Give me yesterday’s bread, this day’s flesh, and last year’s cider. (B. Franklin)

Most Americans have no idea what cider really is or its place in American history.  The founding fathers brought apple trees and presses from England to the colonies.  Everyone drank cider – morning, noon, and night – including children who drank watered-down cider.  Apple trees and cider-making followed the settlers to the west.  Nearly every homestead produced apples and cider.

The industrial revolution was the beginning of the end for cider consumption in America.  As the population moved into cites, it became difficult to distribute cider in large enough quantities to serve the population.  German immigrants in the mid-1800s brought beer-making processes and technologies to America that allowed for large-scale production of lagers.  City-dwellers became beer drinkers, and cider-drinking was relegated to the country bumpkins.  Prohibition killed what was left of cider production in the America.  Orchards across the country ripped out cider apple trees and replaced them with eating apples and culinary apples.   Now that cider is making a resurgence, orchards are frantically replanting cider apple varieties, but they are not keeping up with demand.

So, what is the difference between eating apples, culinary apples, and cider apples.  Modern eating apples are basically just bags of sugar water with enough acid to keep them from being cloyingly sweet.  They are crunchy and extremely juicy, which is desirable in an eating apple.  But these juicy apples, actually have fairly low concentrations of sugar in the juice (typically about 10% sugar by weight).  And, they don’t have much in the way of distinctive flavors.  When you ferment away the sugar, you are left with modest alcohol levels (5% ABV) and bland flavors.  Culinary apples are used for cooking or baking.  Both tend to be high in acid. This provides sharpness to balance the sugar that is added during cooking and baking.  Culinary apples can be used to make cider as they increase the acid level in the final product.

Cider apples generally fall into four categories based upon the relative levels of acid and tannin in each variety.  If you are a wine geek, you understand that acid and tannin provide the structure and determine the mouthfeel of a wine.  Acid and tannin serve the same purpose in cider.  Acid makes your mouth water and conveys crispness in the product.  Tannin provides bitterness and astringency (makes your mouth feel dry and sticky).

The most common cider apples were developed in England and France starting in the 1600s and continuing into the 1800s.  The flesh of these apples is course and chewy, but it releases juice better than a modern apple when being pressed.  The apples tend to be drier (less juicy) than modern apples, but they have much higher concentrations of sugar.  Cider apples have complex, earthy flavors that are more intense than modern apples. These flavors carry over into the final product.

Sweet apples.  These apples produce juice with very high concentrations of sugar – upwards of 19% sugar by weight (Brix).  If fermented to dryness, this will produce alcohol levels to nearly 11% ABV.

Sharp apples.  These apples produce juice with very high concentrations of malic acid, but relatively low levels of tannin.  Sharp cider apples are similar to culinary apples, and some varieties of apples are used for both purposes.

Bittersweet apples.  These apples produce high levels of both sugar and tannin.  These apples also provide the classic cider flavor in traditional English and French ciders.

Bittersharp apples.  These apples product high levels of both acid and tannin.

True cider apples are commonly referred to as “spitters”.  They are either so tart or so tannic that you spit them out if you take a bite.  One book on cider making from the 1800s stated that the best cider apples were so harsh the neighbors wouldn’t steal them and the pigs wouldn’t eat them when they fell on the ground.

Generally, cider is made from a blend of all four types of cider apples with roughly 40% from sweet apples, 30% from sharp apples, 20% from bittersweet apples, and 10% from bittersharp apples.  The primary purpose of the sweet apple is to provide sugar for making alcohol.  The sharp apples provide the acid for crispness, and the two types of bitter apples provide the tannin which completes the mouthfeel of the cider.  A well-made cider is dry, acidic, and tannic.  It has more in common with a dry red wine than the alcoholic soda pop that dominates the market right now.

