Goerwitz

By Richard Goerwitz

If you’re looking for directions on how to make decent hard cider and mead with just a few basic pieces of equipment, and without any chemicals or preservatives, you’ll get that here.

My target audience is people who like the idea of making their own naturally fermented drinks, but who have other priorities in their lives and don't want to spend a lot of money or devote a lot of time and/or space to the process. They just want to have fun.

If that describes you—and if you don't mind a little philosophizing about why small amounts of cider and mead are good for you—read on.

Why I Do It

F or me personally, making naturally fermented beverages is recreation. I don’t expect things to turn out perfectly but I do expect to have fun. My cider is sometimes cloudy. My wine is often sweet. My mead is often too alcoholic. I dislike following recipes. And I rarely make exactly the same thing twice. It's a blast.

Another motivation is that I like growing things. Watching a container of what was once plain apple juice bubble, foam, and transform in my family room while I watch TV, or write web pages, is fascinating, sometimes mesmerizing.

As for the end product, recent medical research has confirmed, amply, that light doses of alcohol (three to seven ounces of fluid a day containing 6-12% alcohol) enhance arterial and cardiovascular health and stave off cognitive decline. If you're reluctant to drink, for religious reasons, I'm not going to advocate abandoning your principles. By all means, follow your conscience. See, however, what I have to say about this below.

Basic Equipment

Basic Equipment

T o start make good ciders (or other fruit wines) and meads, all you need is:

1. One gallon jug
2. Bung (i.e., a stopper) with a hole in it; must fit the jug (e.g., #6)
3. Airlock (must fit the hole in the bung)
4. A meter/yard or more of food-grade siphon tubing and a clamp
5. Brewer's yeast
6. #8 or #9 corks, corker (if you want to bottle)

All this equipment will be available at your local brewing and winemaking supply shop. You can also order it online. My favorite supplier is Midwest Brewing Supplies. The total cost for everything will be fifty or sixty dollars, half of which will go to the corker. Five or ten dollars will get you a pressure/plunger-style corker that works fine, but takes a little more elbow grease to use.

I list the corker as optional because you don't have to bottle what you make. Instead, you can just stick the gallon jug in the refrigerator when you think its contents are done fermenting. It'll keep quite nicely there for at least three weeks, even if you're living in a warm area and aren't tremendously careful with the jug (this I get from my father, who uses the same equipment and basic recipe in Florida, in the southern U.S.).

If you do want to bottle, don't go out and buy wine bottles. If it's legal in your area, just go out trash picking the night before the recyclers make the rounds in your neighborhood. Or ask your neighbors for their empties. Sometimes you can even get gallon jugs that way still.

I'll assume that you already have typical kitchen supplies like dish soap, dish washing brushes, and funnels, which you can use for cleaning and to help with pouring.

Recipe: Mead

M ead is one of the easiest fermented drinks to make. You basically just take organically produced raw honey, add some fruit juice, then stick it into a gallon jug with an airlock until it stops fermenting. It's a little more involved than this, but not much.

Because they are honey-based, most people expect meads to be sweet, and sometimes they are. This recipe, however, results in a classic dry mead, i.e., a complex, sharp, alcoholic mead that has very little residual sugar.

Ingredients:

• One jar organic, unpasteurized raw honey (47 oz)
• Two cans organic apple, cherry, pear, or raspberry juice concentrate (12 oz/355ml; no preservatives)
• Dry yeast package (you'll only use half of it)

Mead Ingredients and Equipment

For this recipe I use EC-1118 champagne yeast, which has a neutral flavor and can subsist happily at a wide range of temperatures. Depending on conditions it will allow your mead to ferment out to around 16% alcohol. If that's too high for you (it's a bit high for me, but I like the reliability of this yeast), then use a different yeast that ferments out to a lower alcohol percentage, and use less honey initially. In general, feel free to experiment. It's really hard to screw this up.

For the chemistry-aware, the explanation for what might seem like a lot of honey and concentrate for just a one-gallon jug is that we want to get the specific gravity of the mixture (called must) up over 1.12. I.e., we want to add enough sugar that the must becomes 12% heavier than plain water. At that level of sweetness, the must can potentially ferment out to over 16% alcohol, i.e., to around the range where EC-1118 quits. Some yeasts have trouble getting started in such a sweet must, but I've never had issues with EC-1118.

