Discounting Calvados imported from France and a few distilleries out west experimenting with re-introducing the spirit, the main producer was Laird & Company. By the 1990s, the apple category was so moribund that even calling it a “category” was misleading. There may be truth to that, but it is equally true that blended applejack was cheaper to make than all-fruit brandy. One could argue that a taste among post-World War II consumers for lighter, blended whiskeys helped drive the decision to cut aged apple brandy with neutral spirits. Seasonal, expensive brandy was on the outs. By the 1950s, whiskey, which could be made year-round for lower costs from grains shipped from other states, was ascendant. Some ceased operations entirely, some converted to other uses, some were bought out and shuttered by the competition. Eventually though, almost all of those distilleries stopped making brandy. So did their colleagues from Maine to Georgia and as far afield as the Pacific Northwest. Delaware distillers did make apple brandies. Although blends of apple and grain spirits were common before Prohibition, the federal class known as blended applejack, comprised of neutral spirits and apple brandy, became recognized in the 1960s at the behest of the oldest surviving American distillers, Laird & Company of Scobeyville, New Jersey.Īpplejack-one of the many names under which apple brandies have traveled in the United States-was once so core to New Jersey’s reputation that it was known far and wide as “Jersey lightning.” Down in Wilmington during Prohibition, some pup journalist floated the idea that apple brandy was known properly as “Delaware lightning,” but that half-hearted theft of Jersey’s thunder rang hollow. There is no legal distinction between the two names in America.

In colloquial use, however, the apple brandy that merchants and attorneys advertised was more often called applejack, apple, apple spirits, cider brandy (or simply “CB” in parts of New England), and perhaps its oldest name: spirits of cider/cyder.Ī distinction is made sometimes between apple brandy distilled in a copper still and applejack, made from the high-proof liquid heart extracted from a frozen barrel of hard cider, but in practice, applejack was a common term for apple brandies across the eastern half of the United States. For those with deep pockets, these dead men’s brandies, mellowed by decades in oak, were the spirits to buy. Farmer-distillers across New England and the Mid-Atlantic were known to lay down barrels for personal use. The term also cropped up in notices for occasional estate sales in which particularly fine examples came on the market. They had convened for a four-day workshop sponsored by the American Distilling Institute to introduce would-be brandy makers to a spirit that’s been distilled in North America since colonial days.įrom the early Republic through the first years of the twentieth century, American merchants advertised stocks of what they called apple brandy in newspapers. Others were just figuring their first steps in the apple brandy business. This past autumn, in the midst of apple harvest season, nearly 20 distillers gathered in upstate New York. After decades of declining trade forced nearly every single distiller of American apple brandy to go out of business or to turn to making other wet goods, however, that old elixir is back. Cider and brandy makers ripped out orchards by the hundreds. Prohibition and the temperance movement that led to it killed off nearly all the small producers. This deprivation went through cycles of plenty, and stretches of extreme want, and there were always gluts from trees that bore fruit more heavily in alternate years, but the trend was ever downward. The famine, as it turned out, would continue in fits and spurts for more than a century. “It is,” continued the report, “an applejack famine.” “There is a famine in New Jersey which, if it occurred in some parts of the country, would create little anxiety and no distress, but in that State it is a severe blow to a large class of citizens, and the consequent suffering cannot be measured.”

On Christmas Day in 1890, a Philadelphia newspaper noted that the city’s neighbors just over the river had fallen on hard times. Various ‘testimonials’ could be gathered showing that George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, George Fox and other personages either made, drank, or sold apple brandy or did all three or express themselves upon the merits of it, but it is about time that apple brandy stood up on its own legs again.

Applejack brandy in rapid city