6911 The New Cider Maker's Handbook

Contents

Preface

vii

Part I The Basics of Cider Making 1 1. Material and Supplies 2. The Raw Material: Apple Juice 3. Cider Preparation

5 15 19

Part II Growing Apples for Cider 27 4. The Cider Orchard

29

4.1 The Cultural Practices

30

4.2 An Extensive Cider Orchard Example

33

4.3 Planning the Cider Orchard

35

4.4 A Commercial Orchard Example: Poverty Lane Orchards

39

5. The Varietal Selection

45

5.1 Cider-Apple Classification

46

5.2 Recommended Varieties by Region

53

5.3 Directory of Apple Varieties

59

Part III Juice Extraction 89 6. Apple Mills

6.1 Main Characteristics of Mills

93

6.2 Making a Grater Mill

103

7. Apple Presses

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93

113

7.1 Main Characteristics of Presses

114

7.2 Designing and Building a Press

121

7.3 Strength of the Press Frame

136

7.4 Screw Mechanics

143

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Part IV The Apple Juice or Must 149 8. The Sugars

153

8.1 Generalities on Sugars

8.2 The Hydrometer

161

8.3 The Amount of Sugar in Apple Juice

169

9. The Acids

153

177

9.1 Total or Titratable Acidity

177

9.2 Measurement of Total Acidity by Titration

180

9.3 The Acidity and the pH

182

10. The Tannins, or Phenolic Substances 11. The Nitrogenous Substances 12. The Pectic Substances

187 191 195

Part V Fermentation and Beyond 199 13. Blending 14. The Fermentation Process

201 209

14.1 The Sulfite

209

14.2 The Yeast and Yeast Nutrients

218

14.3 The Monitoring and Control of the Fermentation

225

14.4 The Malolactic Fermentation

237

14.5 The Alcohol

241

15. Cider Diversity

255

15.1 Sweetness in Cider

255

15.2 Bubbles in the Cider

265

15.3 Ice Cider

279

16. Cider Troubles and How to Avoid Them 291 and Measures Appendix 2 Companion Materials Bibliography Index

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Appendix 1 Units

301 305 311 319

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Preface

I am pleased to present to the cider community this modest contribution to the art and science of cider making. You will find in this book a number of texts and discussions, or articles, dealing with different aspects of the preparation of cider.

The first part is on basic cider-making practices.

Before going on to more in-depth discussions, I thought it was important to present a simple, proven, and sound method to prepare a good cider without any distraction. Once the cider maker has mastered the basic practices, it is time to start experimenting with new or more complex things.

Each of the subsequent parts, then, concentrates on a single facet of cider making. Part II is on obtaining the best possible apples for preparing the cider through adequate cultural practices and varietal selection. As you will see by reading further, I believe the quality of the apples to be a most important factor in obtaining a superior cider.

Part III covers the extraction of the juice from the apples. Making use of my mechanical engineering background, I present a design guide for mills and presses based on sound engineering. Part IV is on the apple juice and how its properties may be influential in the cider that will be obtained from it. And Part V is on cider making itself, the process of fermentation and transformation of the

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juice into cider. You will notice that I have used the word cider in its true international sense: an alcoholic beverage made from the fermentation of apple juice—what is usually called hard cider in the United States. (What is often called sweet cider or simply cider in the United States is really the fresh apple juice, or the must, from which we make true cider.)

What you will not find in this book is a history of cider. Quite a few authors have already done that work, and most of them did it better than I could have. In particular, Ben Watson, in his book Cider, Hard and Sweet (2009) covers the history of cider from the beginning of civilization through the Roman era and its evolution in Europe and America. And Joan Morgan, with Alison Richards, in The New Book of Apples (2002), also gives an excellent historical account, with more emphasis on the story of cider in England. Some excellent books written in French do the same for France and Quebec. For similar reasons, you will not find elaborate tasting sheets and procedures, nor recipes of good food you could prepare with cider and apples, or methods to make such drinks as fruit flavored ciders, apple flavored wines or enhanced ciders. Right from the start, I wanted this book to focus on the preparation of pure juice,

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The New Cider Maker’s Handbook

unadulterated cider and understanding the phenomena that occur during the transformation from an apple flower bud in the orchard to an apple, then to the must or fresh juice, which finally becomes cider—all of this with a view toward obtaining a final product of the highest quality possible. In retrospect, this was enough to keep an author busy for a while.

