Home › Cordials and Liqueurs › Cider and Making Cider Wine
Cider and Making Cider Wine
How to Make Good Cider.
THE process of making cider varies in different places, but in every case essentially consists of: the collection of the fruit; the expression and fermentation of the juice; and the storing and management of the fermented liquor. Mixed apples make good cider, but all of one kind will make better. The most scrupulous cleanliness must be observed from first to last, as the least impurity injures the flavor. First, the barrels into which the cider is to be placed should be thoroughly washed out, and fumigated with sulphur, as follows: tear some cotton rags into strips, dip the strips into melted sulphur, set them on fire, introduce them through the bung-hole, and fasten the ends there by inserting the bung: this will do it effectually. Every article connected with the process, such as the mill, the funnels, press, tubs, etc... should also be thoroughly cleansed. The apples must be picked over and wiped clean of dirt. If any are part rotten, cut out the decayed part, or throw away the apple altogether. They may then be put in the mill and ground to a fine pulp.
The common way of laying up a cheese of pomace with wet straw has several disadvantages, particularly (212)
This is the opening of a working cider-maker's process rather than a fixed formula, and the page breaks off mid-sentence just as the author begins to criticise the straw-layered pomace "cheese." What survives is still the useful part: sanitation, fruit selection, and milling.
- The hinge: clean everythingThe insistence on cleanliness is not fussiness. Sugar-rich apple juice is readily colonised by spoilage organisms — acetic acid bacteria above all — which will turn a promising batch to vinegar. Everything that touches juice should be sanitised, not merely rinsed.
- Sulphuring the barrelBurning sulphur inside a cask is still standard cooperage practice; modern makers use pre-cut sulphur wicks or discs rather than melting sulphur onto rags. Burn it in a ventilated space and keep your face away from the bung — the sulphur dioxide produced is exactly what makes it effective, and it is unpleasant to inhale.
- Rotten applesThe instruction to cut out decay or discard the fruit has a modern justification: bruised and rotting apples carry Penicillium expansum, which produces patulin, a mycotoxin that survives fermentation poorly but is worth avoiding at the source. Windfalls should be sound, not merely picked up.
- "Cheese" and "pomace"Pomace is the milled apple pulp; a cheese is the stacked sandwich of pomace built up in cloths or straw layers on the press bed. Straw was the older method, and the sentence breaks off just as the author begins listing its disadvantages.
- Mill and pressFor household quantities a scratter mill or a sturdy food processor gives the required fine pulp, and a basket or bladder press does the work of the beam press. Whatever the equipment, the pulp needs to be fine — coarse chunks hold their juice.
- Mixed versus single varietyThe claim that one kind makes better cider reflects the period's regard for named cider apples, which balance sugar, acid and tannin in a single fruit. With dessert or culinary apples, a blend is generally better than any one of them alone.
- YieldReckon roughly 2-3 gallons of juice per bushel of apples (a bushel is usually reckoned at 42-48 lb), depending on variety and press. The recipe itself gives no quantities.
- Fermentation, unsaidThe passage stops before fermentation management. In practice a slow, cool ferment — 55-65F — preserves aroma; warm cellars produce a coarser drink and invite spoilage.
Farm cider was through much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a common table drink in apple-growing regions on both sides of the Atlantic, made once a year from whatever the orchard gave and drunk through the following months. That is the context for the near-obsessive cleanliness here: a barrel gone to vinegar was not an inconvenience but the loss of a season's beverage. The broad sequence described — grinding to pomace, building a cheese, pressing — is long-established, and the sulphur wick pushed through the bung-hole is still sold for the same purpose today.