Americans always had a soft spot for the apple. From Johnny Appleseed to The Big Apple via mom’s apple pie. When grain and grape crops failed for the first settlers, it was the adaptable, dependable apple which came to the rescue providing a vital source of food – and liquor.

Americans enjoyed a centuries-long love affair with what they call ‘hard’ [alcoholic] cider and its rough-hewn relation applejack, but Prohibition all but killed off this branch of the apple spirit tradition. So while both Britain and America have a history of distilling cider going back hundreds of years, today if most people were asked to name an apple spirit, they would only know French Calvados.

On both sides of the Atlantic, producers are now fighting to address this by re-claiming, re-introducing and re-inventing products and techniques which are putting apple with oomph back on the market. The variety of traditions, laws, methods and markets means that apple juice could reach you as anything within the range of cider brandy, cider spirit, applejack, apple brandy, apple spirit, pommeau, Calvados or eau de vie de pomme, and the distinctions are complex and often blurred.

 

Applejack – also fondly referred to as ‘essence of lockjaw’ – was a homestead drink made in backyards and barns with little or no control, often with very unpleasant consequences

The oldest commercial distillery in the US was established by Laird’s of New Jersey in 1780, which is still today producing a barrel-aged apple brandy and an applejack (made in this case by blending apple brandy with neutral spirit). The company’s records reveal the nation’s father himself, George Washington, wrote to the Laird family asking for their applejack recipe and the family even supplied his troops with their applejack during the Revolutionary War. But what Laird’s produces today is far removed from the first applejack made by early colonists. And with good reason. For applejack – also fondly referred to as ‘essence of lockjaw’ – was a homestead drink made in backyards and barns with little or no control, often with very unpleasant consequences.

Erika Janik, author of Apple: A Global History, says: “There is a very controlled way of distilling. Most colonial Americans were not making their applejack that way though. They were making it a dangerous way. They would make their cider in the Fall and they’d fill up a barrel and stick it outside, and then it would freeze and, because the water freezes before alcohol, they would skim off the water as slush and that would leave the alcohol behind, which was impure and potentially dangerous. It could be some pretty rough stuff. Applejack is like hard cider’s burly cousin.”

Applejack and hard cider were vital to early settlers. While they had struggled to grow grains and grapes, everyone had apple trees and turning your apple juice into alcohol was a useful way to use and preserve the crop. Cider and cider brandy were so common they were used as trading currency in some areas. And applejack remained the hard drink of choice in the US for many years even as whisky, bourbon, rum and beer grew in popularity. “In 1830 New Jersey had more than 400 distillers and they were all making some kind of applejack product. It was still a big part of life,” says Janik.

Yet by the 1880s and 1890s with the campaign against alcohol in all its forms in full swing, and with a more urbanised population, many cider apple trees were chopped down. More apples were consumed as apple juice, thanks to improvements in refrigeration, and the apple underwent a re-branding as a healthy source of food and drink.

“It really is temperance which does for apple drinks in the US and you really saw a sharp decline in the consumption of any kind of alcoholic apple drink by the early 20th century. Because a lot of growers stopped producing these apple products, you just don’t see it come back after prohibition. Apple trees take a long time to start producing fruit, whereas you can make beer in a couple of weeks and you can make moonshine pretty quickly too,” says Janik. Applejack and hard cider never fully recovered their place in the nation’s heart.

 

“I decided to do what the French and the Swiss figured out about 300 years ago, which is to take the stuff that we grew and make it into an elegant, at least in theory, spirit which I could then sell to the Americans.” Steve McCarthy, Clear Creek Distillery

“I know lots of people who have never had a cider before. It’s so sad to me when I know about this very rich history in this country that many people haven’t tried it. But people are becoming more interested, there are more products available. They are re-learning about this product that was everywhere when this country was first founded. I am starting to see some local ciders or applejacks in bars. The artisan cocktail movement
is doing wonders for applejack.”

In Britain, making cider brandy may go back centuries but strict distilling laws and taxation all but finished the drink here too. The first commercial cider distilling licence was only granted in 1989 to the Somerset Cider Brandy Company. While Somerset Cider Brandy differs from Calvados because of its use of barrels, climate, apple varieties and soils, owner Julian Temperley describes them as “cousins of Calvados”.

