Batch #12: Hard Cider
OK, not really homebrewing, mostly home-fermenting.
2007OCT27
5gal "Blossom Valley" Apple Cider Seneca, NY (pasteurized)
1pkg Lalvin K1-V1116 dry yeast
Activated the yeast in a cup of cider warmed to ~100F
2007OCT28
Pitched another package of the Lalvin, as I think I knocked out the first batch by dumping it into sub-60F cider.
2007OCT29
I think it's fermenting.
Checked specific gravity today, still over 1.030. Wicked sweet. P:itched my last packet of Lalvin K1-V1116. Fingers crossed.
Down the drain.
My cider is still burbling under the kitchen counter, though it's starting to lose its oomph. It's also become quite clear. Hope it stays that way.
Forgive me?
<img src= "http://www.aromaweb.com/images/aromagrams/full2/imsorry.jpg">
I knew the cider was pasteurized (just as the stuff I used last year), didn't think it also had a preservative.
Though <a href="http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/this_britain/article213280.ece">this</a> might give it a run for its money.
My peeps!
While this is sort of off-topic for the Cider thread:
I like to think about how the first beer was discovered. I think there must have been a grain storage cave or hut or something. There was a fire. Some of the barley burned, but some of it got toasted. The fire was doused with water, then maybe it rained for a day or two. The runoff collected in pools and sat for a couple weeks. Then someone came along and took a drink from a fermented pool of runoff water from a burnt-up barley pile. Fantastic!
The story of coffee is similar.
More likely:
People used to gather seeds, and eat them, cooked into a kind of porridge or grits to make them more digestible.
One day, a forgetful peasant left a basket of barley grains out in the open, and it got rained on by a freak rainstorm. The peasant discovered the basket of wet grain a few days later, and brought it back to his hut. rather than let good grain go to waste, he decided to cook it up before it rotted. So he made a porridge, and found to his pleasure and surprise that the porridge was sweet, much sweeter than normal, because the starches in the dry seeds had turned to sugars through enzyme action when it got rained on.
Thenceforth, whenever that peasant and his people wanted a batch of sweet porridge, they left the grain out in the rain and allowed it to stay wet a few days, until it started to sprout. They learned by experience what amount of wetness and what amount of sitting around produced the sweetest porridge.
Then, one day, three hundred and fifty years later, the first peasant's great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson made up a batch of sweet porridge. It was a fairly thin and watery porridge, because the man was poor and had only a few barley grains on hand. Just as he was about to sit down to enjoy a bowl of watery gruel, the soldiers from the great city of Ur appeared, and demanded that he accompany them to do his obligatory ten days' service for the priests of the great god Nanna. Reluctantly, he went, leaving the pot of gruel on the table in his hut, and spent ten days in Ur lugging mud bricks to make a ziggurat to the greater glory of Nanna. When he was finally allowed to return home, he saw that his pot of gruel had developed a foamy scum on the top, and it smelled kind of funny. But he had nothing else to eat (the priests of Nanna don't pay very well), so he ladled out a bowl of the spoiled gruel, and ate/drank it despite the fact that it tasted distinctly...off. It made him surprisingly happy. And he went to bed, and slept well, and woke up with a headache, and happily ladled out another bowl of fermented glop.
Thus was beer born. So say I.
How much earlier was winemaking though?
And could there have been a winemaker turned brewer?
Crystal-clear, pale yellow, and with a final gravity of 1.000 on the nose. I'm impatient. Hope it gets nice and sparkly.
I enjoyed my gil of Pchippy's Stewart's Fermented.
Stewart's, which I'm making the big batch of, is "apple juice," though unusually good apple juice for its price. What I fed you was Randall's "apple cider," not only unpreserved but <i>unfiltered</i>. Both are from Maine, and I like both of them, but unfortunately the Randall's stuff costs about $4.50 a gallon and isn't available (so far as I know) in Massachusetts. The one gallon of it I had here in Boston was left over from our weekend up north.
You should be able to take unpasteurizd cider and put it in a fermenter and let it go itself. It'll take longer than pitching in a Champagne yeast. Even <a href="http://www.positron.org/brewery/cider_2006/">here</a> they pitched yeast. Everything else I read, relying on natural yeast means fermentation over months and months.