How do you like them apples?
Apples go through a process similar to wine before they end up in your glass. Here’s what happens
Ladies and gentlemen, a big hand for the apple – the most important fruit in the world. It inspired Isaac Newton’s laws of gravity; it keeps the doctor away if consumed on a daily basis; it tastes so lovely, not even Adam and Eve could resist its charms; and, most exciting of all, it’s the (ahem) core ingredient of cider!
The apple is to cider what the grape is to wine.
The juice comes from the cider apple which differs from the culinary and dessert namesake because its flesh is more fibrous in texture. This makes it easier to extract the juice, brimming with tannin, giving it body and colour, high in sugar but low in acidity. You wouldn’t pluck a cider apple from a tree and eat it as it would taste pretty strange.
There are more than 400 different varieties of cider apples, the vast majority boasting bizarre names. Cidermakers plant different varieties of tree together, depending on the style of cider they want to produce, in an effort to make harvesting and processing easier.
TYPES OF APPLE
Cider apple varieties can be roughly divided into four different categories based on levels of acidity and tannin:
1) Sweet
Sweet cider apples possess the least flavour of the four categories with little in the way of acidity or tannin.
Cidermakers will use sweet cider apples to balance out the in-yer-face flavours of other varieties that would otherwise blow your tastebuds away.
They’re high in sugar and, as such, very fermentation friendly. Sweet Coppin, Yellow Newton Pippi.....
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Section : Cider Special
Page number : 72
