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To Make Cider
It is generally reckoned that the richest cider is made from the sweetest apples. As it comes from the press pour it into a tub prepared by boring a hole in the bottom (the plug put in very loosely), and filled with alternate layers of charcoal and gravel. As fast as it filters through put it in a clean "white oak" cask in a cool cellar andlet remain open till fermentation has ceased, then bung tight.
This is a farm-scale account of turning pressed apple juice into hard cider, written when nearly every rural cellar held a cask. The method is sound in outline; the equipment is where it has been overtaken.
- The hinge: leave it open, then close itFermentation must vent freely or the cask will build pressure, and it must be sealed once it stops or the cider oxidises and turns to vinegar. Modern practice replaces the open bung with a water-filled airlock, which vents carbon dioxide while keeping air and flies out.
- Skip the charcoal-and-gravel tubA wooden tub packed with loose charcoal and gravel cannot be cleaned or sanitised, and raw apple juice is the classic vehicle for E. coli O157:H7 and Cryptosporidium. Let the juice settle cold overnight and rack it off the sediment instead; commercial pectic enzyme will clear it further.
- "Bung tight" and pressureBunging a cask that has not truly finished is how barrels split and bottles burst. Confirm with a hydrometer that the specific gravity has held steady for several days near 1.000 or below before sealing.
- Sweetest applesThe advice holds for strength, since sugar becomes alcohol, but sweet dessert apples alone give a flat cider. Blend in something sharp (Newtown Pippin, crab apples, Bramley) for acid and something astringent for tannin and body.
- White oak caskWhite oak was the standard timber for tight cooperage because it holds liquid without leaking. The recipe does not say whether the cask is new or used, and gives no reason for the choice. A food-grade plastic fermenter or glass carboy does the same job and can be scrubbed; a used barrel of unknown history is the hardest vessel here to clean.
- A cool cellarRead this as 50-60F. Cider fermented warm ferments fast and tastes coarse; below about 45F the yeast stalls.
- YieldThe original assumes a press and a whole orchard. For scale: a bushel of apples (40-45 lb) yields roughly 3 gallons of juice, and juice loses only a little volume in fermenting.
- YeastThis relies on wild yeast from the fruit and the cellar, which is why period cider was inconsistent. A packet of cider or champagne yeast, pitched after the juice is sulphited and left overnight, gives a predictable ferment.
Cider was the ordinary country drink across large parts of America and of western England during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, though in much of England beer and ale remained the staple; the notion that people drank it because water was unsafe is a familiar claim but a contested one. Orchards in cider districts were planted for pressing rather than eating, which is one reason many nineteenth-century varieties are small, hard and sharp by modern standards. The charcoal-and-gravel filter here belongs to a period fascination with charcoal as a purifier, sold for water filters, tooth powder and poultices alike. In the United States the farm cider tradition declined under temperance sentiment and again during Prohibition, after which the apple trade reorganised itself around fruit for the table; stories of cider orchards being felled wholesale are often repeated but hard to document at the scale usually claimed.