Temperley is doing his bit to resurrect cider brandy by chipping away at the UK and European legal restraints and his company was finally granted geographical protection for its brandy last year. In the best spirit of American enterprise and innovation, the producers re-inventing distilled apple drinks in the US are taking the best of the traditional and the modern from both sides of the Atlantic and refining the rustic forerunners. In the mountains of Oregon, Steve McCarthy has been using fruit from the family orchard to produce distilled drinks since 1985.

“We had several hundred acres of apple and pear trees that produced pretty good fruit, but the market for the fruit was very weak, and so I decided to do what the French and the Swiss figured out about 300 years ago, which is to take the stuff that we grew and make it into an elegant, at least in theory, spirit which I could then sell to the Americans.”

Clear Creek Distillery makes an eight-year-old apple brandy distilled in traditional European-style eau de vie stills – not from cider, but from a fermented apple mash. When McCarthy started out there was very little artisan distilling taking place in the US and for years he struggled to find a profitable market. “But the world, the trade – the distributors, the retailers, the restaurants, the magazine people – suddenly connected what I had started to do with spirits, to what had occurred with small wineries and small breweries,” he says. “All of a sudden what I had been doing for 15 years or something, looked like the next bright idea.” He adds: “I have a lot of respect for what primarily the French and Swiss have done with these kinds of brandies. They’re fabulous. And so every product I’ve made had a European ancestor in almost every case.”

Now Clear Creek’s range of brandies and eaux de vies (including a Douglas Fir distillation) are selling across the US and in enough quantities to turn a decent profit. There is even a distributor selling Clear Creek eau de vie in Paris. “I regard that as the highest praise,” McCarthy says. As in Oregon, in New York’s “apple belt”, the Hudson Valley, the search for new agricultural revenue streams led producers to diversify into high- value products like cider brandy. And here too, they are looking to Europe for ideas and inspiration. Glynwood is a non-profit organisation supporting and promoting farming in the Hudson Valley area. Seeing the potential for farmers in the re-birth of hard cider and cider brandy, Glynwood set up an exchange programme for Hudson Valley farmers with cider and Calvados producers in the Le Perche region of Normandy.

 

“The new producers are taking Applejack to a new place … bringing to it a level of refinement that it never had in the first place.”  Erika Janik, historian

The French farmers visiting the US in 2011 were interested in American farms’ marketing and agro-tourism, while the American farmers on the return visit were able to learn from a cider and brandy-making tradition going back unbroken for hundreds of years and adapt it for their own purposes. Director of Special Projects at Glynwood, Sara Grady says: “Prohibition essentially caused the loss of this very American, very rustic, rural drink – hard cider. The trees were being chopped down or replanted with eating apple varieties. So our entire apple industry has been built on solely growing apples for fresh eating. There has not been any commercial-level production of hard cider apple varieties.

“What that means is that we have this much longer process of re-establishing the right apples for these products. All of the techniques and culture that went along with producing hard cider also went away. That all withered in the 20th century when production and consumption dropped off in this country.”

Years of tradition, however, can present their own problems and French producers visiting Hudson Valley envied the American willingness and licence to experiment and innovate. “The French were looking at the operations and were taken aback by certain things that would never be done that way in France. But on the other hand they were envious because they confessed it is so hard to break out of the traditional way things are done. That practice is immovable. Whereas here what you see is people trying everything and doing things in these very inventive, creative, very individualistic ways.”

The lack of traditional cider apples, the cost of distilling equipment and the convoluted legislative hangover from Prohibition all present obstacles to emulating the French model, even forgetting the commercial difficulties of waiting 25 years or more to age your brandy. But American producers have been inspired to plant new apple varieties and collaborate more with their competitors and with existing distilleries. Some are experimenting with techniques like keeving, wild fermentation and even true freeze-distilled applejack.

Educating the market about what apple juice can become will take time, but the work has begun with Glynwood’s Cider Week now an annual event spreading across more and more states, and, more importantly, a proliferation of cideries and distilleries crafting quality produce. As Janik says, “The new producers are taking it to a new place. Bringing back a spirit which was very popular but bringing to it a level of refinement that it never had in the first place.”

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