It is rare for a cider to be made from a single variety of apple, but it can be done.  Single-variety apple ciders typically use some variety of bittersharp apple which has all the necessary ingredients to make a balanced finish product – high sugar levels, high acid, high tannin levels, and complex flavors.  Any single-variety apple cider you see on the market will be from a bittersharp apple (e.g., Kingston Black).

So, what are the options for a home cidermaker:

1. Become really good friends with someone that grows cider apples and will share them with you instead of selling all of them into the commercial marketplace (or keeping all of them for themselves).
2. Plant your own trees and wait (I planted in 2014. I should be getting apples soon).
3. Make do with alternatives from your local orchard.
4. Learn to make cyser (apple mead – subject of a future article).
5. Seriously, don’t go there. The soft cider that you buy in the grocery store or at your local orchard is generally a blend of juices from modern eating apples.  It is sweet and barely tart.  If you ferment it, the sweet will be gone, and what is left will be bland.

The rest of this article is focused on option 3) above – making do with the apples you can find in your local orchard. 

This means buying fresh apples, crushing the apples, and pressing out the juice.  You need apples that provide complex flavors.

Focus on heirloom varieties, particularly classic apple-pie apples – varieties that originated 100 years ago or more.  These apples will be in the neglected part of the orchard.   No one wants these apples, but the owner of the orchard hasn’t pulled them out yet (it’s not really that bad, but it has some resemblance to reality).  Old apple varieties tend to have rich earthy flavors that are clearly “apple”, but still “different” from anything you are used to.  Modern eating apples are pale in comparison to heirlooms.  The texture of these apples is weird. They do not crunch.  They are chewy and even a bit rubbery.  It is off-putting if you grew up on red delicious and have moved on to Galas or Honeycrisp.

The next apples you want are crabapples.  Really.  Every commercial orchard has crabapples.  These apples produce vast amounts of pollen and are in bloom for a long time.  Thus, they are valued as great pollinators in orchards.  But orchards will grow crabs that are useful for other purposes as well – mostly for making jellies and jams.  Some crab apples are sweet, but many are very high in acid.

The good news is you can make great cider without access to classic cider apples.

The bad news is that not all apples blend well together.  The first year I got serious about making cider, I worked with 15 different varieties of apples.  In the end, I made 6 different blends.  Two were great (I kept those for myself); two were good (I gave those to good friends); and two were OK (those became party booze – make it sweet; put it in a keg; the drunks love it).  A lot of experimentation is required.  The best blend that I made included roughly equal parts of cider made from Whitney Crab (sweet yellow crabapple), Spartan (child of McIntosh, red with white flesh and wine-like flavor), Rhode Island Greening (one of the two oldest varieties in America, green with yellowish flesh, outstanding apple-pie apple), and Dolgo Crab (red with white flesh, shockingly sour, but actually has the highest sugar concentration of all the apples used that year).

To make things more complicated, apples harvest anywhere from early August to late October.  The apples you most care about don’t harvest at the same time.   Crabs typically harvest in early August and heirloom apple-pie apples harvest in October.  This means you make cider from individual varieties and then blend them some time later.

Now to walk through the process of making of a single batch of Dolgo Crab Apple Cider.

You will need two crucial pieces of equipment – something to crush apples and something to press the juice out of the crushed apples.  There are many different configurations of crushers and presses.  Apple crushers have fingers that shred apples and grinders have blades that do the same.  It’s a bad idea to run your hand through either one of them.  Vertical basket presses are the lowest cost style of press to start with and come in two basic configurations – a grape/wine press or an apple/cider press.  Either will do the job.  They look similar but are different.  The T-handled apple press can be used without nailing it to the ground.  The wine press must be fixed in place or it will turn in circles as you crank on the handle (foreshadowing amusing photos in the upcoming wine article).

Whether you use a crusher or a grinder, the basic process is to put apples in the hopper and turn the crank.  I have a hand-cranked crusher.  With a little ingenuity, this can be converted into a motorized crusher.  The next one I buy, when the orchard is producing, will be motorized.

