10/6/2023 0 Comments Applejack bourbonMuch of the flavor had been extracted from the wood, allowing the spirit to mature with wood extract. We choose our oldest barrels that had previously been used for Bourbon and then our Applejack. While the unaged version was good, after some experimentation it was decided to add a new twist to the old classic by letting the spirit rest in barrels for a little over 6 months. Pear Brandy started as a nod to Poire Williams, an unaged Pear Brandy that is made exclusively of the Williams (Bartlett) Pear. ![]() It smells strongly of plum and tastes like blue if colors had taste (or so our distiller says). The final product never touches oak - instead it is rested in stainless steel or glass for 3-6 months and bottled at 80 proof. It is made with 100% heritage blue plums and fermented using the whole fruit. Plum Brandy is our nod to the little know Slavic spirit, Slivovtiz. It is done in a French Calvados style, representing a blend of over a dozen apple varieties and finished in toasted red wine barrels to offer a completely different mouth feel and finish than most American spirits finished in charred Bourbon Barrels. It comes out clear like moonshine, but we found people don’t associate clear spirits with applejack, so to give it some color, we barrel age it for six weeks in a rum barrel we got from a rum distillery in Rhode Island.Apple Brandy is aged in used Red Wine Barrels from one of the Finger Lakes better known wineries. Technically it’s more of an apple brandy. “The cheap way, the freeze distill way, is a bit dangerous, because there’s a lot of bad stuff still left in there,” he said. To give it complex flavors, the moonshiner would take his time to “age” the applejack, by letting charred oak chips marinate in a jar of it.īruce Olson, co-owner of Tree Spirits Maine makes an applejack, but emphasizes, not the old-fashioned way. Unfortunately, similar to bathtub gin, the leftover liquid also contained amounts of methanol, ethanol and other impurities, but drinking it in small amounts seemed to be the trick. If a hard cider averages around 5% and apple wine around 10-12%, applejack spiked as high as 30% or 60 proof. Leaving the apple hard cider outside overnight, the moonshiner would then syphon out the ice that accumulated, leaving behind the liquid, which increased the percentage of alcohol. ![]() Using nature as an ally after the fall harvest, the moonshiner would “jack” or freeze distill the hard cider (which, technically was actually a concentration, rather than a distillation.) As alcohol freezes at a lower temperature than water, applejack would only be made in the winter. ![]() Maine moonshiners irritated by Prohibition (enacted some 70 years before it took hold in the rest of the United States) also decried any form of government interference on a product that they could easily forage from their own orchards and produce with very little equipment at home. With the proliferation of apple trees on the east coast, thanks to what European colonists brought with them, applejack became a Maine pasttime and staple. Sprinkle with cinnamon, nutmeg and/or clove. ![]() And when one didn’t have the fancy still equipment to get “boozy, buzzey and halfway to Concord,” applejack was one of the first and most practical ways of producing a higher concentration of alcohol from freezing fermented cider. Farm-to-flask has been around since the colonial era, when Americans believed that fermented and distilled drinks were a cure-all for pain, illnesses and general fatigue.
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