Made from locally grown apples and distilled in small batches, this apple brandy is aged for at least four years in new charred American oak barrels, giving it a rich, complex flavor profile.Ĭrafted by the Black Dirt Distillery, Black Dirt Apple Jack Apple Brandy Bottled In Bond is made from locally sourced apples and distilled in small batches. As they say in Jersey, bada bing bada boom.About Black Dirt Apple Jack Apple Brandy Bottled In Bondīlack Dirt Apple Jack Apple Brandy Bottled In Bond is a unique and exquisite spirit that's sure to delight the taste buds of any brandy lover. Small Hand Foods makes a great one, but it’s easy enough to make yourself, just boil down some pomegranate juice with sugar. Anyway, it’s important to get real grenadine because that shit Roses makes is just citric acid and food coloring. If you can spring for it, the Straight Apple Brandy bottled in bond has more flavor, no neutral spirits, and makes a great cocktail.ĭid you know the root word for grenadine is the same as the root word for grenade? Just like that weapon of mass disfiguration, a pomegranate is filled with tiny seeds, except the fruit variety bring an explosion of flavor instead of chaos. Their basic Applejack is aged for 3 years and blended with neutral spirits. Lairds of New Jersey, the only widely distributed maker of apple brandy in the US, makes a few different grades of juice. I felt like a thief and an honorary member as I walked out of the bar with that bottle in my hand. And then he went to his back bar, pulled down a bottle of Laird’s, and handed it to me, on the house. “You can’t make a Jack Rose without Applejack,” he told me. This bartender got a concerned look on his face. So one night I told a bartender friend that I’d just found a bottle of Calvados, (dusty, forgotten and heavily discounted, the best kind) on the bottom shelf of a bodega and I planned to play around with some Jack Roses at home. I like asking bartenders what they’ve been drinking lately (provided of course that they have time to chat and they seem amenable to a little shop talk) and for a while in 2010s San Francisco the Jack Rose came up a lot. And Applejack, whose popularity faded as America moved away from her rural roots toward an industrialized future, returned to some status with the success of the pugnacious Jack Rose. The drink itself, with its citrus and syrup, is a return to the punch style of drink making. The Jack Rose exemplifies a theme that we will see over and over in our survey of cocktail development: the return. But good Applejack is a real pleasure, and a real connection to our roots as a country. You just left the cider outside in the winter, let the water freeze and separate from the booze, and after a few rounds you had a very potent, very toxic beverage. Now, the most common way of making applejack in those days wasn’t with a still. Due to risk of death and disease, the colonists were loathe to drink water, so low-alcohol apple cider was a daily necessity, even for the Puritans and the kiddos. Its precursor, hard cider, is arguably more American than apple pie. It’s sad that Applejack isn’t as popular today. It has punch and panache, which is appropriate because the drink does too. You hear the name, you like it, and you want one, or at the very least you want to know what’s in one. And their reason for doing so is the same reason the name Jack Rose (personal opinion again) has carried this otherwise relatively obscure drink. Despite its gustatory charms however, (personal opinion here) I can see this drink being lost to time if it were called something lame like, say, the Royal Smile.Īs it turns out, there were some who tried calling it the Royal Smile. Like the whiskey sour (sans egg white) it’s a quick little jolt of sweet, tart and booze, but with the Applejack and the grenadine, it has an exotic, lively quality that lemon, sugar and bourbon can’t quite attain. No drink, no matter how ambrosial, can get out from under the shadow of a bad name. Naming cocktails is both hard as and important as hell.
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