After a month fermenting in the jug, when the EC-1118 has mostly died out, we'll do what's called racking. Racking basically just means removing the emerging mead from the yeast sediment (lees) that accumulate at the bottom of the jug. This is done by siphoning the mead into another clean jug—or else by siphoning it into a six quart pot, cleaning the original jug well with soap and water, then siphoning the mead back in. (Which is what I do.)

Although the lees are actually quite nutritious, they have varied, and not always pleasant, effects on your mead. For one thing, the dead yeast's cell walls will eventually begin to break down and the cells will start to self destruct (a process called autolysis). This process can add body and richness to the mead, but it can also create off-tastes and sulfury smells. Usually the sulfury smell blows off in a day or two, especially if you agitate the jug. If the smell persists, and bothers you, you can rack your mead early, then rack it again when it's done fermenting (then rack it again for bottling or storage—on which, see below).

During the entire fermentation process (except for the siphoning and racking) the mead sits under an airlock. The reason for the airlock is that it lets the carbon dioxide produced by the yeast escape without allowing new organisms or fresh air in. Many organisms—in particular the ones that make vinegar—need fresh air. So by keeping the airlock on the jug you're denying the vinegar bacteria a foothold. For good measure, keep the jug out of direct light as well (light + air = algae and other nasties).

For those who like to see explicit steps written out, here they are:

• Fill a six-quart pot halfway with filtered or good tap water
• Warm gently on a stove top for a few minutes
• Pour in two cans of organic apple, pear, cherry, etc. concentrate (no preservatives)
• Pour the honey in as well
• Stir until dissolved
• Siphon into a clean one gallon jug
• If necessary add water—until the fluid sits three inches from the top of the jug
• Insert a clean, appropriately sized (usually a #6) bung into the jug
• Insert a clean airlock into the bung
• Drip an ounce of filtered water or vodka into the airlock
• Let cool to about room temperature (EC-1118 is good up to 30° C/86° F)
• Remove the bung and airlock and dump in a half package of dry yeast
• Replace the bung and airlock; fermentation/bubbling will begin within a day if the yeast is good
• Let stand until fermentation dies down to < one bubble through the airlock a minute (~one month)
• Rack, i.e., siphon out of the jug and into a six-quart pot (leaving the lees behind)
• Take a drink; add honey if additional sweetness is desired
• Clean the jug well with soap and water, and siphon the mead back into it
• Replace the bung, then re-insert the airlock
• Re-rack and re-stopper if sediment accumulates
• Wait until the whole mixture clarifies (~three months)

Once the mead clarifies (or before then, if you're not picky), you can remove the airlock, cap the jug with an undrilled bung, or with the drilled bung you've been using (after sticking something into the hole), and put it in the fridge. The mead will keep for several weeks, often longer. Sweet meads tend to spoil more quickly than dry, alcoholic ones.

Alternatively, you can bottle at this point, which involves simply

• Siphoning the mead into wine bottles
• Corking the bottles with a corker
• Storing the bottles upright until you're sure fermentation is really done
• Drinking the mead—or storing it horizontally for aging

Note that, unlike me, most home brewing and winemaking enthusiasts use heat and chemicals to kill unwanted organisms, to arrest fermentation at a time and place of their choosing, and, in general, to produce a consistent, predictable-tasting product.

For my part, I don't like adding chemical preservatives or cleaners and I generally don't heat things above about 120° F. if I can avoid it. I do wash my equipment carefully with soap and water. Sometimes I'll even microwave it quickly. But ultimately I don't care if some wild yeast find their way in and alter the flavor of whatever I'm making.

Recipe: Cider

Ingredients:

• One gallon apple juice, fresh from the press/orchard (no preservatives!)
• One cup sugar (sucrose—or fructose, if you can find the latter)
• Dry yeast package (you'll only use half of it)

As with mead, I typically use EC-1118 as my cider yeast. It tolerates a broad range of conditions and has a neutral flavor. It has a high alcohol tolerance and works quickly, exhausting all the sugar in the must within a month (often within a week or two), leaving a dry cider between 6% and 8% alcohol. Lowering the temperature (50-55 degrees as opposed to room temperature) can make EC-1118 quit fermenting earlier than it otherwise would. But in general, if you like sweet cider, don't use this yeast. Find something that ferments out to a lower alcohol percentage.

Sometimes I add a can of organic cherry juice concentrate to the cider (again, check the label to be sure it has no preservatives that might kill the yeast).

