Honoring the Cider Making Process

Cider making seems like a lot of work (and it is) but it makes itself more than you may know. With the addition of yeast, the apple juice ferments into cider after a few days. Andy Brennan, cider-enthusiast, advises to trust this process and not to interfere. Leaving nature to do its work yields a delicious tasting drink!

The following is an excerpt from Uncultivated by Andy Brennan. It has been adapted for the web.

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Prefer Audio?

Listen to the excerpt below from the audiobook of Uncultivated.

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I hear this a lot at the farmers markets: “How do you make cider?”

If I were to answer that question honestly, I’d sound like a smartass. “You’re asking the wrong question,” I’d tell them. “You don’t make cider, cider makes itself.”

Other organisms, yeasts, are responsible for converting apple juice into cider, so technically they are the cider makers. My job is just to allow for the conditions where yeasts can do their job, which isn’t all that difficult because yeasts are everywhere and pretty self-sufficient.

Sometimes I get a follow-up to that question: “No, what I meant was, how do you make good cider?” And to that, I have another smartass response: “It’s not about making good cider, it’s about not making bad cider.” You can’t improve on silence, either, but you might think of the accomplishments of great musicians like Mozart or Beethoven as improvements. That’s the wrong way of looking at things, though, and when cider makers obsess on an end result they actually fail to see how most great artworks evolved from silence. With cider that silence is the drink’s natural state. Unfortunately we have an industry that pays no mind to this process; it looks immediately to bypass it and improve on Mozart. This is a recipe for noise, and it’s not an environment that will foster future artists or art enthusiasts.

Sweetness, for instance, is not the natural state of cider; it must be achieved by combating the life responsible for it (yeasts don’t just stop eating the sugars on their own; you have to force them to quit). So if you want to make good cider, the better choice would be to honor the pure process rather than assume it’s bad, or worth fighting. Maybe then an appreciation for humble cider can emerge among drinkers, too.

Along the same lines, it’s incorrect to think of the cider maker as a chef-like title similar to master brewer. In actuality, cider makers are just those who help the apple’s natural progression from fruit to drink, simply providing the necessary assistance in this realization.

Beer makers, on the other hand, are responsible for imagining recipes, mastering the ingredients, and cooking it up (“brewing” it, with heat). In other words, their fingerprints are all over the product and they are deserving of the accolades if the drink is sublime. Meanwhile, on the opposite spectrum, cider making is just an extension of agriculture; it’s the artist’s job to continue that life. It’s the cow that tastes good, not the butcher’s handiwork.

Because the goal of cider is to allow life on the farm to blossom in the bottle, a weird distinction arises that beer consumers will forever have a hard time with: The “product” is not the physical drink inside the bottle— or even the taste of the cider itself—but the appreciation of the life itself. Admittedly, this creates a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation, but it’s an important distinction: Though the appreciation is linked to the physical object (specifically the taste), the satisfaction exists with or without the need of this physical evidence. An even better way to think of the cider maker’s role is the example of the schoolteacher: Being a teacher is not about producing something physical but about fostering something that can become physical. Einstein’s mentors can’t take credit for producing his discoveries, but they can be proud that they helped foster his ability to discover them. So, too, Einstein’s fans should appreciate their work.

As a cider maker I want to support a living being that I (and hopefully customers) can sit back and marvel at for its own success. But if customers are focused on what I’ve achieved, or if they think my ciders are good because of me, then they aren’t seeing natural cider correctly. When cider ceases to become agriculture, when cider becomes about the industry that takes credit for it, we, as a culture, have lost our way.

Yeasts start to colonize fruit juice immediately after pressing, and it doesn’t take but a day or two for the liquid to become a frenzied pot of microorganisms. This is known as the primary fermentation stage. Not that I know what’s going on the microscopic level, but my guess is that yeast cells are finding the environment to their liking and responding by reproducing. They do so by dividing (I think): One becomes two; two becomes four; four becomes eight; and so forth. But yeasts need energy to divide, and they are finding their fuel in the sugars of the apple juice. They eat the sugars and convert them into alcohol and CO2. The foam that we see on the surface of the cider during this first stage is a by-product of this energy.

