SC - OOP - Wedding favor question

[Philip & Susan Troy]

Tara Sersen wrote:
> 
> One idea that I had was a "warm up kit" - a bottle of cider and some
> mulling spices to take home and warm up, to beat the October chill.  I'm
> picturing a 12 or 16 ounce bottle of cider with a tea-bag of spices tied
> to the neck or handle.  But, we need to find the 12 or 16 ounce bottles
> of cider.  My experience has been that the cider sold in glass bottles
> is the carbonated-apple-juice variety, not the good, thick rich stuff
> that is heavenly when warmed up.  I've never seen the good stuff in
> glass bottles.  I don't think a plastic pint-sized milk jug would work,
> because we need it to keep without refrigeration - most of our guests
> are staying in a hotel.

One of the problems you may encounter is unexpected fermentation. Hard
cider (or at least, sufficiently aged hard cider) isn't that thick
brownish stuff, as a rule, because its sugars have mostly been eaten by
yeasts, so it doesn't have that syrupy consistency, and the various
solids begin to settle out. This eventually leaves you with something
that looks like white wine. Fresh, "soft", unfiltered cider is liable to
ferment if left at room temprature, unless it's been pasteurized. I
guess what I'm saying is that you seem to be looking for a product
which, by its nature, has a short and somewhat volatile shelf life,
bottled in an inert state. That could be difficult to find. 
 
> So, my question is, do any of you know of a brand of *good* cider of the
> variety I described that comes in small glass bottles?  I'd especially
> be excited if it's an organic brand, but I'm not going to get too picky.

Now, by cider, are we thinking of unfiltered apple juice, or hard cider?
Offhand I don't know of a brand of unfiltered soft cider in glass
bottles suitable for leaving at room temperature, and hard cider tends
to come in larger bottles, unless you are talking about something like
Woodpecker or a similar brand. This is a bottled (16 oz?),
force-carbonated hard cider that looks a fair amount like beer.
Woodpecker (or rather, the variety that gets imported to the USA) is
sweet, bubbly, and about as alcoholic as most American beers. They
aren't generally as fine as the best of the Kentish, Norman or Breton
hard ciders, but being available locally and in quantity, and of at
least respectable quality and extreme convenience may be seen to
outweigh the drawbacks. 
 
> Alternatively, never having brewed, I don't know how difficult it would
> be to bottle my own.  I guess in theory it's just like canning, which
> I've done before.  But, I don't know how to secure lids on bottles, and
> is there any difference in sterilizing them since they're not as easy to
> immerse as a wide-mouthed jar?  Can anybody advise me on whether this
> would be a useful way to spend my time?

I would seriously consider finding a brewer (lessee, would that be
AEthelmearc or the EK?) to do this for you, if you wanted to go that
way. (If you don't know someone, I can put you in touch with the head of
the EK's Brewer's Guild, who can find someone near you.) At one time it
occurred to me that it would be a fine thing to cater my own wedding
feast, but wiser heads with sharp knives prevailed. It's possible to do
this, but there's no need to add to the organizatonal headaches you'll
have already. It's not difficult to brew hard cider that can be bottled
(and glass bottles can be sealed in a number of ways, the most common
being a clamp-top bottle such as Grolsch and other commercial beers come
in, kewl because they're theoretically resealable, and your standard
crimp-top, the kind you remove with a bottle-opener), but you'd have to
learn enough about the craft of brewing (things like racking, etc.) in a
fairly short time. I'd be concerned that a first project being so large
and important as a wedding favor would involve some stress and the
chance for a great disappointment if something goes wrong, to say
nothing of the waste of money.

I suggest you talk to a brewer now, or investigate your local beer
distributor (you know, one of those warehouse-y places filled to the
ceiling with cases of different types of beer; upstate New York was full
of them last time I checked) and ask about Woodpecker or other
Angliski-type hard ciders. These are becoming more common in the US than
they were, but are still probably sufficiently exotic in the Adirondacks
(BTW, I am jealous: a wedding in the Adirondacks in the autumn) to make
a good wedding favor.

Oh, you prolly don't want to use the word "Angliski" to a beer
distributor, you may give the wrong impression. The word is "English".  

Adamantius, off to watch guys in skirts, which look somewhat like
himself, the guys that is, not the skirts, throwing telephone poles
- -- 
Phil & Susan Troy

troy at asan.com