Jersey Lightning

The Jersey Lightning hasn’t ever taken its proper place in the canon of classic cocktails. That may be in part due to a confusion of overlapping names that have landed on a couple of related drinks from the late 19th and early 20th century. The “Jersey Cocktail” began life as something of an old-fashioned made with cider before the drink morphed into one made instead with apple brandy. Back then, and now, the most famous hooch in that category was made by New Jersey’s Laird & Company and has sometimes been nicknamed “Jersey Lightning.” 

By 1916 the fourth edition of J.A. Grohusko’s Jack’s Manual presents the Jersey Cocktail as an apple brandy manhattan, pairing the aged brown spirit with sweet vermouth and Angostura bitters. By the time this drink got to bartender Tom Bullock—and printed in The Ideal Bartender—it was gloriously rechristened the Jersey Lightning (although Bullock left out the bitters.) But after that the drink popped up in a weird mutant form in various books: The structure of the apple brandy manhattan was kept but with lime juice curiously added (very possibly a typo that remains hard to shake.) 

No matter what you call it, a manhattan simply made with apple brandy is a wonderful thing. The high-octane brandy sits comfortably next to whiskey in style, and its brighter and fruitier notes sing when paired with a good sweet vermouth, with or without the bitters.You might have seen this drink as an “apple manhattan” or “harvest manhattan”—while it's true a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, what kind of bard would take a pass on using a name this good when they had the chance?

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