This article was originally posted on Sept. 15, 2011 on my homebrew website, Fat Grey Tom’s Cider. It has been re-posted here with the same time stamp.
Cider caught my attention because of the seeming ease. But really, this isn’t what grabbed me.
What grabbed me was and is and will remain cliché.
European ciders grabbed me.
A small brewery in Germany grabbed me with its local ciders and its deposit-required grolsch-tops.
All manner of ciders in Eastern Europe, in Western Europe, in all my travels, grabbed me. They said, “Listen to us! Pay attention to us! We’re awesome and worth drinking!”
And so I drank.
When it came time to brew our first batch of beer, we brewed. And it turned out well. But I wanted cider.
So, we managed to procure and re-purpose four Carlo Rossi containers and one Mr. Beer keg and began to brew. Such is our first brew, from the Ed Wort’s Apfelwein recipe.
We followed the recipe but broke the recipe up into five 1-gallon batches.
When we originally went to Wally World to buy the juice, we had to go for a bastardization of juices. Two gallons of Mott’s, three gallons off Great Value.
One gallon of pure Mott’s, one gallon of pure GV, three gallons of mixed.
The original recipe calls for a yeast that was not easily available to us so instead we went with another, equivalent wine yeast: Lalvin 71B-1122.
And so, we wait. In the mean time, pictures.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/wcowperthwaite/sets/72157627553002865/
Updates:
Cider Batch 1: Update
Cider #1 (1/5): Bottled — Raspberry Liqueur Primer
Tag: http://brew.wheelerc.org/tag/AW-Batch-1/