There are many reasons you might come to cider making. It could be that you have some apples available that would be lost if not processed into cider. Or it may be for health reasons: cider certainly is one of the healthiest drinks; you may have an intolerance to some chemical product and want a drink whose ingredients you can control, or you may want to make it from entirely organic fruit. It may even be for economic reasons or to avoid paying taxes on your tipple. All reasons are good! For my part, a long and winding road has brought me to this point. It all started in 1982: I was a young mechanical engineer pursuing a master’s degree in solar energy. I enjoyed alpine skiing and fell in love with a piece of land about an hour’s drive from the city of Quebec, close to a beautiful but still undeveloped ski center. The land was on a gentle slope facing south with a beautiful view on the Saint Lawrence River. It was an ideal spot to build the concept passive solar energy house I had been thinking about. Nothing there predestined me toward becoming a cider maker, except that there were a few rows of old abandoned apple trees on the land. At the time I had no particular liking for apples or apple trees, but I thought this was no reason not to buy this land, which was, in all other aspects, ideal for my projects. But then I started cutting the bushes growing on the orchard floor and providing some care to the old trees, which rewarded my efforts by

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giving me loads of apples that I didn’t know what to do with—that is, until some friends convinced me to make cider with them. I was reluctant at first, as cider had a very bad reputation at the time, a consequence of low-quality ciders made industrially during the 1970s in Quebec. But my first trials convinced me it was worthwhile to continue, and the following year I had a brand-new press to extract the juice from my apples. A few rows of old apple trees changed my life—the life of a young engineer who became a cider maker and author.

The book you now hold is really the book I wish I had had when I started to gain interest in cider making and wanted to know more. Yes, there were some books, and some good ones, but they were never as complete as I would have liked them to be. There are also some very specialized books on oenology, but there was a large gap between these two classes of books, which I have tried to fill, at least in part. If a book such as this one had existed back then, it would have saved me quite a bit of work, and I could have progressed faster in my cider-making abilities. But then I wouldn’t have had the challenge of writing it. An important point about this book is that it is based mostly on my notes and tests, my personal experience and research, and borrows relatively little from other publications. In a certain sense, this is influenced by the style of the books that were written 100 to 120 years ago by some true pioneers.

In those days, cider making was essentially an art based on intuition and tradition. These men, who were true scientists, spent literally years in their laboratories analyzing samples of apple juices and ciders with rudimentary instruments. They built the foundations of the scientific knowledge we now have on cider, and the books they wrote are extremely inspiring.

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Preface There are many people to whom I am indebted and who have contributed more or less directly to this book. It started in 1988, when I went with a couple of carloads of apples to the orchard of Pierre Lafond, the owner of Cidrerie Saint-Nicolas, who lent me his press so I could produce my first juice.

He encouraged me, gave me good advice—in particular to read the book by Georges Warcollier that was at the university library—and I became a cider maker. He and his wife, Patricia Daigneault, were also helpful when it came time to write about ice cider (see chapter 15).

The next important step was when I started to participate in the Cider Digest discussion group on the Internet. For this I thank Dick Dunn, the self-styled “janitor” of the digest, for the exceptional work he has done over the years, and still does. With the digest, I started to communicate with other cider makers, exchange ideas, discuss methods of preparing the cider, and sort out technical details. Many of the discussions on the digest have evolved into one article or another of this book. Through the digest I was also able to meet some other extraordinary cider makers, in particular, Andrew Lea, the “official cider scientist” of our community. Andrew has helped me settle numerous technical details, giving this book a sounder scientific base. Gary Awdey, the president of the Great Lakes Cider and Perry Association, allowed my first trials of keeved ciders, as he generously made available the PME enzyme to the community of cider makers. Gary is also responsible for having me participate in cider competitions.

At first I was hesitant, but since my ciders have won their share of medals, I started to like that! I discussed details of cider making with many other

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ix

participants in the Cider Digest and the Cider Workshop discussion forums; I thank them all.

