![]() 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.
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