Rensselaer Union, Volume 7, Number 7, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 November 1874 — How to Have Good Cider. [ARTICLE]

How to Have Good Cider.

~ The careless, shifting way we have of making cider and spoiling it at the same time is a sin—as if cider were good only for vinegar, and as if vinegar would be good enough, no matter how poor the cider! We shake our trees, gather the sour apples (in many cases) into heaps, let half of them become rotten, take them off to the cider mill, dump them into the common heap, and take the socalled sweet cider which the pressman allows us—so many gallons to the bushel. The apples are ground, and, if no water be added directly to the mash, the straw with which the cheese is laid up is dripping wet with water, and of course the cider is diluted by just so much. Water is of course added if the cider will bear it. Such cider is poor stuff, anyhow. It tastes of rottenness when “ sweet,” has a harsh flavor when at its best, sours before it has done sparkling, and is “ hard” —that is, vinegar, or vinegary—before February. • 7——— ———-■ - Try this way: Select sound —that is, not rotten —apples. Bruises are no disadvantage, perhaps the contrary. They may be both sweet and sour, and the more substantial the apples the better the quality of the cider. Insist upon cleanliness at the mill. Better use a hand mill than® take apples to a mill where you cannot have things done just as you want. Grind the apples and let the mash stand some hours before pressing, stirring it to get color, and when one cheese is in press have another ground and waiting. Use no water to wet the straw, but moisten it with sweet cider; it requires but little. Run the cider or “must” directly into clean, sweet whisky barrels. If there is the least smell- of mustiness the barrels should be purified by burning sulphur in them. If they have held either cider or vinegar before wash them out thoroughly with soda, letting them stand for some time with water in them, rendered’alkaline by soda, and swash it around in them frequently so as to remove the vinegar from every part.

Carry them home full and place them in the coolest place available. Then draw out. perhaps, two gallons, to allow space for the effervescence to work off without overflowing during the active fermentation. Have one barrel or half barrel to drink from if you need, and to fill up the others from as soon as the active fermentation is over. Keep the bungholes covered with pieces of clean blanket, with stones laid upon them. This will keep out fruit flies and exclude access of air, while the carbonic acid gas formed during the fermentation will pass out freely. The cooler the cider is kept the slower will be the working and the better the result. In a week or fort: night, according to circumstances, the fermentation will have quieted down and a considerable deposit of lees will have taken place. Then rack off into clean barrels, filling them full. As soon as the ‘ ‘ singing” has ceased and the cider is nearly clear, rack again and bung up tight It ought really to be racked again in March, and as soon as racked “ fined” with isinglass, dissolved after long maceration in cider only until it becomes a thin jelly, using one and a half to two ounces of isinglass to the barrel. This will carry with it all impurities to the bottom and leave the liquid clear and pure. This cider should be nearly as fine as hock, and may be rebarreled or bottled. There are sundry minutiae which the best cider-makers lay great stress upon. We would be glad or the views of those who are really adepts at this simple art. It is really a shame that with such an abundance of the raw material our people generally should be as ignorant of what good cider is as they are of good cheese. — Rural New Yorker.