Order Cider: Making, Using & Enjoying Sweet & Hard Cider, Third Edition

Over All Rating Reviews :

If this were advertised as a book on "how to establish a Cidery" which happened to have info useful to the homebrewer I would have cut it a lot more slack, but as advertised it's deeply disappointing. While I did enjoy the level of detail regarding some aspects of brewing such as the importance of acidity, the 50 page "how to start your own orchard" section was a complete waste of time, as were the neurotically detailed breakdowns of common apple types by region. Anyone looking to start an entire orchard should perhaps be pointed at another more thorough text so that that 50 pages could be reclaimed for, oh, I dunno, brewing? It's pretty badly organized considering it's a third edition, and furthermore it's highly repetitive.

Any brew text that chooses to devote multiple chapters lovingly detailing (and in some cases diagramming) the multitudinous types of equipment used to reduce apples to juice and then repeatedly recommends MOUTH STARTING a siphon for bottling has its head screwed on the wrong way. Fermenting methodologies listed are limited to wild open fermentation or sulfiting the living daylights out of things, and the idea that one might use different yeasts is barely acknowledged.

The only thing to be said for adding this book to your library is its section on "beyond cider" which included a discussion of vinegar, canning, cooking with cider and (perhaps most interestingly) distilling Apple Jack and Apple Brandy. While the authors are very careful to state repeatedly that the production of hard alcohol (even via freeze distillation) is most definitively illegal in the US and that these are not directions (merely information in the interest of completeness) they then go on to give a fairly complete basic rundown on home distillation via multiple methods (including tables, construction details, and diagrams) and the best ways to finish products gained from these methods. Not to say this has any use to the homebrewer either, but at least it's interesting.

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