Making cider not as simple as it might seem
The first challenge we face is finding a barrel, and from square one it is clearwe cannot use a chestnut barrel, which is a costly thing to buy— hundreds of dollars, plus shipping from Portugal or Spain.
I sometimes have to remind my girlfriend, Maria, that cider and beer are different beverages.
“So, what do we need to make the beer?” she asked a few weeks ago, while we discussed plans to press and ferment a large batch of apple juice.
“It’s not beer,” I answer. “I mean, cider.”
“Beer is made mainly from grains, cider is from apples, and the process of making them is totally different,” I tell her.
Her innocent conflation of the two beverages is telling of how cider is marketed in the United States versus Europe. There, cider of apples and pears is treatedmore like wine than beer. It is sold in bubbly wine-style bottles, and it is produced in vintages, with the year of harvest often printed on the bottle. As with wine, the cider is made of fruit juice, with essentially nothing of substance added except, sometimes, yeast.
On this side of the Atlantic, cider is generally sold like beer — in four- or six-packs of 12- or 16- ounce cans. Often, producers add untraditional ingredients, like chili peppers, prickly pear juice or hops, very much in the spirit of craft brewing.
But, we’re aiming for a European-style cider. Specifically, I would like to emulate the cider of northern Spain, where brewers — I mean cidermakers — ferment the juice of their apples in chestnut barrels for months, winding up with a dry, low-alcohol cider that is barely carbonated, faintly sour and rich, with funky bacterial aromas and flavors. It is, in my opinion, the best cider in the world. The stuff is sold in champagne-type bottles for the equivalent of $3 each.
The first challenge we face is finding a barrel, and from square one it is clear we cannot use a chestnut barrel, which is a costly thing to buy — hundreds of dollars, plus shipping from Portugal or Spain. We then consider a wine barrel.
Used ones can be purchased for $50 off Craigslist but they come with problems. For one, they are large, more than 50 gallons. To minimize contact between the cider and air, which can damage the cider,
we would want to fill the barrel almost entirely, and by our calculations, that would mean collecting, grinding and pressing about 1,000 pounds of apples. We have a ready source: an orchard of golden delicious near Graton, in Sonoma County.
However, the volume daunts us. Making apple juice in large quantities requires a press — a beautiful, hand- operated machine that is cranked down on the fruit and spits out a stream of rich, golden juice. However,
using a press requires a preliminary step, too, grinding the apples into pulp.
I own both a press and a grinder, but they accommodate small volumes, and to make 50 gallons of juice in a session will mean filling, emptying and rinsing the contraptions many times. It will be a multiday athletic endeavor.
We hunt for a smaller barrel but find none for a reasonable price.
Anyway, there is another
problemwith wood barrels; they might leak.
“Let’s just go with plastic,” I suggest.
We abandon the romance of wood and reluctantly submit to the convenience of food-grade plastic. We order several plastic fermenting buckets online. (My collection of brewing buckets is currently occupied by fermenting salted fish sauce as well as a batch of Gravenstein cider from the summer.)
On a cool afternoon in early October, we drive to the orchard, roll down the rear windows of my Prius and start dumping in buckets of yellow apples. The car sinks visibly over its tires as we strip the trees, one by one, and load the fruit.
By the time we have gathered just 400 pounds or so, we are both exhausted. Our shoulders are aching from the overhead picking and we are sweaty and sticky.
We decide we’ll make as much cider as we can with what we have. We spend a day grinding the fruit and pressing out the juice, getting sweaty and sticky again.
Using a hydrometer to measure the density, or specific gravity (which indicates sugar content) of the juice, we get a reading of 1.068.
We fill four 5-gallon buckets, and we add homegrown hops to one of them. We are saving up beer bottles to fill with our cider when it’s done — probably in November. We will bottle it when the gravity has dropped to 1.006 — what will be a dry cider of more than 8% alcohol-by-volume.
“Whoa,” Maria says. “That’s a strong beer.”