The Best Cider

Brewed. Blended. Bottled....

I finally put this cider to bed this weekend... it was a long road for this batch, very unlike the process I describe in http://hairyhippymountainman.blogspot.com/2013/01/easy-cider.html.  Oddly enough, a portion of the cider started as a batch of "Easy Cider" from a local orchard that must not have had the proper balance of juices.  It started as my first failure in the cider making business.  The batch in question was almost undrinkable - much too tart and without any balance.  Emily and I aged the cider for months in a glass carboy, without any marked improvement in the flavor.  We gave up and bottled the stuff in every growler we had sitting around the house, figuring we would use this bulk beverage for something down the road.  

As time went on, we tried a nip of the stuff here and there, and after a year or so since it was brewed, the cider started to mellow, get drinkable, and almost good, but it was still a little too much on the tart side to be called good.  Around the same time, we took a trip to a you-press cider operation (http://www.bishop-orchard.com/).  The must from this adventure went into primary fermentation with the best fragrance of any cider I had brewed.  Unfortunately, that is all that came out of the fermenter... fragrance .. the juice was relatively flavorless.  So now I had two poor ciders on my hands, and both were poor because they were too strong in one component of tasty cider.  So I mixed 'em.  Two gallons of the tart stuff and four gallons of the fragrant stuff.

I had read about the virtues of blended ciders, but this has been my only firsthand experience making one, and I couldn't be more stoked about the result.  The clear lesson is this: if you ever have a cider that doesn't come out quite right... save it.  For one, flavors will mellow with time.  Second, you never know when a strongly flavored cider in the cellar will balance well with a future boo-boo.