Scrumpy's Farmhouse Style

OK, so my last couple batches have been, uh, mixed victories. Well, OK, so they've both been pretty hard to drink. The last one particularly -- the apples I used for it were a bit green and with the sugar gone (I fermented it almost to full dryness) it was just really sour, nearly undrinkable. The one before that came out OK but I really didn't like the molasses tone I got from the brown sugar I fortified it with.

To top that off, a buddy of mine who got out of homebrewing (he thought he was turning himself into an alcoholic) gave me a bunch of high-end beermaking goodies. Two carboys, a grain mill and a bunch of other stuff. I started thinking about a nice high-powered IPA ...

I'd pretty much decided I was getting out of cider.

Then ...

I picked up a bottle of this Scrumpy stuff at the Whiteside Brewing Supply.

Disclaimer -- I've no idea who these people are, other than I heard the stuff mentioned on this forum before in connection with some kind of spiced cider they made. But I really, really like this stuff.

Anyway, I would really like to make a similar cider -- some sweetness, not much acid, light sparkle -- I'm not asking for proprietary secrets but does anybody have a recipe that's in the same style?

Cheers!

--Finn

Be careful what you wish for. Found this after a google search

12 pounds, mixed apples (make sure they're clean with no blemishes)
1/2 pound, raisins
1/2 pound, raw meat
1 gallon, water at 70 degrees
champagne yeast (tradition calls for bakers yeast)

Method

Chop all ingredients. Then grind the apples and raisins. A food processor is helpful. Toss the ingredients into the water and stir. Add the yeast and seal the brew bucket with an airlock. Each day, stir the ingredients by swirling the ingredients in the closed bucket. After the first fermentation slows, about 8-10 days, move to a secondary fermenter. If you like a dry cider, add a second dose of yeast to the secondary fermenter. Seal with an airlock. Let sit until the fermentation slows to a very slow, almost imperceptable bubble. Move to a carboy to get out more of the particulates. Let it sit for about a week and bottle.

The scrumpy will need to mature for about four months before you will want to even try it since it will give off a strong unpleasant smell and almost vinegary taste. The longer it is allowed to mature, the better, smoother and drier it will get.

Comments:

This is a recipe for a strong British cider called scrumpy. It is really strong. One glass and the world begins to glow. A second glass, makes it all go.

It is wonderful served cold when mature. I have let it sit for a year and it is quite fine

RAW MEAT?

Tell me that this is a typo and you meant to put something else there, that is insane!

Nope! This was copy/pasted directly.

Ok, so what would be the point of putting raw meat into the cider?
Would it provide some chemical that is now commercially available and clean that was not readily available then? I can just imagine the potential contamination possibilities with raw meat. And what kind of meat too boot, anything?
Beef, pork, chicken, deer, moose, rabbit, duck, bear, cougar, anything goes?

I'm curious, too. What does the meat bring to the table?

Hey, it's a British drink, fellahs.

You can't always explain the British.

You cannot, with a sound concience, put meat in anything you brew.
This must have been to either set and settle the pectin without the original recipe author knowing it or just to be totally crazy.

Insanity, insanity I tells ya!

I think this is probably the scrumpy Finn is talking about: http://www.organicscrumpy.com/ I've had it and it's pretty good. I'm pretty sure the recipe that includes the meat is archaic/not in common use and definitely not in the scrumpy he refers to.

don't know if it's true or not, but I heard quite a while back something about Guinness putting raw meat in their fermentors too.

Lol, i think the raw meat is supposed to be chopped at the same time as the apples and then thrown on the grill and cooked while you're mixing up your cider. When you pop on the airlock and shove it under the stairs head out back and eat dinner.

mike

Drew966 said:

I think this is probably the scrumpy Finn is talking about: http://www.organicscrumpy.com/ I've had it and it's pretty good. I'm pretty sure the recipe that includes the meat is archaic/not in common use and definitely not in the scrumpy he refers to.

Click to expand...

This is the stuff! Very nice. As for raw meat, well ... I have enough trouble keeping bacterial infections out of my wort as it is... I can see it now: "Great cider, Finn! But that yeast, I can't quite place it. What is it?" "Salmonella. Zippy, isn't it?"

Cheers!

--Finn

As I recall, one of the characteristics of a "scrumpy" cider is that it is fermented with raw meat in the fermenter. I'm not sure what the raw meat does, but I wouldn't add it to my fermenter...ever.

As for the dry/sour notes...there are some good cider yeasts that should leave some residual sweetness. Even Nottingham might yield good results. Avoid the wine yeast strains - they're bound to leave your cider quite dry.