Two other very important persons in my cider life have been Terry Maloney, who unfortunately left us prematurely while working on his cider, and his wife, Judith. With the annual Cider Days event that they initiated, I was able to meet in person most of the people mentioned here. Some cider makers have participated more directly in this book: Steve Wood showed great patience when I went to meet him for an interview, and he and Derek Bisset, John Brett, Chuck Shelton, Dick Dunn, and Gary Awdey helped by making recommendations on the most appropriate varietal selection for different regions of North America. Michael Phillips, the maker of an infamous “battery-acid cider,” is a great inspiration to us, always searching for better ways to grow apples; he kindly reviewed some of my writing on apple growing. Ben Watson, my editor, as well as a cider lover and promoter, believed I could make a good book on cider and managed to convince Chelsea Green of this, after having seen only about twenty pages of text, mostly written in French. And for the third time, I thank Dick Dunn, who reviewed the first draft of the manuscript and made many good suggestions. Finally, I would like to mention my wife, Banou Khamzina, who first said innocently, “Claude, I think you should write a book.” She didn’t know what she was getting into.

I close this preface with a warning: cider making is highly addictive. Once you start, it may be very difficult to stop! It might change your life completely (and the life of the people that surround you also).

Claude Jolicoeur Québec, January 2013

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The New Cider Maker’s Handbook

Centrifugal Mills Centrifugal mills represent the most recent evolution in milling, as some modern technology is required to make them. These mills use blades that rotate at high speed inside a chamber to hit, cut, and project the apple particles against the walls of the chamber (see figure 6.6). The particles are finally ejected through a grid by centrifugal force.

The dimension of the openings of this grid dictates the size of the pomace. Some models have interchangeable grids of different sizes. Hammer mills are a type of centrifugal mill where masses rather than blades are used to smash. Large industrial hammer mills have many of these rotating masses side by side (figure 6.7). Centrifugal mills require more powerful motors than grater mills of the same capacity.

Big hammer mills are common in large cider operations both in Europe and in America.

Centrifugal mills are used mainly in Europe for the smaller production of serious hobbyists or small commercial cider makers. Here are some of the most popular models: • The Fruit Shark (figure 6.8) is a Czech mill made by Vares (www.vares.cz). It is especially widespread in England, where there is a distributor (www.ciderworkshop.com/fruitshark .html). It is also distributed in France (www .tompress.com). Rated at 250 to 600 kg/h (dependi ng on the source of information), the mill is supplied only with a 50 Hz motor and so isn’t available in America.

• The Speidel mill from Germany (www.speidels -hausmosterei.de) is more expensive than the Fruit Shark but has greater capacity, with a rating of one ton per hour (figure 6.9). This makes it powerful enough for small commercial cider making. It is generally available and quite popular in Europe but is not well known in North

Figure 6.6. Chamber and rotor of a Pillan centrifugal mill.

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Apple Mills

99

America, even if it is (Mini Mixer) has a capacity available with a 220 V/60 of 800 kg/h and the mediHz motor (see morewine um (Mixer), rated 1,500 to making.com), which does 2,000 kg/h. There also is a require a special outlet. larger model (Maxi Mixer), • Italian “trumpet” mills rated 3 to 4.5 tons/h. are so called because of • The Austrian company their shape and look (figVoran (www.voran.at) has ure 6.10). Made of staina line of centrifugal mills less steel, they are proranging from 650 to 4,000 Figure 6.7. Rotor of a hammer mill. Photo by Red58bill, Wikimedia Commons. duced by different mankg/h in addition to a grater ufacturers under the mill. All their mills are trade names Zambelli (www.zambellienotech equipped with 380 V motors. These are indus.it), Pillan (www.enotecnicapillan.it), and others. trial-quality mills for professional use.

(Note that Pillan bought Zambelli in 2001, and their product lines have now merged.) Some are In addition to the above commercial models imported to Canada and the United States fitmade specifically for apples and fruits, some ted with a 60 Hz motor that may require a spepeople have adapted machines designed for other cial 220 V or 240 V outlet; others may be fitted purposes. In particular, inventive cider makers with a 110 V motor. Two models are sometimes have modified kitchen sink disposals and garden sold in wine-making supply stores: the smallest shredders into small centrifugal apple mills.

Figure 6.8. Fruit Shark mill. Photo courtesy of Vicky Gorman.

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Figure 6.9. Speidel mill. Photo courtesy of Speidel.

Figure 6.10. Italian “trumpet” mill.

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