They arrived in Monmouth, New Jersey, in 1678, and the family has only moved a half mile in the last 340 years.

The first-Lisa’s seventh and eighth degree great grandfathers-were scotch distillers fleeing religious persecution in County Fife, Ireland. Lairds have been in the United Sates since before there was any such thing. “Obviously, that is not what we’re tasting today,” Lisa says. The intense process also gave it such names as “Jersey Lightning,” “Corpse Reviver,” Essence of Lockjaw,” “Slug of Bluefish Quills,” and “Horn of Gunpowder.”īut don’t let those fanciful monikers scare you off from applejack-we’ve come a long way. The water would freeze, and as they kept re-freezing it, it would continuously condense the product. “They would take the hard cider and put it outside to freeze.

“Most colonists made their Applejack through jacking,” Lisa says. Lisa traces the term “applejack” to colonial times, when apple brandy was made through the process of freeze distillation, or “jacking.” Over the course of Thirst Boston this past April, I had the chance to meet Lisa Laird and attend her seminar titled “Applejack: America’s Native Spirit.” That’s a bold claim, but Laird herself is a testament to its truth: she represents the ninth generation of America’s oldest distilling family, the Lairds of Laird’s Apple Brandy.įrom the role of the Laird family in the American Revolution to their hand in creating the blended applejack category, here are just a few of the things I learned from Lisa.

Laird applejack whiskey