Growing Apples for Homemade Cider

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A Good Cider Blend

Most of us will determine our cider blends when we dump the apples into the grinder hopper. Apples are categorized primarily by sugar content, tannin, and acid. American tastes lean toward the sweet side in fresh juice, but a more flavorful hard cider will result from a blend favoring the tart side. Neutral, low-acid apples like Cortland, Baldwin, and even the muchmaligned Delicious give a sweet base juice to blend with more aromatic apples like Northern Spy, Gravenstein, and any of the russets. A handful of crabby cider makers get very exacting about proper proportions, but my advice is to trust your intuition and have fun. Pressing one bushel at a time on a screw press gives you many opportunities to "try, try, and try again."

Cider Apples of Renown

Heading the list of classic cider apples are the Golden Russet, Ribston Pippin, and the Roxbury Russet. Each of these makes a singularly rich cider by themselves, a nonblended distinction afforded few apple varieties over centuries of opinionated cider making. Bill MacKentley of St. Lawrence Nurseries in Potsdam, New York, likens a Golden Russet cider to "the nectar of the gods." Russets tend to yield a third less juice by volume than other varieties, but when dealing with heavenly ambrosia, who cares?

The North Orchard at Thomas Jefferson's Monticello estate in Virginia was dedicated exclusively to the pursuit of fine cider. Virginia Hewes Crab, Golden Permian, and the lost Tailiferro were particular favorites of Mr. Jefferson. Tom Burford of the nearby Burford Brothers Nursery in Monroe does a cider-making workshop here each October: "It's become commonplace to me now to hear people say 'I didn't know there were so many tastes in apples."' The spicy Grimes Golden gets a strong Virginia commendation for hard cider makers, with a sugar content of 18.8 percent fermenting to 9 percent alcohol.

Out in Courtland, Kansas, amongst the wheat and milo fields, Dan and Carla Kuhn are defying the windswept plains with orchard plantings for their Depot Cider Mill. Jonathan apples squeeze out a sprightly subacid juice that the Kuhns blend in the renaissance spirit with Stayman Winesap, Arkansas Black, and Saint George. There are apples for every region and a cider for every taste.

My own cider favorites don't need to withstand tree-leaning winds as much as deep, cold winters. I'll know in the decades to come if these vintage cider apples — Sweet Bough, Peck's Pleasant, Fameuse, Wickson, Ashmead's Kernal, St. Edmund's Russet, to name a few — continue to pass the winter hardiness test on our sloping mountainside. Equally exciting are twentieth-century selections of Malus domestics that offer both marketable fruit and tasty juice. Milton adds an aromatic sweetness to our late - September pressings. Treeripened Paulareds make a good, mildly tart juice base. Macoun, today's vogue apple, crunches sweetly into the October nectar flowing from our water powered press.

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