Cidermania

I'm going to ferment you all!

I mentioned in an earlier post that the first batch of homebrew I ever made was an apricot wheat beer. The second batch was a lager, specifically a clone of Shiner Bock. One of the hardest parts of brewing is the waiting. In order to pass the time while I was waiting for those beers to be ready, I decided to try my hand at making some cider. I had been perusing the HomeBrewTalk forums and encountered what might just be the most popular cider recipe in the homebrewing community: EdWort's Apfelwein. Apfelwein is a German style of cider and it is very dry. Bone dry. It usually has a final gravity below 1.000, meaning it is less dense than water. It is also very strong, usually around 8.5% ABV. There is a thread on HomeBrewTalk that is attempting to track how many gallons of the stuff has been made. Only including the people who self-report on that thread, it's already at 28,383 gallons. I'm sure the actual figure is much larger.

This stuff has started to grow in popularity at my house. More of my guests are getting a taste for it, and I realized I only had one batch left, which I made last June. I have a batch that I bottled in champagne bottles (it can be fun to carbonate it like champagne), but when my current keg kicks, I will only have 5 more gallons to put on tap. Given that it takes months for the stuff to mature, I decided something needed to be done.

Super Lazy Ice Cider: An Experiment

In November of last year, I was reading the November/December 2014 issue of Zymurgy and I ran across an article named "Frozen: Making Ice Cider" by Nathan Williams (I also read an article in BYO). I've had ice wine before, I guess it had never occurred to me that one could also make ice cider. Ice wine is made by leaving grapes on the vine until they freeze, which does two things. First, it allows the fruit to develop more sugars (essentially becoming overripe). Second, it freezes the juice of the fruit, so that when pressed, much of the water is left behind as ice, yielding a very concentrated must. There's nothing particularly special about grapes in this case, and the same can be done with apples. As of December  2008, to be designated as cidre de glace (it originated in Quebec), a beverage must obey the following rules: