Cider

With apple picking season in full swing across the northeast, I knew it was only a matter of time before Chris would stop by and let me know that we were going to make some cider. This visit always makes me a little bit anxious because, to be perfectly honest, my relationship with cider is at best, shaky. Don’t get me wrong, I love cider dearly. I often have a gallon in the fridge and I am known for my mulled cider recipe. But when it comes to making it, things just seem to fall apart.

It just never seem to go as planned. Our first time ended in everyone getting a bit sick after drinking it, but that was only after we started out with a few totally failed attempts at fermenting pasteurized cider with bread yeast. There was also the time in under my bed in my old dorm room that I try not to talk about. But this time, we hoped things would be different. Firstly, we were considerably more experienced, and second, I was not in charge of it this time, Chris was.

It started off smoothly. Chris and Elsa went apple picking  and brought back 50lbs of mostly macintosh and cortland apples. We cut them up, used our old grape grinder to get them into bits, and then pressed them. The result was amazingly good pure cider. We should have just stopped there. But we were committed, so we added some extra sugar to bring the specific gravity up and put in the cider yeast. Chris took it home to keep an eye on it and taste it daily so that he could stop it when it reached the right balance of sweet and dry. When it was ready, he bottled it with a bit of priming sugar (we ended up with 26 bottles) and let it carbonate for a few weeks. But somewhere between the bottling and the first drink, things went wrong. So wrong in fact, that Chris has not even let me try any. Apparently it turned out extremely alcoholic and almost undrinkably tart. I am going to get Chris to write a guest post at some point soon to highlight the successes and failures of our experiment.

On a side note, we also tried making an apple version of Grappa with the leftover pomace, but it ended up not producing enough alcohol to be worth distilling.

I guess there’s always next year.