12/7/2023 0 Comments Applejack bourbon![]() Stop in for a tour and you’ll not only see a fully operating distillery but a fully operating winery and underground barrel warehouse. 1 tourist destination in the entire state of Indiana. Add all these family friendly things up and you have the No. The farm features Starlight Café, a farmer’s market, the winery, the distillery and many U-Pick opportunities throughout the year. Starlight Distillery is a part of Huber’s Orchard, Winery and Distillery. When you visit the farm distillery today you’ll find Master Distillers Ted Huber and Jason Heiligenberg are committed to crafting the finest brandy, bourbon, rye whiskey and several liqueurs using the only finest local ingredients. The distillery officially started in 2001 and with proper aging their first products were released in 2004 with much fanfare. Huber’s has been distilling wine and brandies for 100s of years. ![]() When Huber’s says “We produce farm to glass wine and distilled spirits” they mean it and have the 550 acre farm to prove it. That’s when the family first immigrated to the United States and they’ve been working the same farmland for more than 175 years now. It comes out clear like moonshine, but we found people don’t associate clear spirits with applejack, so to give it some color, we barrel age it for six weeks in a rum barrel we got from a rum distillery in Rhode Island.Huber’s Starlight Distillery can trace its Southern Indiana farm roots back to 1843. Technically it’s more of an apple brandy. “The cheap way, the freeze distill way, is a bit dangerous, because there’s a lot of bad stuff still left in there,” he said. To give it complex flavors, the moonshiner would take his time to “age” the applejack, by letting charred oak chips marinate in a jar of it.īruce Olson, co-owner of Tree Spirits Maine makes an applejack, but emphasizes, not the old-fashioned way. Unfortunately, similar to bathtub gin, the leftover liquid also contained amounts of methanol, ethanol and other impurities, but drinking it in small amounts seemed to be the trick. If a hard cider averages around 5% and apple wine around 10-12%, applejack spiked as high as 30% or 60 proof. Leaving the apple hard cider outside overnight, the moonshiner would then syphon out the ice that accumulated, leaving behind the liquid, which increased the percentage of alcohol. Using nature as an ally after the fall harvest, the moonshiner would “jack” or freeze distill the hard cider (which, technically was actually a concentration, rather than a distillation.) As alcohol freezes at a lower temperature than water, applejack would only be made in the winter. Maine moonshiners irritated by Prohibition (enacted some 70 years before it took hold in the rest of the United States) also decried any form of government interference on a product that they could easily forage from their own orchards and produce with very little equipment at home. With the proliferation of apple trees on the east coast, thanks to what European colonists brought with them, applejack became a Maine pasttime and staple. ![]() ![]()
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