@kferr too bad about Bulmer’s. I found a pub near me that has 16 taps, 15 beers and 1 Magners which as the article says is Bulmer’s.
As for perry, there’s a bar I’ve been to that specializes in music rather than in drinks, The Bitter End in Greenwich Village, that serves one cider, Kopparberg, labelled as Swedish “pear cider”.
It’s going to vary with which product you begin with and how you encourage fermentation to occur.
It’s like milk. You have a gallon in your refrigerator and it “goes bad”. You can throw it out. You can do things to end up with yogurt. You can do other things and end up with cheese. Depending on what “things” you do you can have an end product that is barely acceptable or is something a gourmand would rave over.
I have been accused of a lot in my time, but never of being a gourmand.
Neither a gourmet nor a gourmand ever be, is my motto.
I was never aware you could do much with milk that’s gone bad, other than vomiting.
Fresh milk makes much better yogurt than milk that’s already gone bad.
Yep, specifics of your technique affect the quality of the end product.
I do not drink cow’s milk, but allow it to age in a specific manner and I love the resulting yogurt or cheese.
Do tell.
I’m not sure how it would kill you. Make you throw up perhaps if it’s somehow really bad, but even then, I’m not sure. It’s not like making hard alcohol where you do have to be careful about getting rid of the heads and tails (first part and last part) of your distillate. And even then, you’ll most likely just end up with a really bad hangover rather than blind as you really have to concentrate those heads and tails to produce something enough to kill you or make you blind.
At any rate, you can make it with store bought cider, but you should not buy any with potassium sorbate in it, if you can, as that will kill your yeast. I believe you still can ferment it, it’ll just take a bigger pitch of yeast and may develop off-flavors. I’ve just used the farm cider that comes around during the fall.
About twenty years, just before ciders became ubiquitous, I had an experiment where I made about sixty or so gallons of cider from my Iowa City friend’s bumper crop of apples. After juicing all of them (and burning out a juicer in the process–I’m a city mouse, I don’t have a cider press), I fermented them with various yeasts, cut some with honey or malt, etc. So about 20 different 3-gallon experiments. All were drinkable, some were great – my favorites were the spontaneously fermented one (no yeast pitch), and one fermented with Weihenstephaner Weissbier yeast. They also needed a bit of age before they really started getting into their own. Around six months is when they began to shine.
This is for cider that has been completely fermented out. If you want to sweeten it, you can do something called “backsweetening” and add some sweet juice or concentrate before serving. (Don’t do it if you bottle unless you kill our yeast first – usually with sorbate.)
I personally am waiting for jerkum to make a comeback! (Jerkum is the plum version of cider, and historically tied to some small area of the UK I don’t feel like looking up right now.) I’m only half facetious about that. I made it once with commercial plums, and it was okay, but I suspect there are better plums to make it from than what I can find at the supermarket that is grown for eating, not fermenting.
I looked up Woodside and they look great so I’ll have to plan a trip out to where they are. The last time I was out there was 2 years ago.
Uh, no.
It’s really difficult to find apple juice for sale that isn’t preserved or Pasteurized. If you let that sit out, it will spoil; it won’t ferment.
It’s really difficult (around here in Wisconsin) to find apple juice for sale at roadside stands that isn’t filtered and UV irradiated. … same story. It spoils; it doesn’t ferment.
There are a host of varying state regulations to protect Consumers from contaminated food. Now, the apple juice that you have your eye on may or may not be contaminated, but — so far as your state government is concerned — the merchant who sells it has to take steps to prevent it from becoming so, and that includes preserving it in some way before it gets to you. The state tries to make sure of this.
… which, when you think about it, is a bit silly. Consumers — before they became less sophisticated — used to be able to spot contaminated food and took steps to dispose of it before consuming it.
What the state is mostly concerned about is contamination (with bacterial agents such as E. coli), which may not be apparent to the Consumer. Apple juice is easily contaminated with E. coli by raising livestock and apples in close proximity. It’s unlikely that apples have E. coli spores on them that will cause food poisoning in humans, but it’s really likely that they will have E. coli spores of some kind on them. …and you can’t tell which kind under a microscope. Better to be safe than sorry.
This is one of the foremost reasons Consumers prefer to live under a nanny state: They can yank food off the supermarket shelves, pay for it, haul it home, consume it, and never worry about when it will spoil or whether it was spoiled when they bought it.
That’s not the way it is with raw apple juice unless it is preserved, Pasteurized, or filtered and UV irradiated. You can press your own apple juice, however, and dodge state interference. The juice you press yourself (or have custom pressed for you) will ferment from the wild yeast that inhabits the rind of the fruit. Of course, you do open yourself, your family, and your dinner guests to the risk of drinking a contaminated beverage, but the risks you run in that regard are no greater than the risks your grandparents ran, and they lived long enough to reproduce, didn’t they? The juice you press yourself will be cloudy; it won’t be the crystal clear, unsedimented stuff from the store, but it will definitely taste better. It won’t have that cooked taste you get from heat treatment and/or preservatives.
