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Cider and Perry with Gordon Strong – BeerSmith Podcast #316
2024/12/24
BeerSmith Home and Beer Brewing Podcast
G
Gordon Strong
Gordon Strong: 我参与了BJCP新的苹果酒指南的编写工作，这是一个大规模的改写，旨在提升指南的质量和细节。新的苹果酒指南是BJCP内部完成的，内容比之前的版本更加详尽，并增加了新的类别。新的苹果酒指南增加了至少四个新的类别，并对现有类别进行了扩展，以帮助评委更好地理解不同风格的苹果酒。我制作苹果酒的方式类似于啤酒酿造中的“麦芽汁”方式，我购买现成的苹果汁进行发酵。制作苹果酒的关键是使用不含防腐剂的新鲜果汁，并且最好是当季的。制作苹果酒的过程很简单，类似于啤酒酿造中的“麦芽汁”方式，只需将苹果汁发酵即可。制作苹果酒需要清洁容器并进行消毒，然后添加酵母进行发酵。未经巴氏杀菌且不含防腐剂的苹果汁可能含有天然酵母，可以直接发酵。可以使用专门的苹果酒酵母，也可以使用啤酒酵母或葡萄酒酵母。与啤酒不同，酵母对苹果酒最终风味的影响相对较小，苹果本身的风味更为重要。我通常将苹果酒装入啤酒桶中，并添加气体进行碳酸化。我更喜欢干型苹果酒，有时为了比赛会添加一些甜味剂来提升甜度或苹果风味。可以用冷冻苹果汁浓缩物来增加苹果酒的甜度，而不会影响其风味。可以用生果汁、糖溶液或其他果汁来增加苹果酒的甜味，在比赛中，我会用纯果汁来制作水果苹果酒。如果苹果酒装在啤酒桶中，添加甜味剂后，可能会增加碳酸化程度。我更喜欢调整苹果酒的碳酸化程度来达到理想的风味，而不是添加甜味剂。标准苹果酒和特色苹果酒的区别在于，标准苹果酒只使用苹果或梨，而特色苹果酒则会添加其他成分或采用不同的工艺。苹果酒的甜度等级从低到高分为五个等级：低、偏低、中等、偏高、高。梨酒是用梨而不是苹果酿造的，它可以像苹果酒一样，使用普通的水果或一些特殊的品种。梨中含有较高的山梨醇，这是一种糖醇，赋予梨酒更饱满、更顺滑的口感。真正的苹果酒是通过发酵过程酿造的，而不是简单地将酒精添加到果汁中。许多水果都适合与苹果酒混合发酵，例如核果和浆果。酸度和单宁含量高的水果，例如酸樱桃、黑加仑和各种浆果，最适合与苹果酒混合。可以使用各种香料和草本植物来制作苹果酒，但需要注意的是，不要让香料的风味盖过苹果本身的风味。啤酒花可以用来制作苹果酒，但需要选择合适的品种，避免其风味盖过苹果的风味。选择香料时，可以参考苹果相关的菜肴的调味方式，选择与苹果风味相匹配的香料。新的BJCP苹果酒指南将苹果酒分为四个主要类别：传统苹果酒、强型苹果酒、特色苹果酒和梨酒。传统苹果酒类别包括五个子类别：普通苹果酒、传家宝苹果酒、英式苹果酒、法式苹果酒和西班牙苹果酒。新的BJCP苹果酒指南旨在涵盖全球不同地区的苹果酒风格，不仅仅局限于美国。强型苹果酒类别包括新英格兰苹果酒、苹果酒、冰苹果酒和火焰苹果酒。我制作苹果酒的方法比较简单，通常是选择优质的苹果汁进行发酵，并添加其他配料进行变化。我认为成为一名优秀的苹果酒评委比成为一名苹果酒酿造者更重要。我喜欢用苹果酒和蜂蜜酿造苹果酒蜜酒，并添加苹果派香料。
Brad Smith: 积极参与讨论，提出问题，引导话题。
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Gordon Strong: 'And this is the fully in-house review. So expanded more, more making the cider guidelines of the same level of quality and detail that people expect out of the beer guidelines, for instance.'
