For a while in the mid-nineties, I was brewing a couple of times a
month and sharing it with friends and brewing most of what I was
drinking.
This is no longer the case — I haven’t brewed a regular beer in
well over a year. But I still buy apple cider at the Boston Wort Processors annual cider
picnic, and make several gallons of cyser with it.
This year’s recipe is simple:
- 6 Gallons cider, pressed by Russell’s Orchards,
containing mostly baldwin apples, with some cortlands, macouns, and
russets. - Close to a gallon of wildflower honey, bought over the internet
from ebeehoney.com.
I’m thinking about adding some lemon juice, and if the fermentation
gets sluggish I will probably add some raisins. But honey and cider
by themselves really make a very good beverage.
I heated this enough to make it easy to dissolve the honey, and put
itinto a three gallon and a five gallon carboy. When it was cool, I
added the yeast. I had hydrated two packets of dry beer yeast in
small amounts of the cider, one
Nottingham and one Edme. Unfortunately, I failed to keep track of
which packet went into which carboy. They both bubbled
enthusiastically in the cider, and fermentation in the cider/honey
mixture was well established within an hour.
Update, November 2: I noticed that the larger, formerly
more enthusiastic, carboy had practically stopped bubbling, so on
October 30, I added a handful of raisins. I also shook it up a
little, and it immediately developed a layer of bubbles on top of the
liquid. As of November 2, both carboys are bubbling at a rate of
about one bubble per 40 seconds or so.
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