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Apple Brandy, or Pomona Wine
To six gallons of new cider add one gallon of brandy and let stand from eight months to a year before racking off. To make Apple Jack or Cider Brandy distill the cider alone.
This entry is two things at once: a fortified cider, and a one-line instruction to distil spirits. The second makes the page unusable as written, and the first has problems of its own.
- Distilling is the disqualifier"Distill the cider alone" is the whole of the applejack instruction. Operating a still to produce beverage alcohol without a federal distilled spirits permit is a felony in the United States and is tightly controlled almost everywhere else, regardless of quantity or personal use.
- Why an unmeasured distillation is dangerousA fermented wash carries small amounts of methanol and other volatiles that come over first, in the foreshots. Separating them takes measured temperatures, a known cut point and experience; a recipe that says only "distill the cider" gives none of that. Alcohol vapour near an open heat source is also a straightforward fire and explosion risk.
- "New cider" means fresh juiceIn period usage this is fresh-pressed, unpasteurized apple juice, not the filtered supermarket product and not a canned hard cider. The recipe gives no fermentation instructions, but a long stand of this kind assumes the juice ferments on its own resident yeast.
- Eight months to a year, unprotectedA vessel of cider left standing that long with no airlock and no measured sulphite is an open invitation to acetobacter. The recipe names no vessel and no storage conditions; left in a warm kitchen with air contact, the likely result is vinegar rather than wine.
- The proportions, for reading onlySix gallons cider to one gallon brandy is a 6:1 fortification, adding on the order of 6-7% ABV to the finished volume; whether that halted fermentation would depend on how far the cider had already worked. "Racking off" is siphoning the clear liquid off the lees, a term still in use.
- If you want the drinkFortified cider and pommeau are made commercially and by hobbyists working from current, measured procedures. Use one of those rather than this paragraph.
Pomona was the Roman goddess of orchards and fruit trees, and her name was attached in the nineteenth century to almost anything apple-flavoured that wanted dignity — wines, cordials, horticultural societies and journals alike. The recipe reflects a period when cider was the ordinary drink of American farm households and every large orchard had a use for windfalls: fortify some, let some sour into vinegar, and send the rest to a neighbourhood still. Applejack itself is generally traced to the colonial mid-Atlantic, and some of it was made not by distilling at all but by what is traditionally called "jacking" — leaving a barrel out to freeze and drawing off the unfrozen core, a method that concentrates congeners along with the alcohol, though how much of the total production came this way is disputed. That the compiler could dispose of the entire process in a single clause tells you how unremarkable home spirit-making still seemed.