You see: Fermentation puts a lid on E. coli. Also, it puts a lid on other bacterial growths in cider. If you’re going to ferment cider, you want to keep it warm enough for the yeast to outrun the other bacterial contaminants that may be (and probably are) present. I find that leaving fresh-pressed apple juice on the kitchen counter for two to four days makes it a little “drier” and a little less sweet and imparts a pleasant carbonation — that sparkling fizz that tells you the fermentation is working. In this case it’s the real thing, not that fake soda-pop fizz meant to mimic alcoholic drinks. Then, I refrigerate it to enjoy it for another week or two.
… so, yes, you can get real, live, natural cider. I, myself, haul about six bushels of apples to a custom press every autumn and take home about 30 gallons of juice. The press owner makes me — along with all his other customers — sign a release, swearing that I am aware of the imminent dangers of consuming unpreserved fruit juice, that I am going to take steps to minimize the risks of this inherently dangerous enterprise, and that in no way will I do anything with the product to reflect poorly on the outfit that produced it. So there! It’s hard to imagine retail customers going to such trouble for a quart or two of juice, though. That’s why you don’t commonly see it at roadside stands around here.
In fact, I can’t let all 30 gallons of the stuff ferment. Fermentation isn’t so much a risk to health as it is a risk to the value of the crop. It can turn out badly. For this reason most amateur cider bottlers will kill the natural yeasts and bacteria in the juice and re-inoculate with a strain of brewers’ yeast, which produces more or less standard results.
No. What I do is freeze as much as my freezer will hold. The rest of it I pressure can. Neither is as good as fresh fermented, but the frozen can be inoculated with the lees of the first fermented jug, and it’s almost as good.
In the UK Kopparberg is seen as an alcho-pop, something sweet and boozy for those who don’t like beer, regular cider, or wine. Sort of an apple based Zima (if that is still around).
Where i live, in the northeast, the market distinguishes between apple juice, which is sold essentially “canned”, sterilized and sealed under vacuum, and “cider”, which is unfiltered, unpreserved, and sold in flimsy plastic containers. The “cider” is pasteurized, but i think the cold UV pasteurization process commonly used around here does not kill all the wild yeasts. At any rate, mine routinely ferments, all three brands i tend to buy.
That sounds almost exactly what our apple juice concentrate cider was like. It smelled heavenly, but it was mostly sour and a little bitter. I don’t know about hangovers, because I never actually could choke enough down at one sitting to give me one. But it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if the stuff gave fearsome hangovers.
That just means that it’s essentially pasteurized when packaged, and likely what happens is that bacteria get a foothold before the yeast do, which is not typically the case with the flora that’s naturally on/in the apples.
I would bet that if you pitched some cider yeast, it would ferment just fine.
This discussion of UV pasteurization of fresh cider
https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1355&context=etd
Suggests that the treatment reduces the bacterial count more than it reduces yeast. It talks about how the treated cider keeps longer before it ferments, not that it falls to ferment.
And you could toss in a little yeast, i suppose.
All I was getting at is that typically if you leave freshly pressed cider out, it spontaneously ferments because the naturally present yeasts get the upper hand quickly.
If you pasteurize it in some way, you screw up the existing flora (wipe it out largely), and that means that whatever gets to it first may dominate.
Which is why I always “Wonderbra” my ciders. Just before bottling, I hit the batch with a can of frozen apple juice concentrate. Gives just the right amount of carbonation and a nice but not cloying sweetness. Enough to win me at least 10 awards in 4 states at least, even though I would be shunned by CAMRA.
You didn’t get bottle grenades? I’d have thought you’d either ferment out all the sugar, or it would continue to ferment and blow up the bottles.
Although I suppose maybe the ABV was high enough to inhibit the yeast from fermenting all the sugar out? I have to imagine that’s a pretty narrow tightrope to walk though.
It is, but I use a yeast with a low tolerance for alcohol percentage. That, and it’s pretty much worn out by the time I dose. I tend to let it stay in the fermenter until bone dry. Damn near arid.
Still, I wouldn’t want to stash them in the back of the closet for a future occasion.
Canada has a lot of people of British origin and some of their traditions. There was a time two decades ago when drinks like Strongbow were trendy, popular in bars and widely available on tap. They are certainly sold at all provincial liquor stores. I am sure some taverns still serve them, but most probably open a can rather than a spigot. AFAIK they are no longer that popular, but I’m not that up to date with these things.