Apple Jack Rabbit

A Savoy cocktail classic from 1930: applejack shaken with fresh lemon, orange, and real maple syrup into a bright, balanced autumn sour with nearly a century of history behind it.

The Apple Jack Rabbit has a documented history stretching back to at least 1927, when it appeared in Here's How!, a popular cocktail guide published under the pen name "Judge Jr." — three years before its more famous appearance in Harry Craddock's The Savoy Cocktail Book (1930). Craddock is part of the story himself. An American bartender who left the United States as Prohibition dried up his trade, he crossed the Atlantic and became head barman at the Savoy Hotel's legendary American Bar in London, where he assembled the 750-recipe guide that still bears the hotel's name. The Apple Jack Rabbit was one of many American-rooted drinks he carried into that collection. The original Savoy recipe is considerably sweeter than what most modern bars would pour — it calls for one "hooker" (roughly 2.5 oz) each of applejack and maple syrup, a ratio that reads rich by today's standards. By the time David A. Embury revisited it in The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks (1948), he had rebalanced toward a drier, spirit-forward build and offered his characteristically dry verdict: "not half bad." He also noted the drink was sometimes called the Applejack Dynamite, a nickname he found baffling. The drink appeared again in Trader Vic's Bartender's Guide and was later revived for modern cocktail menus by Jim Meehan in The PDT Cocktail Book. The applejack itself is worth a note. Distilled from fermented apples and produced in the northeastern United States since colonial times, it is one of the oldest American spirits. Laird's Applejack from New Jersey remains the benchmark domestic bottling. French Calvados — also an apple brandy — is a widely accepted substitution, and tends to bring a more floral, orchard-forward character to the glass.