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| It's a yellowish cup of yellow liquid on a yellow background! This is photography. |
Turns out that already-tart regular cider makes extremely tart hard cider, once the yeast eats up even more of the sugars. But not one to be daunted, I added a touch of bottled apple juice to a glass of the stuff tonight, and the result is a nicely sweet-and-sour concoction that seems quite in line with what I understand others have done. (Though I wasn't expecting it to be cloudy. I know nothing about if ciders are filtered -- is that normally necessary?)
The longsuffering Mrs. Wife pronounced it drinkable and even "good," despite me shoving a small taster glass at her as she called it a night.
The other exciting part of this, of course, is that I have no idea of the alcohol content in this glass. It was a small enough batch that I wasn't able to do any effective gravity measurements. That means the sole ABV estimate I got was from my intrepid bottling team, who when the first bottles were filled took a whiff and said "Yep, that sure is alcohol in there." (Newsflash: They're right.)
So, much to learn on the cider front? Definitely. But we're already off to a better start than with the gluten-free beers that repeatedly failed to go anywhere. I'm very excited about what's next.
Other updates:
- The well-watered hops presumably are doing their thing underground. Haven't seen them peek up yet, but will keep all three of you who likely read this thing posted.
- Also bottled at the same time as the cider: a basic wheat beer with cinnamon tossed in, following an idea from an episode of the Basic Brewing podcast. I was hoping that more of the ground cinnamon would make it into the final bottled product, but it seems that a fair amount stayed in the bottom of the fermenter... we'll see what that means for the flavor in the end.
- Beer festival this weekend! I will take pictures.
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