Dolgo crab apples are about the size of a large cherry.  They run through the crusher with ease.  The fingers on the crusher are quite small. So, any apple bigger than these crab apples needs to be cut into halves or quarters depending on how big they are.  While this seems like extra work, it means you get a chance to examine each apple and discard any that show signs of spoilage.

When you turn the crank, the fingers inside the crusher shred the apples.  The shredded apples fall out of the bottom of the crusher and into a bucket.  From here, the apples go into the press.  There is one serious problem to contend with when using a vertical basket.  The juice must flow from the apples in the middle of the basket to the outside where gaps between the slats allow juice to exit the basket.  Unfortunately, crushed apples (and grapes for that matter) are basically slimy little pieces of fruit covered in sticky juice.  When you squeeze two fruit pieces together, they form a water-tight seal.  So, juice that is in the middle of the basket can’t get out.  The solution to this problem is to mix rice hulls into the crushed fruit (all-grain brewers will be familiar with this trick).  The rice hulls act like little straws providing channels between the pieces of fruit so that juice can flow between the pieces even under high pressure.

A couple of important notes.  First, all apples oxidize; some faster than others.  If you cut an apple in half and leave it on the counter, the exposed flesh will turn brown.  If you crush and press fresh apples, the juice will turn brown as you watch.  This is concerning to a beginning cidermaker, because, in almost all cases in brewing, oxidation is a bad thing.  However, in cider, oxidation is a key part of the flavor profile of the finished product.  And much of the browning will be reversed during fermentation thus yielding the classic yellow-gold color of cider.  Note that heat also produces browning (ask the food geeks at Glibs about the Maillard reaction).  So, pasteurization of apple juice can contribute to browning.  But the browning due to pasteurization does not produce desirable flavors and will not be reversed during fermentation.

Second, I learned the hard way to line the wooden basked with screening material (I now buy screen door repair fabric at the hardware store).  If you don’t line the basket, pulp and seed will be squeezed into the spaces between the wooden slats.  This is a pain to clean up afterward.

One of the nifty features of Dolgo crab apples is the red pigment in the skins will rub off on your hands.  It is also highly soluble.  This results in pink colored juice running out of the press.  I sliced the skins off a dozen or so apples and put them into the primary to enhance the color.  Normally, I add oak cubes to secondary fermentation, but for this batch, I added medium toast French oak cubes in the primary.  The cider was fermented with an English ale yeast (Wyeast 1318 London III).  Note the primary is a Rubbermaid Brute which has a loose-fitting lid.  There is no need for an airtight seal during primary fermentation.

After a week or so in the primary, the cider was racked to a 6 ½ gallon glass carboy.  An airtight seal is provided by a rubber bung with a S-shaped airlock.  It appears that I carried over the oak cubes from the primary because a week really isn’t long enough exposure for cubes.  This is the time when a bacterial culture is introduced to the product to perform malo-lactic fermentation – the conversion of malic acid to lactic acid (the acid found in milk). This fermentation takes two or three months.

At some point, this batch of Dolgo cider was mixed with other batches of cider.  Fining agents were used to clarify the blended cider (I really like Super Kleer).  After it cleared, it was bottle conditioned by adding 1 ounce of raw cane sugar per gallon of product and bottling in beer bottles.  This resulted in a sparkling, semi-dry cider.

Sometimes I keg and force carbonate.  This allows the cider to be back sweetened and stabilized with potassium sorbate.  The resulting product can be semi-sweet or sweet depending upon the target audience for the kegged product (party booze generally needs to be sweet, because there aren’t enough educated cider drinkers out there).

There are other major issues to consider.

Brewers will generally work with three types of acid in fruits: citric acid from citrus fruits (and many types of berries); tartaric acid from grapes; and malic acid from apples (and also many types of berries and grapes).  For any given acid concentration, malic acid has the harshest flavor and mouth feel.  Lactic acid has a much smoother flavor and mouth feel.  Converting the malic acid in cider to lactic acid makes the product softer and smoother even at high acid levels (this is commonly done in a lot of red wine styles as well).  So, malo-lactic fermentation provides great benefits to cider, but it comes with a significant risk.

