Seventeenth-century English bottled cider

What is seventeenth-century bottled cider?

This is the sparkling cider of Restoration England, made by putting apple cider into glass before it had quite finished fermenting. Sir Paul Neile described it in a discourse printed by John Evelyn in 1664. He wanted cider that would "mantle and sparkle in the glass" as it was poured, with a light head that settled quickly.

Neile was clear about the limits. If the cider frothed and flew out of the glass, it had been bottled too soon. If the corks blew out or the bottles burst, it had been bottled much too soon. The drink he aimed for sat between still cider and the potgun-drink that sprayed about the room. A version of his method also appears in The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby, printed in 1669 under the heading Sir Paul Neale's way of making cider.

There is no added yeast in the old method and no measured sugar. The sparkle comes from the yeast already working in the cider, closed into a strong bottle with a little sugar left to ferment.

Which apples went in?

The Closet text names the Redstreak as the best apple for cider that has to keep, with the Gennet Moyle next and pippins after them. Evelyn called the Redstreak the famous apple of Herefordshire and said it had been raised from a wilding within living memory and nicknamed the Scudamores Crab.

The Herefordshire Pomona describes it as a yellow apple streaked with red, firm and crisp, with juice of specific gravity 1079. By the 1880s its authors wrote that the Redstreak no longer existed as a distinct variety. A modern maker has to choose a substitute, and the old texts point to fruit with rich juice, since Worlidge observed that poor cider broke more bottles than rich cider.

Neile also made cider from pippins. He gathered them, let them lie in the loft about three weeks and made the cider at the start of November. The Closet version gives the same three-week rest for all the apples.

Why the juice was settled before it fermented

Neile's whole method rests on one idea. Cider that works hard and often grows harder and sharper each time, and the solid matter of the apple is what sets it working again with every change of weather. So the juice was cleared before fermentation could take hold.

The Closet text runs the stamped and strained juice into a wooden vat with a spigot three or four fingers above the bottom, covered with hair cloth or sackcloth. After twelve hours the juice is drawn off into a barrel left about two fingers short of full, with the bung open. After a day it is drawn off again above the dregs, and if it is still not clear it goes into a smaller vessel for another day. In Evelyn's print Neile fills the vessel all but about a gallon, leaves it twenty-four hours and draws it off by a tap two or three inches from the bottom.

This repeated racking takes away much of the yeast and apple solids. The cider that goes into bottle still has sugar and some live yeast, but not so much that it races away.

Choosing the moment to bottle

Neile admitted there was no certain rule. He bored a small hole in the cask with a piercer, fitted a peg and drew a little out two or three times a day to watch how it changed.

His target was cider that was "not perfectly fine" when bottled, with a little haze still in it. That haze meant yeast enough to fret in the bottle and give "a fine quickness". Bottled too thick, it might drive out the corks, break the bottles or fly about the house when opened. Bottled too fine, it would stay flat.

He preferred to err on the early side. He filled his bottles in the order they came from the cask, because the cider at the top of a hogshead differed from the cider near the bottom, and he tested one bottle at each end of the row and one in the middle. The last bottles drawn, near the lees, he let settle three or four days and poured off clear before stopping them.

Venting, cellars, straw and sand

Within about a week Neile could see how a batch was behaving. If it was fermenting too hard, he opened all the bottles and let them stand open two or three minutes before closing them again. The Closet version visits the bottles after two or three days and leaves the stopples out for half a quarter of an hour. Worlidge advised opening the corks two or three days after bottling, to save the bottles from breaking when the wind next turned to the south.

The bottles lived in a close, cool cellar. In frost Neile covered them with straw. From about the beginning of April he set them into sand up to their necks. He used cool sand to hold back a cider bottled early and a thick covering of straw to hurry one that was slow.

Worlidge laid his bottles on their sides on the ground. Frames and shelves were worse, he wrote, because the air higher up in a cellar changes more. He doubted that sand did much beyond softening sudden changes of temperature, and thought a cistern of spring water was the best store of all.

Sugar as a remedy

Neile wanted the juice of the apple and nothing else. Sugar was his fix for a batch bottled too late. After about a week he put into each bottle a little piece of white sugar about the size of a nutmeg, which started a small fermentation and gave the cider its briskness.

Others used sugar as a matter of habit. An aphorism printed with Neile's discourse mentions two or three raisins in every bottle, and in Somerset as much sugar as a walnut. Worlidge wrote that cider bottled early needed no addition, while poor or flat cider could be given "a new life" with a small quantity of loaf sugar.

