Louiz just dropped me a line about Scrumpy, a hard cider made in the West Country of England. Sounds damn good. I'm betting what makes Scrumpy scrumpy is the type and ratio of apples used. It's a traditional hard cider, though, which means an alcohol content of 10% or less.
While looking up Scrumpy (did I mention, sounds damn good?) I found the really depressing statistic that making apple jack is illegal 'in nearly all countries'. Apparently freeze distillation concentrates nasty fermentation byproducts like methanol, and so of course paranoid regulators (pushed into it by legal distilling companies desperate to make a profit, I bet) have made it illegal. At the same time, it pushes the alcohol content as high as 40%, or eighty proof. My first thought was "well hell, I don't intend to drink it a quart at a time, for god's sake". But at any rate. If you do make your own, any police involvement is not my fault, and drink the stuff in small amounts.
I found an article about chocolate genomes and genetic types. Brace for more food chat, later today.
Oh, and I made some dulce du leche cake last night.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
Ahh, Scrumpy. I drank many a pint of scrumpy when I studied abroad in Bath. The Beehive would have really cheap pints some nights and we'd all walk home with the "scrumpy smile."
So I can legally brew beer at home, can make wine in my basement to my heart's content, but I'm goignto get arrested if I leave a jug of "bad" cider out in the freeze and then collect the free liquid????
I think this should fall into the "stupid laws" category, like in whatever state it's illegal to have sex without taking off your boots first...
I think it's less because of the "distillates" than the fact that they can't tax the jeepers out of you if you make your liquor at home!
Johnny Appleseed legends tend to neglect the little tidbit of information that apples don't tend to grow "true" from seed, and thus all those apple trees he planted were cider apples - essentially he was spreading the love of applejack across the new US. This was "discovered" when sombody started poking into the legend some years ago, and visited a number of trees supposedly planted by him, and found that he probably was a real person, and that he was planting "non-edible" apple trees.
And the schoold teach our kids about him... LOL
As a Terry Pratchett fan (scrumpy features more than once in his books), all I have to say to that is "Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!"
Now here we're hitting a problem with dialects! I know scrumpy as a *really* strong version of alcoholic cider (cider is alcoholic here in the UK and it throws me when people outside of the UK refer to it as a children's drink!), but when I asked himself for clarification he knows it as a really rough home made cider...
I know it as the type of thing where one drink makes the world spin, two makes it go away. And when you wake up you wish you hadn't.
Scrumpy is also a brand now.
Post a Comment