OK, my friend and I made some scrumpy from the quoted recipe. He was in England, many moons ago, and had some of the real stuff. We decided anything that has meat in it is too weird to not try. We used lean turkey breast. (I wanted to use sausage.)

We did some research. It turns out that this is a home-grown type of brew made at farmhouses. The meat part comes from rats getting drunk from eating/drinking the foam. They would fall into the vat and provide new protein/enzymes for the cider.

We've got 3 gallons of something, but we are not sure what it is yet. We began this in October, 2010. It's still in the secondary and it has a lot of solids still. They have not settled out. I think we have opened the lid and checked it too many times, and let oxygen into the mix.

We have been trying to get volunteers to sample our scrumpy. So far, no takers. We are going to do this again, but we will do it a bit differently.

I'll update after we try it. If we live. LOL

sailrat said:

OK, my friend and I made some scrumpy from the quoted recipe. He was in England, many moons ago, and had some of the real stuff. We decided anything that has meat in it is too weird to not try. We used lean turkey breast. (I wanted to use sausage.)

We did some research. It turns out that this is a home-grown type of brew made at farmhouses. The meat part comes from rats getting drunk from eating/drinking the foam. They would fall into the vat and provide new protein/enzymes for the cider.

Click to expand...

I'd go for the real thing. Check out a reptile pet store in your area and get 1 large feeder rat, or about 1/2 lb of feeder mice and drop them in whole.

I've had many a laugh at this topic. Raw meat? hahah.

British Scrumpy has 3 characteristics - It's strong (7%ish usually,) it's flat, and it's often brewed in wooden barrels rather than anything particularly "sterile." That's the only difference between our Cider and Scrumpy. It can be served cloudy too...

So ignore all of that arse and just make a strong cider

sailrat said:

OK, my friend and I made some scrumpy from the quoted recipe. He was in England, many moons ago, and had some of the real stuff. We decided anything that has meat in it is too weird to not try. We used lean turkey breast. (I wanted to use sausage.)

We did some research. It turns out that this is a home-grown type of brew made at farmhouses. The meat part comes from rats getting drunk from eating/drinking the foam. They would fall into the vat and provide new protein/enzymes for the cider.

We've got 3 gallons of something, but we are not sure what it is yet. We began this in October, 2010. It's still in the secondary and it has a lot of solids still. They have not settled out. I think we have opened the lid and checked it too many times, and let oxygen into the mix.

We have been trying to get volunteers to sample our scrumpy. So far, no takers. We are going to do this again, but we will do it a bit differently.

I'll update after we try it. If we live. LOL

Click to expand...

I'd be afraid of poultry. And pork even moreso. Anything you can't eat raw, basically. If I were crazy enough to do this, I'd at least get some quality beef that could be eaten tartare.

RobWalker said:

I've had many a laugh at this topic. Raw meat? hahah.

British Scrumpy has 3 characteristics - It's strong (7%ish usually,) it's flat, and it's often brewed in wooden barrels rather than anything particularly "sterile." That's the only difference between our Cider and Scrumpy. It can be served cloudy too...

So ignore all of that arse and just make a strong cider

Click to expand...

Part 2 of the story:

Bill had to argue with the locals to get served scrumpy. Then he had to scrape oily greasy stuff off the top of his drink. They would not give him a glass like the locals had, they only served him a little glass, midget-sized. He ended the night with a DUI. Bottom line, it was not 7%.

Be well and stay awake.

I looked at this recipe awhile back, and heard the backstory. apparently people liked something about the rat batches more than the others. so they started just throwing legs of mutton and whatnot into the fermenters. i would say if you were to try this. use very very lean meat. the fat is what would go rancid first, and use meat that you know. At my house we'v been building some hutches for rabbits, and that would be the meat i plan on using. from healthy home raised rabbits, lean meat, and a clean butchering process. Alot more than you could put your health on from store meat. I've made perfectly good cider without the help of meat, but im really just curious!

This idea is supposed to be humorous rather than a serious proposal but I believe meat was used to provide nitrogen for the yeast, before they knew about microbiology. Now that you can buy DAP nitrogen, you would be crazy to put meat in cider. Some people try to keep nitrogen levels low to slow the ferment, there is a process called keeving which aims to keep the cider naturally sweet by removing the nitrogen.

My uncle used to put bits of skinned rabbit in his ciders, and all that came out was a very white bleached bone.

