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April
Cider like gardening, grows more intoxicating
with age
People who know how immature I am will find it hard
to believe, but I’m pushing 50. I’m
really just in my early to mid to late 40s, but
there’s no denying the passage of time.
I’m even starting to think that some of the
dreams of my youth— winning the Tour de
France, becoming a Supreme Court justice—may
actually never happen.
This is why I love gardening. My chances of
space travel may be di- minishing, but in the
garden I’m in my prime. Gardening is an old
person’s game, and in that arena I’m
still an upstart, a young Turk,
a whippersnapper! Even Thomas Jefferson said
that “tho’ an old man, I am but a young
gardener.”
Gardening gives confidence to those of us no
longer in the 18–24 cohort that dominates our
culture. We may not feel too comfortable busting a
move in a dance club or playing beach volleyball in
a Speedo, but we can swagger into any grocery
store, even the fanciest fine food market, feeling
absolutely certain that we can grow a better tomato
than any they sell.
The cocky feeling of satisfaction that gardeners
have as we strut through the produce section is one
of the great joys of our hobby. Most of us
don’t often feel this way in a store. When
I’m buying a computer or a sofa, I rarely
think to myself, “Oh, come on, I can make one
better than that.”
But what about when I’m buying something to
drink?
This year, I decided to find out, by making hard
apple cider. With a gallon of juice, a packet of
yeast and four weeks to go before Thanksgiving, I
set off on a fermentation adventure.
Why make cider, you ask? Why not brew beer like
a normal person? For one thing, I have a dozen
young apple trees growing in my yard that, in a few
years, will start making way more apples than we
need to keep the doctors away. We can’t just
let them go to waste! And they’re not your
typical dessert apples meant to be eaten. I planted
heirloom apples of various types, from sweet to
tart, and I’m growing more from seed. I chose
them after careful research, using a sophisticated
algorithm that considered a wide range of criteria,
from which varieties Thomas Jefferson grew at
Monticello to which varieties happened to be
cheapest at Costco.
These obscure fruits will be much more
interesting to eat than Golden Delicious and Gala,
and they will blend into a much more complex cider
than sweet apples from the store ever could. As
with vegetable gardening, many of the unique and
delicious heirloom varieties have disappeared from
stores, so you have to grow them yourself. A little
backyard orchard is a small but important way for
anyone to help preserve the vanishing genetic
diversity of the apple. To the untrained eye,
I’m making homemade hooch, but in fact,
I’m single-handedly saving the world’s
biodiversity.
I never knew how varied apples could be until I
spent a couple years in Almaty, Kazakhstan, the
modern apple’s ancestral home. (The
city’s name even means “Father of
Apples”!) Like every American kid, I grew up
eating tough-skinned, mealy Red Delicious apples
and not really liking them. But in Kazakhstan, you
can hike though whole forests of wild apple trees,
each one producing a wildly different fruit. And as
you stroll through the bazaars, sellers slice off
free samples from beautiful, crisp apples weighing
a kilogram each. Hav- ing grown up in a country
where the typical grocery store carries 40 brands
of basically identical ketchup but only about four
varieties of apple, I had to go halfway around the
world to discover the incredi- ble variety of this
common fruit.
Like their wild cousins, trees grown from seed
are not clones of the parent, so their apples will
likely be tart, inedible “spitters.” But
they’re fine for drinking, especially after
your yeasty friends have mellowed them out for a
few months.
See, my interest in cider is not about the
alcohol. It’s about the crisp mouthfeel, the
light effervescence, the subtle apple flavor, no
longer overpowered by sweetness. To some, this
protesting too much in favor of hard cider might
seem like claiming to read Playboy for the
articles. But that’s my story and I’m
sticking to it.
Hard cider is wonderfully refreshing. It used to
be the most popular recreational beverage in
America, but it virtually disappeared in the early
20th century. It’s just starting to make a
comeback now, thanks to the foodie homesteader
movement.
The fledgling cider renaissance is about at the
stage where home- brewing beer was a couple decades
ago. In those simpler times, the only alternative
to watery, mass-produced domestic beer was slightly
less watery, mass-produced imports, and Heineken
seemed exotic and good by comparison. People
started homebrewing because it was the only way to
get decent beer.
