People drank it straight or, occasionally, as scotchem, a body-temperature-boosting blend of applejack, hot water, and a dollop of ground mustard. (A night’s lodging, in comparison, cost 12.5 cents, and dinner cost a quarter.) Abe Lincoln, during his brief stint as a tavern keeper in New Salem, Illinois, sold applejack to his customers at a cost of 12 cents a pint-cheaper than wine, gin, French brandy, whiskey, or rum, which may have ensured its popularity. There were soon dozens of distilleries churning out apple brandy-nearly 400 of them were up and running by the 1830s. Even refined, it was known as “Jersey Lightning.” By 1760, George Washington-who had substantial apple orchards at Mount Vernon-was asking the current Laird for his recipe. See The Highs and Lows of Hard Apple Cider History.) (The traditional rye for this drink didn’t grow too well in the Colonies. One story holds that he was doing his best to come up with a decent substitute for Scotch whiskey. The original Laird (William) arrived in Monmouth County, New Jersey, in 1698, and soon thereafter began producing a more refined version of applejack, an apple brandy aged in oak kegs. “…The victim of applejack,” claimed The New York Times on April 10, 1894, “is capable of blowing up a whole town with dynamite and of reciting original poetry to every surviving inhabitant.”īy 1780, applejack had gone professional, most famously from the distillery of Laird & Company, still in business today and the producer of the bulk of America’s applejack. A common nickname for applejack was “essence of lockjaw,” and over-indulgence in it led to a wobbly condition known as apple palsy,doubtless followed by a splitting headache. Drunk in quantity, it packed a powerful punch. ![]() This process of freeze-distilling, which relies on the fact that alcohol freezes at a lower temperature than water, was known as jacking-hence the cozy name applejack.Ĭider, converted to applejack, shrank to as little as one-tenth of its original volume, and could reach 65 proof–that is, over 30 percent alcohol. The water in the cider would freeze, and as ice was removed from the cider container, the alcohol in the brew became increasingly concentrated. The solution to this pressing pioneer problem was applejack.Ĭider, circa 1775, was routinely transmogrified into the stunningly stronger applejack simply by setting a pan of it on the back porch in the frigid days of winter. While the American colonists drank hard cider like their modern-day counterparts swill Pepsi and Coca-Cola, for some, cider’s relatively mild 4 to 6 percent alcohol concentration just wasn’t alcoholic enough.
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