Blackcurrant varieties
This article is about the alcoholic beverage. For the non-alcoholic beverage, see Apple cider. This article blackcurrant varieties additional citations for verification.
Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. The juice of most varieties of apple, including crab apples, can be used to make cider, but cider apples are best. The addition of sugar or extra fruit before a second fermentation increases the ethanol content of the resulting beverage. 10 times the amount of sugar in lager or ale. Perry is a similar product to cider made from fermented pear juice. When distilled, cider turns into fruit brandy.
This section needs additional citations for verification. Ciders can be classified from dry to sweet. Their appearance ranges from cloudy with sediment to completely clear, and their colour ranges from almost colourless to amber to brown. The variations in clarity and colour are mostly due to filtering between pressing and fermentation. Modern, mass-produced ciders closely resemble sparkling wine in appearance. More traditional brands tend to be darker and cloudier.
They are often stronger than the mass-produced varieties and taste more strongly of apples. Almost colourless, white cider has the same apple juice content as conventional cider but is harder to create because the cider maker has to blend various apples to create a clearer liquid. The cognates in the different Romance languages : Spanish, Portuguese sidra, Italian sidro, etc. By the 19th century, cider referred to the expressed juice of apples, either before fermentation as sweet cider, or after fermentation, a hard cider.
The first recorded reference to cider dates back to Julius Caesar’s first attempt to invade Britain in 55 BCE where he found the native Celts fermenting crabapples. He would take the discovery back through continental Europe with his retreating troops. In the cider market, ciders can be broken down into two main styles, standard and specialty. English cider contained a drier, higher-alcohol-content version, using open fermentation vats and bittersweet crab apples. The French developed a sweet, low-alcohol “cidre” taking advantage of the sweeter apples and the keeving process. Cider styles evolved based on the methods used, the apples available and local tastes.
Modern ciders are made from culinary apples and are lower in tannins and higher in acidity than other cider styles. Heritage ciders are made from both culinary and cider apples, including bittersweet, bittersharp, heirlooms, wild apples, and crabapples. Specialty style ciders are open to a lot more manipulation than modern or heritage style ciders. There is no restriction to apple varieties used and the list of specialty styles continues to expand.
Listed on the USACM Cider Style Guide, specialty styles include: fruit, hopped, spiced, wood-aged, sour, and iced ciders. Fruit ciders have other fruit or juices added before or after fermentation, like cherries, blueberries, and cranberries. Two styles not mentioned in the USACM Cider Style Guide are Rosé and Sparkling Cider. Rosé cider can be produced from apple varieties that have reddish-pink pulp, like Pink Pearl and Amour Rouge. There are many hundreds of varieties of cultivars developed specifically for cider making. Historically this was done using pressing stones with circular troughs, or by a cider mill.
Cider mills were traditionally driven by the hand, water-mill, or horse-power. In modern times, they are likely to be powered by electricity. The pulp is then transferred to a cider press where the juice is extracted. Traditionally the method for squeezing the juice from the apple pulp involves placing sweet straw or haircloths between stacked layers of apple pulp.
Today, apples can be quickly pressed on a mechanized belt press. The juice, after being strained in a coarse hair-sieve, is then put into either open vats or closed casks. Fermentation of ciders occurs by a very similar mechanism to the fermentation of wine. The process of alcoholic fermentation is characterised by the conversion of simple sugars into ethanol by yeasts, especially Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Steps taken before fermentation might include fruit or juice blending, titratable acidity and pH measurements and sometimes adjustments, and sulfur dioxide and yeast additions.
