Pommeau is so intriguing to me, mostly because there’s not much like it out there in general, especially not associated with apples. But to understand pommeau at all, you need to understand brandy first.
Basics of Brandy
Brandy is just a category of spirit that’s created by distilling wine that’s already been fermented. Often, that’s grape wine, but not always; although generally decried as inferior in every way, wine can actually be made with just about any sweet fruit or even honey (but then it’s called mead). Apples and berries are really the stars here, and wine made from these fruits has always been popular wherever the fruit is plentiful.
So, you take any wine made from anything, throw it in a still, and out comes brandy. Like anything, distilling eliminates any of the color. I’ve never seen a white brandy despite the increasing popularity of white dog whiskey, but I’m sure it exists somewhere!
The color, like any other brown spirit, comes from the aging process. Like whiskey and wine, this is really where the biggest distinctions between distilleries in the same region come in. The same fruit wine can produce a very different brandy depending on how it’s aged. Calvados, the apple brandy that pommeau comes from, is aged at least 2 years in oak barrels.
Watering it Down
Most spirits are watered down after they come out of the barrel to both increase volume and improve the quality of the spirit; barrel proof is often more booze than you actually want to drink, and the booze tends to overwhelm everything else in the spirit.
In the case of pommeau, the brandy isn’t watered down so much as sweetened down; instead of water, the spirit is cut with a pure apple juice. And instead of cutting the spirit in the bottle like most, pommeau is cut in the barrel and the resulting mixture is then aged together. It’s then bottled after a few years this way at 30-40 proof.
All Kinds of Cocktails
If that description sounds a lot like a fortified wine to you, then we see eye-to-eye here. And with that comparison in mind and the unique sweet profile of pommeau, there’s a whole lot of cocktailing that cane be done.
Walk in the Leaves
For this one, I played around with adding some Pommeau to a Boulevardier to change the profile a bit and make it more seasonal. I’m really pleased with the result! The apple sweetness works well with a high-proof whiskey and works better with the bitterness of Campari than I expected.
Pomtini
I mentioned that I’d never had an appletini and wasn’t sure if the drink could be saved, but I think I was wrong. Adding a bit of pommeau to a vodka martini certainly sweetens the drink too much for some, but it also deepens it; there’s apple flavor in the vermouth that really comes out here as well, so it really does drink like a big boozy apple.
Desert Juice
I love the idea of non-whiskey old fashioneds, but they’re often a bit too forward for lots of folks. I’ve been experimenting with sweetening with liqueurs instead of sugar for these drinks, and that’s what I did here with a good reposado tequila. Apple and agave work well together here as the sweetness stays bright.
