily and flat on your fingertips, those are the tails. Set them aside. Some men run them again with the next batch. Never pour them in with the hearts to stretch the batch. That's how you make gum-wash, as Miss Higgins would say.
Wilkins: And the copper. Bright copper is a busy, hungry metal. The sulfur stinks rising off the boiling cider, rotten egg and burnt rubber, and yes, there's that rubber again, latch onto the copper and stay there, so the vapor comes down the worm cleaner and sweeter. But the copper only works when it's clean and bright. Scour your pot after a run. Don't let crust build up. Don't you dare patch a seam with lead solder or a scrap of God-knows-what from a burned-out mill. A copper pot is like a set of teeth. You don't fix one with mud and you don't wait until it stinks to clean it.
Wilkins: The fire. Spirit vapor is hungry for flame. Keep your fire under the pot and nowhere else. Catch your spirit well away from the firebox, never with a lantern or a pipe leaning over the jar, and keep a bucket of water and a bucket of sand by the door. My cousin Horace lit his pipe over a jar of fresh heads in 1858, and the flame jumped from the jar to his beard and his beard to his eyebrows, and he ran down the turnpike burning like a Fourth of July Roman candle until he dove into a watering trough in front of the Pittsfield tavern. He came up smoking and said, well, that's one way to get a drink in this town. He never grew those eyebrows back. He drew them on with a burnt matchstick every Sunday for thirty years, and he always looked surprised in church.
♪ Short fiddle sting
♦ Wax crackle
Wilkins: Segment the fourth. Myths, slang, and the voice of the people.
Wilkins: Let's start with a myth, and I'll strike a coin for every lie I bury. The blue flame test. You've all seen some fool at a barn dance pour a spoonful of liquor, set a match to it, and announce: burns blue, it's good, burns yellow, it's poison, burns red, there's lead in it. Hogwash.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin, sharp anvil ring
Wilkins: That's one. The flame can't tell you whether that liquor carries wood alcohol, because wood alcohol burns too, with a faint, pale flame that's near invisible in a bright room. The flame tells you there's spirit in the spoon, and you knew that already. The blue flame test tells you exactly one thing for certain: that you've just set fire to good liquor in front of witnesses. The only test that matters happens at the still, at the cuts, before the jar is ever filled.
Wilkins: Now we've got a cylinder on the call-in line, as we call it, that talking machine my apprentice rigged up at the turnpike tavern so you folks can holler your questions in. This one comes all the way from Wilkesboro in North Carolina. Roll it, boy.
♦ Mechanical click, a hiss and whir of a turning cylinder, distant tavern murmur
Cletus: Alchemist, this is Cletus Miller, but everybody calls me Rabbit, down in Wilkesboro, North Carolina. 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?
♦ Cylinder clicks off, wax crackle
Wilkins: Rabbit! A Wilkesboro man calling Wilkins. I like you already. Your uncle's question is a good one, because it holds two separate myths stuck together like a bad pair of dentures, so let me take them apart one at a time.
Wilkins: Hickory ash first. What's hickory ash, Rabbit? Ask your granny. It's what she pours water through in the ash hopper behind the house to leach out lye for soap-making. Potash. Strong alkali. Throw it into a hot thump keg and you're making lye water. Now, alkali can knock the edge off a wash that's gone sour and vinegary, which is likely why some old man swore it improved his liquor and the story got passed down. But that's not the bad heads. The heads are the wood alcohol and the stinging solvents that boil off early in the run, and lye doesn't lay a finger on them. They come right through your keg, ash or no ash. Your uncle's hickory ashes will make you a fine bar of soap, Rabbit, and that's the only clean thing they'll ever give you.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin, sharp anvil ring
Wilkins: That's two. Now red oak shavings. Here's a coopering lesson. Red oak's no good for a liquor barrel. It's full of open pores like a sponge, and if you make a spirit barrel of it, it weeps out the sides like a widow at a wake. That's why coopers use white oak for whiskey. Toss red oak shavings in a thump keg and they'll steep out tannin and color, turning the spirit amber and a little bitter, so it looks like it sat in a barrel for years when it sat in a keg for an hour. That's not cleaning. That's painting. It's fooling the buyer's eye. Rabbit, red oak shavings in a thump keg are like rouge on a dead mule: it looks livelier, but you still shouldn't ride it to town.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin, sharp anvil ring
Wilkins: That's three. And the truth underneath it all: a thump keg is a second boiling, a doubler, and it'll strengthen your spirit, but nothing you throw into it removes the poison. The only cure for bad heads is the distiller's own judgment and his own discipline. Throw out the foreshots. Set aside the heads. Keep the hearts. Nose every jar. Do that, and you won't need ashes, shavings, prayers, or the Wilkesboro undertaker.
Wilkins: But Rabbit, I'll defend your uncle a little. He's not a liar, he's a keeper of old stories, and every old story has a grain of something true in it, even if it's only that some old man's liquor got a little less sour. Tell him Dr. Wilkins of Pittsfield said he's a fine storyteller and a terrible chemist, which is the same thing the Merrimack magistrate said about me. A Pittsfield shout-out to Cletus Rabbit Miller and all of Wilkesboro! I'm stamping a cent for you tonight, Rabbit, and I'll put it in the mail.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin, sharp anvil ring, coin skitters across anvil
Wilkins: There it is. G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. Hold onto it. It's worth exactly one cent, and in Boston they'd find a way to charge you a royalty on it.
Wilkins: Miss Higgins, before we let you go, does Virginia have a myth worth burying?
Clara: Oh, we've got one, Doctor. Folks swear if you put a store tooth in the jar, it'll turn black if the liquor's bad.
Wilkins: And?
Clara: Mostly it just turns the tooth drunk.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin, sharp anvil ring
Wilkins: That's four, and that's the last, because I'm running out of pennies and Barnaby's running out of patience.
♪ Theme begins softly underneath
Wilkins: One last quick word from our friends.
Announcer: Friends, before you blow out the lamp: the Flame-Flow Still, United States Patent 10,561,960, heavy-gauge pure electrolytic copper, handcrafted to last. See it on Route 28 at Fort Wilkins or order today at moonshinestill.com!
♦ Wax crackle
Wilkins: Well, neighbors, that's the evening. We talked rubber teeth and Boston lawyers, dead men's smiles and a bear's digestion, apple brandy and the cuts that keep you alive. I want to thank Miss Clara Higgins for coming all the way north and putting up with this valley and its bear.
Clara: It's been a pleasure, Doctor. I'm taking home the story of the Licensed by Barnaby plate and telling it at every stir-off till I'm dead.
Wilkins: Tell it right. He had a third set of teeth stuck in his fur for a week. And if you want to learn this craft proper, the history, the copper, the cuts, the fire, and the old ways done honest and safe, sign up for the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. I'll teach you everything I know except how to stay out of the Merrimack County jail, because I never learned that one myself.
Wilkins: So here's to Cummings, who got the patent; to Goodyear, who got the royalties; to the lawyers, who got the gold; and to the dentist, who got the bill. The only ones who came out of it with teeth were the patients, and that's how it ought to be.
Wilkins: Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme swells and fades
♦ Bear grunt and final drip into jar
♦ Wax cylinder crackle runs out to silence