![]() The oils from the peel add a lot more flavor and aroma than you may think. It’s simply not the same cocktail without it. Don’t Skip the Orange Peelĭon’t underestimate the power of the orange peel in an old fashioned. True flavors and aroma of fall in every sip. My personal final touch is the cinnamon stick-it completes the Fall circle of maple, orange, apple, and cinnamon. Lastly, it’s garnished with an orange peel. This cocktail used whiskey barrel-aged bitters or black walnut bitters in place of your typical Angostura bitters, which gives the drink more of an oaky flavor. Maple syrup is used in place of sugar or simple syrup (which is essentially sugar water), to infuse it with darker natural maple and vanilla flavors. It has very subtle notes of apple and cinnamon spice (and it’s actually made with fresh apples). The secret ingredient is Laird’s Applejack brandy (There is no real substitute in my eys). The Fall old fashioned tastes exactly how you’d expect it would. What kind of food blogger would I be if I hadn’t experimented with the “fall special?” Building The Ultimate Fall Whiskey Cocktail The “fall special” or the traditional old fashioned. ![]() I requested an old fashioned and to no surprise, I was presented with two options. So you could say he “passes the bar.” Pun 100% intended.Īfter Thanksgiving dinner, we decided to have some post-turkey coma cocktails. He was actually a bartender in Boston for a few years while he was in law school. Fred is a true cocktail guy so he makes cocktails by the book. The fall old fashioned was introduced to me by my brother-in-law, Fred. 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.The Applejack old fashioned is a seasonal spin on the classic old fashioned cocktail. 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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