Crab Cider
To a thirty-gallon cask put one bushel clean picked grapes. Fill up with sweet cider, just from the press--crab preferred. Draw off in March, and it is fit for use. Add brandy, as much as you think best.--Mrs. A. D.
A wild-fermented country cider, thinned in nothing and bulked out with whole grapes for sugar, tannin and acid. The instructions assume a cellar, a press and a cooper's cask, so most of the work of translating it is a matter of scale and vessel.
- The quantities, in modern termsA bushel of grapes is roughly 40-48 lb; a thirty-gallon cask is a small barrel. Scaled to a 5-gallon carboy that is about 7 lb of grapes topped up with cider, which is a far more manageable batch.
- "Crab preferred"Crab apples are small, hard and very high in acid and tannin, which is exactly why cider makers wanted them. Modern dessert apples give a flabby cider; if crabs are unavailable, blend in some genuinely sharp or bitter fruit rather than relying on Gala and Fuji.
- Cider "just from the press"The recipe depends on raw, unpasteurized juice with its wild yeast intact. Supermarket cider treated with potassium sorbate or sodium benzoate is likely to ferment poorly or not at all. Pasteurized juice with no preservatives will ferment if you pitch a wine or cider yeast.
- Crush the grapesWhole grapes dropped into juice ferment slowly and unevenly. Crush them so the sugar and skin tannin are actually available, and expect to strain or press the pulp out at the first racking.
- The cask must ventThis is the point the original takes for granted. A fermenting 30 gallons produces a great deal of carbon dioxide; a bunged, sealed vessel will burst. Use an airlock, or leave the bung loose until fermentation has clearly finished.
- "Draw off in March"Pressing happens in the autumn, so this implies roughly four to five months on the lees before the clear cider is drawn off the sediment into a clean vessel. The recipe treats March as the point at which it is 'fit for use', though the cider will keep improving with further months in glass.
- "Add brandy, as much as you think best"Fortifying helps preserve the cider and sweetens the impression. Roughly one part brandy to eight or ten parts cider lifts the strength to around 10%, still well short of fortified-wine range; add it at racking, not during fermentation, since spirit will stall the yeast.
- SanitationNineteenth-century cellars accepted a certain amount of vinegar loss. Sanitize the fermenter, airlock and siphon, and keep the vessel topped up and air-free after fermentation ends, or acetobacter will turn the batch to cider vinegar.
- YieldAs written, close to thirty gallons. The scaled 5-gallon version gives about 25 standard wine bottles.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions signed with initials like this one's "Mrs. A. D.", belongs to a Virginia still thick with orchards and home presses. Cider was the everyday drink of the Upper South long before it was a specialty product, and crab apples -- whether the native American crab or seedling volunteers gone hard and sour -- were prized precisely because their acid and tannin gave a cider backbone and keeping quality that sweet eating apples could not. Adding grapes would raise the sugar, and so the alcohol; the finishing splash of brandy follows the same logic that produced fortified wines, since spirit both preserves a barrel and covers a multitude of cellar sins. Recipes of this kind are notably casual about measurement because they were written for households that already owned the cask and the press.