applejack , a spirit distilled from apples, is, historically speaking, as American as apple pie. Variously known as cyder spirit, cider brandy, apple brandy, or apple whisky, the apple-based spirit was a fixture of American life from colonial days all the way up to Prohibition. It fueled the enthusiasm of voters at campaign rallies and conventions, and was even reputed to have its best vintages in presidential election years.
Applejack is said to have derived its name from a crude method of concentrating the alcohol in hard cider, called “jacking,” that involves freezing it and removing the frozen water. Commercial applejack producers, however, typically employed copper pot stills or wooden three-chamber stills to distill their fermented cider, and they mellowed the resulting spirit in oak barrels. See still, pot, and still, three-chamber. (General consensus has long held that applejack reaches its peak of potability after roughly four years in the barrel.)
Although applejack has traditionally been produced in several states along the Eastern Seaboard, including New York and Connecticut, its deepest roots are in the Garden State, New Jersey—hence its nickname, “Jersey lightning,” a moniker that may been inspired by the potency of the unaged spirit. “As the liquor runs from the tail of the still it is as limpid as the purest water, and fully as innocent-looking, but it is the most deceptive stuff imaginable,” a Jersey City News reporter opined in 1892, when there were more than seventy applejack distilleries in New Jersey alone. “It will make a strong man wince to take a mouthful of it if he is not a confirmed liquor drinker.”
Throughout much of the nineteenth century, applejack distilleries were a common sight at many family farms in New Jersey and nearby states. Apple farmers who didn’t operate their own distilleries could sell their surplus crop to neighbors who did, and they frequently took their payment in applejack. But with the advent of a federal excise tax on alcohol imposed during the Civil War and competition from cheap imitations artificially “aged” by rectifiers with burnt sugar or peach pits, the number of applejack distilleries dwindled, leaving only a few still in operation when Prohibition took effect and shut those down as well.
apples and Laird’s. At the dawn of the twenty-first-century cocktail renaissance, the acquisition of a bottle of Laird’s Bonded Apple Brandy was a rite of passage for a young mixologist and the gateway to mixing up a number of forgotten classics, including the Jack Rose, the Widow’s Kiss, the Star (an applejack Manhattan), and the lethal Diamondback (with applejack, rye, and yellow Chartreuse). See Jack Rose and Widow’s Kiss.“Jersey Lightning.” Jersey City News, November 23, 1892, 3.
Weiss, Harry Bischoff. The History of Applejack or Apple Brandy in New Jersey from Colonial Times to the Present. Trenton: New Jersey Agricultural Society, 1954.
By: David Mahoney