On to the excitement at hand ...
Last week I wrote about our lovely time apple picking. If you haven't gone yet, you really must go this weekend. Fall is so much better when you have more apples than you know what to do with. Take this also as a warning that there may be quite a few apples posts in the next few days!
Apple project #1: Brew hard apple cider
Originally, we were going to make our own cider and then ferment it, but as the moment approached and I looked into how to make cider, we decided to take an easier route. Making small batches of apples into cider involves shredding apples in a food processor and then putting them in cheese cloth, pressing them under some kind of weight for a while and catching the runoff. While this is do-able, it was 7:30 pm on a Thursday night and I didn't want the kitchen to become a huge, sticky mess. Maybe once we get some kind of backyard with a hose ... but in the mean time, Whole Foods sells these glass jugs of unfiltered apple juice (basically, cider without any spices) which are basically ready to go. It's great! Add some sugar, pour in some yeast and put an air lock on the thing - wait for a long time - end up with hard apple cider!
This is not something to try if you need immediate gratification. We mixed everything in, finally got the cork to stay in to our liking and then we watched it for a few minutes. Nothing happened. Then we worried about it, watched it a little bit more and then realized that there's nothing we can do about it, so we went to bed.
The trouble is, we will probably have to wait a few months before we can actually try it. Yes, months. I think we'll need to hide it in our pantry so that we can forget about it and not be tempted to try it any time soon! Our first foray into the world of home brewing - exciting and anti-climactic but hopefully tasty a therefore successful. I'll let you know.
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