[Sca-cooks] Stefan finally succeeds in making cider

[Stefan li Rous]

Some of you my remember my laments about not ever having gotten a hard 
apple cider to work out. Of three or four attempts all were failures. 
Some explosively so.

Well near the end of October my wife and I held a revel at our house. 
In part this was to celebrate the barony managing to successfully put 
on two big events, Known World Academy of the Rapier and our large fall 
event, within weeks of each other. We tried to have our revel the 
weekend after the fall event and our timing was apparently bad. Only a 
few people showed up. We found out later that some folks attended a 
small, local Scottish fair that we weren't aware of when we scheduled 
our revel and many folks simply decided to spend that evening at home, 
since they had been spending a lot of time working on the events.

Anyway, I had bought a gallon of cider for the revel and put about half 
of it in a crock pot and put in various spices. Only half of it because 
crock pot wasn't quite as big as I thought it was. :-) Only a few cups 
of the spiced cider were drunk, mostly by me. So when the revel wound 
down I poured the remaining cider, minus the spices, back in the gallon 
jug with the unused portion, and capping it. Since I didn't have room 
in the refrigerator, I left it out.  Well in a few days I noticed it 
foaming up. Still not having any room in the refrigerator I continued 
to leave it out. Tasting it in early December, it was alcoholic and not 
too bad.

At the last minute, I decided to bring it along to our baronial Yule 
Revel. I returned with less than half of what I took, so some folks 
must also have liked it.

So, sometimes you succeed even when, or perhaps because, you don't try.

Maybe it's time to siphon off what is left and bottle it.

Stefan
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THLord Stefan li Rous    Barony of Bryn Gwlad    Kingdom of Ansteorra
    Mark S. Harris           Austin, Texas          
StefanliRous at austin.rr.com
**** See Stefan's Florilegium files at:  http://www.florilegium.org ****