Affy Tapples are a fall Chicagoland tradition. (They are, as you might have guessed, taffy apples.) When I was a kid, you bought them at school, and kids who normally took the bus home got picked up by their parents on Affy Tapple Day so they could load cases of caramel-and-nut-covered apples into the car. My family always bought six apples—three with peanuts, and three without—which were placed in a paper bag that I carried the few blocks home as fast as I could.
One recent Friday, I heard people talking about “the Affy Tapple beer.” At first I assumed some brewery had ripped off Affy Tapple’s intellectual property, but no: this was Phase Three Brewing Company in Lake Zurich, Illinois, and it had used Affy Tapples’ actual caramel, plus apple juice and peanuts, to make a 6% Golden Ale called A Bushel of Apples. It went on sale the following morning, and I figured I had nothing better to do than make the hour-long drive to drink a little 6% ABV nostalgia and pick up a couple four-packs for all the people who wanted some.
Just before the sale started I noticed it had a one-per-person limit, but I figured no biggie: I’d buy one in my name and one in my wife’s name. I quickly secured my four-pack, refreshed the page, and the beer was sold out. When we arrived at the brewery four hours after opening we couldn’t even get in the parking lot, so we had to find a spot down the street. A sign saying “A Bushel of Apples Sold Out For Today” greeted us. We hung out long enough to eat an apple cider donut and order a 10oz pour of the beer (spoiler alert: it was very sweet).
On our way back to the car, someone stopped me. “Hey, did you get the apple beer?”
“Yeah.”
“Any left?”
“No, it’s all sold out, but they have it on tap.”
They walked back to their car dejected. And I got into mine feeling like a kid again.
