So, you can leave out rats, snake heads, lead shot, sheep, and trouser buttons. Not letting it come in contact with metal may be tricky, given the cider-making implements at hand.
As Applejack is a distilled beverage, board rules prevent giving you advice on how to make it.
Cider, however, can be as simple as a 4:1 water:apple juice ratio, so, 4 gallons of water per 1 gallon of juice. If you want it to be stronger, leave out half a gallon of water and replace it with 4 pounds of honey.
Do not under any circumstances use deadfall apples. The three-second rule does not apply when you’re going to toss it into a nutrient vat and let it ferment for a month.
I now name and invoke The Sitting Duck Rule. There a so many easy and amusing answers that come to mind that a sporting person must simply throw up his or her hands and walk away.
Picked apples for a few orchards when I was younger.
Harvested windfall apples were almost universally ( Could be different on Discworld) turned into cider. The joke was the brown color was derived from the slugs ground up in it.
I live in proper UK cider country, and also know quite a few UK hobby cider makers (hopefully trying it myself this year too)- they don’t add any water to the mix, it’s just pure juice, and they all use windfall apples.
You really don’t have to worry about a few bugs and stuff in there either- one traditional English recipe really does involve chucking a dead rat in there, which entirely dissolves. Other places let a toad swim through the juice (apparently they’d keep a pet toad on the orchard for the purpose), dating back from before anyone knew anything about what caused fermentation, when there were some really bizarre ideas about what would encourage it.
I always thought Scumble was Terry’s playful way of renaming Scrumpy, which is Very Strong Cider. It is mostly apples. Counts as one of your five a day, of course.
I always thought of it as moonshine, made from whatever they had available.
It might just be a Noodle Incident, something that leaves out the details cuz anything you make up to fill them in yourself will funnier than what the author could write.
I was going to suggest concentration via freezing and removing the ice (warning: this may still be technically illegal in the US), but apparently making applejack via that method can result in a potentially dangerous or at least nasty-hangover-producing beverage. So never mind.
This is a wonderful thread and exactly the kind of information/stories I was looking for. Please keep sharing.
I really appreciate homemade goods like this too and I’m always interested in learning from the kitchens and breweries of others. So please keep it coming, and thank you!
I heard there’s a test to see if it’s real discworld scumble. Have someone light a match, hold it over the mug of scumble, and peek into the mug. If he still has his eyelashes and eyebrows after that, it’s not real scumble.
Outside of New Zealand, distillation of alcohol for human consumption is illegal pretty much everywhere and always.
Distillation for other reasons, for use as a fuel or just as a science project, generally legal most other places in the world including the USA.
It’s ‘possible’ to get a distillation permit in the US, but not practical for most people. I’m not a lawyer, but I read up on the subject a few years back.
Anybody interested in distillation should check out homedistiller.org for some interesting reading, but be aware that actually *making *liquor is about as illegal as making methamphetamine.
Yup. I’m a homebrewer (in the US) so I know full well that running a still to make homemade booze is seriously illegal, but I wasn’t sure about just concentrating some hard cider. Turns out it’s probably a spectacularly bad idea regardless of legality.
I honestly don’t know if freeze distillation counts, but I believe so. It’s not as bad of an idea as it may sound. Any time you are using fruit as a base, instead of sucrose, you can end up with methanol and other impurities. But proper procedure and attention to detail will reduce or eliminate that risk. Most of the fear of methanol is outdated propaganda from the First War on Drugs (Prohibition), it’s like concerns about leftover lye in homemade meth.
