Applejack is a strong alcoholic drink produced from apples. Popular in the American colonial era, the drink's prevalence declined in the 19th and 20th centuries amid competition from other spirits. [1] [2] [3]
Applejack is used in several cocktails, including the Jack Rose. [1] It is a type of fruit brandy.
Apple brandy was first produced in colonial New Jersey in 1698 by William Laird, a Scots American who settled in Monmouth County. [4] The drink was once known as Jersey Lightning. [4] Laird's great-grandson, Robert Laird, who served in the Continental Army, incorporated Laird's Distillery in 1780, [4] after previously operating a tavern. [5] The oldest licensed applejack distillery in the United States, Laird & Company of Scobeyville, New Jersey, was until the 2000s the country's only remaining producer of applejack, and continues to dominate applejack production. [4] [6]
Once popular in early America, applejack declined in popularity due to the rise of other spirits that were easier to manufacture on a commercial basis, including rum and whiskey (especially bourbon) in the 19th century and gin, vodka, and tequila in the 20th century. [1] In 1920, with the beginning of the Prohibition era, Laird's ended the production of liquor and began producing apple juice. In 1931, John Evans Laird received permission to produce apple brandy for "medicinal purposes" and stockpiled its product until the repeal of Prohibition in 1933. [5]
Applejack has been associated with four presidents of the United States: After the American Revolution, George Washington requested from Robert Laird his family's recipe for applejack; Abraham Lincoln served it during a brief stint as a tavern keeper in Springfield, Illinois; Franklin D. Roosevelt included applejack in the Manhattans he regularly consumed; and Lyndon B. Johnson gave a case of applejack to Soviet leader Alexei Kosygin in the 1967 Glassboro Summit Conference. [5]
In the 2010s, a number of smaller craft distilleries began to produce applejack in places such as New Hampshire, [7] Pennsylvania's Lehigh Valley, [8] New York's Hudson Valley, [9] Holland, Michigan, [10] and most famously in Toronto [11] at Nickel 9 Distillery.
When commercial production began, applejack was also starting to be produced through evaporative distillation. [12] Modern commercially produced applejack is often no longer produced by jacking but rather by blending apple brandy and neutral grain spirits. [5] [2] [3]
The name applejack derives from the traditional method of producing the drink, jacking , which is the process of freezing fermented cider and then removing the ice, increasing the alcohol content. [1] Cider produced after the fall harvest was left outside during the winter. Periodically the frozen chunks of ice that had formed were removed, thus concentrating the unfrozen alcohol in the remaining liquid. [3] An alternative method involved placing a cask of hard cider in snow, allowing ice to form on the inside of the cask as the contents began to freeze, and then tapping the cask and pouring off the still-liquid portion of the contents. Starting with the fermented juice, with an alcohol content of less than ten percent, the concentrated result can contain 25–40% alcohol. [3] Because freeze distillation is a low-infrastructure method of production compared to evaporative distillation, and does not require the burning of firewood to create heat, hard cider and applejack were historically easier to produce, [3] though more expensive than grain alcohol. [13]
The disadvantage of freeze distillation, also called fractional crystallization, is that the substances remaining after the removal of the water include not only ethanol, but also harmful methanol, esters, aldehydes, and fusel alcohols. [14] In modern times, reducing methanol with the absorption of a molecular sieve is a practical method for production. [15]
Applejack is somewhat similar to calvados, an apple brandy from Normandy, France, [1] to which it is often compared. [16] However, calvados is made from cider apples, while applejack is made from apples such as Winesap. [1]
Whisky or whiskey is a type of liquor made from fermented grain mash. Various grains are used for different varieties, including barley, corn, rye, and wheat. Whisky is typically aged in wooden casks, which are typically made of charred white oak. Uncharred white oak casks previously used for the aging of port, rum or sherry are also sometimes used.
Brandy is a liquor produced by distilling wine. Brandy generally contains 35–60% alcohol by volume and is typically consumed as an after-dinner digestif. Some brandies are aged in wooden casks. Others are coloured with caramel colouring to imitate the effect of aging, and some are produced using a combination of aging and colouring. Varieties of wine brandy can be found across the winemaking world. Among the most renowned are Cognac and Armagnac from south-western France.
