The Whiskey Reviewer A World of Whiskey, Poured Every Weekday
By Richard Thomas
Rating: B
Ole Smoky Apple Pie
(Credit: Richard Thomas)
One of the great traditions in Southern style moonshine is the apple pie flavor, a classic recipe for making white lightning more palatable. Most purveyors of legal moonshine have a version. So, it only follows that one of the biggest legal moonshine distilleries would too, and especially so considering it is located outside Great Smoky Mountains National Park: Ole Smoky Moonshine.
The idea is pretty simple. Take your “corn in a jar” (and Ole Smoky’s base moonshine is 80% corn), add apple juice, cinnamon and other pie spices, and there you have it. Old Smoky’s version winds up at a quite tame 70 proof afterward, comparable to some fortified wines.
The Moonshine
The nose on this iced tea-looking liquid smacks of pie spices (cinnamon first and foremost) and apple juice, but mostly the spices. The apple comes forward on the palate to evenly share center stage, and the flavor really is like apple pie, and it’s not at all a boozy apple pie taste either. In fact, the first hint (and a hint is all it is) of booze comes only with the sweetly spiced finish. Even for a 20% ABV product, it’s amazingly non-alcoholic, due in large part to how flavorful it is.
The Price
A jar of Ole Smoky Apple Pie goes for a fairly reasonable $25.
Where are you getting 40 proof Ole Smokey Apple Pie? Even the picture in this review shows that it’s 70 proof!
They have a 40 proof version and I mixed them up while I was typing. Sorry for the mistake.
It’s better then some others, favor more balanced, but it’s over priced, especially in Virginia at $25.
Oddly other states sell it cheaper.
I buy it only on sale, it’s decent stuff.
It, at the end of the day, it’s just straight up moonshine, with spices, maybe a little aging.
German Schnapps, like Apple schnapps is distilled from apples, peach, from peaches, etc, so I would expect to pay more, but this stuff, well plain moonshine itself, in my opinion, retails too high, part of that illegal stigma, those ridiculous TV shows.
Oh, US made schnapps seems to be made like Apple Pie, grain alcohol, flavor added.
I noticed propoline glycol in this. Am I correct