The Case for Apple Brandy

Fall-ify your cocktails with this underrated bottle.

If I had to pick a single type of liquor that’s most underrated by home bartenders, it would be brandy — and American apple brandy in particular. Apple brandy was a favorite of America’s Founders, and you can still buy something branded as George Washington’s Apple Brandy from the Mount Vernon distillery. 

Apple brandy fell out of favor for many year after World War II, but it has played a key role in the cocktail resurgence of the last two decades, showing up most prominently in the Jack Rose. 

Yet I still find it common to look over well-stocked home bars and discover that there’s no apple brandy present. That’s a shame. Quality apple brandy is not just an essential ingredient in a handful of well-known cocktails, it’s one of the best bottles to have on hand if you like to tinker with cocktails, modifying and adapting them to various occasions and taste preferences. In particular, it’s a great way to add a little bit of what you might think of as “essence of fall” to a drink. 

You can use apple brandy as a primary ingredient in riffs on classic drinks, and it’s especially good as a substitute for bourbon or rye whiskey. With a little bit of thought and care, you can make delicious apple brandy riffs on both shaken and stirred cocktails  — and in today’s newsletter, we’ll look at recipes in both categories. 

But its real strength is as a partnering ingredient, adding an apple-y depth to drinks with complementary spirits. 

We saw this recently in a recipe for an elevated Whiskey Sour. One of the tricks that drink uses is to swap out a small portion of the whiskey base and slot in a bit of apple brandy, making for a sort of whiskey-brandy sour.

The base spirit in a cocktail is sort of like the lead singer in a band — the foreground voice that all the other elements support. For newer readers who might not be familiar with this concept: A split base doesn’t add additional liquor, in terms of volume; rather, it takes the same measurement (typically two ounces) and, well, splits it between two different spirits.

This gives you something more like a spirit harmony, in which the lead singer is accompanied by another voice or voices with complementary characteristics. If you’re familiar with the singer-songwriters Lucy Dacus, Phoebe Bridgers, and Julien Baker, you probably know they all make great records on their own. But sometimes they team up to form a sort of indie supergroup, boygenius, sharing songwriting and lead-singing duties. It’s not quite a perfect analogy, but you can think of split-base cocktails as the boozy equivalent to boygenius. Split base drinks are creative partnerships involving multiple strong spirits that can and do work perfectly well as base spirits all on their own. In that Whiskey Sour variation, bourbon and apple brandy share the lead.

Apple brandy might be the single most versatile spirit for creating swaps and splits. That’s because it goes with just about everything: It matches well with bourbon, rye, and scotch, obviously. But with a little bit of thought and care, it also goes well with aged rum, mezcal, aged tequila, and even aquavit. If you want to add depth, interest, character, or complexity to a cocktail, splitting some apple brandy into the mix is one of the most reliably delicious ways to do so. Apple brandy harmonizes with just about anyone. 

So this week, we’re going to learn a little bit about apple brandy. And then we’re going to look at a couple of different recipes and recipe iterations that show not only how to use apple brandy in some specific drinks, but how to use apple brandy to riff and tinker with familiar cocktail structures. Think of it as a little lesson in how to fall-ify your favorite drinks. 

An Apple Brandy a Day Keeps the Doctor Away? 

Brandy is a spirit distilled from fruit (or in rarer cases vegetables). Apple brandy, then, is a spirit distilled from apples. Apple brandy is mostly made in the United States and France, where it’s known as Calvados. 

Different apple brandies have different flavors and characteristics, with some tasting more of bright, fresh apples, and others boasting a more pronounced wood cask note that makes them taste a little more like aged brandy or even bourbon. 

French apple brandy is subject to stricter region and production requirements. Broadly speaking, it tends to be a little softer and mellower than American apple brandy, and the regulatory environment means there is less variation overall. 

Calvados is delicious and makes a wonderful cocktail ingredient. I typically keep a bottle of Busnel Fine or VSOP around, both of which are relatively affordable. For cocktails, you don’t need to invest in a long-aged, super pricey bottle. 

But home bartenders who are just starting out with the spirit should probably stick with American apple brandy if they can find it. (I understand this may be more difficult for international readers.) 

In particular, I strongly recommend Laird’s Straight Apple Brandy Bottled-in-Bond, a 100 percent apple brandy, aged for four years in charred oak. As David Mahoney writes in The Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails, “at the dawn of the twenty-first-century, the acquisition of a bottle of Laird’s Bonded Apple Brandy was a rite of passage for a young mixologist.” We are somewhat past the dawn of the century, but that remains true today. 

Laird’s makes a number of different apple brandies, including an unaged “Jersey Lightning,” which can be a lot of fun but drinks more like a pisco made from apples than the aged brandy 

Laird’s also makes a blended Applejack, which is a combination of apple brandy and neutral grain spirit. Not surprisingly, it’s lighter in body and character. In my experience, it’s also easier to find. If you can’t find straight apple brandy, Applejack will work well enough in shaken drinks. (Some people even prefer it for a Jack Rose.) But I probably wouldn’t make an Old Fashioned style cocktail with it. The bonded straight apple brandy is richer, heavier, with a more assertive character that is better suited to stirred-and-boozy cocktails. 

If you want to dig deeper into the category, or explore other brands, I have also become a big fan of Copper & Kings American Apple Brandy. Produced in Kentucky and aged in bourbon casks, it’s even darker and richer in character, and drinks a bit more like bourbon. If you are a whiskey connoisseur, this expression may be a little more friendly. 

Think Different 

Once you have a bottle of apple brandy, what can you do with it? The answer is…pretty much anything. 

Nearly any drink that is made with an aged spirit can be successfully re-made with apple brandy at its core. It works in shaken drinks. It works in stirred drinks. It works in classics and modern classics. It just works. And it lends itself to tinkering, tweaking, and tailoring. 

Take, for example, the Manhattan.