Experimental Design: How to Make Cider?

Denmark has no cultural understanding or approach to cider making so let us define on our own how to make cider.

Traditionally cider is produced by fermentation of a nutrient poor apple must. The poorness is do to the clarifying process step known as Keeving where nutrients are trapped in a pectin gel and removed from the juice. Without nutrients yeasts will to ferment and this results in a cider with a residual of sugar. This technique has been practiced for centuries in cider producing countries as France and England. So should we just stop here and implement this technique in Danish cider making as well? No. The traditional approach to winemaking is radically different from the modern wine industry: Here wines are produced under optimal conditions regarding nutrition’s, temperature, time, and so on.

There is a clash between these two techniques. So how to produce Danish cider? What is the most optimal for our varieties? During my experiments I will challenge the way to make cider and therefore do it by a modern approach and a traditional approach. The figure above illustrates the two approaches.