“Apple brandy is like American apple pie,” says Joe Heron, founder of the Louisville, Ky.-based brandy distiller Copper & Kings. “When I was younger, when I said my family made applejack, people thought I meant the cereal.” Restoring applejack to its rightful place in our drinking lexicon may seem like a tall order, but it's almost low-hanging fruit given the renewed interest in classic cocktails and the emergence of craft distilling. “We kept apple brandy alive all these years,” says company vice president Lisa Laird Dunn. soldiered on alone for most of the 20th century. Take A Bite Out of These Apple BrandiesCider and apple brandy were a cornerstone of American drinking until Prohibition, when apple brandy largely fell off the map. Laird went on to found America's first commercial distillery, Laird & Co., which still makes apple brandy under family ownership two and a half centuries later. A century later, Robert Laird, a Revolutionary War soldier, gave his recipe for apple brandy to George Washington. Long before the birth of bourbon, colonial Americans used freeze distillation, a decidedly low-tech precursor to modern techniques, to preserve their apple harvest in liquid form. Apple brandy, historically known as applejack, is America's original spirit. When you learned about the American folklore hero John Chapman, nom de pomme Johnny Appleseed, in grade school, they probably didn't tell you he was propagating apple trees throughout the country to make cider and brandy, not for lunchbox snacks.
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