Day 803: Make Simple Cider

Of all the things I thought I would miss from England, Cider was not high up on my list. But here in Sweden, Cider is a byword for shitty, sugary, fizzy syrup with a vague apple hint somewhere behind the sweetness. If Swedish cider is an annoyingly perky teenage girl who talks in incessant high pitched babble about vacuous nothing, then English cider is a wizend, contemptuous, sardonic old man who knows his way around a pub or ten and won't associate himself at all with the former.

As you may have read, a not-so sneaky apple thief came a-scrumping a month or so ago and I had no apples. Fortunately a friend, actually two friends, came to my rescue and rekindled my cider-making motivation. One friend knew where we could get some apples, and the other had the right kinds of bottles to store the maturing cider. If you know where you can get these two things, then you might benefit from my simple step-by-step instructions for how to make your own cider.

1. Get apples

We did not have the means to weigh our apples, but an educated guess puts these three boxes at around 60kg. They are autumn apples, as summer apples like the Transparence Blanche that my scrumping thief stole from my garden are no good for making pressed apple juice. Apparently they just bruise and taste bad.

2. Press apples

In Sweden you can look up your local musteri or juice press. For a small fee per litre they have the capacity to press the apples quickly and efficiently. We pressed ours at Vårdsätra Musteri and they produced 40 litres or delicious juice, ready to drink or brew into cider. You can press the apples yourself, there are plenty of tutorials online, but you need extra materials and lots of space and these factors put me off. It's supposed to be simple!

3. Freeze the juice

Your juice should not have preservatives in it and can go bad quickly. Therefore if you want to gather together the things you need and not feel rushed into brewing straight away you can freeze the juice and keep it for up to 3 months. Just make sure you thaw it completely and bring it to room temperature before you add any yeast.

4.  Buy yeast, a water lock and a siphon

 

This is a water lock (vattenlås, jäsrör) you can buy this and other useful things (such as larger containers if you want to brew more cider, bigger corks and lids, yeast and siphons) from www.humle.se. I brewed my cider in the plastic bottles provided to me by Vårdsätra Musteri and just bought the cap and water lock in the picture. You put water in the water lock (no shit Sherlock) and it lets the gas out of the cider while stopping air from going in and contaminating the cider. Make sure all the things you use are clean to avoid contaminating the cider.

As for yeast I bought Safcider Yeast for Cider because it was cheap and had a good tempearature range. My bathroom is always 20 degrees and that's right in the middle of this yeast's range.

I also bought 1 metre of plastic tube to use as a siphon, which is really useful for transferring the cider from the big bottle to small bottles without all of the yeasty crap following along.

If you live in England, you can buy all of these things really, ridiculously easily. Even Tescos and Wilkinsons sell home brew kits.

5. Add sugar and yeast to the apple juice

If you want to be precise, you can also buy a Hydrometer to measure the alcohol content of your cider and to work out how much sugar needs adding.

If you are impatient, like me, and just want to see how it turns out, then add some white sugar (I added 100g to my 5L batch, I will let you know how it turns out!) to your apple juice and then add some yeast (a 5g packet like the one above is good enough for 20-30 litres) and then guess how alcoholic it is at the end when you drink a bottle and fall over (or not.) According to some websites, if you add no sugar at all you will end up with 5-6% alcohol in your cider.

Put your airtight waterlock on the bottle.

6. Let it ferment for 1-2weeks

I left mine in the bathroom for 10 days at 18-20 Degrees. I knew it was working because some froth formed (and left the brown smudge on the neck of the bottle) and for a few days in the middle you could hear the "sploop" of the air escaping from the lock. After 10 days I knew it was done because the air sploops had stopped.

7. Sterilise some containers to put the cider in

I was able to get my hands on some Czech and German beer bottles with resealable rubber/metal/ceramic lid contraption dealies. I boiled the lids to sterilise them, for 10 minutes on a rolling boil.