I was too young to ever try it, but people seemed to like it.

interesting, i read somewhere that it can come out cookable still in some cases. My friend has been trying to figure out something of the sort with hard alcohol (he works at professional distillery) but he settled for just throwing steak in mix drinks, and i think hes trying to make a sort of rabbit tincture of sorts.

NOT RAW MEAT ......RAW MEAL ! LLLLL
Raw meal (flour = meal = flour) should be used as a starter for the yeast. It feeds the yeast and 'activates' it. You don't need much. After all, apples have very little yeast if any at all. It is the raisins that supply the yeast (white stuff on raisins) so Sundried on the vine is best.
Even Pastry Cooks often use flour depending on the type of yeast used.
The reason the word 'raw' is used is to denote uncooked, unroasted and untoasted; those cuddly terms TV cooks use.
We now have the luxury of packet yeast so the raisins and raw meal could be omitted.
Please don't, do not, use meat.


Re: Be careful what you wish for. Found this after a google search
12 pounds, mixed apples (make sure they're clean with no blemishes)
1/2 pound, raisins
1/2 pound, raw meat NO NO NO NO NO
1 gallon, water at 70 degrees
champagne yeast (tradition calls for bakers yeast) etc

PLEASE!

Leave dead animals or parts thereof to reseed bacteria in septic systems. NOT CIDER!

No No No No No!

Raw meal (flour = meal = flour) should be used as a starter for the yeast. It feeds the yeast and 'activates' it. You don't need much. After all, apples have very little yeast if any at all. It is the raisins that supply the yeast (white stuff on raisins) so Sundried on the vine is best.
Even Pastry Cooks often use flour depending on the type of yeast used.
The reason the word 'raw' is used is to denote uncooked, unroasted and untoasted; those cuddly terms TV cooks use.
We now have the luxury of packet yeast so the raisins and raw meal could be omitted.
Please don't, do not, use meat.

Please leave dead animals for reseeding septic tanks, NOT CIDER!

No No No No No

Raw meal (flour = meal = flour) should be used as a starter for the yeast. It feeds the yeast and 'activates' it. You don't need much. After all, apples have very little yeast if any at all. It is the raisins that supply the yeast (white stuff on raisins) so Sundried on the vine is best.
Even Pastry Cooks often use flour depending on the type of yeast used.
The reason the word 'raw' is used is to denote uncooked, unroasted and untoasted; those cuddly terms TV cooks use.
We now have the luxury of packet yeast so the raisins and raw meal could be omitted.
Please don't, do not, use meat.

Please leave dead animals or parts thereof to reseed septic tanks

I am originally from Britain and my mates used to think that maple syrup was made with raw meat to control the amount of froth during the boil - so vegetarians would not touch maple syrup. I suspect that a recipe that included raw meat was both acknowledging that mice and rats were likely present and that there was no guarantee that the end product would be totally vermin free AND was added in a recipe to make sure that gullible strangers would be suitably "scunnered" (disgusted) by the supposed ways of the locals. (yet there are recipes for beer that include bacon and others that include oysters so perhaps the idea of fermenting animal muscle is not so exotic after all)
All that said, when I was growing up, scrumpy was simply a cider made with yeasts on the apples themselves. A cloudy, tart drink with plenty of character but hard to believe that such cider would be stronger than 6 or 7% ABV but if you are drinking a few pints of it rather than the same amount of beer at about half that ABV then you would soon know all about it.

Hi, here in Chile we have something like a scrumpy and it's calles "chicha". You can make it from grapes or apples....and in the deep country they put some raw meat to make the fermentation go faster (because of the protein and son nutrients for the wild yeast)

Finn said:

Anyway, I would really like to make a similar cider -- some sweetness, not much acid, light sparkle -- I'm not asking for proprietary secrets but does anybody have a recipe that's in the same style?

Cheers!

--Finn

Click to expand...

Hi,

I have a seriously simple and reliably fast recipe. Just juice, black tea, & yeast. To make it a bit more farmhouse-like i would have 30g of either white american or dark french oak chips for a week in secondary.

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/showthread.php?t=544345

YES YES YES

A dead rat or two, in a large vat of cider, that's they way do it the southwest of England.

A leg of mutton was used to provide the nitrogen that yeast needs in addition to sugar. We're not cavemen anymore so we use DAP or some other chemical yeast nutrient.

Tom_Bell said:

A leg of mutton was used to provide the nitrogen that yeast needs in addition to sugar. We're not cavemen anymore so we use DAP or some other chemical yeast nutrient.

Click to expand...

An attitude like that is just putting meat out to pasture.