Upon buying our farm, one of the first things we noticed growing were two McIntosh apple trees. They clearly hadn't been tended in many years (the farm had been abandoned for 10 years), so in late March we did some heavy pruning, removing crossing and broken branches, in the hopes of bringing the trees back into production. The effort paid off, as we ended up with fairly decent-sized apples that were ripening in September. Not content to simply have apples or applesauce, we decided to try our hand at making our own Hard (alcoholic) Cider.
The key to the entire process is SANITIZE, SANITIZE, SANITIZE. That means that *everything* that touches the apples or the juice to be obtained needs to be thoroughly cleaned. With that in mind, here was our process:
1) We gathered about one full bushel of apples from each of the two trees. We have small trees, and got a bushel from each. (Note: having done this successfully once, next year we will seek to add apples from our neighbors trees, to give us a variety of apples to blend)
2) We rinsed them off, cut them (with a sanitized knife) into two or four pieces, and put them through a (sanitized) standard kitchen food processor. That made the pulp small enough to be able to easily crush them in a fairly inexpensive Cider Press that we bought online and subsequently sanitized.
To sanitize, we filled the sink with warm water, and added a blop of bleach. It worked fine. then we left the solution in the sink, because we kept finding little tools to help us along the way, and needed to sanitize them before using them.)
3) We pressed the apple mash in the press, and collected the juice in small sanitized catch pans.
4) We then poured the juice from the pans into sanitized gallon jugs.
5) We added one gram of Nottingham yeast to each gallon jug, and then capped the jugs with a sanitized cork and a sanitized airlock. To prevent "bad air" from entering through the airlock, we put a little vodka in the bend of the lock; this enabled the gasses created by fermentation to escape by "bubbling" through the vodka, without permitting air or bugs to get in.
6) We placed the jugs on a bench in the basement, where it stayed about 55 degrees. For two weeks, the yeast worked its magic, bubbling constantly. After two weeks, it subsided, and there was about an inch of dead yeast and apple pieces ("leas") settled on the bottom of the jug.
7) Then we siphoned the juice, using a sanitized tube, into a new sanitized gallon jug for secondary fermentation (aging, really, as the yeast was done).
And we let it sit, without moving or touching it. For Weeks. For what seemed like an eternity.
Then, on New Years Eve (3 months after secondary), we poured the cider into sanitized bottles using a sanitized funnel, and drank the rest.
And it was delicious, crystal clear, and definitely alcoholic :-)
We will do this again next year on a GRAND SCALE for sure!
