If you visit a distillery while they’re in production, the first thing you notice is the heat. That’s due to the process of fermentation where yeast are eating sugar, which creates alcohol, carbon dioxide, and a lot of hot air. The mash is heated, causing the alcohol evaporate. What’s collected is your new, higher proof spirit.

But what if you didn’t have a reliable way to heat anything up? Say you still wanted to get a stronger drink than beer or cider, but needed a different way of accomplishing this.

Enter jacking

You can think of jacking as the opposite of distilling. Since alcohol and water have both different boiling temperatures and freezing points, just as you can use heat to evaporate alcohol away from water, and you can also freeze water to remove it from your alcohol.

This was the technique used by early American colonist to create their spirits, and New England winters provide more than enough chill to make the process of jacking work quite well. Colonist would leave a barrel of apple cider outside to let it freeze. Since the water is what freezes that ice can be broken and removed from the top of the barrel, and the process is then repeated, until another layer of ice(water) has formed and can be removed. Do this a few times, and now your 3% to 5% apple cider has been jacked up anywhere from 25% to 40%. This is where the name applejack comes from.

Note

Today’s applejacks are made using distillation. The jacking process isn’t nearly as reliable as distilling, and it can’t get rid of some of the harmful compound that distilling removes.