Non-beer Brewing

There’s a food market in central New Jersey near where my parents live called Delicious Orchards. They’ve got lots of great fruits and veggies, gourmet coffee and tea, chocolates and candies from places I’m not sure actually exist, cheeses, cakes…you name it. But the best thing they have is apple cider. Awesome apple cider. They make these killer apple cider donuts with it that are painfully good. Painful because I eat too many and get a stomach ache. That good.

So one day I decided I’d try to make some hard cider with some of this stuff. I mean, I’ve got all this equipment for fermenting things and I love cider, so why not? They sell two kinds: regular and tart. I’ve never actually had the tart, but I’m sure it’s good. For this experiment I bought a gallon of the regular stuff. The process was simple – dump some cider in a gallon jug, chuck in some yeast, pop an airlock on it and wait. I used some ale yeast I had sitting around, probably WLP001 California Ale but I honestly can’t remember and I lost the notes for this. I don’t even remember when I did this, because I only just found the bottles of it this morning. The bottles are labelled “Cider 7% 6-20-08” so I’m guessing I threw it in the primary in April, secondary in May and bottled in June. But that’s a wild guess.