As for the bottles themselves, I soaked them in soapy water for 10 mins to remove the labels and then baked them for 20 minutes at 120 degrees to sterilise them.

I let them cool completely before putting any cider in them!

Some people re-bottle the cider in another large container and let it sit a bit longer before bottling, just to get rid of the dead yeast and make sure the cider is really ready.


 Since my cider had completely stopped making any bubble noises, I decided to put it straight into bottles. This may or may not be a giant mistake, watch this space...

I took the bottling process as an opportunity to try the cider and it tasted ok, like the old man mentioned above but maybe not quite wizened. I hope me comparing the taste of cider to the taste of an old man isn't putting you off completely.

And now I wait, to see if some time sitting in bottles in my basement will make the flavour mature at all, or just turn all my hard efforts into vinegar.

Day 794: Amirite?

Imagine you're at school and you are waiting for the teacher to give you a test back so you can see your score. The teacher hands you your test and most of your answers are marked with THIS:

You think "I done fucked up big time!" (It was probably a grammar test if you think in that voice). To your horror only one or two of these feature on your test:

"The world is so unfair!" you whine "I really, actually, truly studied for and/or cheated on this test! There's no way I could have failed!"

You actually did really well. In Sweden, ticks mean WRONG! and crosses mean RIGHT! as I discovered when handing back tests to my students, and as I explained to my team mate at a pub quiz last week when some Swedes marked his answers. If you don't believe me (because this is the only country in the DAMN WORLD THAT GETS TICKS AND FUCKING CROSSES MIXED UP!) then you can see for yourself on this teacher's blog.

Day 787: Plastic not so fantastic

Today marked the first day of the new rules in England forcing everyone to pay 5p for their plastic bags. Once again, as with the "Poo Bus" last year, I am left wondering how the hell England is so far behind environmentally. Well, I say that feeling all smug over here in Swedenland, but actually it turns out Sweden doesn't use that many fewer bags...

Source: BBC

God knows what the Czech are doing with their bags, making a fort? Brewing them into bag beer? Oh wait, I know, making LE FASHION.

 Katerina Smejkalova, Miss Czech Republic 2005

A hundred bags per year in Sweden? Really? I don't think I collected that many last year. But my boyfriend recently developed an obsession with reusable bags with cute print. He buys them "for me" you understand...

okay...he didn't buy ALL of them,

We do have a plastic bag full of bags in the cupboard though, which I am sure everyone has (unless you live in Finland or Denmark. There you have a plastic bag containing exactly 3 bags). What do Finns and Danes do when a friend visits and needs to carry something home? "Do you have a plastic bag I can use" "Piss off it's my last one". Reminds me of a Rolo advert. Do you love anyone enough to give them your last plastic bag?

What about when you run out of bin bags? Then what do you use? I guess a nation prepared enough to live life on the edge with only 4 plastic bags per year is also prepared enough to never run out of bin bags. This is something Brits will take some time to adapt to, culturally. We're not the most prepared folk, we'd rather just deal with the problems when they show up rather than pre-emptively tackling them.

"You've put asbestos in that wall"
-"Yeah we'll take it out when we find something better".

"Are you going to put insulation in that house?"
-"No we'll wait for people to move in and they can install it themselves".

"Let's make lots of nuclear power plants!"
-"What about the nuclear waste?" 
"Oh I'm sure we'll find something to use it for".

-"Is it a good idea to encourage dependency on Diesel fuel?"
"Sure why not! What's the worst that could happen?"

-"What will happen when you sell all those NHS contracts to private companies?"
"Only good things, I'm sure!"

And so on, and so forth. Perhaps this would be a good time to take some advice from the Danes? On this handy dandy website there are some top tips for how to avoid using excessive plastic bags, with such classics as "carry it yourself" and "make your child carry it". With the BBC already worrying on behalf of the pound shop who, poor them, will have to charge 5p increments instead of nice, round figures, I can only wish good luck with your reduced bags, England. I think you'll need it.