![]() Not advisable, but it’s not going to kill you. Well, no, it’s not any more dangerous than drinking an entire gallon of hard apple cider. The same goes for apple Jack, because it’s concentrated now all of the methanol and the fusel oils and things that are normally discarded during normal heat distillation, they’re still in there.Īnd you may be asking yourself, is that toxic? Is it dangerous? If you drank this whole gallon of hard apple cider at, let’s say 6%, six and a half percent alcohol, you would probably have the worst hangover of your life. Let’s say you turn this into hard apple cider, and then you freeze it and you turn it into applejack. And what ends up happening is you get a much higher alcohol content, but you also get really strong flavors and, um, a really tasty little drink. 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.So, Applejack, what is it? And why do we do it?Īpple Jack is basically where you make hard apple cider and then you freeze concentrate it by letting it freeze, draining off the liquid that doesn’t freeze because it’s full of alcohol and then discarding the water and ice.Īnd you do that two or three times. 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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