Calvados

Thanksgiving is coming up and Epicurious had an article on a type of apple brandy called "Calvados". Me being me and always on the lookout for festive drinks around the holidays felt the need to read about it. The summary of the article was as follows, "Calvados" is a apple brandy produced in a region of France called "Calvados". They started distilling cider in the 19th century because there was a grape blight that destroyed the vines in that region and as they had lots of apple trees and a desire to keep boozing they started distilling cider.

Something else that I found out from Wiki is that the term "brandy" refers to a alocoholic beverage that is distilled from grapes. For whatever reason my mind was lumping brandy in with bourbon, and whiskey when in fact those are distilled from barley and rye. Interestingly enough (for me, which means it's probably not interesting for anyone else) is that Cognac and Armagnac are brands of brandy, which may be why I thought brandy was a rye/barley based alcohol, I dunno "Hennessy" just screams whiskey to me. One last thing that I thought was neat about the differences between the different brandies are that fruit brandies (like Calvados) are generally clear as they tend not to age them, however when they do it is at that time when they gain some color. So now all I need to do is run over to Andersons and see if I can acquire a bottle of this tasty sounding beverage called "Calvados", so that it can "make a hole" during our dinner at Thanksgiving.