Gordon Strong: 'Yeah, there's at least four new categories and a complete new organization. And yeah, the existing ones have been expanded quite a bit because I know from judging in as many competitions as I go to, a lot of people understand the basic mechanics of judging, but they might not really have a good understanding of the style. So we have to give... Enough detail so that somebody who knows how to judge, if given the guidelines, can do sort of a reasonable, decent job.'
Gordon Strong: 'Really, all I do, I mean, I'm basically an extract equivalent cider maker because I live in a region that has a huge variety of apples. So I've got some favorite local orchards that press their own sweet cider without preservatives, and I just go and buy some in season. um, you know, bring it home and, uh, ferment it, throw it in a carboy, add some yeast, um, and just wait until it clears.'
Gordon Strong: 'it's important to say, you know, you can use almost any juice as long as it doesn't have preservatives in it. Right. But I mean, it can be pasteurized, right? Yeah. Yeah. You, uh, it's the preservatives that are the things that are going to, I mean, it's preservatives inhibit spoilage by, uh, you know, preventing growth of organisms in the cider. And, you know, yeast is certainly one of those things. So, you know, the best raw ingredients you get are the ones that are minimally processed, fresh, local, in season.'
Gordon Strong: 'So, let's say I get my five gallons of juice. Can you walk me through the process of making a batch? Sure. Oh, yeah. It's like stupid simple. You like, I mean, it's basically like extract brewing. Without the boil? Well, if the extract you bought was already mixed with water. So the juice is ready to ferment. You don't really have to do anything with it, except boil.'
Gordon Strong: 'clean your vessels and everything. But, but you basically just pitch the yeast. Sanitize a fermenter. Yeah. You sanitize a fermenter. Um, you know, glass carboys are fine. Buckets are fine. Just, you know, something, something that you can sanitize and seal and, you know, slap an airlock on. Um,'
Gordon Strong: 'some ciders you can make just with the sort of natural fermentation of the, the yeast that's present. If it's unpasteurized and, um, You know, without preservatives, they won't have treated it. There can be natural yeast. And sometimes if you buy sweet cider and you leave it around for a couple of weeks, if you pick up the container and you sort of feel it, it can feel like, oh, it feels like it's getting a little carbonation there. You know, it's starting to do that work for you.'
Gordon Strong: 'You put it in a vessel, and then you pitch whatever kind of yeast you want. There are cider-specific yeasts that you can use. I mean, you can use beer yeasts, and you can use wine yeasts like you would use in mead. The cider-specific strains are interesting, and there's more of them that are coming out. In dry form, there's more than just one.'
Gordon Strong: 'You know, the yeast can give it different characteristics just like in beer, but it's not going to totally drive it. You're really looking more towards, you know, what the apples are providing. The yeast isn't going to drive the final product, you know, to the same extent, as you'd see in beer'
Gordon Strong: 'well it ferments uh you know salt most of its simple sugar so it ferments very quickly and then uh do you prefer to carbonate yours do you like to bottle it keg it i have kegs so i it's and kegging is simple so usually i wait till you know it naturally clears in the fermenter i prefer the fermenters that have you know i use the plastic ones um that uh you know, if they have like a spigot in the bottom, so you can kind of, you know, sort of drain directly out or, you know, you can, you can certainly use a tube to, um, a siphon. Um, and I just put it, put it in the keg and, um, you know, usually I usually give it some gas. Um, I, I prefer my ciders with a little bit of sparkle to them. And I think it also kind of helps, uh, protect it in the keg. You know, I'm not, I'm not doing a natural, um, carbonation in that, that form.'
Gordon Strong: 'Yeah. Um, you know, some of the, some of the yeast, um, you know, don't ferment quite as much. I tend to avoid the champagne yeast that can go super, super dry. I prefer dry ciders. I like to, I like to taste the, the flavor, but if I'm, Back when I was competing for competition, yeah, I would sometimes sweeten them if I was trying to boost up either the sweetness or the apple character.'
