Cider Making

We have three dwarf apple trees that produce hundreds of apples every year.We bought the three varieties, Pink Pearl, Sierra Beauty, and White Pearmain as bare root trees from Trees of Antiquity in California about six or seven years ago. For the last three years we've been making apple cider. I'm not talking about some cloudy apple juice. This is a fermented product using champagne yeast. It's a pretty labor intensive process usually taking the better part of a morning to do a two to five gallon batch.The fermentation is complete after about 3 weeks.At that point,it's like a nice still white wine. We rack it off a couple of times, add sugar for carbonation, and then bottle it. I don't know what the alcohol percentage is, but it does go to your head just like champagne. On Thanksgiving or Christmas when we look at the bubbles rising in our glasses, we can remember our labors under blue autumn skies and know it was more than worth it.