Cider Apples
As you read about cider, you’ll notice a fair amount of discussion centering on culinary versus cider apples. What does this mean? Culinary apples are the eating or baking apples that you encounter in your supermarket produce section. Think your everyday Red Delicious, Golden Delicious, Fuji, or Granny Smith apples. These apples, even the tart Granny Smith, ali contain a high amount of sugar with a restrained bitterness and acid level.

Cider apples used to be the dominant form of apple. The average orchard focused on these mean little hard globes. If you were to grab a traditional cider apple, like a Winesap or a Cox Pippin, and take a bite, you’d be floored by the flood of sharp and bitter flavors.

Instead of a wave of sugary sweetness, the juice is heavily acidic like a Granny Smith. The juice also carries an astringency that, to our modern tastes, rings alarm bells. A good comparison to this level of puckering is the taste of medicine, like aspinn, left on the tongue too long. Ironically, cider apples tend to be as sugar filled, if not more so, than culinary apples; you just can’t taste it due to the other sensations.

You may think it strange that for most of history these unpalatable little buggers have been chenshed, fostered, and shepherded around the world. The reason should be obvious, given that you are reading a hard cider book! When the juice is extracted and mixed with yeast (naturally occurring or introduced by the cider maker), the previously harsh characters change and begin to meld into a beverage of great character.

Most cider books will now stop and say, “Don’t make cider with cullnary applies. They can only make bland, insipid, boring cider. Use real cider apples!” This is sound advice; cider apples do make better cider. The problem for most cider makers is the impracticality of procuring enough true cider apples without growing your own. Thankfully, there are a few tricks that you can use to transform bland aulinary apple juice into a great-tasting cider.

Fruit
It makes sense to add other fruits to your cider. Just about any fruit is full of possibilities and opportunities, and each offers a different set of flavors, aromas, and mouthfeel to your cider. All that it takes is a little gumption on your part and the willingness to experiment. Remember, nothing says you have to make a full batch to figure out how best to use a fruit.

Notice that many of these flavor additions to the cider occur after the primary fermentation is done. In part, this is to allow you to react to the flavor of the batch and, more importantly, to preserve the unique character of your additions.