Then the best homebrewers turned pro and
launched the craft beer revolution. Now, aspiring
drink-it-yourselfers may feel left behind. I’m
certain I could never brew anything as good as
Dale’s Pale Ale or Ranger IPA, so why even
try?
Unlike beer, cider still appeals to the
gardener’s ambition to surpass store-bought
products. I can’t compete with craft brewers,
especially here in the Napa Valley of beer. But
good local hard cider is just becoming available.
We’re still on the frontier.
Cider-making has a synergy with gardening that
appeals to me. Not many homebrewers grow their own
barley, although some are planting hops rhizomes
nowadays. But cider can be pure DIY magic,
transforming backyard food into a bubbly adult
beverage. The fizziness adds something special to
the creative satisfaction, a real feeling of
alchemy.
How is my experiment going? I couldn’t wait
for the apples from my own trees, so I used organic
store-bought apple juice. My kids were appalled
that I would spoil a whole gallon of perfectly good
apple juice, but I explained how this experiment
was essential to advancing scientific knowledge.
This satisfied them, and they like learning about
chemistry and biology by observing the yeast and
watching the carbon dioxide bubble through the
airlock on the jug.
Like all good parents, I am actively
supplementing my children’s education—by
having them help me make alcoholic beverages. Hey,
before you judge me, ask yourself this: Does your
8-year-old know what specific gravity is?
According to our Thanksgiving guests, the first
batch wasn’t bad: dry, crisp and bubbly, but
still just an early effort that will improve as it
ages. And as I learn more about the art and science
of blending apples with various sugar, acid and
tannin levels, I’m sure my future batches will
improve as I age. Entering this new world makes me
feel like a kid again. With all the variables,
fermenting cider is at least as complex as making
wine. It’s easy enough to get started. But
learning the techniques, growing the apples and
waiting for them to ferment will be a long
journey.
Fortunately, gardeners are used to delayed
gratification. We can en- dure months just to enjoy
a single parsnip. This has prepared me to wait the
several years for my apple trees to bear fruit and
the several months for my cider to age and mellow.
I’ll just be aging and mel- lowing right along
with it.
In most ways, we want time to slow down. Our
lives are hurtling by, and time seems to pass ever
faster as we get older. Gardening is an effective
antidote to this existential dread. On the first
warm days of spring, our excitement about summer is
dampened by the knowledge that it’s going to
go by way too fast. Gardeners have per- spective on
this feeling—we don’t want summer to end,
but we take solace in knowing that when it does, at
least our carrots and pump- kins will finally be
ready.
Growing fruit takes this discipline to a whole
new level. I doubt there are many other
fortysomethings out there who find themselves
think- ing, “Man, I can’t wait for the
next five years to pass.” But the giddy
anticipation of waiting for the big backyard apple
harvests makes the approach of the big 5-0 seem a
bit less like a yawning abyss.
In the unlikely event that I never become the
first Tour de France champion to serve on the
Supreme Court, it’s comforting to kno that my
best days as a gardener, orchardist and cider maker
are stil ahead of me.
I’ll have to be careful, though, if this
hobby proves as obsessive as gardening. According
to my cursory research, I can only make 20 gallons
a year for my personal consumption without running
afou of federal liquor laws. I’m not saying I
plan to drink 200 gallons o homemade hard cider
next year, necessarily. It’s just nice to know
that I could.
© 2012 John
Hershey
Other Father Issues,
Books
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Parents are the bones on which children sharpen
their teeth. - Peter Ustinov
John Hershey
is a dad, a writer, and a lawyer (in that order).
He writes a syndicated biweekly humor column about
parenting and family life.. His columns have been
published or accepted for publication on websites
and in magazines around the world, from Maine to
Oregon, Colorado down to Texas, and down under in
Australia.
Blood, Phlegm & Bile:
Parenting with Humor appears monthly on
menstuff.org. But, why the gross title? Well, for
one thing these are three substances with which
every parent becomes quite familiar. They were also
called the "humors" by medieval scientists who
believed that the proportion of these bodily fluids
determined a person's health and temperament. So
it's a pun! A pun requiring a lengthy explanation,
but a pun nonetheless. E-Mail
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