The House Cider Rules

My roommate has been thinking about making alcohol for a while. I like the sentiment, but beer seemed like it required too much of an infrastructure to start. Plus, we don't have a basement that could absorb any hypothetical explosion. Just when things seemed darkest for the possibility of homemade alcohol I discovered The Paupered Chef's three part series on making hard cider (Parts I, II and III).

Not a lot was required: apple juice, yeast, a container and an "airlock". An airlock is a mechanism that lets gas come out of the container while stopping bacteria from getting into it. A balloon with a pinprick in it could suffice and, as that sounded whimsical, we decided to make that our airlock.

So now we needed to go out and buy these products. We went to the Valumart to buy the apple juice, it would have to be one without preservatives. I originally misremembered this as without pasteurization which, as you can except, was not being sold. After a while of looking, I realized that everything in the store was going to be pasteurized and we ended up getting a 1.75 L bottle of "Simply Apple" Apple Juice. We also got a pack of balloons and, unrelated to this post but still pretty cool, a 10 lb sack of potatoes for $2. We weren't sure where to get yeast and briefly toyed with the idea of using baker's yeast. Thankfully, my friend Emma's dad pointed us to Danny's Wine and Beer Suppliers which is on the bus line.

I was in class all day, so my roommate ventured out to Danny's to purchase the yeast. We got Lalvin EC-1118 Champagne yeast (or, rather, yeast from the Champagne region). While there he decided to spend a few bucks to make an airlock, so we ended up not using the balloons after all. The mouth of the Simply Apple bottle was too big for the airlock, so we cleaned out an old pop bottle and poured the juice into there. Then we activated the yeast, which involves adding some warm water and waiting for about 15 minutes. The yeast packages are intended for bigger batches than we had, so there was a lot of improvised math. We erred on the side of too much yeast, because the supply of sugar was fixed and that was what was important. Just meant more sludge. So we tipped in the yeast, and let it ferment!

It was always fun opening up the closet we stored it in and watching the bubbles. Still, there was a bit of a pungent smell in said closet which did not bode well for the future. After a week was up, we opened it up and decided to taste it.

It was... actually pretty good. It tasted like a dry white wine with a hint of apples and, at least in the beginning, a nice fizz. Several of my friends tried it and expressed surprise that 1) it wasn't terrible and 2) that we did not go blind. It was especially gratifying even the slapdash way we went about making it. It's almost all gone now, but tomorrow we're probably going to get some more apple juice.

What will we do differently? Well, the way we did it wasn't terribly cost effective. It was a test run so we used a smallish bottle. For the next time we'll buy a bigger bottle of apple juice. Also, instead of champagne yeast we'll try lager yeast, which apparently creates a more cidery type flavour. We're also thinking about adding some honey to one of the batches to see what happens with the extra sugar and honey flavour. It's pretty good honey too – given to me by my friend Megan from her family bee farm. Maybe we'll ferment these ones in sanitized wine bottles to give it a classier touch than a pop bottle. Whatever we do, I'm looking forward to experimenting more with cider.