One of the takeaways from Cidercon for me was using some historical techniques. The challenge with medieval ciders is while we know they existed (Palladius from ~400 AD, et al. forward tell us about them), we don’t know much about how they were made until nearly out of period. There is a French treatise about cider from the mid to late 1500s and the earliest English equivalent is Worlidge in the mid 1600s.
Sparkling cider is only documented in the mid 1700s. So what follows is a very modern cider but using late medieval technique.
The first technique I want to try is pet nat. Pétillant Naturel, pet nat for short, is a modern name for what is called the technique ancestrale, which the fancy French word for most of us call “bottle conditioning.” To any brewer, bottle conditioning is nothing new or unusual. However, there are some unique steps that pet nat uses. Pet nat can be traced to 1531 when the champagne technique was first documented. There is no evidence that cider used it then but cider does use it now. In most ciders, you ferment the cider dry, then add a few brix of fermenting must to the bottle, cap, and store. Cider actually does well to keep on the lees as the interaction of alcohol of lees produces some interesting flavors. The bottles are stored as tirage (tier-age), that is, on their sides for a few months to allow the carbonation to happen.
The other thing I might do is keeving. Keeving is an old French process for making cider. The cider is allowed to wild ferment and some of those microbes interact with the pectins to make a chapeaux brun, brown cap, that forms a barrier to the outside air. This is normally done as “low” temperatures, ~ 50 degrees F. The yeast ferment slowly and eventually run out of nutrients and die. They will therefore leave some sugar in the must. With enough knowledge of the sugars present and potentially added, you can calculate the pressure in the bottles. Keeving was definitely done medievally for many centuries in Normandy and Brittainy.
Where the two ever combined? Probably not. But I intend to 🙂 I will be adding a Norman to Oswyn’s family tree. Not unusual for any English person after the conquest. But that would bring some of these French techniques to Oswyn Swann’s manor.
The hardest part of this experiment will be getting ahead of the right apples. That might be impossible. But I think I can find a reasonable substitute. Assuming I can do this in the Fall, it might be ready for Better War or Chamfron in 2024.