Gordon Strong: 'if it just needed a little boost is that if you bought some frozen apple juice concentrate yep you know it's frozen and then you let it thaw but the stuff that's thawing is the juice before the water so you get something really concentrated you just can put a couple of drops in and it it could boost the sweetness without you know overwhelming the um the character of what what you had fermented out yourself'
Gordon Strong: 'Yeah, I mean, you can sweeten with either raw juice or a sugar solution or some other kind of fruit juice. That's often how I would make a fruit cider for a competition. I'd have a dry cider and I'd I'd blend in some sort of pure fruit juice, you know, often something like cherry or raspberry, something that would be very distinctive, easy for the judges to recognize. And you're just relying on the natural juice of the fruit.'
Gordon Strong: 'Well, it depends on how you're packaging it. If it's in a keg, what difference does it make? You know, it just might wind up a little more carbonated, but it depends on how fast you're going to drink it. I mean, it's not going to immediately... um, take off, especially if you're storing it cold. Um, yeah, it'll, the sugars, yeah, they'll, if the yeast is in there, it'll eventually work on them, but that, you know, would tend to be slow. But yeah, if you, if you're putting it in a bottle, you don't want to create bottle bombs. So you'd have to, you'd have to filter out the yeast or, um,'
Gordon Strong: 'I'm more likely to play around with the carbonation. And there, I'm putting in a keg and I'm force carbonating it to something I just sort of enjoy. I tend to, especially the drier ones, I tend to push to a higher level of carbonation. because it just sort of increases the refreshing quality to it.'
Gordon Strong: 'Yeah, that was just the arbitrary classification we'd used. It was basically sort of apple and pear only ciders and peris. So just... The traditional ones just using those fruits and the specialty ones would be using additional ingredients or processes or, you know, basically building a variation based on those other base styles.'
Gordon Strong: 'Yeah, we originally had three levels of sweetnesses, you know, sort of low, medium, high. In the 2015 guidelines, the cider community wanted to go to five levels of sweetness, so basically adding a medium low and medium high. You know, they call them semi-dry and semi-sweet. So, you know, it's just like a... A scale of five.'
Gordon Strong: 'Well, I mean, Perry is basically a cider made with pears instead of apples. It's not—Perry doesn't have apples in it on its own. It's just pears. And they can be like apples. You can be using table fruit like you would buy in a supermarket, or— Or there are sort of heirloom classic varieties that aren't good for eating but have qualities that make these sort of more complex products.'
Gordon Strong: 'Pears often have an increased level of sorbitol in them, which is a sugar alcohol, which kind of gives this sort of fuller, smoother mouthfeel. It's quite interesting.'
Gordon Strong: 'So, you know, know what it is that you're drinking. But, you know, those mass market ciders can be quite enjoyable and refreshing as well. So it depends on, you know, what you're interested in drinking at the moment. But there's a lot of categories. Are there a lot of good artisanal, I should say, peri makers? I'm not familiar with many in our area. I think there's quite a few cideries, but... Yeah, there's, there's fewer of them in the U S I think, um, you know, it's, um, I see, I see more of them in France, you know, maybe in Canada, different, different areas like that. Um, you know, you, you kind of have to hunt for it. It's not going to have the same kind of volume. Um, and, uh, It's always, you know, when you get to these heirloom-ish kind of things, it's very regional because you have to, they're going to be small batches, so they're not going to be widely distributed.'
Gordon Strong: 'Which fruits tend to work well with cider? Stone fruits. Stone fruits. Berries, those are sort of my favorites. I mean, really, really pretty much any fruit that you enjoy the flavor profile of. You just have to, you just like with making mead or like with using fruit with beer, you have to understand the fruit is providing other than flavor because they'll provide acidity and tannin.'
Gordon Strong: 'I think Ken Tram, famous mead maker Ken Tram, who I've had on the show several times, he coined the term, I think it was noble fruits, which are the fruits that are high in acidity and highly tannic. And it includes things like, oh, I don't know, sour cherries, black currants, all the berries, raspberries, dates. Logan Berry's all those other ones. You look at the stuff that he uses in his meads and those are probably it. Yeah, that was it. Yeah. But I thought it was, I thought it was pretty clever. And honestly, they probably do work the best actually. Yeah. So. Yeah. The very tannic, very acidic fruits.'
