A Guide to Tropical Cider Alchemy

10I don’t drink much these days, but I do make a lot of alcohol. As I write I have a rum mash fermenting and I’m cooling down the mash for the chilli lime tamarind cider (recipe below). I mostly share or trade the cider and rum, most recently for car mechanic services and yoga classes. Being able to share homemade beverages adds to one of the great joys of my life, hosting friends. But my interest in brewing and using tropical ingredients in my brews goes far beyond that. I’m personally interested in brewing for a number of reasons:

• I want to use as many plants from my garden in my daily consumption patterns, especially herbs and medicinal plants.
• It is an excellent way to preserve excess harvest.
• It is delicious, fun and makes a great gift or trade.
• I don’t support large alcohol companies and the type of agriculture their ingredients come from.

I’ve put together this simple overview of my brewing process to encourage others to take up the brewing task. This is merely a dip into a vast topic. This article is based on my experience being around many wild brewers over the last decade and the past year of a deep dive into the topic of brewing. I’ve had the chance to learn under some wonderful brewing teachers, starting with Laura Killingbeck and her ginger beers over a decade ago, and more recently Sharleen Ortiz and Connor Harron. At the end of the guide you will find additional resources for all your brewing schemes.

The Tropics and Alcohol

As the micro-brew movement takes off here in Costa Rica, it seems like an ideal time to present an opportunity and challenge to the brewing community. Can we make a shift to tropical and local ingredients? The hops, barley, and wheat used to brew nearly all beers do not grow easily in the tropical latitudes. They are all imported, and although we continue, and likely will for a long while, to participate in a global economy, we also have to recognise its fragility.

What if we shifted to brewing and drinking ciders, beers, hooches, wines, chichas, and such that were made with only local ingredients? Sugar cane and mangos, corn and sweet potato, lemongrass and ginger, cacao and vanilla, jackass bitters and hombre grande—the possibilities of tropical ingredients are endless. You are only limited by your creativity.

Shifting to Tropical Ingredients

What I am requesting is a shift in our culinary habits away from modern European style ales and lagers. These are very recent arrivals to our diet, and do not reflect the vast brewing history that we find in the tropics. Traditional tropical alcoholic beverages were mostly thicker gruel-like drinks, low in alcohol content, produced from starchy plants like sweet potato, aguaje palm, cassava, or pejibaye. Additionally, sugar wines produced from abundant harvests of sweet fruits, palm sap, cactus pulp or fresh pressed sugar cane juice were historically common in the tropical latitudes. These beverages were almost always consumed fresh, as storage in this climate is challenging, and they were always based on what was in season. They were not clear and cold liquids like the modern beers so many of us enjoy.

I believe that we can find a middle ground. I believe it is entirely possible to create a beverage with the mouthfeel, clarity, and carbonation of the alcoholic drinks that we enjoy, while using exclusively tropical ingredients. This blog seeks to inspire you to do just that.

Fortunately there are a number of folks doing just this already in our country. I encourage everyone to try a beverage from the Costa Rica Meadery, Chichitas Cusuco, and Ginger Elixirs.

The Basics of Fermentation

When you make an alcoholic beverage you are participating in one of our planet’s most ancient and powerful technologies, fermentation. Much has been written about fermentation and I won’t attempt to add to that library here. The references at the end will be an excellent guide.

On the most basic level alcohol fermentation occurs as follows: yeast consume sugars and release two bi-products, alcohol and carbon dioxide. Happy feeling and fizzy drink, respectively, two birds with one stone.

Different species of yeast participate in this process, consuming and replacing each other while slowly converting the different forms of sugar (carbohydrates, glucose, fructose, sucrose) into simpler and simpler molecules.

The entire fermentation process should be done in an anaerobic environment to provide some control over the microorganism population and to prevent the alcohol from converting into vinegar.

Brewing Process

The basic brewing process looks as follows.

1. Make a tea with all the wonderful flavours you want. Herbs, spices, bitters, fruit juice, and more can be added.

2. Dissolve sugar into the tea.

3. Cool the tea down to below 37 C or 100 F.

4. Add yeasts, water, and any other ingredients, such as fresh fruit.

5. Put into a fermentation vessel and watch it bubble.

6. Drink when you like the flavour.

That is it. You can get far deeper into this topic. You can research enzymatic and Maillard reactions, you can attempt to create a drink that tastes a lot like a traditional grain and hops based beer using bitter tropical herbs, you can replace the sugar with your fruit juice, and so forth.

A Few Recipes

All of the following recipes are for either 6 or 12 Litre batches.  These should help get some creative ideas flowing. Use these recipes to understand the amount of sugar and yeast to add to get the brews fermenting properly.

Brewing with Porvenir Design

Our team at Porvenir Design would love to help you design and plant your garden and orchards to specifically grow food for creating wildcrafted ciders and hooches. Please contact us to learn more about our services.

Resources

Wild Fermentation by Sandor Katz

The Wildcrafting Brewer by Pascal Baudar

The Drunken Botanist by Amy Stewart

The Art of Fermentation by Sandor Katz

The Permaculture Book of Ferment and Human Nutrition by Bill Mollison

Sacred Herbal Healing Beers by Steven Buhner