The bacteria that convert malic acid to lactic acid are highly susceptible to potassium metabisulfite (sulfite) which is used to protect against spoilage organisms like Brettanomyces.  And Brett lives everywhere.  It is on the skins of fresh fruit.  When you crush and press fresh fruit to make cider or wine, it is in the juice.  It is essential to add sulfite to the fresh juice to kill spoilage organisms at the start of fermentation.  Sulfite also works to prevent or reverse oxidation.  When you put small amounts of sulfite into highly oxidized apple juice, it will chemically interact with the oxygen and become neutralized (read a book on wine chemistry if you care about the details).  Thus, the amount of free sulfite in the juice drops quickly (this is complicated and could be the topic on a stand-alone article).

The goal is to introduce enough sulfite into the fresh juice to kill the spoilage organisms present on the fresh fruit, but at a low enough rate that there will be no free sulfite left by the end of primary fermentation.  You can then rack into a secondary, pitch malo-lactic bacteria, and wait for 2 or 3 months for the bacteria to work while hoping your sanitation was good enough so that you didn’t introduce any new spoilage organisms going from primary to secondary.  And the mathematical formula for getting that right is – I have no idea.

My process, which has worked so far, is to prepare a 1-quart spray bottle with a solution of 1 tsp of sulfite and 1 tsp of citric acid (sulfite works best in high acid solutions).  I press juice into a small bucket.  When the small bucket is full, I pour it into a large bucket and spray the juice with a couple of squirts of sulfite solution.  Then I cover the large bucket with a lid while I continue to press juice.  Eventually, all the juice is poured into a primary fermenter which was sanitized by spraying it down with the same sulfite solution.  This seems to get enough sulfite into the juice to prevent spoilage while not carrying enough sulfite into the secondary to inhibit malo-lactic fermentation.  After a couple of months of malo-lactic fermentation, I add about ¼ tsp of sulfite to each carboy.  This will prevent spoilage during long-term aging.

That’s enough for now.  Go forth and make cider.

There are many roads to success in brewing.  I try to avoid telling people how they should brew.  So, I talk about how I brew, and let others decide whether or not my methods have any value to them.

Generally speaking, the universal recipe for making alcohol is 1) dissolve sugar in water; 2) add yeast; 3) wait for the yeast to work; and then 4) wait some more for the resulting product to be palatable.  That’s it.  We’re done here.

Well, I suppose there are a few more things to chat about.  Firstly, there are many ways to make or acquire sugar-water.  You can dilute honey with water.  You can extract juice from fruit.  You can mash malted grain in hot water.  You can combine all of those options.  Secondly, you can select from different kinds of yeast to improve your odds of getting a pleasant flavor in the final product depending upon what your source of sugar was.  Thirdly, you can add all sorts of other ingredients to alter the flavor of the product at various stages in the production of that product.  These include flowers, spices, herbs, and charred/toasted wood.  And we’re not going to talk about any of those things today (Nephilium is taking the lead on those topics).

Today, we are going to focus on step 3) waiting and step 4) waiting – otherwise known as fermentation and aging.  Given the products I make, steps 3 and 4 are pretty much the same regardless of which primary fermentable sugar I am working with whether it be honey for making mead, fruit juice for making cider or wine, or malt for making sour ales.  This is because I ferment everything at pretty much the same temperature and age everything for pretty much the same amount of time (at this point I only make sour ales which can benefit from months even years of aging, so no young hoppy beers from me).  This means that I have lots of product sitting around in secondaries for long periods of time – typically 12 months (and sometimes up to 36 months) before I package it up.  This takes space – lots of it.  And it requires good climate control.

