The best part? It shouldn't cost you more than $25-30. Without Laird's, it just doesn’t taste like an Old Fashioned to me. It’s what I the drink was introduced to me with back when I started working at Clover Club in 2009. Laird’s 100 proof Apple Brandy (pictured above) is easily my top choice in an Applejack Old Fashioned. So some old cocktail books or articles that recommend grade B - such as mine perhaps - would refer to dark or very dark today.Īs I've made a point to mention before, I don’t usually like to recommend brands (though admittedly, I tend to point this out when I'm about to recommend a brand), but in this case, I can’t help it. This labeling led to the understandable misconception that grades B and C were lower quality, which precipitated the change. The old system had 3 subheadings of Grade A as well as a Grade B which was the darkest and strongest in flavor, and the bartender's choice for cocktails (there was also a grade C that wasn't commercially available and sold to factories for wholesale production of things like maple candy). Sap runs off lighter when tapping begins which is usually somewhere between late January-mid March depending on how cold it is, and gets progressively darker throughout the season, which typically taps out - sorry, couldn't help myself - after 4-6 weeks. The differences between the grades is a result of when the sap was tapped. It takes about 40 gallons of sap to make 1 gallon of syrup (!!!). The sap is collected and boiled down until to syrup consistency. Keep in mind these grades have nothing to do with quality, it’s just different flavor profiles. For cocktails, stronger is ideal but any will suffice. They are organized, quite literally, by color and taste:Īs you can see, the darker the syrup, the stronger its flavor. There are four grades of maple syrup which are subheadings of Grade A (a bit redundant I would say, but whatever). I don’t have anything against Aunt Jemima on pancakes, but there’s something off about them in it in cocktails that reminds me of cough syrup. It can be used straight out of the bottle, and it should be real maple syrup, as in from a tree. There’s no need to dilute maple syrup for cocktails - as you would with, say, honey.

These are a mixture of 20-30% apple brandy with the rest being neutral grain spirits - not bad, but not my favorite. However, sometimes a spirit will be labeled as “Blended Applejack”, or “Applejack - a Blend”. You still see printed applejack on labels sometimes, just remember there’s no production-related difference from apple brandy. The term Applejack persists today presumably because it sounds cool (and very cool at that, that's the only reason I call it an Applejack Old Fashioned, as opposed to an Apple Brandy Old Fashioned). So hear that kids? Don’t try this at home. Aside from being prohibitively impractical on a large scale, it’s also quite dangerous because toxic higher alcohols like methanol aren’t removed as they can be with traditional distillation. No commercial apple brandy is made with this method today. The process can be repeated for further concentration, though it won't reach an ABV as high as a traditionally distilled spirit.Įventually, someone coined 'jacked' cider, with the catchy name applejack. This ice can then be skimmed off leaving the remaining liquid at a higher proof. This is when a fermented beverage like hard cider, beer or wine is kept at freezing temperatures so the non-alcoholic elements solidify while the alcohol - which freezes at much lower temperatures - remains a liquid. But distillation requires a still, which not everyone had access to, so many who were in search of a stronger drink turned to a simpler method of concentrating the cider called jacking, aka freeze distillation. With no shortage of apples in the northeast, thirsty colonists made hard cider which could be then distilled into apple brandy.

Though there used to be more of a distinction.Īmericans have been making booze from apples as far back as the 1600s. To be perfectly clear, Applejack is Apple Brandy, they are interchangeable terms.

Good applejack brandy