Full directions:

• Pour 12-ounces of your freshly pressed apple juice into a glass and drink it
• Pour the rest into a six-quart pot
• Warm gently on a stove top for a few minutes
• Pour in 1 1/2 cups of sugar, or a half cup and a can of cherry, pear, or other concentrate
• Stir until dissolved
• Siphon into a clean one gallon jug
• If necessary add/remove water—until the fluid sits three inches from the top of the jug
• Insert a clean, appropriately sized bung into the jug
• Insert a clean airlock into the bung
• Drip an ounce of filtered water or vodka into the airlock
• Cool overnight
• Remove the bung and airlock and dump in a half package of dry yeast
• Replace the bung and airlock; fermentation will begin within a day
• Let stand until the fermentation dies down mostly (two to four weeks)
• Rack, i.e., siphon the must into a six-quart pot (leaving the lees behind)
• Take a drink; add a half cup of sugar if it's too weak (experiment!)
• Clean the jug well with soap and water, and siphon the mead back into it
• Replace the bung, then re-insert the airlock
• Wait until the whole mixture clarifies (three to six months)

Overpressurizing

Once the cider clarifies (or before then, if you don't care about the color), you can remove the airlock, cap the jug with a plain stopper or with the bung (after sticking something into the hole), and put it into the fridge. The cider will keep for a few weeks, sometimes longer.

Cider has a sharp, sour apple-ish taste that takes a while to get used to if you're a beer or wine drinker, or a non-drinker. It grows on you after a few batches. Adding cherry concentrate cuts the sharp taste a bit (my wife likes it better that way). Cider is also good poured into unfermented fruit juice to make a cooler.

If you like, you can also bottle your cider, which involves simply

• Siphoning the cider into wine bottles
• Corking the bottles with your corker (directions will come with the tool)
• Storing the bottles upright until you're sure fermentation is really done
• Uncorking and drinking the cider—or storing it horizontally for aging

If you have a bottle capper and some caps (very optional), it's sometimes fun to add a half cup or so of sugar to the cider and, instead of siphoning it back into the jug to clarify, siphon it into clean beer bottles, and then cap them. After a few weeks you'll get a nice, dry sparkling cider. Don't go overboard on the sugar, though. In October 2007 I tried this (i.e., going overboard on the sugar), in efforts to create a sweeter sparking cider. The EC-1118 devoured the sugar and overpressurized the bottles, causing one of them (probably a defective one) to explode. Of course, when one bottle goes, its neighbors typically go, too, especially if the bottles are stacked right on top of each other. The result is, well, a mess. See the photo, right. (The culprit in this case was the little box in the upper left center part of the photo, not the well-padded beer cases where the cider-filled bottles were better protected.)

Mead and Wine as Christian Drinks

I t is a peculiar feature of many Protestant groups in the U.S. that they shun alcohol. Given the degree to which alcohol is abused here, as elsewhere, I can't take issue with anyone who feels it's better just to abstain. What I do take minor issue with, though, is the notion that abstinence is required by the Christian faith.

I note, for example, that the in Christian book of John, Jesus' first miracle is to turn water into wine at a wedding party. And in the Christian books of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, one of Jesus' last acts is to give his disciples wine for Passover as (a symbol of) the blood he was to shed.

Although the wine could theoretically have been only partially fermented, or unfermented, recall that people living two millennia ago didn’t have refrigerators and high-tech preservatives. So if they wanted to keep juice around for more than a few days, and didn’t want vinegar, they had to store it in dark, sealed containers where the ubiquitous natural yeasts would spew alcohol and carbon dioxide, driving out harmful organisms, and allowing the juice to keep much longer than would otherwise be possible.

In all likelihood, therefore, it was wine (albeit a mild one), not grape juice, that Jesus was offering people at Passover and at the wedding. To me, Jesus' doing this reflects not so much promotion of alcohol per se as acceptance of wine, and other mild, healthful, fermented beverages, as a natural part of human culture.

Unfortunately, as human society has evolved, circumstances have changed: Agriculture has become more productive and yeasts have become more specialized and more tolerant of their own waste (i.e., alcohol). Distillation has also become widespread. As a result, alcoholic beverages have become available in quantities and strengths that our bodies simply haven’t had time to adapt to.

The result has been an epidemic of alcohol abuse, and a justifiable caution on some people’s parts about drinking it at all. I therefore, as noted, don't begrudge anyone's abstaining. I just believe that it is a personal choice, at least for Christians. I also believe that if an alcoholic beverage is created using simple, natural ingredients, and is carefully consumed in small amounts and at low strengths, it is very unlikely to be abused, and can bring fun and better health.

But again, this is just my personal opinion, and my personal choice. You may agree or disagree as you see fit!