I’ve written before about home-fermented beverages, and how I’m especially partial to apple-fermented drinks, because they are entirely local and use the tons of otherwise unharvested apples around here. Pictured here is a bottle of applejack (“Jersey Lightning”) made by my sister’s father-in-law. She was quite willing to part with some of hers, due to the noticeable “dirty socks” aftertaste – details, details, say I. The stuff definitely gets the stomach rumbling, and appears to merit the traditional name “rotgut.” But nothing could be more soporific: after a day of hard labor in the cold autumn rain, I come home, heat up some fresh cider on the stove, then add a shot of this moonshine, some honey, and squeeze a third of a lemon into it. I wake nine hours later.
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Two things. We’ve been doing a lot of hiking lately. Yesterday we did a 9 mile hike around Standing Stone State Park in Tennessee. It was awesome– you would have loved it. We recently went up to the Finger Lakes National Forest and hiked through much of it. There were wild apple trees and we were picking them off the trees and eating them on the trails. We also visited the wineries and it seems like hard cider is making a comeback– at least up there. They were awesome too.