The Hard Cider Incident: Part 1

This fall I tried my hand at hard cider. I went to Bishops Orchard in Garfield, WA where they had some old fashioned cider presses. My friends and I impressed ourselves by cranking out nearly ten gallons of cider in a half-hour. The cider was pressed from spartan and golden delicious apples, which I believe are fairly sweet. I had no idea but  hard cider is apparently better if made from tart apples.

My research recommended pasteurizing the cider by heating it up to 160-170 degrees Fahrenheit, just shy of boiling, to ensure that no wild yeast would be involved in the fermentation. But as you can tell from my first few posts, I couldn't let an opportunity to harvest my own strand of wild yeast go to waste. So, I didn't heat up the cider at all, but instead I left it alone to spontaneously ferment, which of course it did, exactly five days after I pressed it.

The unfermented cider was incredibly sweet when I tasted it. And my hydrometer confirmed this: original gravity of the cider was 1.074, which usually translates to around 6.8% ABV. My research tells me that average gravity for a cider is 1.050. So this cider was very sweet. As a result I decided not to add any adjuncts such as honey or dextrose. However, I did add some cinnamon sticks a few days before I bottled. The cider sat in the primary for five weeks and clarified pretty well.

When I took a reading at the end of the fermentation I was shocked, the final gravity was a smidgen under 1.000. To give you an idea, water has a specific gravity of 1.000, so my cider had a density slightly less than water. At first I wasn't sure this was possible, but alcohol has a lower density than water, so a fluid with a high percentage of alcohol could be under 1.000. For those of you who haven't already done the math, this cider has an ABV of 9.7%.

Before I bottled it, the cider smelled musty and tasted very dry with absolutely no sweetness, since all the sugar had been metabolized. There were a lot of off-flavors that I couldn't put my finger on. But the cinnamon was nice. I hoped that the cider would get better with age, so I bottled it with some dextrose and it's been sitting ever since. I've cracked open a few to get acquainted with the progress, but next post, I'll do a proper tasting.