We made some more cider this weekend. And just like the beer operation we ramp up quickly. This time we did it all from scratch, we harvested and pressed our own apples. Jason has some apple trees on his property, and I acquired a cider press. So it was obvious that we would need to put them together; and then really, whats the point of making cider if you don’t at least ferment some of it?
Jason harvested (and I’m guessing a little) about 8 bushels of apples, 3 bushels of Red Delicious and 5 bushels of 20oz apples. We pressed 16 gallons of fresh cider from the apples, so that means each bushel yielded about 2 gallons.
It took three of us (Jason, James, and me) about 3-4 hours to press all those apples. The fresh pressed cider was simply amazing. The Red Delicious cider was quite sweet and very good, but surprisingly it was the 20oz apples that really shined. This is a variety that I had never heard of. The NY Apple Association describes it as having a pale yellow flesh, and that it is firm, juicy, and tart. This apple was very close to the way they described, except it was much sweeter than I think we were expecting. This might have something to do with how late in the season they were harvested, after a few frosts. The resulting cider was very smooth, had an excellent mouth-feel, and had a superb balance between sweetness and tartness.
We saved off 2 gallons each of the Red Delicious and 20oz fresh cider. This still left us with over 12 gallons of cider to ferment into hard cider.
Using our 20 gallon brew kettle we boiled the cider down and reduced it to about 9-10 gallons of cider. I had contemplated adding some malto-dextrine (that I had leftover from a beer kit that I forgot to use it in) into the boil. The thought was that this would add some body to the cider and a little more sweetness, since it is unfermentable sugar. In the end we decided not to, for a couple reasons I think: 1. the cider itself was just so good on its own already, we decided it didn’t need any more sweetness; and 2. this was our first time making fresh-pressed hard cider, we don’t know if it will even need more body. I think we made the right decision not to include it.
However, we did decide to experiment a little with the yeasts. The 9-10 gallons of cider got put into 2 6.5 gallon carboys, and we used a different yeast in each. The first carboy got WYeast Cider yeast, this came in a sealed foil pouch of sorts that you agitated, left on the counter for a couple hours, and it puffs up. This seemed to work really well as there was noticeable active fermentation of the cider by the next morning. The second carboy got dried L-1118 Champagne yeast. Travis used Champagne yeast in his batch of cider several weeks ago. Its not done yet, but preliminary tastings indicate that it will be quite strong and very dry.
We’ll be calling it the Livonian Cider, trying to build on our Livonian line, the hope being that it will turn out as good as our Livonian IPA did!
I think everybody involved in the cider activities would say that it was an enjoyable afternoon. Making cider turns out to be a fun and easy affair, I encourage people to give it a try!