“Do you want to see the cidery?” asked Brian Dressler of Dressler Estate, leading the way to a converted garage in Downingtown.
“A hobby turned into obsession,” joked the mechanical engineer by trade, who now produces 30 cases of cider a month, taking “a winemaker’s approach.”
“Cider is easy to make. It’s fun to make and to enjoy. It’s also a lot more than people traditionally think about,” he said. “It can be something very nice, very beautiful.”
Intrigued? “For under $30, you can make a batch of cider,” Dressler added. “If you go to Whole Foods, they have a pretty nice apple juice blend. It’s only $8 a gallon, and it already comes in the glass jug you can ferment it in.”
At home-brew stores, find yeast, rubber stoppers, airlocks, which “let carbon dioxide come out, but don’t let air in,” and an auto-siphon for transferring cider between containers.
“You can do this with just a few tools. I started off pretty low-tech,” said fellow enthusiast Mark Turdo, author of the Pommel Cyder blog and curator of the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia. “I have a little game with myself. How can I do this as easily and cheaply as possible?”
His focus: historic cider, once spelled cyder.
“You can read an eighteenth- or seventeenth-century cider manual and read nothing else and make really good cider today,” he explained. “The process is the same. Some of the advice is the same. There’s a wonderful continuity to it.”
“It’s kind of neat that the original beverage is coming back,” agreed Jamie Bock, cider maker at Frecon Farms in Boyertown.
Using Frecon apples, including old cider varieties, he bottles 9,000 gallons a year with names like Early Man, Crabby Granny and Hogshead.
“This time of year, I think Hogshead is one of my favorite ones. It’s strong. It’s oaky,” he described. “It’s fermented with brown sugar and raisins.”
Experiment with sugar, different yeasts, a combination of fruit juices and more. Or simply stick to the basics.
“People will make it sound very scientific. It can be as easy as put all your ingredients in your fermenter and let it go,” Turdo said. “Because there’s no one right way to do it, there’s no one right flavor. And I find that very freeing.”
This spring, he’ll bottle almost 25 gallons. His advice: Don’t hesitate.
“People kept telling me, ‘You have to find the right juice, and you have to prepare it in a certain way.’ And I believed them for too long,” Turdo admitted. “Just jump in and try it. Even my failures have been somewhat drinkable.”
Basic Cider MakingSupplies1 gallon of apple juice (see note)
1 packet Lalvin EC-1118 yeastRubber stopper, drilled
AirlockAuto-siphonCleanerSanitizer
Another 1-gallon glass jugGrowlers or bottles (with caps and capper) for packaging
InstructionsNote: We recommend Whole Food’s 365 Organic Gravenstein Apple Juice since it conveniently comes in a glass jug that can be reused!
Pour off 1/4 to 1/3 from the jug and save it to drink later. This makes room for active fermentation. Open yeast packet and add contents to the remaining juice. Fit clean and sanitized stopper into the jug’s opening and then fit airlock (filled with water) into the drilled hole of the stopper. Let sit undisturbed until the foaming dies down. Using an auto-siphon, move the finished cider off the lees (sediment) on the bottom into another clean and sanitized vessel. This process is known as racking. This finished cider can be left to clear and racked again if desired. Once your cider has settled for a few days, you can rack into a growler to be consumed within a few days or into bottles for conditioning.
A more advanced technique includes using a hydrometer to measure the original gravity (sugar content), determining the potential alcohol by volume. The hydrometer is used to take other specific gravity measurements throughout the fermentation process to determine when it’s complete.
Recommended reading: “Cider, Hard & Sweet: History, Traditions, and Making Your Own,” “Cider: Making, Using & Enjoying Sweet & Hard Cider” and “The New Cider Maker’s Handbook: A Comprehensive Guide for Craft Producers”
INSTRUCTIONS COURTESY OF BRIAN DRESSLER OF DRESSLER ESTATE
