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Craft Hard Cider Is On A Roll. How Ya Like Them Apples?
Hard cider is having a hot moment. Hotter still, if it's locally made and distributed. Over the past four years, the number of cideries across the country has doubled, from 400 to 800, according to The Cyder Market LLC, a small business that keeps statistics on the cider industry. [...] Wine has long had its connoisseurs. With the rise of the craft beer movement, drinkers have learned to appreciate the nuances of that brewed beverage, too. But cider, in many drinkers' imagination, remains an unrefined, blandly sweet drink, says Johnson. The reality is far different, he says.
[...] Hard cider's history in the U.S. goes all the way back to the Founding Fathers. During the American Revolution, many landowners had apple orchards and made homemade fermented cider using the cider apples that grew in their backyard, says Michelle McGrath, executive director of the U.S. Cider Makers Association. "Prohibition came and most of the cider apple trees were cut down in this country. But now, it's having a renaissance," she says. "It's coming back really strongly; it's taking market share from beer."
Nielsen's research says sales for regional cider are up 35.6 percent. McGrath says this is because local cideries have more varieties of cider that appeal to more sophisticated palates. In other words, cider seems to be going through what wine and beer went through years ago: people moving from drinking big brands to being more discerning, niche, and sometimes downright persnickety.
(Score: 4, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday December 06 2017, @02:28AM (11 children)
No thanks. I'll stick with making my own if it's all the same to you lot. It's easy as anything, a hell of a lot cheaper than buying it, and your guests think you have magical powers.
Also, applejack != cider. Applejack is what you get when you freeze hard cider and either skim the ice crystals off as they form or freeze it solid and let it drain into a new container until you have a big block of ice in the original container and some strong hooch in the other. It's illegal in all fifty states and quite dangerous as every bit of the methanol and other badness that distillation would remove is still there and now concentrated. You can poison the hell out of yourself with the methanol in it before you pass out from too much ethanol. Delicious in small quantities though.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 06 2017, @02:38AM
It might be suitable for your lawnmower if you are in a pinch though :)
Applejack fuel for all your non-performance vehicle needs.
The methanol would certainly give it some kick. Any remaining sugar might lead to excess carbonization though.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 06 2017, @03:12AM (1 child)
https://www.homebrewtalk.com/forum/threads/methanol-toxicity-of-hard-cider.104640/#post-5656739 [homebrewtalk.com]
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday December 06 2017, @03:22AM
Interesting. Hadn't thought of boiling the methanol off via pressure change. Now I'm going to have to design myself a smallish vacuum chamber. I've avoided applejack for years because the last time I overdid it a bit and had a three day hangover from hell.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Arik on Wednesday December 06 2017, @04:21AM (7 children)
"Applejack is what you get when you freeze hard cider and either skim the ice crystals off as they form or freeze it solid and let it drain into a new container until you have a big block of ice in the original container and some strong hooch in the other."
That's ice-distillation, you can do that with any alcohol. I've made some very strong beer this way, but it's not practical to produce hard alcohol, there's a fairly low limit to what it can accomplish (at least assuming the homebrewer level of equipment rather than a lab somewhere.)
"It's illegal in all fifty states and quite dangerous as every bit of the methanol and other badness that distillation would remove is still there and now concentrated. You can poison the hell out of yourself with the methanol in it before you pass out from too much ethanol. Delicious in small quantities though."
Horribly confused. There are naturally trace amounts of methanol in cider, yes, but they cause no problem because they are just trace amounts suspended in a much larger amount of ethanol. Ethanol is a treatment for methanol poisoning - the ethanol blocks the body from processing the methanol which then passes through the body harmlessly. This has been shown in the lab to work with up to a 50/50 mix and this is more like 100/rounding error, it's no concern at all. It's similarly no concern after distillation, either heat distillation or ice distillation, because what's being removed in each case is the water, so you're left with a very similar proportion of ethanol to methanol afterwards.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 06 2017, @04:58AM (1 child)
Professional, licensed winemaker here.
It's not the methanol that's the problem. Conventional fermentation of apples produces tiny amounts of methanol that nobody cares about.
The main problem from a toxicity standpoint is fusel alcohols. Technically, what people call ice distillation or freeze distillation is actually fractional freezing (ask a chemical engineer) but the difference between intelligently done fractional distillation (not creek hooch) and fractional freezing is that fractional freezing doesn't remove the heavier fluid components. In this case, that's the problem - fusel alcohols.
And yes, the BATFE considers fractional freezing to be a form of distillation, and home distillation is illegal, period. This doesn't mean you have to panic if your cider freezes in your shed; just let the water melt back into the brew and you're OK with the law (other things being equal).
(Score: 1) by anubi on Friday December 08 2017, @04:16AM
We had to consider the same thing when making Backwater Hooch. Wet dog. Devil's piss.
The first thing off the still was methanol. We would use it for antiseptic on the farm.
The center cut was the good stuff. You watched your pressures ( including barometric ) and temperatures carefully to know when to start saving the good stuff.
The last stuff out was also terrible stuff, but we would run it for yet more wound dressing and veterinary usage as a topical antibacterial. These were the heavier fusel alcohols, some called it fusel oil.
The word I got from Grandpa and his buddies is that the mobsters of the day would come by and demand so many gallons of hooch as part of protection rackets, and the locals would be bottling really bad stuff for the moonshine runners. So many people were getting terribly sick and dying from bad 'shine. But that was an inevitable outcome from Government trying to criminalize alcohol combined with the economic incentives thus created for the bad guys to circumvent those laws. Only the farmer who made the hooch knew for sure whether the hooch was good stuff or poison. It could all come from the same still, only difference being when, in the distillation process, one recovered the product.
The guy waving his gun in a threatening manner usually got the poison, which he sold to someone else, and no-one knew for sure where all the methanol and fusel alcohols distilled in old lead-soldered car radiators came from.
Believe me, I do not want to drink hooch that wasn't made by family or a really trusted friend.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 06 2017, @04:33PM (4 children)
Applejack is the correct term for hard cider that has undergone the ice process.
Maybe in your neck of the woods they use the same term for simple hard cider, but I believe this is sloppy slang and not historical usage.
Please see:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Applejack_(drink) [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 06 2017, @07:13PM (3 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 06 2017, @08:26PM (2 children)
In places where it reliably gets cold enough outside to pull the ice distillation trick, I have never heard "applejack" refer to anything but ice distilled cider.
But, we are talking regional usage of a word here, which can vary. If you look at the wikipedia article, it says that *historically* applejack referred to ice distilled cider, so if we have to go with which usage is "correct", I would have to say that using applejack to mean ice distilled cider is "more correct."
(Score: 2) by Arik on Wednesday December 06 2017, @10:33PM (1 child)
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 07 2017, @02:14AM
Maybe the region I am familiar with (New England) is more alkie than yours. ;-)