Cider Can Be Hard!

I'm really enjoying this home brewing thing.  I'm on my fourth batch of beer and ready to rack it to secondary. Batch one was a PDG(Pretty Darn Good) Pale Ale from a Great Fermentations kit. It tasted good. It was bitterer than the beer I was used to. There was a nice aroma from the hops. After I let some if it actually carbonate, it even had a nice feel on the tongue. My success encouraged me to stay the course.

I bought a second kit from Great Fermentations called Easy Wheat. The second batch was a mild wheat beer. I was going to add cherry for something similar to Sam Adams cherry wheat. Apparently, I didn't sanitize as well as I thought. Some bit of bacteria slipped into the fermenter and I got serious funk in my beer. All but a half gallon of that batch went to the septic. I have a faint hope the batch will mellow over time like a Brett beer, tart but tasty. It's a very faint hope.

I decided to try again. This time I bought a kit from Tuxedo Park Brewers Supply. They're pretty cool over there. This batch turned out good. The beer was bland but after I added the cherry concentrate, it turned out very tasty. I got some great feedback on the beer and actual requests for more.

About the time I started the second batch of beer, I also decided to dive headfirst into hard cider. It was October and the apple orchard out by Mom's house had fresh apple cider without preservatives. I did some reading, listened to some podcasts and I was ready to go.

I bought a gallon jug of the cider and a packet of bread yeast. I was going low tech. I drilled a hole in the cap of the bottle and fitted it with an airlock to keep that nasty bacteria laden air outside and release the carbon dioxide created during fermentation. I heated the cider to pasteurize and added the yeast, then some corn sugar for extra oomph and yeast food. For weeks, I checked the bottle. It bubbled steadily for a month.

Finally, I couldn't stand it any more. I decided to bottle the cider. I was much more excited than a gallon of hard cider deserved. With a happy heart, I went to the basement and set the cider on the washer. Then I ran back upstairs to heat up some sugar water for carbonating the bottles.

When the carbonating mixture was ready, I skipped merrily down the stairway to the garage eager to add it to the mix and rack the cider into bottles. When I reached the washer, I was devastated to see my gallon of cider on the floor and the clothes washer on the spin cycle with an unbalanced load. Half my cider had leaked out of the cap. Not only was I going to have to clean up the cider, the smell was going to permeate the garage and my dirty clothes for weeks.

I set the cider up on the washer since the spin cycle was finished. With the dirty towels, I started to mop up the cider. Man, I was mad at myself. That was a dumb move. I saved some of the cider but I lost a lot. In my own little world, I kept cleaning.

Suddenly, a bottle of cider fell on my head. Apparently, my clothes washer has two spin cycles. I quickly righted the bottle after losing a little more of the precious elixir. I turned off the washer and set the bottle on top. Then, I inserted a racking siphon into the neck of the bottle. A racking siphon is a rigid plastic tube used inside a container to move liquid from one container to another. I had attached a plastic tube and bottle wand to the end to make filling my bottles easier.

Apparently, a racking cane with a tube on the end is exactly heavy enough to tip a half bottle of apple cider. Yes dear reader, after filling one half bottle, six ounces, the bottle once again fell on top of my head. It was at this point that I went insane.

After waiting impatiently for over a month with joy and excitement in my heart, I had been forced, through my own stupidity to kneel in a pungent apple mixture and then been attacked not once but twice by the very cider I was trying to save. I ranted. I raved. I dented my washer. Not only that but I still have no idea where the bottle from the cider landed when I heaved it out the door and into the woods.

Several weeks later, I saw some cider for sale in the grocery store. FYI even when its not on the label, commercial cider contains an additive to prevent fermentation. At least this time, I don't smell like apples.

Cider can be hard. However, I can't seem to prove it.