Next to straight cider, cider royal was the most common cider-based beverage in early America.
Cider royal is a fortified drink, made by blending cider with a distilled spirit, like French brandy or apple brandy. To make it cider royal one also has to add what was called sweets (a boiled syrup of sugar, water, and egg whites) and letting it condition for several months to several years.
Last fall I fermented a batch of cyder intended for royalling and fortifying. Once the cyder was finished in the spring I made a batch of sweets according to one of William Salmon’s 1710 receipts.
I boiled white sugar, eggs whites, and water into a syrup. It was basically a meringue. I had to keep skimming it.
It took a couple of hours before it cleared up.
After the sweets had cleared and cooled I added French brandy (I used French brandy for the simple reason that it was on sale) and then blended the the fortified sweets with the cyder. I let them condition for five months before bottling.
As part of the experiment, I also made a one-gallon batch of fortified cyder, just adding a quantity of French brandy to straight cyder.
To figure out the final alcohol content for both the cider royal and the fortified I used a Pearson’s Square. Based on the proportions they both went from being a straight cyder at 7% ABV to fortified cyders at 10%.
The formula can be found here. Or you can use an online calculator.
Last week I bottled everything and sampled both.
L: Fortified – R: Royal
As you can see the fortified cyder is clearer. It also has a noticeable alcohol burn on the tongue.
The cyder royal is cloudy, sweeter, and smoother. In some ways the cider royal is definitely closer in profile to modern industrial ciders (but without carbonation).
I wonder if one of the reasons cider royal was popular was because the sweets helped overcome any harsh sharpness or other extremes in the cider. Having a higher alcohol content probably didn’t hurt either.
Filed under Cider
The candidate, himself a wealthy man, convinced the country that his opponent was a snob who could never understand real Americans. As proof the candidate said his opponent didn’t like hard cider.
It was the election of 1840, and William Henry Harrison was running his
“Log Cabin & Hard Cider” campaign against incumbent Martin Van Buren. As you might imagine, Harrison’s campaign created a plethora of log house- and hard cider-related art.
A favorite among them is this not-so-subtle mechanical card
Left:
A BEAUTIFUL GOBLET OF
WHITE HOUSE CHAMPAGNE
pull the tab at the bottom and it changes the image to
Right:
AN UGLY MUG OF
LOG-CABIN HARD CIDER
Special Collections Research Center
Syracuse University Library
His campaign worked and Harrison became our 9th president.
Filed under Cider
Pommel Cyder 