In my formative years, well before I had an affinity for the hard stuff, I had an appreciation-by-proxy for applejack.
The drink, an American apple brandy, which is a cousin to the French Calvados, had everything an aspiring male writer could want: written approval from Steinbeck and Hemingway, enough kick to make it an acquired taste, and a cool name, derived from “jacking” hard cider by leaving it out in the cold to bring up the alcohol content and lock in the nastiness that guarantees a hangover.
The Americana angle was huge. Who couldn’t take a sip of what’s called America’s oldest native distilled beverage, close their eyes and imagine sharing the bench seat of Steinbeck’s camper truck Rocinante with The Man himself and his dog Charley on one side, fingers surfing the air outside the window on the other, and cap the day with a “dollop” of applejack with the boys at the campground?
At one point, the whole industry almost went to pot, nearly tarnishing the romantic literary dreams of thousands of young boys like myself. It’s a small miracle that American applejack and apple brandy survived the 20th century and are now the fetish items of craft bartenders. Applejack and apple brandy, whose histories stretch back centuries, lost hundreds of producers in the decades surrounding and particularly following Prohibition, then were among the hardest hit in the collapse of brown spirits (drinks like whisky or bourbon that derive color and flavor from aging in oak barrels) between 1980 and 1995.
“This place doesn’t exist,” said an employee at Laird & Co., and though he was just talking about peculiarities in the postal system that keep them from being able to send or receive mail at their Scobeyville, N.J., headquarters, it seemed as if he was talking about the spirit’s near-disappearance.
Despite celebrating 225 years in business in 2005, confirming Laird as the oldest commercial distillery in the United States and producer of the bartender’s reference when it comes to applejack — they, too, barely made it into the 21st century.
“We stopped producing for years,” said Laird vice president Lisa Laird Dunn, referring back to the brown-spirit slump. “We had too much stock and sales continued to spiral down.”
Add to it that applejack’s reputation as an old man’s drink quite literally meant that what Laird Dunn refers to as the “shot and beer back” crowd was on or approaching their deathbeds. Plus, the signature cocktail, the Jack Rose, made with lemon juice and grenadine, fell victim to pre-made mixes.
“Sweet and sour mix and fake grenadine killed the Jack Rose,” explained Laird Dunn.
What was applejack’s escape clause? Bartenders who cared. Craft bartending, of the style where the bar’s lemon juice is squeezed from a lemon, saved the spirit.
“Your drink is only going to be as strong as your weakest ingredient,” said Joaquín Simó, bartender at Death & Co. in New York City’s East Village neighborhood, “but if you take care to use your own juices and grenadine, it’s remarkably different from what you get with the pre-made stuff.”
This is just one element at the core of the rise of craft bartending in the United States, where other spirits like rye whiskey, Old Tom gin and what Simó calls “lost and forgotten” liquors and cocktails are rising again.
“The beauty of old cocktails is in their simplicity — most of the old drinks only have three or four ingredients,” said Simó. “They’re super-delicious, but everything in there’s gotta be good.”
I learned this the hard way, trying to make an applejack jackrabbit, a mix of applejack, orange and lemon juice and maple syrup and the only applejack cocktail for which I had all of the ingredients in my kitchen. Despite squeezing my own juices, I used Mrs. Butterworth’s Syrup, leaving me with a drink that smelled and tasted like a musty old house.
To demonstrate the good path, Simó made a Jack Rose, this one with Laird’s Straight Apple Brandy (it should be noted that many bartenders, including Simó, and even producers will confusingly refer to both apple brandy and applejack as applejack), Calvados, lemon and lime juice and house-made grenadine. The drink has the taste of fall apples, even capturing the bitterness of apple peels, and has an undercurrent reminiscent of tamarind. The whole thing tastes like a perfect Jolly Rancher candy. He also pours a Shruff’s end, blending Laphroaig 10 Year Old whisky, Laird’s Apple Brandy, Benedictine and two dashes of Peychaud’s bitters, creating a softening effect on the peaty, medicinal whisky and bringing out nougat flavors and the overall feeling of drinking a caramel apple.
Alone, however, Laird’s Straight Apple Brandy can be a zinger. This is the stuff that made a friend and New Jersey native recently exclaim, “Laird’s? That’s Jersey Lightning,” referring to applejack’s local moniker, “That [expletive]’s hot! Hot! Hot!”
Another member of my sipping coterie referred to its high alcohol content (100 proof, when something like whisky or bourbon are generally sold at 80 proof) as “Hell on fire.”