Gordon Strong: 'Well, let's go on to herbs and spices. Obviously, you can use those. And I know I've gone to a number of cideries where they had hop cider as well. Yeah. And, you know, I consider that all part of the same category. I mean, hops are basically an herb the way you use it because you're not using hops like you would in beer because you don't want like a big bitter element of it besides your nut.'
Gordon Strong: 'boiling it, I hope. So you're essentially dry-hopping a cider. And there you have to pair the aromatics of the hops with what the character of the apple is. So you don't want one to step on another. I think something like Amarillo very nicely, because it's sort of a gentle... It's not something that would really step all over any apple aromatics. But a hop cider can be awfully nice. It's interesting.'
Gordon Strong: 'Yeah, again, I tend to think in cooking terms. So, you know, if there are any apple-based dishes, whether savory or sweet, Think about how they're spiced and think about whether those are compatible. So, I mean, the obvious one is the classic American apple pie, you know, pretty much like what you said, cinnamon, nutmeg, maybe clove. Be careful on the clove. But it was another good one, I think, yeah.'
Gordon Strong: 'I'll start organizational. So you talked about the 2015 guidelines having two categories. We're expanding that to four. Okay. So we're breaking, we're breaking Perry into its own category. And what had been sort of the, the, the traditional cider, the standard cider, is traditional cider. So the regional cider varieties of the world that are primarily just taking apples, crushing them, and fermenting them.'
Gordon Strong: 'So the common cider is made from table apples, but also, you know, we had English and French styles before. We're adding an heirloom variety, which is kind of like a modern craft cider, something that has apples with more tannin, but not necessarily the extra fermentation effects that you get out of English and French, things that have malolactic fermentation that generate funky or, you know, spicy kind of elements. No, just something that has more tannin to it as opposed to the generally sweeter and more acidic table fruit. Adding the Spanish cider?'
Gordon Strong: 'So, yeah. So that's, uh, again, the, uh, BJCP is looking to be more than just an American organization. So we're trying to be open to styles that exist in other countries and, you know, representing their heritage, even if it is sort of hard, would be hard for an American to produce them. You know, not all cider is going to be made here. So we have to be open to that.'
Gordon Strong: 'Yes, that's fine. So, like I told you, there's traditional, which has the five sub-styles. Then there's a group of ones that I'm calling strong-siders. So New England cider, apple wine, ice cider, and fire cider. They're all using some form of concentration technique or some additional form of sugar being added, something to make a stronger product, and it might have some other effects.'
Gordon Strong: 'Yeah, so I don't put my – I mean, I've won medals in cider. I've won national medals in cider. But I don't consider myself the geeky cider maker. I'm more like the find some really, really, really good sweet cider and then ferment it. using the techniques that I know how to do. And then maybe I'll make variations of that by adding other ingredients. So just knowing how to ferment something, knowing how to balance something, knowing how to present something to judges, that can take you so far.'
Gordon Strong: 'What I tend to think of myself more as is a really good cider judge. So you can appreciate these things. You can learn to develop the vocabulary about the flavors of what you're tasting, to understand what's expected in these world styles, and then be... then be one of the people that can help decide, you know, the most worthy examples in a competition.'
Gordon Strong: 'The other thing that I love to do with getting the cider is I'll make sizer, which is actually the mead. with using apple cider and honey. And that's where I tend to bring in the apple pie spices. Oh, yeah. I've won a lot of medals with my apple pie spices. Apple pie cider or mead, I should say. Yeah, like liquid apple pie.'
Deep Dive
Making cider at home is easier than you think! This chapter explores the straightforward process, from using store-bought sweet cider to sourcing fresh, local apples. We also discuss the different levels of difficulty and how to choose the right apples for your cider.
- Use commercially available sweet cider as an extract equivalent.
- Source fresh, local apples in season for best results.
- Consider apple varietals and their impact on flavor and tannin levels.
Shownotes Transcript