Jack Rose Cocktail – Applejack Cocktail Recipe

The Jack Rose is a forgotten classic. Named for a hairless gangster and immortalized by Hemingway, this is the Applejack you’ve been looking for.

Jack Rose – Cocktail Recipe

This is the Jack Rose cocktail Hemingway made famous in the Sun Also Rises. It is made with Applejack, grenadine and lemon. A combination not commonly found on cocktail menus these days.

Jack Rose Cocktail

Ingredients

Apple Jack

Applejack is an American style of apple brandy that dates back to the colonial era. In fact Laird’s Applejack has been producing apple brandy in the US since 1780. They are the oldest and longest continously producing distiller in the country,

Apple jack gets its name from ‘jacking’ fermented cider. Settlers would raise the alcoholic proof of fermented cider by letting partially freeze. This would raise the alcohol content and concentrate flavours in the spirit.

The Jack Rose cocktail is the the most well known cocktail associated with applejack.

If you are having trouble finding applejack calvados will do. It is a French apple brandy. Delicious, but with a slightly more refined quality.

Grenadine

Grenadine is a syrup made from pomegranates. It gained a bad reputation for being the sweetener in Shirley Temples and adding colour and flavour to dozens of drinks popular at college town dives.

It has been clawing its way back to respectability as people realize that pomegranate offers a lot in the way of interesting flavour. There are also many more high quality grenadine syrups available these days.

If you really want to make the Jack Rose cocktail properly make your own grenadine syrup. It’s not as hard as you might think and the results are totally worth it.

Lemon Juice

The Jack Rose cockail is sometimes referred to as a Jack Rose martini. This is a bit of a misnomer. It is in fact more of a classic sour cocktail. The combination of 2 parts apple brandy and equal parts lemon and sugar put it squarely in that territory.

Because it is a sour and it contains lemon juice that means we are pulling out our favorite cocktail shaker and shaking this thing into perfection. Fine strain into a chilled cocktail glass and you are good to go.

Jack Rose – Applejack Cocktail Recipe

  • 2 oz bonded apple brandy
  • 3/4 oz fresh lemon juice
  • 3/4 oz grenadine (preferably homemade)
  1. In a cocktail shaker, combine brandy, lemon juice and grenadine.
  2. Fill the shaker with ice and shake vigorously for 10-15 seconds.
  3. Strain into a chilled coupe glass.

Jack Rose

The Jack Rose is an applejack drink made with grenadine and lime juice. It was popular during the Jazz Age of the 1920’s and makes an appearance in Ernest Hemingway’s classic novel The Sun Also Rises.  As with so many other cocktails the history is murky and there are several stories surrounding its creation. My favorite is the one that attributes the cocktail to Jack Rose, an old-timey gangster.

Baldy Jack Rose a notorious member of New York City’s underworld in the early 20th century. He lost all of his hair including his eyebrows after contracting typhoid fever at the age of four. Mobsters, not known for their nuanced sense of humor, gave him the alias of Baldy. As the saying goes, fortune favors the bald, or something along those lines. At any rate, he was a prominent enough figure that he apparently had a cocktail named after him.

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