With the holidays — and nippier weather (at least for Florida) — around the corner, few tastes go with the season as well as cocktails made with applejack and Cognac.
Both are brandies: Applejack is traditional American hooch and Cognac is quintessentially French.
Let's start with applejack. After a long period out of favor, applejacks are being produced by artisanal distillers, but these can still be tough to find unless you're enough of a spirits geek to hunt them down, mostly online. Laird & Company, the nation's first federally licensed distillery, makes the only widely available brand and it's very good. It runs about $25 a bottle.
Now don't let the name fool you. Applejack isn't some Schnapps-like treacle. This is brandy made from apples, so naturally it tastes of apples, but is dry and complex.
Applejack is a very versatile cocktail ingredient. It swaps out easily with most any drinks calling for bourbon or rye. And it plays nice with other spirits, juices and spices — especially maple syrup, cinnamon and the tangy pomegranate taste of grenadine.
As for Cognac, I like drinking it straight. But there's a whole tradition — and one that's blessedly being revived in bars around the country — of making cocktails with it.
By way of a quick tutorial, Cognac is simply brandy produced in a postage stamp-sized region in France. Brandy is a distilled wine made from most any fruit: apples, grapes, pears, etc. Don't let yourself get confused by the alphabet soup of Cognac classifications — VS, VSOP, XO. VS just means "very special." VSOP is "very superior old pale." XO stands for "extra old."
For drinking straight, I wouldn't go lower than VSOP. For cocktails, I wouldn't typically go higher than VSOP, since XO also tends to be extra expensive, and its subtler charms will be masked in a cocktail. Hennessy, Remy-Martin, Camus, Courvoisier and Martell are great brands for straight drinking or mixing.
Here are two recipes using these versatile brandies: first, a nifty twist on a classic Cognac cocktail, the Sidecar, which swaps out Cognac for applejack; and second, the classic Cognac-based Chicago, a drink from the 1930s that gets a festive kick from the addition of champagne or sparkling wine. As with most cocktails, the Chicago's origins are hazy. It's not even known if it was first mixed up in the Windy City. Some recipes call for it to be served on the rocks in a double old-fashioned glass (basically, a short, wide glass), but I think it looks better straight up in a champagne flute.
Applecar Cocktail
aka Apple Cart or Kiddie Cart
Ingredients:
2 ounces applejack
1/2 ounce fresh lemon juice
1/4 ounce Cointreau (you can also substitute Grand Marnier)
Directions:
Combine all ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake vigorously and strain into a cocktail glass. Garnish with an optional lemon twist or apple slice.
Chicago Cocktail
Ingredients:
2 ounces Cognac
1 dash Cointreau
1 dash Angostura bitters
Couple ounces of champagne or sparkling wine
Directions:
Into chilled champagne flute combine Cognac, Cointreau and Angostura bitters. Stir briefly to mix. Then top with bubbly.
(Note: this drink is sometimes garnished with a sugar-rimmed glass. If you want to do this, you'll need some superfine sugar and a lemon wedge, to moisten the glass rim. If you don't know how to rim a glass — see how naughty cocktails can sound?! — you can look it up on the Internet).
This article appears in Dec 8-14, 2011.