While Laird’s makes a fine and more mellowed 12-year-old sipping brandy, the door was open for a steady rise in applejack produced in micro-distilleries, particularly farm distilleries, to produce their own slow sippers. These smaller producers also afford a clearer understanding of the production process.
Aged about 4½ years, Flag Hill’s Josiah Bartlett Barrel Aged Apple Brandy draws on its New Hampshire roots not only for its name (Bartlett was a Granite State governor and signed the Declaration of Independence) but also from the Macintosh and Cortland apples that thrive in the state’s orchards.
Flag Hill’s got a good feel to it, with a big tin-roofed farmhouse, a vineyard out back and a sticker on a boom box near the still that reads: “I’M STILL DRUNK.”
Distiller Graham Hamblett takes unpasteurized cider made by Apple Hill Farm in nearby Concord, adds yeast to create hard cider, then double-distills and ages it in American oak to make its brandy. The drive to create something sip-worthy led Hamblett and Flag Hill owner Frank W. Reinhold to scrap the company’s first apple brandy production.
“Our first batch didn’t come out so well,” said Hamblett. “We cleaned it up too much and it was like sipping on a glass of oak.” Now, however, Flag Hill’s brandy tastes like a young Calvados with a bit of caramel lift at the end.
In Indiana, Ted Huber of Starlight Distillery makes both apple brandy and applejack in what he calls the Midwestern style, aging the distilled spirit in charred bourbon barrels, which gives his applejacks some hallmarks from the barrels and their former contents that reveal a distant, pleasant Jim Beam-esque aroma. Huber uses a majority of tart Jonathan and Winesap apples and gets “a little bit of sweet” from Golden Delicious and Galas, all of which are grown on the farm surrounding the distillery.
Market-wise, Huber’s got his eye on craft bartenders looking to come up with a signature drink with a spirit on the rise, but he prefers his applejack served straight up, on the porch.
“I like it neat in the winter or with an ice cube or two in the summer,” he said.
I try this at home, borrowing his trick and dropping a cube into a glass of applejack, bringing the heat and alcohol content lower. Anything resembling “Hot! Hot! Hot!” is swirled down to a dollop of “Mmm, mmm, mmm.” The porch chair becomes a bench seat. I surf my fingers through the breeze.
The drink, an American apple brandy, which is a cousin to the French Calvados, had everything an aspiring male writer could want: written approval from Steinbeck and Hemingway, enough kick to make it an acquired taste, and a cool name, derived from “jacking” hard cider by leaving it out in the cold to bring up the alcohol content and lock in the nastiness that guarantees a hangover.
The Americana angle was huge. Who couldn’t take a sip of what’s called America’s oldest native distilled beverage, close their eyes and imagine sharing the bench seat of Steinbeck’s camper truck Rocinante with The Man himself and his dog Charley on one side, fingers surfing the air outside the window on the other, and cap the day with a “dollop” of applejack with the boys at the campground?
At one point, the whole industry almost went to pot, nearly tarnishing the romantic literary dreams of thousands of young boys like myself. It’s a small miracle that American applejack and apple brandy survived the 20th century and are now the fetish items of craft bartenders. Applejack and apple brandy, whose histories stretch back centuries, lost hundreds of producers in the decades surrounding and particularly following Prohibition, then were among the hardest hit in the collapse of brown spirits (drinks like whisky or bourbon that derive color and flavor from aging in oak barrels) between 1980 and 1995.
“This place doesn’t exist,” said an employee at Laird & Co., and though he was just talking about peculiarities in the postal system that keep them from being able to send or receive mail at their Scobeyville, N.J., headquarters, it seemed as if he was talking about the spirit’s near-disappearance.
Despite celebrating 225 years in business in 2005, confirming Laird as the oldest commercial distillery in the United States and producer of the bartender’s reference when it comes to applejack — they, too, barely made it into the 21st century.
“We stopped producing for years,” said Laird vice president Lisa Laird Dunn, referring back to the brown-spirit slump. “We had too much stock and sales continued to spiral down.”
Add to it that applejack’s reputation as an old man’s drink quite literally meant that what Laird Dunn refers to as the “shot and beer back” crowd was on or approaching their deathbeds. Plus, the signature cocktail, the Jack Rose, made with lemon juice and grenadine, fell victim to pre-made mixes.
“Sweet and sour mix and fake grenadine killed the Jack Rose,” explained Laird Dunn.