My brewing room is roughly 15 feet by 15 feet in size.  Three of the walls are part of the poured concrete foundation for the house.  The last wall is a standard stud wall that I built to isolate the brewing room from the rest of the basement.  There is no ductwork bringing heating or cooling into the room.  Other than the open doorway, there is no significant flow of air in to out of the room.  So, the temperature in the room is extremely stable and there is basically no temperature change over any given 24-hour period (this is probably true for any given week).

The temperature in the room is effectively controlled by the temperature of the soil outside the foundation walls.  The soil temperature lags the seasons by about 3 months.  So, the coldest temperature in the brewing room is typically late March or early April when the temperature drops to about 62° F (although it got down to 58° F after one particularly brutal winter).  Conversely, the warmest temperatures occur in late September or early October when the room reaches about 68° F.

That means I do all fermentation and aging between 62° and 68° degrees.  I focus on cool, slow fermentation, and I think this works great for the things that I make – mead, cider, wine, and sour ales.  However; this is not ideal for other types of products such as lagers that need to be fermented cooler or saisons that need to be fermented warmer.  But I rarely drink those products, and I never make them.  When I do want one, there are many fine drinking establishments in the area that can provide one at a reasonable price.

But a room with temperature control isn’t enough. We need structures – tables, counters, shelves – to store primaries and secondaries that are in use, primaries and secondaries that are not in use, tools, ingredients, and other assorted sundries.  My room has built-in shelving around the entire room.  Every linear foot of wall (excluding the door) has shelves.

The middle shelf is a bit higher that a standard kitchen counter.  This is where the most of primaries and secondaries are stored during fermentation and aging.  Occasionally, I work with primaries that are too big for the shelves (note the 44-gallon Rubbermaid Brute that I am starting a batch of pyment in – to be discussed in a future post.).  The middle shelf is wide enough to hold a 9-gallon demijon (not shown in the picture).  The corners can hold a 14-gallon demijon.

The bottom shelf is somewhat narrower than the middle shelf.  This keeps me from banging my shins when I am lifting primaries and secondaries from the floor and then placing them onto the middle shelf or moving them from one place to another.  I generally keep heavy stuff on the bottom shelf, like the cases of honey in lower left of this picture (six 5-lb jars per case).  There is an upper shelf which is the same width as the middle shelf.  I keep empty carboys and other not-so-heavy items up there.

I long ago lost track of how may primaries and secondaries I have.  I sold off a dozen 6-gallon carboys to my brewing friends several years ago.  I have since acquired both bigger and smaller containers to fill that hole in my heart.

To the best of my recollection, I have a dozen ½-gallon jugs; two dozen 1-gallon jugs; half a dozen 1.3-gallon demijons; half a dozen 2.6-gallon demijons; half a dozen 3-gallon carboys; a dozen 5-gallon carboys; a dozen 6-gallon carboys; a dozen 6.5-gallon carboys; three or four 9-gallon demijons; and three or four 14-gallon demijons.

I generally use plastic for primaries.  I have converted 2.5-gallon and 6.5-gallon screw-top pails into primaries.  Basically, you drill a ½ hole in the screw-top and install a replacement rubber grommet into the hole.  This allows the use of a standard airlock.  I have half a dozen of each of these sizes.  I have about half a dozen standard 7.9-gallon wine pails from the home brew shop.  And I use a lot of Rubbermaid Brute garbage cans.  They are food grade plastic and come in a variety of colors.  I use white so they are easier to see if they are clean.  As far as Brutes go, I have 10-gallon, 20-gallon, 32-gallon, and 44-gallon pails.

I generally use the small containers (plastic primaries and glass secondaries) for experimental batches.  I have done yeast trials and oak trials over the years to see how these affect the product.  I also do sets of small batches to make samples for teaching classes. I use the mid-size containers for most of my brewing (5 to 6.5 gallons of finished product).  I use the large containers for bulk production – usually wine – when I am working with fresh seasonal fruit – mostly local grapes.

