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Cider Wine
Cider Wine.
When cider has fermented for about one week in a cask, add half a pound of white sugar to every gallon; then allow it to ferment further until it has acquired a brisk and pleasant taste. An ounce of the sulphite of lime is then added for every gallon of cider in the cask, and the whole agitated for a few minutes and then left to settle. The sulphite of lime arrests the fermentation, and in the course of a few days the clear cider may be poured off and bottled, when it will retain the same taste that it had when the sulphite was added. About an ounce of the sulphite of lime added to the gallon of cider in any stage of fermentation will preserve it from further change. A sparkling cider wine is produced by the mode described. The following is another method of making cider wine: Take pure cider as it runs from the press, and add a pound of brown sugar to every quart, and put it into a clean cask, which should not be filled to within about two gallons of the top. The cask is then placed in a moderately cool cellar or apartment, and the cider allowed to ferment slowly by the bunghole being left open until it has acquired the proper taste, and sparkles when a small quantity is drawn. The cask is then bunged up tight.
PART XV.
HOW TO MANUFACTURE VINEGAR BY THE QUICK METHOD, IN THE SHORT SPACE OF TWENTY-FOUR HOURS; WITH A DIAGRAM AND DESCRIPTION, SHOWING HOW TO MAKE A VINEGAR GENERATOR.
Vinegar.
MANY methods have been invented to produce vinegar; but that known as the "German, or Quick Method," has superseded all others, and is now in general use in the United States. By this process (which is very simple) time and labor are both greatly abridged, and a very fine article is produced.
How to Make a Vinegar Generator.
The construction of a vinegar generator is very simple. A is a tub, eight feet in height, three feet in diameter at
This is a nineteenth-century commercial formula for arresting fermentation chemically, and the dose it calls for is far outside anything permitted or safe in food today. The notes below explain what the ingredients were and where the numbers go wrong.
- Sulphite of lime is the problemThis is calcium sulfite, sold to cider men and brewers as a fermentation stopper. The purity of what was sold under that name in the period cannot be assumed, and the quantity called for here is far beyond any modern permitted level.
- The dose is off by orders of magnitudeAn ounce per gallon is roughly 7,000-8,000 parts per million of sulfite. Regulated winemaking works at 50-200 ppm total SO2, and labels must warn at 10 ppm. Nothing in the text reduces that load before bottling; the settling only drops the solids.
- Chemical stabilisation is not the same as pasteurisationThe method depends entirely on the additive to hold an actively fermenting, unheated liquid. If the sulphite is weak or unevenly mixed, fermentation restarts in sealed bottles. Use a current cidermaking text if you want a stabilised sweet cider.
- The second method's sugar rateA pound of brown sugar to every quart is about four pounds per gallon, which would give a must well over 30 percent sugar. Most cider yeasts stall long before that, and the phrasing may be a compositor's error for a pound per gallon, which is closer to the first method. As printed it does not describe a workable ferment.
- Bunging a sparkling caskSealing a cask tight the moment the cider sparkles traps the remaining CO2 with no relief; the pressures involved are genuinely dangerous.
- Vessel and cellar termsThe text says only "a moderately cool cellar or apartment" and gives no temperature. Leaving the cask two gallons short of full gives the working ferment room to throw its head out of the open bunghole.
- "Pure cider as it runs from the press"Unpasteurised sweet cider taken straight from a press carried whatever the fruit and the press cloths carried, including E. coli O157:H7 and Cryptosporidium. Commercial juice sold today is pasteurised or UV-treated for exactly that reason.
Cider wine was a strong, sweetened, sparkling cider that could be bottled and sold at a wine price, and the sulfite-stopping trick belongs to the same commercial world as the "quick method" vinegar generator that follows immediately after it in the text. Sulfur had been used in cider and wine cellars since at least the fifteenth century, generally in the form of burnt sulfur matches held inside the cask, and the powdered lime sulfite sold in the 1800s offered a more convenient carrier for the same effect. It took the pure food agitation of the 1880s onward, and eventually the U.S. Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, to force the question of how much preservative a drink could legally carry.