The “I’m gonna make some hard apple cider this afternoon” afternoon!

Have you ever had that perfect hot apple cider? Maybe it was at a ski lodge or walking around Manhattan on a cold afternoon while window shopping….ok maybe I would grab a hot pretzel just because they smell so good. Now imagine the taste of that perfect cider except in a cold beer bottle and with a kick. Yeah that’s what I’m talking about…..hard apple cider! How difficult can it possibly be to make hard apple cider? No, really hot apple cider is pretty easy so making hard apple cider should be fairly easy right? Well…..kinda. Now don’t get me wrong, compared to making all grain beer it is, but there is definitely an art to it.

So let’s talk about how I decided to go about it and what have I learned so far.

Well it all started with a newspaper (AleStreet News which by the way is not a bad read) that i picked up at the local liquor store. As I was flipping through the pages I ran across an article about how to make hard cider. The picture it painted was get some apples from a local farm, have them crush them for you if you don’t have a press and have them put it in a carboy for you (the one you were bringing along that is). They covered the fact about how you can use the natural yeast found in the apples for the fermenting process. Then came the you can add brown sugar and cinnamon as well as other favors and mention of adding sulfates if you want to add your own yeast. (by the way I’m paraphrasing…the article had more detail than just that) So as a confident novice brewer I figured: “this is easy”…..right? Wrong.

Once I had convinced Hannah that this was going to be easy, we set off to hit up some of the local farms to get us some apples or see if they would sell us some cider. The reasoning here was that the article said that some farms crush apples and make their own cider that they sell. It was late October when we found a nice Saturday afternoon that we figured would work out perfect (the article also mentioned that getting apples near the end of the harvest was the best option since they would be sweeter and closer to start fermenting).

Windows down, sunroof open in the Jeep and sunglasses on, we started our fun ride on the back roads of Baltimore County leading to the farms. What we quickly realized was that we were not going to get apples…or cider. Why? Well for one thing most of the farms had already sold off the apples and second they don’t make their own cider. It seems that they sell their apples to certain farms which then make the cider, pasteurize it, add flavor, sulfates and most of the time preservatives and then sell it. So now our quest had a little hitch, we could drive to PA (Amish country) to find what we were looking for or just crush our own apples(that means buying a press $$$). Things were getting complicated….oh did I mention that a law was passed recently in MD that will not allow a farm to sell un-pasteurized cider or apple juice? I suppose that would have been a good thing to know before I started this quest.

Now what? All is not lost yet…. We headed over to my friend Tom at The Thirsty Brewer to see what he could tell me. While we were there we figured we could pick up some yeast, some priming sugar and caps so not a lost afternoon. Incidentally if you are looking to buy hard cider supplies feel free to visit The Thirsty Brewer.

Tom being a wealth of knowledge about brewing, saw the opportunity to school us about making hard cider. Well for one thing, making hard cider is very similar to making wine. So to start he suggested not leaving things to chance or better said, leaving things up to the whatever strain of yeast was in the apples we were using decide how the cider would turn out we should use a sulfate to inhibit or make it go dormant and add our own. Now you do have a choice here, you can skip the sulfate and just add the yeast that you want and see how things go. We decided to skip the sulfate…..now this will not work to my advantage as you will see later on. Another interesting thought was about what apples I was going to mix together…mix together i thought, really? Yes some types of apples taste better than others as well as pair better than others, so its important to find the right mix that will satisfy your taste buds. (I’m thinking I will get into this in a later post). Next thing was that we can use apple cider from a store or farm even if it has been pasteurized.

Pasteurized? But I thought if it’s pasteurized then all the natural yeast would be killed….exactly, that’s why you have to add your own. Ok so good thing I bought my own yeast strain to add. So now we were back out looking for a farm that would sell us some pasteurized apple juice that didn’t have any preservatives. Wait, what? No preservatives? You got it…that pretty much ruled out any supermarkets(at some point we should talk about adding concentrated apple juice to your batch, but i think we should leave that for another time). Now believe it or not we found a farm called Weber’s Cider Mill Farm. This was my first time there and I was quite impressed….I called it the “Disney world of farms”. Why? Yes it had rides and the kids with their parents were standing in line to pay to get on the rides…did i mention there were a lot ok kids and long lines? Enough with the rants….on to the farm store! In the farm store which by the way was wall to wall people, I found what I was looking for. Before making the purchase I decided to try it out…they even have a place where you can buy drinks and ice cream(home-made that is). Needless to say this is where I bought my pasteurized without preservatives or sulfates apple cider.

Let’s see:
Apple cider….check, yeast…check, brown sugar…check(by the way unrefined brown sugar is what you want….we can talk about this later), carboy, containers and all the rest of my beer brewing gear….check. Looks like I’m ready to make myself some hard apple cider! Well give me a couple of minutes to get my notes together and I will write the next post on how I “made” hard cider.

Till my next post Brew on!

 

~ by beerandcake on January 14, 2013.