From the Portland Mercury‘s Craft Beer Issue!
Last fall, I went apple picking at Morning Shade Farm in Canby and picked hundreds of apples. Some of them had bruises and worm-holes and dirt, and some were so perfect I could picture them sitting on a cartoon teacher’s desk. A few days later, I took a couple sativa hits, blasted a Spotify playlist, and spent a perfect solitary afternoon slicing, dicing, boiling, and making a wonderful mess out of my kitchen.
At the end of the day, I had jugs and jugs of nonalcoholic cider—but I didn’t want to stop there. So I filled a couple of old growlers with the cider, added some wine yeast I found in my garage, and covered the growlers with pieces of foil that I’d poked a few holes in. A couple of weeks later, I poured the growlers’ contents—now a funky, yeasty brew that smelled somewhere between fresh baked bread and rotten apples—into some old Corona bottles. I tucked the bottles away in a corner of my closet and forgot about them until Christmastime, when I threw them in my suitcase before traveling to visit family.
