Growing Apples for Homemade Cider

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Gathering Your Apple Varieties

The road to cider ambrosia begins with the varieties of apples available to be pressed. You can grow those apples, purchase them from nearby orchards, or take to the countryside and explore abandoned farmsteads and hedgerows in search of palatable fruit. Wild apples, in offering something more than the bland sweetness of today's commercial favorites, have a place in a robust cider blend.

Trees found growing near abandoned stone foundations or in now-neglected orchards are a good source of these old-time cider apples. Large-trunked trees set at a consistent spacing indicate grafted origins. The seedling trees sprouting under the drip line are likely windfallen progeny of the mother variety, and any bearing fruit should be tasted with that genetic potential in mind. Local orchards often grow a wider range of apple varieties than commonly found in the supermarket. Pick-your-own operations will guide you to the ripest fruit, but purchasing "orchard run" apples by the bushel spares you picking labor and saves on the price of graded fruit. The best cider apple deal is found in bins of windfallen fruit, but even handselecting drops like these won't suit the discriminating cider maker.

You should be just as gentle picking apples for cider purposes as you are with dessert-quality fruit. A good picking rhythm—once you have the basics down — is no slower than a bruise-and-batter technique. And, as you'll soon learn, the best cider is made after "sweating" the apples for a week or two. Unnecessary bruises have that much more time to decay. Heavily bruised apples essentially make a bruised cider, in which fermentation has begun even before the fruit has been pressed.

Old-time cider makers insisted on pressing sound, ripe apples only. It was said that an apple that reached the ground imparted an earthy flavor to the cider. My own prejudices against windfallen fruit don't go quite that far, but as a nation, our standards for an acceptable cider apple have undergone quite a decline. J.M. Trowbridge stated his position emphatically in The Cider Maker's Handbook in 1903: "Whoever thinks that any apple is good enough for cider had better not engage in the business."

Dropped apples for cider are suspect as well in the recently published scare about E. coli bacteria in cider. It was always thought cider was too acidic to harbor this bacterium, which, in tainted meat, has made people sick enough to die. E. coli can only be present if the apples used for cider have been in contact with "hoofed and horned" animal droppings (mice, for once, are not a concern). A conscientious cider maker would never use fallen apples gathered in a pasture, but no apple grower can assure that deer won't find ways into the orchard. Rinsing apples down with a hose isn't necessarily an effective wash. Quality goes hand in hand with safety if all the apples being pressed have been picked directly from the tree.

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