Applejack (beverage)

A bottle of blended apple brandy, along with a Jack Rose Cocktail

Applejack is a strong apple-flavored alcoholic beverage produced from apples, popular in the American colonial period. The name derives from "jacking", a term for "increasing" (alcohol content) and specifically for "freeze distilling", the traditional method of producing the drink.

History

In colonial New Jersey, applejack was used as currency to pay road construction crews during the colonial period, leading to the slang name 'Jersey Lightning'. The oldest licensed applejack distillery in the United States, Laird & Company of Scobeyville, New Jersey, was until recently the country's only remaining producer of applejack.

Because freeze distillation is a low-infrastructure method of production compared to evaporative distillation, and does not for example requiring burning firewood to create heat, hard cider and applejack were historically easy to produce, though more expensive than grain alcohol, and hence were important drinks in the colonial era and the early years of the United States, particularly in cold northern areas without access to clean water.

Production

Applejack was historically made by concentrating cider by the traditional method of freeze distillation. Rather than consume an alcoholic fruit beer, the cider harvested in the fall was often separated in the winter via freeze distillation, by leaving it outside and periodically removing the frozen chunks of ice, thus concentrating the unfrozen alcohol in the remaining liquid. From the fermented juice, with an alcohol content of less than 10%, the concentrated result contains 25-40% alcohol. When commercial production began, it was also made by evaporative distillation.

Modern commercially-produced applejack is no longer produced by jacking but rather by blending apple brandy and neutral spirits.

Decline in popularity

With easy availability of grain, metal stills, clean water, and eventually pasteurization starting in the mid-19th century, cider and applejack were gradually displaced by other beverages and liquors. Apple alcohols were less economical to produce than grain alcohol. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, traditional applejack also acquired a stigma as a result of its association with the older production process.

Health concerns also arose. Freeze distillation concentrates not only the drinkable ethanol but also the methanol and fusel alcohols (byproducts of fermentation which distillation by heat separates out); these latter can be unhealthy. Many countries prohibit freeze-distilled applejack as a health measure. However, reducing methanol with the absorption of 4A molecular sieve is a practical method for production.

See also

• Calvados (brandy), a similar French drink
• Fractional freezing