I was about to put the insipidity of the resulting mess down to Lost Generation high spirits. So, garden-variety Laird's applejack in hand, I mixed up a batch. I began with my trusty copy of David Embury, and ended, inevitably, with eGullet's own Drinkboy. Most recently this was upon rereading The Sun Also Rises and being intrigued by (is it?) Bill Gorton's proclamation that he has "just drunk Jack Rose cocktails." Needless to say, an investigation was in order.
It requires much less equiment and the components are easier to hide.īeing dilatory and a sluggard, it was only yesterday that I made an acquaintance with the good Doctor's posts, and may I say that now I weep for the days spent without his expertise!īeing a Michigan boy, the apple is a subject near and dear to my heartĪnd, finally, being a dramaturg and a drunkard, Applejack has been an area of interest for me for quite some time, waxing or waning depending on the project or book in which I am immersed at the moment. They had previously used dry ice but had some trouble with it cracking the containers keeping it from contact with the liquid.Īnyway, it is not far-fetched that a small company could use ice extraction as opposed to distillation. It only takes a very small amount to charge one of the cylinders. We have a large cylinder of it in the office as one of the doctors uses it for cold cautery. Liquid nitrogen is not that difficult to obtain. I recognized the house and outbuildings from my visit there some 30 years ago. The orchard was featured on one of Huell Hauser's PBS segments a few years ago. The group disintegrated after a few years, although the apple orchards are still in production, and still have most of the rarer (for this area) apple trees and sell to very upscale markets and at farmer's markets. I was given a little 1/2 pint jar of the stuff which I used in a recipe for pork with apples, in which I would ordinarily have used Calvados. I can't drink alcohol at all but friends who tasted the stuff said it was extremely potent. When the fermentation had produced a certain level of alcohol, they put a steel jacketed pressure container into the liquid and charged it with liquid nitrogen which immediately acquired a casing of ice and effectively pulled 90% of the water out of the liquid which was then bottled (or rather jarred, in quart or pint jars.) They "stored" the cider in stainless steel kegs or barrels, which were simply the containers used in bars but with the tops cut off. They sold unfiltered cider, home canned applesauce and apple butter and an "under the table" more potent product.Īs a friend of one of the people from whom they were leasing the land, I got a tour of their place and a demonstration of their technique for upping the alcohol content of their "hard" cider which was also a non-licensed operation (they had a few others, all of the horticultural type )
Back in the early 70s there was a small apple orchard/commune/producer of apple products in the Lucerne Valley that had a farmstand with many varieties of apples not commonly grown in SoCalif.
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