Applejack drink boy12/6/2023 ![]() ![]() Virginia apples now power Jersey’s lightning. Though it once had three distilleries, Laird’s is down to one, located in North Garden, Va., outside Charlottesville. ![]() Laird went on, in 1780, to license America’s very first distillery, in Scobeyville.Ĭompany Vice President Lisa Laird Dunn says she’s proud to be the ninth generation of her family involved in the business. George Washington liked the booze enough to ask Robert Laird, then a soldier in his command, for the recipe. Now better known as applejack (often nicknamed “Jersey lightning”), the vast majority is still made by New Jersey’s Laird & Co., around since the 1700s. Cider came first, but then came “cyder spirits,” liquor produced by freezing hard cider and removing the ice, thereby increasing the alcohol content. Long before Americans trusted water - rank stuff, filled with dysentery and typhoid - they trusted apples a mildly alcoholic cider was not as welcoming to germs. In the Colonial era, the vast majority of apples ended up not in pies, but in drinks. The dogs (I should really call them “dawgs” for accuracy) were partaking in a long tradition of apple-boozing. ![]() Their blundering, aggressive clumsiness and sporadic lunging chomps at the fruit fermenting beneath the trees convinced me: These beagles weren’t just feral. Had I been casting the canine remake of “Deliverance,” my work would have been done. Soon, galumphing through the trees, came a pack of the most hillbilly-looking beagles I’d ever seen, walleyed and bent of tail. I found myself growing sentimental - all of us there, together, in the cold air and autumn light - when we began to hear baying, distant but closing in. There’s something primal and piercing about the smell of apples, redolent of the past, suggestive of coming winter. His house outside Crozet, Va., is surrounded by orchards, and we walked the railroad tracks, past fields abuzz with wasps and heavy with the cidery scent of fruit browning and boozy under the trees. A decade or so back, after gorging ourselves on Thanksgiving dinner, my extended family - gathered at my uncle’s place in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains - bundled up for a walk, determined to burn off a hundredth of what we’d eaten. ![]()
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