Calvados is a brandy from Normandy in France, made from apples and/or pears.
Moonshine is high-proof liquor, traditionally made or distributed illegally. The name was derived from a tradition of distilling the alcohol at night to avoid detection. In the first decades of the 21st century, commercial distilleries have adopted the term for its outlaw cachet and begun producing their own legal "moonshine", including many novelty flavored varieties, that are said to continue the tradition by using a similar method and/or locale of production.
A pot still is a type of distillation apparatus or still used to distill liquors such as whisky or brandy. In modern (post-1850s) practice, they are not used to produce rectified spirit, because they do not separate congeners from ethanol as effectively as other distillation methods. Pot stills operate on a batch distillation basis. Traditionally constructed from copper, pot stills are made in a range of shapes and sizes depending on the quantity and style of spirit desired.
A column still, also called a continuous still, patent still or Coffey still, is a variety of still consisting of two columns. Column stills can produce rectified spirit.
Fractional freezing is a process used in process engineering and chemistry to separate substances with different melting points. It can be done by partial melting of a solid, for example in zone refining of silicon or metals, or by partial crystallization of a liquid, as in freeze distillation, also called normal freezing or progressive freezing. The initial sample is thus fractionated.
Grappa is an alcoholic beverage: a fragrant, grape-based pomace brandy of Italian origin that contains 35 to 60 percent alcohol by volume. Grappa is a protected name in the European Union.
Pálinka is a traditional fruit spirit with origins in the medieval Hungary, known under several names. Protected as a geographical indication of the European Union, only fruit spirits mashed, distilled, matured and bottled in Hungary and similar apricot spirits from four provinces of Austria can be called "pálinka", while "Tótpálinka" refers to wheat-derived beverages. Törkölypálinka, a different product in the legal sense, is a similarly protected pomace spirit that is commonly included with pálinka. While pálinka may be made of any locally grown fruit, the most common ones are plums, apricots, apples, pears, and cherries.
An eau de vie is a clear, colourless fruit brandy that is produced by means of fermentation and double distillation. The fruit flavor is typically very light.
Fruit brandy is a distilled beverage produced from mash, juice, wine or residues of edible fruits. The term covers a broad class of spirits produced across the world, and typically excludes beverages made from grapes, which are referred to as plain brandy or pomace brandy. Apples, pears, apricots, plums and cherries are the most commonly used fruits.
An alcoholic beverage is a beverage containing alcohol (ethanol). Alcoholic drinks are typically divided into three classes—beers, wines, and spirits—and typically their alcohol content is between 3% and 50%.
Cider is an alcoholic beverage made from the fermented juice of apples. Cider is widely available in the United Kingdom and Ireland. The UK has the world's highest per capita consumption, as well as the largest cider-producing companies. Ciders from the South West of England are generally higher in alcoholic content. Cider is also popular in many Commonwealth countries, such as India, South Africa, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and New England. As well as the UK and its former colonies, cider is popular in Portugal, France, Friuli, and northern Spain. Germany also has its own types of cider with Rhineland-Palatinate and Hesse producing a particularly tart version known as Apfelwein. In the U.S. and Canada, varieties of alcoholic cider are often called hard cider to distinguish it from non-alcoholic apple cider or "sweet cider", also made from apples. In Canada, cider cannot contain less than 2.5% or over 13% absolute alcohol by volume.
Sawdust brandy is a neutral spirit produced through the distillation of wood products.
Laird & Company is a distillery located at 1 Laird Road in the Scobeyville section of Colts Neck Township in Monmouth County, New Jersey, United States. Founded by Robert Laird, it is the oldest licensed distillery in the United States and received License No. 1 from the U.S. Department of the Treasury in 1780. Laird has a rectifier and blender license from the New Jersey Division of Alcoholic Beverage Control.
The production of distilled spirits in New Jersey has not been a large industry in the state. Strict alcoholic beverage control laws in place during and after Prohibition (1919–1933) prevented the industry from growing for almost a century. In 2013, the state passed a law creating a craft distillery license. and issued the first new distillery license since Prohibition to Jersey Artisan Distilling.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to whisky:
