![]() ![]() To press your own you can buy your own grinder and press (which can easily run $450 or more) get friendly with someone who has one (this may cost you in bartered bottles of finished product, or labor) or if you’re somewhat masochistic, you can wash, cut, and grind your apples with a food processor and/or juicer (if you’ve got loads of time and patience). The other alternative, obviously, is to grind and press your own. This last consideration is the most crucial, and I will come back to it. There are three considerations, however: price (in peak season, a gallon of fresh cider can fetch as much as $5) preservatives (normally, orchard-fresh cider is untreated, but one must be careful) and suitability for fermentation. It’s convenient, of course, to go to the orchard and buy jugs of fresh sweet cider. The first question simply underscores the choice that you have between buying pressed cider from an orchard or pressing it yourself. There are two questions that any would-be cider maker needs to consider, above and beyond all else: How fresh does the cider that you will ferment need to be? And how hard do you want to make it? ![]() I hadn’t yet started making beer either, but Kirk remedied that by buying me a homebrew kit the following Christmas, and the rest is history. Tasting some of Kirk’s homemade cider made me long for Normandy (where I had lived for a year) but also reminded me that it was possible to make it myself. But it was my brother Kirk, who began making cider as part of his job as a historian/interpreter at a famous New England farm museum, who really got me going. My first foray into homebrewing involved gallon jugs of orchard-fresh sweet cider that I hid in the back of my closet and allowed to turn a little when I was a teenager. In northern New England, where we are closer to Quebec, there is some cross-border influence, and many cider makers in Vermont, Maine, and New Hampshire leave their cider sweeter, fruitier, and lighter, and bottle condition it with added priming sugar.Ĭider is one of the reasons I became a homebrewer in the first place. If it is packaged, it is usually still or only slightly carbonated. New England farmers tended to make English-style cider (and still do, in the main), fortifying it with various sugars, honey, maple, and the like, letting it ferment on its own naturally (with the possible addition of raisins to inoculate the juice or “must” with a suitable “wild” yeast), and leaving it to age in casks. ![]() The cider I make is marked by both the English and French traditions. I limit myself to these three influences mainly because that’s where my cider-making picks up. ![]() Indeed the province of Quebec is another major producer of hard cider today, most of it similar to the French style, light and sparkling but varying in dryness from sweet and fruity to champagne-like “sec.” Those same apples, and those of Brittany as well, were also brought to the New World by French explorers and settlers in Quebec. Norman hard cider is distilled and aged to produce the wonderful apple brandy known as Calvados.Įnglish cider apples are in all likelihood descended from Norman apples brought over by William the Conqueror in the 1060s. Méthode champenoise bottling procedures (fermenting in the bottle) are used, especially in Normandy and Brittany, France’s most renowned cider-producing regions (and arguably the best in all Europe). In my experience, and I’m sure I’m making a generalization to which someone will object, I have found British cider to be strong and still, basically an apple wine of 8 percent to 10 percent alcohol by volume, with a very strong apple aroma and fruity flavor.įrench “cidre,” on the other hand, is lighter, sometimes sweeter and sometimes quite dry but almost always effervescent. But even there we find a number of distinct style variations, depending on which country we find ourselves inhabiting. Today, outside the United States “cider” generally means hard cider. “Sidre” came from Latin, which came from Greek, which apparently came from the Hebrew “chekar,” meaning “strong drink.” So perhaps the English term cider should only apply to fermented or “hard” cider. The word “cider” comes to English, like so many food and beverage words, from medieval French. But just what is it? What differentiates it from mere “apple juice”? After all, technically, unfermented or “sweet” cider is only fresh-pressed apple juice. The word has mythological overtones, especially in rural areas where it is or was made. ![]()
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