Area-distilled apple spirits catching on

Apple spirits are catching on with younger drinkers, and Laird & Co. likes them apples just fine.

The Scobeyville, N.J., company operates a distillery in North Garden, where it manufactures a huge percentage of the apple spirits produced in the country.

The company expects 2009 sales to be up about 20 percent over 2008’s, said Tom Alberico, the company’s senior vice president for sales and marketing.

“Over the last couple decades that I’ve been associated with the company, the sales of applejack have been steady at best,” Alberico said. “It was kind of a sleepy thing, but over the last … less than five years, we’ve seen an increase in sales every year.”

It’s an increase he attributes to younger drinkers of apple spirits.

For the uninitiated, apple juice first is allowed to ferment, and then the resultant hard cider is transferred to a still. In the still it is condensed into apple brandy of 160 proof (80 percent alcohol), then cut slightly, to about 130 proof (65 percent alcohol), for aging.

The distillation happens in Virginia, but the aging takes place in New Jersey. From the aged apple brandy, Laird’s makes two main types of hard spirits.

Some of the brandy is simply aged, then cut again to the appropriate proof and bottled. This is marketed as apple brandy.

Other brandy is blended with grain-neutral spirits — basically, unflavored alcohol — and marketed as blended applejack.

The Laird family, which is the only maker of blended applejack in America, has been distilling the drink since 1780, Alberico said.

In early America, the drink was popular, said Miranda Dean, curator at Michie Tavern.

“It was a common drink, a brandy, along with hard cider, beer and even whisky right after the Revolution,” she said.

Colonists thought alcohol was a safer drink than water, which was often contaminated, though society did frown on drunkenness, she said.

Nowadays, beyond a local market near the company’s New Jersey headquarters, apple spirits attract three main market segments, Alberico said: cooks, the old and the young.

Cooks put the spirits to a variety of uses, from flavoring braised rabbit to moistening cakes.

Older drinkers, often seniors, tend to remember the spirits from their fathers’ and grandfathers’ bars, Alberico said.

But Alberico said the newest, and fastest-growing, segment of the market is young, hip drinkers paying real attention to the cocktail.

“It definitely started in New York, in New York City,” Alberico said. “You could say, at least for us, it was the epicenter of this authentic cocktail/serious bartender phenomenon.”

Alberico said the drink’s lack of flashy marketing and very-old-school resume make it attractive to that crowd.

Recently, the company ran an instructional tour for bartenders in a number of big cities and released a booklet with apple spirits recipes and history.

“The phenomenon that we’re trying to support is that you’ve got young, educated, interested, dedicated bartenders across the country who have discovered this product,” Alberico said. He traced the movement back about five years, and said the company’s 225th anniversary and new packaging at about that time probably helped the company tap into the new movement.

The trend hasn’t yet caught on in a big way in the Charlottesville area, though.

At Maya restaurant on West Main Street, bartender Ted Norris has been experimenting with recipes, but so far hasn’t found a concoction that will get the liquor on his menu.

“I’m definitely still dabbling with it and still playing around with it,” he said.

Without an all-star cocktail, it can be hard to get new drinkers on board with apple spirits, said manager Jaime Jacobs of Zocalo on the Downtown Mall.

At that restaurant, the liquor appeared briefly, but fell flat.

“We no longer serve it because it wasn’t selling at all,” Jacobs said.

Instead, the bar is offering apple cider spiked with whiskey.

And at Mas on Monticello Road, the brandy is served as an after-dinner drink, where it competes with beverages such as port, but isn’t incorporated in mixed drinks, said bartender Liberty Cogill.

“We like to support everything local,” Cogill said.