Brewing
Picking
The first step to brewing cider is picking apples, lots of apples…
Pressing
Running our press takes some serious physical effort, it’s an antique hand crank press. Luckily we’ve always had enough people to rotate between loading the apples, turning the crank for the crusher/grinder, and operating the screw for the press. It’s a rush when the cider starts flowing.
Fermenting
We drink the cider while it’s fresh, and we can some in jars to preserve it for later, but it’s a lot of work and jars are expensive. The easiest way to preserve cider is to ferment it. The yeast actually fights off other bacteria until the alcohol content is high enough to preserve it.
We normally pasteurize the cider to give the yeast an edge over wild bacteria or other yeast strains, then we introduce brewers yeast. You can heat pasteurize, or use potassium metabisulfite. One of the most important parts of brewing is cleaning and keeping everything sanitized.
You want the cider to be oxygenated at the start of fermentation, but once the fermentation process has started you want to minimize oxygen exposure.
The fermentation process creates CO2 gas that must be vented through a bubbler. If you mix in other fruits, make sure they don’t plug the bubbler. We found out the hard way after blackberries plugged the bubbler, the glass carboy built up pressure, and we had a blackberry explosion all over the ceiling!
Sharing
I have a big family with lot’s of Aunt’s, Uncle’s, and Cousin’s, and we have a big Christmas get-together every Christmas Eve. One year we made enough cider to send everybody home with a 6-pack containing Cherry, Blackberry, and Raspberry cider!
My family also has a huge tail-gating group before the OSU football games. It’s awesome to be able to bring a keg of homemade craft cider, especially when many of the people there took part in producing it!
