Applejack vs Apple Brandy: Pectin, Methanol and Honest Cuts from Hard Cider

The Apple and the Lie in the Word Cider

To understand the Widow Pettingill's sin, a man must first understand the apple, and to understand the apple he must forget all his grandmother told him about pie. The trees of old New England were not planted for eating. Most grew straight from seed, and an apple grown from seed is a gamble: plant the seed of a sweet Baldwin and you may raise a tree whose fruit is sour enough to turn a cat inside out. Our grandfathers knew it and did not care, for they were not after eating. They were after drinking.

Cider was the table drink of this country, for man, woman and child. Water drawn from a town well beside the privy and the tannery would kill you slower than a Concord lawyer, but just as surely, and cider was safe. Old John Adams wrote that he took a tankard of hard cider of a morning, and he went on to sign the Declaration, so it did him no lasting harm. As for Mr. Chapman, whom they called Johnny Appleseed, if you fancy every seedling nursery he planted in the western country went to pie, I have a book of bridges to sell you.

The method is plain enough for any experimenter. Press the apples and catch the sweet juice, cloudy and honest, a child's drink. Leave it in an open cask with a rag over the bung, and the wild yeast living on the skins sets to work. In a few weeks you have hard cider of five to seven parts in a hundred, about as strong as a good stout ale. A farmer may drink it at haying and still find his own barn.

Jacking, the Still, and the Revenue

But give a Yankee a good thing and he will find a way to make it worse and stronger. The first way is jacking. Set a barrel of hard cider out in a New Hampshire January and the water freezes out of it, while in the middle a little pool of strong, dark liquor stays liquid, for alcohol is a stubborn thing that will not freeze in any honest weather. Bore in with an auger, draw off that heart, and you have applejack.

Mark this well, for my whole tale swings on it: jacking throws nothing away. Every foul thing that was in the cider remains in the jack, only crowded closer together. The bad spirits a still-man would cut off and pour on the ground sit right there in your cup. Freeze-jacked cider is the only liquor that collects its fee in advance and then bills you again in the morning.

The second way is the copper still, which turns hard cider into apple brandy. Here the Government thrusts in its long thin nose. Under Mr. Lincoln's excise, apple brandy is distilled spirit, taxed at the barrel like any whiskey, while hard cider is another animal in the eyes of the law. A word costs nothing and the tax costs a great deal, so small wonder a clever country woman might call her brandy cider. And though the Washingtonians and the Sons of Temperance went county to county from the 'forties, and some neighbours grew so righteous they took an axe to their own grandfathers' orchards, every congregation in New England still poured cider at harvest supper. Who would question a widow carrying a crock of cider into the vestry?

The Harvest Supper of 'Fifty-Eight

The Widow Hepzibah Pettingill kept eleven acres of orchard on the Barnstead road. Her husband Josiah went to his reward in the winter of 'fifty-seven, kicked by his own ox, which the town agreed showed rare judgment in the ox. He left her a cellar full of barrels, a little copper pot bought off a tinker from Gilmanton, and the firmest fruit in Pittsfield. I speak only of apples.

At the harvest supper in the meeting-house vestry, among the baked beans, brown bread, a ham the size of a deacon and seventeen pies (four of which I ate, God forgive me), the Widow set down two stoneware jugs: a little of Josiah's cider, said she, in his memory. I put my nose to my cup, and my nose knew in an instant. It was apple brandy from Josiah's pot, cut back with sweet cider for colour and innocence, and, I would have bet my anvil on it, strengthened with jacked cider off the north side of her barn. It smelled like Eden and it hit like Cain.

The Reverend Ezekiel Thorne, who had preached against strong drink every third Sunday for eleven years, pronounced it a remarkable vintage of the apple. He asked for seconds like a Christian and thirds like a sailor, and by the pie course he had loosened his collar, his waistcoat and his doctrine, and stood on a bench to preach the Widow's miracle. Deacon Philbrick rose to stop him and went headfirst into the bean pot, came up glazed like a molasses baptism with a bean in each nostril, and sat down in the pie. The choir got hold of the second jug and sang Old Hundred in three keys at once.

Monday brought what I call the apple palsy: heads pounding as though a smith worked iron behind the eyes, sour stomachs, hands shaking so the mill girls could not thread a bobbin. The Reverend kept his bed till Tuesday. That was the jack at work, everything a still would have thrown away, poured down a minister. The sheriff rode first to Fort Wilkins, as they always do. I showed him my copper, clean as a bride's teeth, and my honest cuts, and told him my spirit gives a man opinions, not the palsy.

