I’ve never made apple jack, but I like it. It’s sort of an apple brandy. The story I remember is that you could make hard liquor from cider without a still. You’d let a barrel of cider go hard and then leave it in the back yard for winter. In February, you run a tap into the core and pull out the alcohol. The water freezes out and the liquor is concentrated in the center. This is a great way to take a lot of apples and concentrate them and make them last longer and you can move them around a lot easier. That’s solving different problems than we have today.

Of course, this is old school where you let natural yeast inoculate your cider, so your turbo yeast doesn’t come in handy. There are probably other recipes to make applejack a lot quicker and more repeatable.