Carbon dioxide (CO2), a gas heavier than air, is expelled from the liquid and sits above it while pushing oxygen out of the vessel. This is why you see air locks on modern wine tanks and carboys: The air lock traps in the CO2 and keeps oxygen from getting back inside, potentially bringing spoilage microbes along with it. Carefully managed, this natural CO2 by-product of yeast fermentation will act like a shield on the surface of the cider, even when the vessel is wide open.

When we first started learning about cider, we made all our batches in 5-gallon carboys (glass containers with narrow necks the shape of a Red Stripe bottle). Carboys are the standard vessel for home wine and cider production, largely because when they are full of liquid they weigh less than 50 pounds, which is about the maximum weight an average adult can move around. We learned early on that a good place to let the carboys ferment was in our bathtub upstairs.

This is for two reasons: (1) The indoor temperature in early November (plus or minus 67°F) was perfect for getting the yeast activity started, and (2) once the yeast activity began, it tended to get a little too active and bubble out of the container for a few days before it settled down. As the yeast took the party to the streets, the tub made for easy cleanup.

In 2009 we needed to up our game. By this point in our careers we had already conceived of our cider business, and 5-gallon batches weren’t going to cut it anymore. I needed to learn how to make barrel cider, a standard of 55 gallons liquid volume. Barrels, of course, are made of wood, but nowadays wineries more often use stainless steel or plastic barrels for their primary fermentations. Plastic is especially light and cheap, and compared with wood it is easily cleaned, so it made the perfect vessel for my first attempts at scaling up cider production. Always a spendthrift, I found hand-me-down plastic barrels from a local winery at $10 each.

The bathtub option was out. And there’s no way of moving a barrel of cider once it’s full of liquid (close to 500 pounds).

Planning was key

Knowing how messy things can get, I would have liked to ferment the cider outside, but certain yeasts (particularly wine yeasts) require stable, relatively warm temperatures and that’s not what you’ll find in October. In fact the nighttime-to-daytime temperatures can swing 50°F or more. Ultimately, I determined the cider needed to start indoors where I’d had much success at the 5-gallon level. And this is how our dining room became our first cidery.

The plan was to start the barrel fermentation behind a Japanese screen in the corner so we could maintain the illusion of domesticity; later we would draw a hose down the steps to the basement so as to eventually siphon the liquid into an aging barrel (a used oak barrel, also a winery leftover). I prepared the floor with towels in case the fermentation got too rowdy. After 11 trips to the dining room with 5-gallon buckets, I was able to fill the blue plastic barrel in the corner, and within a day the liquid assimilated to the indoor temperature of around 65°F. Perfect.

The good part about having cider as your house guest is that you can check it often and monitor the progress more acutely. It wasn’t until the third day that a small amount of bubbles found their way around the edge of the surface like river foam. Each day I spooned out a sample to taste; my experience was that the sweetness faded over the coming days, giving way to a more chalky experience. The foam edge grew until the fifth day, at which point the entire surface was submerged under a light yellow crud dancing with tiny bubbles. And the crud was growing.

By Day 6 it was 4 inches thick and approaching the rim of the barrel. I closed the lid to keep tiny flakes of apple scum from leaping out onto the floor. And on Day 7 I woke to find the foam oozing down the outer surface of the barrel. I quickly lifted the lid to scoop out bubbles with a strainer and wiped up the mess. Now our house guest was wearing out its welcome.

And another unforeseen issue made itself known

Living under the same roof as a fermenting 55-gallon barrel of cider is like being under the bedcovers after a bean dinner. I would describe a healthy fermentation as smelling “meaty” or “bready.” Camembert also comes to mind. It’s an acquired taste. If what you are used to is deodorant and fastidiously sanitized people, then a human’s natural smell can seem offensive, but after being in Europe for a little while you get used to these odors and may even miss it once you’ve returned home. But I’ll admit I wasn’t a Camembert fan at first, either.

After two weeks the foam had finally subsided and returned to the surface of the liquid. It was at this point I started to worry about air contamination. My curious opening and closing of the lid had likely blown off the natural CO2 that had formed invisibly on the surface, so I took one last sip before letting it rest another week before racking. Twenty-one days in my dining room, and the cider still had a touch of sweetness, but it was definitely alcoholic. And there was a briny quality that I now know is common at this stage, reminding me of hand soap (unscented Dial, specifically). This note now serves to let me know things are progressing as they should.

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