Applejack Rabbit variant

I'm writing this post in the middle of a 75°F day, but last week it was definitely fall weather. Fall means apples, and apples mean applejack, so I grabbed a few recipes from the PDT book. My favorite of the night was a variant on the Applejack Rabbit, which is a drink that combines apple brandy, citrus, and maple syrup.

As it turned out, I didn't have exactly the right ingredients for the drink as the book listed it. I had applejack instead of 100-proof bonded brandy and Grade A maple syrup instead of Grade B, and I didn't find the time to hand-squeeze the fruit juices. So I played around with the ingredient ratios to find the best combination of what I had.

Ingredients:

• 2 oz. applejack
• 3/4 oz. lemon juice
• 3/8 oz. orange juice
• 1/2 oz. grade A maple syrup

Shake with ice.

The original recipe called for twice as much orange juice, but thanks to the differences in the ingredients, the orange ended up overwhelming the rest of the drink. After I halved the orange juice, the initial taste became much more balanced. Different people identified each of the apple, the citrus, and the maple syrup as the dominant taste of the drink, which I took as a sign of good balance! The aftertaste was very much dominated by the maple syrup, which stuck around for a while - not something I had known about maple syrup before. I'll have to find some proper grade B syrup someday to see what it does to the aftertaste.