I found the Widow in her barn pressing apples with forearms like a ship's carpenter, and told her plainly to throw away her heads. She bade me show her, and so I did, all that winter. She paid me partly in a cartload of working pomace for my hogs, which my bear Barnaby pulled down upon himself, forty pounds of it, wasps and all, and shortly returned in full upon Crockett, the county assessor, come to count my barrels. He never did count them, though he carried a fine apple smell until Christmas.

The Great Disguise

My friend Captain Donald Vance, a retired revenue officer, assures me the Widow was far from alone. Cider, he says, was the great disguise, for a barrel of cider never made a revenue man look twice. Near Lebanon on the Connecticut he once found six cider barrels hauled up on a barn roof by block and tackle, so the January wind would freeze them faster, with a brace and bit hanging from the eaves to draw off the jack. He poured it out and told the weeping farmer it was a headache in a barrel, with everything that ought to be thrown away still in it.

At a Sons of Temperance pledge supper in Woodstock, Vermont, the society's own treasurer spiked the punch bowl; the Captain read it in the pledge book, where the copperplate signatures grew tall, then leaning, and ended in an X beside a smiling pig. A tin peddler sold crocks labelled Boiled Cider, for Mince Pie. Now true boiled cider is sweet cider cooked down thick and dark as molasses, without a lick of liquor in it, yet this poured like spring water and smelled like an orchard on fire. When the peddler pleaded a thin year for boiled cider, the Captain answered, "Friend, it's a thick year for nonsense." Worse, the lids were soldered with lead, and he broke every crock against the man's own wheel. And at a barn raising in Bradford, a pail of switchel that was three parts apple brandy set the ridgepole crooked, and that barn has leaned east ever since.

What I Taught the Widow

First the plain law: making distilled spirits to drink without a federal permit is illegal in these United States, and what follows is history and instruction only. Pick ripe, sound fruit and cull the rot, for ten bad apples will make your brandy smell like a cellar floor. Crush, press, and run the juice into a clean cask, never one that held pickles, fish or a dead squirrel. Leave the bung loose under a cloth and keep it snug by the chimney, for yeast loafs in the cold like a deputy on payday. In two or three weeks the bubbling stops, and your hard cider of five to seven parts in a hundred is your charge.

Now the chemistry that sets apple apart from corn. The apple is full of pectin, the stuff that sets your grandmother's jelly, and as the cider works, that pectin breaks down and gives off wood spirit, which the learned men call methanol. It blinds, and in enough measure it kills. A fruit charge carries more of it than a grain mash, so the cider man must be more generous at the head of the run. That was the Widow's whole sin: with jack she kept every drop of the poison, and with her brandy she was too stingy with her cuts.

Fill the pot no more than two-thirds, so it does not foam over into the arm. Seal every joint with flour paste or a proper union, never lead solder. Keep a low, patient fire. As the vapour climbs, the copper seizes the sulphur, the rotten-egg stink, which is why a copper still runs sweeter; clean it after every run to keep the metal working. Many a careful man runs twice, stripping to low wines and then taking the spirit run slow.

There the cuts are made. The foreshots come first, smelling of cobbler's cement: onto the ground with them, no less than a good half-pint for every ten gallons of cider charged, a full pint if the fruit was ripe and heavy. Then the heads, harsh, of glue and lamp spirit; set them aside. Then the hearts, round and soft, the whole orchard in October. Catch them in small numbered jars and choose your cut with your nose instead of your greed. Last come the tails, oily and flat as wet cardboard and dog. Mind the fire, too: alcohol vapour burns, so keep joints tight, the spirit jar away from the flame, and a bucket of sand by the door.

Ashes, Oak Shavings, and the Blue Flame

Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, asks whether hickory ashes or red oak shavings in the thump keg clean out bad heads. Ash soaked in water is lye, fit for soap and hominy; it may knock a little sour off the taste, but it never touches the wood spirit. Oak does lend colour, tannin and a toasty taste, but changing the taste is not cleaning, and red oak is open-grained and leaky besides, which is why a cooper prefers white. The bad heads cannot be washed, filtered or prayed out, only caught and poured away. As the Captain put it, the uncle sounds like "a fine man and a terrible chemist."

As for the blue flame, good spirit burns pale blue and so does methanol, and lead can throw the colour off besides. The only honest test is at the spout. The Widow learned it, sold a little to the sick and the sad, and never gave another man the palsy. She lived to ninety-one and outlived Reverend Thorne by eleven years. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low.