Fortune’s Fruit & Flower

Apple Brandy

To The Core

The apple harvest means that fall is right around the corner. Once my friends found out that I fermented and distilled apples, I suddenly had a glut of fruit. Crab apples, backyard apples, whatever-random-decorative apples, I take them all. With skilled distilling and tinkering with yeast and fermenting temperatures I can usually coax something interesting out of them. If they’re especially finicky, I just distill them down to vodka. Even so, every donor gets a cut of the their apples back for a little something to add to those hot toddies during the dark and damp winter.

Apples are full of history. Paris gave Aphrodite a golden apple, anointing her more beautiful than Hera and Athena and starting the Trojan war. Apples grant wisdom, fruit the land, trick Snow White, and are both literal and metaphoric parables for abundance and adoration.

Jacking, as in apple jack, means to set your fermented juice out in the cold and let the water freeze into a block of ice. Since water freezes before alcohol (queue memories of the forgotten bottle of vodka in the freezer that did not explode, but the beer cans that did), people could remove the ice and therefore ‘jack’ their fermented cider to something a little more potent.

Fortune’s Fruit and Flower Apple Brandy is a more subtle sort of drink. Made of the fruit from the fall and the delicate apple blossoms harvested in the spring, the fruit and the flowers mingle folding the edges of spring and fall gently together. To me, summer is the domain of the garden and all its vegetables, but spring brings the perfume of blossoms and the burst of juicy berries. Fall is the season of fruit. Apples, peaches, pears, melons, and grapes all turn the summer sun into delicious sugars to eat and ferment. Big Wild Spirit’s Fortune’s Apple Brandy joins the fragrance of spring into the sugars of fall and makes a delicious cup to sip. Enjoy!