Cider anyone?

Today was bottling day. My goal: to have hard cider available and ready to drink by Easter, since I promised my brother that I'd have some ready to go for our family gathering. I've been wanting to make my own hard cider for awhile now, and this year I finally got around to trying it. This batch uses natural yeast, entirely. I was on a mission last fall to find some cider mills that still offer unpasteurized cider, and fortunately, I found some. This is no small task these days. Apparently about five years ago, someone developed an e. coli infection from drinking cider, and so the scare police got a bill rammed through our state legislature to require warning labels for unpasteurized cider. It turns out that the cider mill with the miscreant cider utilized fallen apples from an apple orchard where horses freely grazed. Apparently, some road apples got in with the real McCoys, thus the e. coli infection. Nasty, ain't it? Regardless, the damage was done, and the legislation passed, so most cider mills decided to implement pasteurization to avoid a big ole WARNING label on the side of their jug, truly a tragedy. People have been drinking cider the old fashioned way for centuries, and enjoying that zing that starts to develop after about a week: the beginning of fermentation. Thanks to pasteurization, that just won't happen anymore, let alone the production of a true, natural batch of hard cider.

Thankfully, my search for the real deal paid off. Back in the fall, I found two places that produce unpasteurized cider, one about an hour away, and another two hours away. Both were worth the drive! I bought some from each cider mill, came home, and poured them into two separate glass carboys, sealed them with a water lock, and waited. After about a week, those carboys started foaming up, and roiled away as the fermentation took hold and went to town. Slowly, over time, the cider cleared as sediment collected on the bottom. Eventually, the fermentation stopped completly, and I let the cider just sit and mellow, until about a month ago. I decided to test the cider out, and so did a test bottle of each. The first was a batch mixed with cherry juice, what this cider mill calls cherry cider. They simply mix cherries in with the apples as they press them. I thought this would be a nice flavor, and it resulted in a cider with a beautiful reddish hue. The other was straight apple, and it has the look of white wine. I placed some priming sugar in each bottle, hoping for some additional bottle fermentation, which would result in sparkling cider. After a few weeks I figured it was time to try them. The cherry cider was a bit dry, but the pure apple was fantastic. I was pretty proud of that apple batch, and I'm hoping it's just as good come Easter.

For some reason, it's immensely satisfying for me to know that this cider developed from the yeast naturally found in these orchards. It's so fascinating to see how nature took it's course and transformed these two batches of cider into delicious alcohol, each with a different personality. I wish I had the wherewithal and knowledge to actually identify the individual strain of the yeast found in each of these batches. From what I've read about yeast, it's likely that they're different strains, though in a similar family. These orchards are over an hour away from each other, and it's highly doubtful that they'd be the same. There are thousands of different yeasts in nature, and each brings it's own flavor components and personalities to the table. I find it disappointing that because of an act of legislature, it now is only in a handful of orchards where one can take advantage of these unique yeasts. The yeasts are still growing in the fields and orchards, but they're stopped dead in their tracks through technology-- to me, that's a tragedy.

I plan to use the leftovers, or dregs, of this batch to experiment even more with yeast. I have a plan of attack to cause the yeast that's still in the carboy to be turned into bread! I have a fairly extensive library of cookbooks, and in one of my favorites, "Baking With Julia," there are instructions on how to begin a sourdough starter. The object is to capture the natural yeast in the environment, and feed this starter with the ultimate goal of baking bread. You start with whole wheat flour, a little sugar, a little water, and a tiny amount of milk. You let this sit in the open for two days, and if all goes well, a spore of yeast will land on your starter and begin fermenting it's little heart out. Well, instead of water or milk, I'm going to just put some of the remnants of my hard apple cider in with the whole wheat, and hopefully, the yeast I captured from an orchard an hour south of Kalamazoo will become the basis for some tasty bread. My plan: on Easter, we'll be drinking hard cider, alongside bread produced from the same yeast that made the cider. This is the type of thing that gets me all fired up!

I'll let you know how it goes.