Those lumps were never weighed. In the modern method below the sugar is measured, because the amount of sugar left in a closed bottle decides the pressure it reaches.

Bottles and corks

The cider went into dark English glass. The bottles of the middle of the century had a round body and a long neck, and by the end of the century they were squat onion shapes with a pushed-up base. Worlidge preferred glass to stoneware, which leaked, tainted and could not be seen into.

He steeped corks in scalding water before use so they fitted well. He also described glass stopples ground to each bottle with emery. These sealed so well that no gas could escape, and he warned that such bottles were apt to burst where corked ones rarely did. Cork that could give a little was the safer seal.

Some makers tied corks down. Worlidge did not recommend it. He thought it better for the liquor to fly the cork than to break the bottle.

How it was drunk and kept

Neile judged the finished drink in the glass. The right bottle cider mantled a little and sparkled when poured out, then settled. If it frothed and flew, the batch had gone into bottle too early.

Good bottle cider could keep for years. An aphorism printed beside Neile's discourse says that Lord Scudamore seldom failed of three or four years with his bottles and calls the dark bottles "the nappy Wine". The Closet version is more modest about pippin cider, which it says lasts until the summer grows hot.

Ingredients

The historical method uses only apples. Neile named the Redstreak, the Gennet Moyle and pippins, and added a nutmeg-sized piece of white sugar only to a batch that had gone flat.

The modern version uses fresh juice from sound cider apples, a cultured cider or wine yeast and a measured weight of white sugar for priming. Loaf sugar broken and weighed works the same as granulated sugar. The quantities are for one batch of about 4.5 litres. Washington State University's guide uses one gram of dry yeast for about a US gallon of juice, which is about 3.8 litres, so this batch takes about 1.2 grams.

Method

As Neile wrote it, the apples rest three weeks, are stamped and pressed, and the juice is settled and racked off its dregs over one to three days. It goes into a cask short of full with the bung open and is watched through a small peg-hole. It is bottled while slightly hazy, vented after a few days if it works too hard, and kept cool in a cellar. Nobody today should follow that method as written, because there is no way of knowing how much sugar is left in each bottle.

The modern method reaches the same light mantle with numbers. Ferment the juice with a cultured yeast at 16 °C or below until the hydrometer reads 1.000 or lower, which Washington State University's guide treats as the end of fermentation. Rack it off the yeast. Add about 4 grams of sugar per litre and bottle at once in bottles built for pressure. The guide says this gives about one bar, a gentle sparkle well below the six bars a Champagne bottle is rated for.

Andrew Lea gives a second natural route. The cider goes into bottles early, at a gravity of about 1.003, and finishes fermenting there. That is nearer to Neile's way, but every point of gravity left is a guess about the final pressure, and a dry cider primed by weight is easier to control.

How the bottle makes the sparkle

Yeast turns sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide. In an open vessel the gas escapes. In a sealed bottle it has nowhere to go, so pressure builds in the headspace and the gas dissolves into the cider. When the bottle is opened the pressure drops and the gas comes out as bubbles.

The amount of gas depends on the amount of sugar the yeast can still reach. That is why Neile's timing mattered so much, and why the modern method starts from a dry cider and adds a known weight of sugar. The yeast left in the cider ferments the priming sugar, then settles as a fine layer at the bottom of the bottle. Lea notes that this deposit will always cloud the last of the bottle a little when it is poured.

The guide also warns against adding sulfite after fermentation in bottle-conditioned cider, because the priming needs live yeast.

Food safety and storage

The main danger is the bottle. Sugar and live yeast in a sealed bottle keep making gas, and a bottle that is not built for the pressure can burst. Lea calls an over-sweet sealed bottle a bottle bomb and advises goggles when handling fermenting bottles. Use Champagne bottles, crown-cap beer bottles or PET bottles made for carbonated drinks. Never seal sweet juice or a cider that is still fermenting, and never use ground glass stoppers or tied-down corks on a fermenting bottle.

Fresh juice carries its own risks. The FDA juice guidance lists harmful bacteria from the fruit and patulin, a toxin produced by moulds on damaged or rotten apples. Sort out mouldy and rotten fruit and work with clean equipment. Bubbles, smell or taste do not show that a cider is safe or that fermentation has finished.

Once the bottles have conditioned, keep them cool and out of sun and heat. The old makers stored theirs in cellars, in sand or under straw. The cited sources set no shelf life for a bottle-conditioned cider.