I also use the large Brutes for blending products such as ciders made from 3 to 5 different varieties of apples.  The apples get harvested at different times in the season (anywhere from early August to late October), so the initial fermentation is done for each variety separately.  Later in the winter, multiple batches of single-variety cider will get blended in a large Brute and then pumped into mid-sized or large-sized glass secondaries (carboys or demijons) for additional aging before packaging.

In the beginning, when I started making mead, I was paranoid about using air-tight primaries and airlocks.  All the homebrew books and brew shops tell you that you need them.  Then I started making wine with some friends.  When you make red wine, you open the primary two or three times every day to punch down the cap (to be covered in detail in future posts, but you are pushing the grapes skins down into the wine below).  You learn pretty quickly that as long as the fermentation is going strong, all you need is a loose cover to keep the bugs and dirt out.  I have been to pro wineries where wine was fermenting in steel tanks with a blue plastic tarp pulled over the top.

I continue to use air-tight primaries and airlocks when I am working with small to mid-sized batches.  This allows me to lift and move the primaries without worrying about spilling.  But when I work on large batches with lots of whole fruit, I use the Brutes with loose fitting lids.  The key point is to rack into an airtight secondary when you’ve extracted what you want from the whole fruit and fermentation is slowing down.  Note, that I recently acquired the 1.3-gallon and 2.6-gallon demijons (listed above) which have very wide openings so that I could do small experimental batches with whole fruit.  This allows me to open the demijon and punch down the fruit during the initial fermentation and to reach in and clean the demijon after the product is racked to a secondary.

One of the tricky issues is deciding when fermentation is done.  It seems like an easy thing to check.  The airlock stops bubbling or the hydrometer reading stays the same for a while.   But rubber bungs and airlocks don’t always maintain a perfect seal.  So very slow fermentation may not move the bubbles in the airlock.  And the specific gravity of the product may change by less then your ability to detect it on a standard hydrometer.  So, I have discovered an alternate way to tell.

The key is to watch the very top of the product in a clear carboy or jug.  Even when it is fermenting very slowly (too slow to notice activity in the airlock), you can still see tiny little bubbles running up the outside of the carboy or jug and joining a ring of bubbles at the top.  When there is a continuous ring of bubbles, the product is still fermenting quite a bit.  When there are only a handful of bubbles, the product is nearly done.  When there no bubbles, there is no fermentation going on in the product.

If you are making a carbonated beverage and are going to bottle condition or keg, a ring of bubbles on the top of the product is not a problem.  In fact, it indicates you have healthy, active yeast to support bottle conditioning.  But if you are going bottle still products in a standard bottle with a cork, you need to wait till it is finally done.  If you are going to continue aging the product in a carboy or jug, you can replace the bung and airlock with an airtight screw cap or rubber carboy cap as appropriate for the type of container.

I try to rack my products a few times as possible.  My general schedule is to leave the product in the primary fermenter for 2 to 4 weeks, depending up what it is and how strongly it is fermenting.  After primary fermentation is complete, I will the rack into a secondary and leave the product alone for 2 to 4 months.  It is during this time frame that I will do malo-lactic fermentation if the product requires it (typically for ciders or wine).  This is also the time when I will use oak cubes if it is part of the plan for that product.  After this, I will rack it into another secondary (or tertiary, since it the third container).  Here it will sit for half a year or several years depending up what product it is.  Note that there is no fermentation going at this stage.  So, there is no dead yeast piling up on the bottom.  Therefore, autolysis is not an issue, and I don’t worry about the product sitting on whatever sediment builds up during this phase of aging.

When aging is done, it is time to package the product.  If you want a carbonated beverage, you can bottle condition (fermentation in a sealed bottle) or force carbonate in a keg.  If you bottle condition, the product must be put into a bottle that is intended to handle the pressure – beer bottles or champagne bottles.  Standard wine bottles can explode if fermentation occurs in the bottle.  If you want a still product, it can be put into pretty much any kind of bottle and sealed with a cork, a cap, or a swing top.  Specific information on different ways of packaging products will be provided in subsequent articles on cider, wine, mead, and beer.