What was applejack’s escape clause? Bartenders who cared. Craft bartending, of the style where the bar’s lemon juice is squeezed from a lemon, saved the spirit.
“Your drink is only going to be as strong as your weakest ingredient,” said Joaquín Simó, bartender at Death & Co. in New York City’s East Village neighborhood, “but if you take care to use your own juices and grenadine, it’s remarkably different from what you get with the pre-made stuff.”
This is just one element at the core of the rise of craft bartending in the United States, where other spirits like rye whiskey, Old Tom gin and what Simó calls “lost and forgotten” liquors and cocktails are rising again.
“The beauty of old cocktails is in their simplicity — most of the old drinks only have three or four ingredients,” said Simó. “They’re super-delicious, but everything in there’s gotta be good.”
I learned this the hard way, trying to make an applejack jackrabbit, a mix of applejack, orange and lemon juice and maple syrup and the only applejack cocktail for which I had all of the ingredients in my kitchen. Despite squeezing my own juices, I used Mrs. Butterworth’s Syrup, leaving me with a drink that smelled and tasted like a musty old house.
To demonstrate the good path, Simó made a Jack Rose, this one with Laird’s Straight Apple Brandy (it should be noted that many bartenders, including Simó, and even producers will confusingly refer to both apple brandy and applejack as applejack), Calvados, lemon and lime juice and house-made grenadine. The drink has the taste of fall apples, even capturing the bitterness of apple peels, and has an undercurrent reminiscent of tamarind. The whole thing tastes like a perfect Jolly Rancher candy. He also pours a Shruff’s end, blending Laphroaig 10 Year Old whisky, Laird’s Apple Brandy, Benedictine and two dashes of Peychaud’s bitters, creating a softening effect on the peaty, medicinal whisky and bringing out nougat flavors and the overall feeling of drinking a caramel apple.
Alone, however, Laird’s Straight Apple Brandy can be a zinger. This is the stuff that made a friend and New Jersey native recently exclaim, “Laird’s? That’s Jersey Lightning,” referring to applejack’s local moniker, “That [expletive]’s hot! Hot! Hot!”
Another member of my sipping coterie referred to its high alcohol content (100 proof, when something like whisky or bourbon are generally sold at 80 proof) as “Hell on fire.”
While Laird’s makes a fine and more mellowed 12-year-old sipping brandy, the door was open for a steady rise in applejack produced in micro-distilleries, particularly farm distilleries, to produce their own slow sippers. These smaller producers also afford a clearer understanding of the production process.
Aged about 4½ years, Flag Hill’s Josiah Bartlett Barrel Aged Apple Brandy draws on its New Hampshire roots not only for its name (Bartlett was a Granite State governor and signed the Declaration of Independence) but also from the Macintosh and Cortland apples that thrive in the state’s orchards.
Flag Hill’s got a good feel to it, with a big tin-roofed farmhouse, a vineyard out back and a sticker on a boom box near the still that reads: “I’M STILL DRUNK.”
Distiller Graham Hamblett takes unpasteurized cider made by Apple Hill Farm in nearby Concord, adds yeast to create hard cider, then double-distills and ages it in American oak to make its brandy. The drive to create something sip-worthy led Hamblett and Flag Hill owner Frank W. Reinhold to scrap the company’s first apple brandy production.
“Our first batch didn’t come out so well,” said Hamblett. “We cleaned it up too much and it was like sipping on a glass of oak.” Now, however, Flag Hill’s brandy tastes like a young Calvados with a bit of caramel lift at the end.
In Indiana, Ted Huber of Starlight Distillery makes both apple brandy and applejack in what he calls the Midwestern style, aging the distilled spirit in charred bourbon barrels, which gives his applejacks some hallmarks from the barrels and their former contents that reveal a distant, pleasant Jim Beam-esque aroma. Huber uses a majority of tart Jonathan and Winesap apples and gets “a little bit of sweet” from Golden Delicious and Galas, all of which are grown on the farm surrounding the distillery.
Market-wise, Huber’s got his eye on craft bartenders looking to come up with a signature drink with a spirit on the rise, but he prefers his applejack served straight up, on the porch.
“I like it neat in the winter or with an ice cube or two in the summer,” he said.
I try this at home, borrowing his trick and dropping a cube into a glass of applejack, bringing the heat and alcohol content lower. Anything resembling “Hot! Hot! Hot!” is swirled down to a dollop of “Mmm, mmm, mmm.” The porch chair becomes a bench seat. I surf my fingers through the breeze.
