Left: Normal jug. Right: Jug full of unpasteurized apple cider left unfrozen too long.

If you ever wonder why stuff needs to be pasteurized, the above picture is a demonstration. (It looked much better in person than in the picture.) The swollen jug on the right holds apple cider that we made with friends, which was left in the fridge for a month or so. The jug on the left is a normal jug, for comparison.

Unpasteurized cider only seems to last a week or so in the refrigerator before enough microbes grow to alter the taste. Then they start emitting various gaseous byproducts of digestion, which swells up the jug. I don’t know whether the jug would have burst if we’d just left it forever - probably not, since that plastic is pretty tough.

Pasteurizing apple cider requires heating it to between 160 and 185 degrees for a short period. It’s tricky to do that precisely without boiling it and spoiling it, and even when done right many people think it alters the taste. (Making “hard” cider is even trickier.)

Despite all this complications, making cider is fun. A friend of a friend has a cider press, which lets the juice run out and keeps the pulp, seeds, etc. in a wooden bucket. We gathered a few bushels of windfall apples and spent several hours squishing them, then poured the cider into various plastic jugs that we had collected and cleaned. It felt very New Englandy, in both a rustic and a cheapskate way.

Tags: pasteurization