Cider Made Simple by Jeff Alworth

Author:Jeff Alworth [Jeff Alworth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chronicle Books LLC
Published: 2015-04-01T16:00:00+00:00

What are they doing there?

Let’s back up a step. One of the by-products of natural fermentation is a light dusting of yeast cells that settle to the bottom of a bottle of cider. After three months, the cider becomes clear and sparkling, but the moment the cork comes off the bottle, all that trapped gas will agitate the yeast, slightly clouding the cider. This cloudiness disturbed the French mind. Going to all the trouble of naturally fermenting, carbonating, and clarifying and then everything gets cloudy? To avoid that minor imperfection, winemakers in the Champagne region came up with an incredibly laborious process known as the méthode champenoise (the Champagne method). Few cider-makers go through the bother, but Cyril Zangs is one of them. And what a bother!

Zangs goes through the normal procedure for bottle fermentation, though he caps rather than corks his bottles. (This is another reason he lets the cider go drier than most of his colleagues do—there’s no risk of explosion in a capped bottle.) Then he places them on the racks at a forty-five-degree angle. For the next three weeks, he will turn each bottle “nearly a quarter” turn every day. This process is known as “riddling” (or remuage in French) and the goal is to slowly work the lees down the bottle and into the neck. It’s a tricky business because the particles have different density. “The heavy yeast goes down quick,” Zangs explains, “but the light one always stays back. So, if you do it too quick—poof—the big one goes and you will never get the light one back. The big one [pushes] the small one at the same time.”

This riddling process is labor-intensive and big companies have automated it. I saw one of these machines in action at Le Face Cachée de la Pomme in Quebec. The bottles are placed in a large crate and trussed up on a mechanical device that slowly moves the entire crate, rather than each bottle. It takes Zangs a half hour to rotate each of his three thousand bottles, but the machine does it in a matter of seconds. As the days go on, Zangs also adjusts the angle of each bottle so that as the yeast nears the neck, the pitch gets steeper.

If Zangs has done his riddling properly, in three weeks’ time there will be a small puck of yeast resting on the upside-down bottle cap. Next comes disgorgement (dégorgement), when the puck is removed. Normally he sets aside two long, sticky days to work through the whole batch, but on the day I visited, he demonstrated with a single bottle. The contents are under explosive pressure, so the first thing he does is don a rubber jacket—after a couple hours, it will be running with rivulets of cider. The process is pretty much what it sounds like—a pop of the cap and the puck is “disgorged” and sent skyward, along with a spray of mist. There is a trick, however. In order to do it properly, the disgorger holds the bottle neck down while fitting a church key onto the cap.

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