Kitchen Beasts

We've captured a wild beast in a jar; we've fed it, and even now it gnaws ravenously at its meal perched on our kitchen table. Farting and belching as it eats, it does our bidding.

Coffee-brown raw apple cider from our press has lightened to rusty red orange, and clarified as our wild yeast consumes the apple-sugars. Carbon and sulfer dioxides each stream upward in straight rows of tiny tiny bubbles, as the little eaters digest our juice and make alchohol.

Feast, my pretties, feast! They eat and make nectar, out-gas and reproduce. The bottom of my gallon jug is littered with the dead bodies of past generations. Soon enough they will all pay for their gluttony by the extinction of the species in their little glass universe.

The wild yeast that came in on the Oak Glen apples, the critters hiding in the cracks and crevices of our old cider press, a few hitchhikers on the wind on Pressing Day -- all trapped, our slaves making our raw cider over into hard cider.

In a few weeks we will decant this scant-gallon into sealed brown bottles, trapping the dying breathes of a million yeast critters as disolved CO2. And by summer we will have sparkling hard cider!

Next weekend, we will put down five gallons of good store cider -- alas, not our great raw home-pressed, but quite good. No preservatives, unfiltered. Pasteurized, though, so for this batch we will have to import guest yeast, a commerical strain from somewhere far off.