“Savor and enjoy your next drink, whether it be a red wine, pint of ale, or a hard cider, a lot of work and care went into that beverage.” – Lee Larsen, 2Towns Ciderhouse
Written by Anneka Miller
Photos & Video by Will Kanellos
As soon as the leaves become crisp and golden, the grocery store isles are stocked with local apples, pears, and especially apple cider. Fresh apple cider, hard apple cider, and sparkling apple cider, they all appear, ready to help us ring in the fall. Nothing is better than a mug of spiced cider on a chilly evening, or a glass of local hard cider with friends.
The apple cider in that mug is the same thing as apple juice, except the natural apple pulp and sediment is left in rather than filtered out, which gives the drink extra body and character. Most store-bought apple cider has been pasteurized (heated to a high temperature to kill any bacteria). Some cider purists prefer raw cider to the pasteurized products.
“It tastes better,” says Katy Stokes, who presses her own apples for cider. “I think that it’s healthier for you. It’s a living food.”
Whether it’s pasteurized or raw, fresh or hard, the cider-making process begins with the apple harvest. Generally, there are two apple harvests, one early and one later in the fall. The weather during the growing season impacts how the apples will set and ripen. This year’s cold, wet spring impacted the blossom set on many of the apple trees in the Willamette Valley. Cold weather and lots of rain didn’t allow the blossoms to develop normally and get fertilized by beneficial insects, like bees.
Lee Miller, of Earth’s Rising Co-op Farm outside Monroe, noticed that his trees had almost no apples set for the late harvest and very few for the early harvest. A lot of his crops at the farm weren’t ripening on time either.
“Where was the heat in September?” he asks.
Stokes also has her own trees on 4 Wands Farm near Corvallis. About eight of them are standard trees over 100 years old. She explains that older trees, like hers, are every other year producers. She had a lighter crop this year as well.
Miller and Stokes agree that King apples are the best for fresh cider pressing. Good firm, hard apples are better for pressing, Miller explains. The softer the apple the harder it is to get a good press. All tallied, it takes roughly five gallons of apples to make one gallon of cider.
Stokes thinks that the best cider comes from a blend of apples. She also likes Spitzenburg apples. “They’re a little spicy,” she says. “They were Thomas Jefferson’s favorite apples.”
Stokes usually presses apples from the first week of September until the week before Thanksgiving. This year she’s already done two pressings with friends from Corvallis.
“It’s a traditional thing to get together with one person who has a [cider] press,” she says. “You can have a couple people running the grinder and other people prepping the apples.”
Apple presses come in all shapes and sizes. Stokes’ press is made out of wooden slats shaped into a barrel with an open top and bottom. Miller uses a plastic, PVC barrel with holes under his press.
Before the apples go into the press, they’re ground up. The mash of apples is put into the press barrel and then gets pressed to extract the juice. This fresh-pressed juice is also called sweet cider. It can be served warm or cold. Traditional hot, spiced cider recipes usually include cinnamon sticks and cloves that are steeped together and then served hot.
Besides enjoying fresh pressed apple cider, Miller freezes his juice for later. Stokes gives cider to friends who want fresh juice. Then she cans the rest or ferments it into cider vinegar and hard cider. Hard ciders require more processing time than plain fresh cider because the juice is fermented. Fermentation is a process that converts the sugars in the apple juice into alcohol to create hard cider.
Lee Larsen, another Corvallis-based cider enthusiast, plans to start such a cider label with childhood friend Aaron Sarnoff-Wood. They don’t have their own apple trees to get fruit from, like Miller and Stokes, so they purchase blended juices from a company in Washington for their label, 2Towns Ciderhouse.
When it comes to picking apples for hard cider, the best eating apples aren’t the best cider apples. “My favorites are Golden Russet and Rome varieties,” he says.
Larsen explains that eating apples don’t have enough acid or tannins, an astringent chemical property of some fruits, to make good hard cider.
Hard cider can be made with fresh-pressed apple juice, pasteurized apple juice, or juice concentrate, but a lot of hard cider makers deal with fresh-pressed apples. The first thing they add to their fresh juice is potassium metabisulfite, a chemical compound that kills any bacteria and unwanted wild yeasts. The juice then settles out and the clearer liquid is siphoned off into another fermenter where yeast gets added.
“Once your cider is happily fermenting away, you will want to decrease the fermentation temperature to somewhere around 60 to 65 degrees Fahrenheit,” Larsen says. This keeps the aromatics and flavors locked in that would ferment away if the temperature got too high.
It takes two weeks to a month for the first round of fermentation to finish. After the cider finishes it’s transferred to a secondary fermenter leaving a layer of “lees” – skin, pulp, and yeast particles – behind.
“The cider can stay in the secondary for two weeks to a year depending on how long you are willing to wait before you must sample the product,” Larsen laughs.
Once the desired characteristics are achieved, the cider is ready to go into the bottle. One of Larsen’s tips about cider is to “sanitize, sanitize, sanitize everything, and then sanitize again!” This is especially important during the bottling process because foreign bacteria can cause perfect hard cider to go bad in the bottle.
However you choose to celebrate this holiday season, consider including a little local apple cider, hard cider, or sparkling cider in the festivities.
Want to see how Lee Miller presses cider? Watch this behind-the-scenes video.
Your Own Cider Recipe
Spiced Cider by Georgeanne Brennan
Yield: Makes 6 servings of about 2/3 cup each
Total Time: 30 minutes
Ingredients:
5 cups apple cider
1 (3-inch) cinnamon stick
1 whole clove
1 (1/2-inch-thick) orange slice
1 (1/2-inch-thick) lemon slice
1/2 cup brandy
6 (3-inch) cinnamon sticks
For a nonalcoholic version, you can omit the brandy.
Preparation:
Combine cider, cinnamon stick, clove, orange slice, and lemon slice in a medium saucepan; bring to a boil. Cover, reduce heat, and simmer 30 minutes. Strain cider mixture through a sieve into a bowl; discard solids. Stir in brandy. Serve warm. Garnish each serving with 1 cinnamon stick, if desired.
