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Wine, Cider
Mix sixteen gallons of apple-juice, sixteen pounds of honey, four ounces of white tartar; enclose in a bag one ounce each of cinnamon, cloves, and mace, and suspend it in the mixture while fermenting. When the fermentation is complete, add one gallon of rum.
A cyser — cider fermented with honey — scaled for a cellar rather than a kitchen. Nothing here is dangerous, but the quantities, the missing yeast and the missing vessel all need translating before anyone attempts it.
- Scale down firstSixteen gallons is roughly 60-75 litres depending on whether the book means imperial or US gallons; Cassell's, being London-published, means imperial, so about 73 litres. The working ratios are 1 lb honey and 1/4 oz cream of tartar per gallon of juice, with the spices and rum in proportion. A one- or five-gallon trial batch is the sane starting point.
- White tartarThis is purified cream of tartar, potassium bitartrate. In this recipe it is acting as an acidifier and, loosely, a yeast conditioner — apple juice sweetened heavily with honey ends up low in acid and low in nutrient, and the tartar addresses the first of those.
- No yeast is namedThe recipe assumes wild yeast from the fruit and the cellar, which is why it cannot promise a time. Modern practice is to pitch a known wine or cider yeast, which gives a predictable ferment and avoids the acetic and mousy off-flavours that spontaneous ferments in an open vessel often produce.
- The juice must be liveSupermarket apple juice preserved with potassium sorbate or sodium benzoate will not ferment. Use fresh-pressed cider, or pasteurised juice whose only ingredient is apple juice, or concentrate with no preservative.
- "When the fermentation is complete"Not a timing so much as a measurement. At roughly a pound of honey per gallon on top of apple juice, expect an original gravity around 1.070-1.080 and a primary ferment of two to four weeks, with the vessel airlocked and headspace left for foam. It is finished when the hydrometer reads the same for three consecutive days, not when the bubbling merely slows.
- The spice bagSuspending whole cinnamon, cloves and mace during fermentation gives a gentler extraction than steeping in the finished drink, and the escaping CO2 carries off some of the harshness. One ounce each is generous — clove in particular dominates quickly, and tasting after the first week is worth doing.
- The rumOne gallon into sixteen is about six per cent of the volume; with rum at 40 per cent that lifts the finished drink perhaps two to three points of alcohol. That is too little to guarantee stability against renewed fermentation in the bottle, so read it as flavour and strength rather than preservative. Add it after the ferment has stopped, as written, not before.
- Vessels and sanitationAnything holding this needs to be food-grade and sanitised — a demijohn or fermenting bin, not a decorative crock of unknown glaze. Sanitiser, an airlock and a hydrometer are the three pieces of kit the original takes for granted or does without.
- YieldAbout seventeen gallons of finished drink, which at full scale is roughly a hundred 75 cl bottles before racking losses. It wants six months to a year in bottle; young cyser tastes raw and honey-sharp.
Honey and apple juice fermented together is old enough that the drink has its own name in modern mead-making circles — cyser — though nineteenth-century English books rarely used the term, filing such things simply under "wines" made at home from whatever the orchard and the hive produced. Cassell's places this in a run of domestic wines because a household with fruit trees was expected to convert surplus into something that kept; commercial bottled drinks were dear, and cider was still paid out as part of agricultural wages in parts of the West Country. The spice bag and the final gallon of rum belong to an older tradition still, the fortified and spiced "made wines" of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, where sugar, brandy and warm spices were used to bulk out and preserve drinks that would otherwise have turned to vinegar by spring. The absence of any named yeast is unsurprising: pure yeast cultures were only just being isolated for commercial brewing in this period and would not reach domestic wine-makers for some decades, and until then the fermentation was simply something that happened if the cellar was the right temperature.