just the juice

It's cider season.

By Pat Petzel

It seems too simple to say that cider is just apple juice.  When so-called fruit drinks in the grocery store contain as little as 3 percent juice, it almost seems odd to think that cider contains only the juice from apples.  No added sugar or water – just the juice.

Fall and cider seem to go together like winter and hot chocolate.  Back in the days when people on farms out numbered the people in the cities, many farms had their own cider mills where, in the fall, apples were pressed and cider was bottled and stored.  Now that job is primarily left to orchard growers who sell their cider at far markets or large producers who sell through supermarkets.

It also sounds too simple to describe cider production as just getting some nice apples, pressing the through a cider press and bottling what results.  It is more complicated that that, though not much.

That cider is a food product makes production complicated because of all the safety factors that go into making cider.  And as good cooks know, anything that tastes good has to have the right blend of flavors.  For cider, that means a good balance between tart apples and sweet apples.

Steve Hirsch, a fourth generation orchard grower ,knows about obtaining that sweet/tart balance.  “The key is to use a variety of types of apples,” he said.  All golden delicious, for example, would make the cider too sweet and pale colored.  It takes the right combination of tart and sweet apples for the proper color.  As the season goes on cider tends to get sweeter because early season apples are more tart than apples grown later in the season. 

Hirsch and his family have 50 acres of orchards near Chillicothe.  Apple cider for the Hirsch operation provides another method of marketing apples.  About 30 percent of the apples they produce are made into cider; the rest are sold as fresh fruit.  Statewide, approximately half of all apples are used for cider production.  Cider is an important part of an orchard operation because apples that are too small to be sold can be used to make cider.  “Apple cider keeps the floor under fresh apple prices,” said Dr. Winston Bash, director of Ohio State University’s Food Industries Center.

So how exactly do apples go from bright red or yellow fruit into a sweet amber liquid?  Step one is of course picking ripe apples from the tree.  Next the apples are sorted and graded by size and quality.  Large apples are sold fresh, small ones are sorted to the cider pile and anything that you wouldn’t want to take a bite out of, no matter the size, is discarded.  After sorting, the apples are brushed and rinsed with water or chlorinated water.  Then the cider apples are literally ground to a pulp – seeds, stems and all.  That pulp is then squeezed through a cloth filter that separates the juice from the pulp.  The juice that trickles through is then filtered again so that any pulp that slips through is removed.  Next the cider is pumped to a holding tank where it is cooled before being bottled.  Generally it takes one bushel of apples to make three gallons of cider.  But better, more efficient presses can produce as much as four gallons per bushel.

And there it is, pure apple juice.  Wait a minute there – is it apple juice or cider?  In some ways it’s like asking the difference between rugby and football: You know the difference when you see it, but good luck explaining it.

“You get the juice from apples called different thinks in different places,” Bash explained.  “Here in Ohio, cider generally applies to the fresh product that my be pasteurized and may have preservatives to extend its shelf life, but is not shelf stable.  Apple juice has been thermally processed to be shelf stable.”  In other words, just because a product has been pasteurized doe not mean it is “shelf stable.”  Cider should always be refrigerated and apple juice, if unopened, does not need to be refrigerated.  Pasteurized does not mean the product can be left out of the refrigerator.

Some people let cider sit unrefrigerated for days at a time until it starts bubbling.  Those bubbles mean fermentation – a chemical reaction between oxygen and the yeast in the juice.  Hard cider is cider that is fermented.  It’s simply an alcoholic fermentation produced by the yeast, the same yeast that produces beer and wine, Bash explained.  But don’t try this at home – there is potential for danger because bacteria can grow at the same time as the yeast.

After the alcoholic fermentation is complete the air (oxygen) is allowed back in and certain bacteria will grow in the alcohol and produce acidic acid – vinegar.  And vinegar, as we well know, tastes a whole lot different than apple cider.  Nevertheless, it’s still just the juice.

Note: This story was originally printed in the 1997 Buckeye Farm News. 

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