You communicate openly and honestly. Good communication is a key part of any relationship. When both people know what they want from the relationship and feel comfortable expressing their needs, fears, and desires, it can increase trust and strengthen the bond between you.
Many couples focus on their relationship only when there are specific, unavoidable problems to overcome. Once the problems have been resolved they often switch their attention back to their careers, kids, or other interests. However, romantic relationships require ongoing attention and commitment for love to flourish. As long as the health of a romantic relationship remains important to you, it is going to require your attention and effort. And identifying and fixing a small problem in your relationship now can often help prevent it from growing into a much larger one down road.
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You fall in love looking at and listening to each other. If you continue to look and listen in the same attentive ways, you can sustain the falling in love experience over the long term. You probably have fond memories of when you were first dating your loved one. Everything seemed new and exciting, and you likely spent hours just chatting together or coming up with new, exciting things to try. However, as time goes by, the demands of work, family, other obligations, and the need we all have for time to ourselves can make it harder to find time together.
Commit to spending some quality time together on a regular basis. No matter how busy you are, take a few minutes each day to put aside your electronic devices, stop thinking about other things, and really focus on and connect with your partner.
Focus on having fun together. Couples are often more fun and playful in the early stages of a relationship. However, this playful attitude can sometimes be forgotten as life challenges start getting in the way or old resentments start building up. Keeping a sense of humor can actually help you get through tough times, reduce stress and work through issues more easily. Think about playful ways to surprise your partner, like bringing flowers home or unexpectedly booking a table at their favorite restaurant. Playing with pets or small children can also help you reconnect with your playful side.
One the most powerful ways of staying close and connected is to jointly focus on something you and your partner value outside of the relationship. Volunteering for a cause, project, or community work that has meaning for both of you can keep a relationship fresh and interesting. It can also expose you both to new people and ideas, offer the chance to tackle new challenges together, and provide fresh ways of interacting with each other.
While a great deal of emphasis in our society is put on talking, if you can learn to listen in a way that makes another person feel valued and understood, you can build a deeper, stronger connection between you.
Sex is often a cornerstone of a committed relationship. It can be an intimate emotional experience and a great tool for protecting or improving your mental, physical, and emotional health. However, many couples find it difficult to talk about sex, especially when sexual problems occur. Feelings of embarrassment, shame, and hurt can often impact physical intimacy and push you apart.
Look back to the early stages of your relationship. Share the moments that brought the two of you together, examine the point at which you began to drift apart, and resolve how you can work together to rekindle that falling in love experience.
Be open to change. Change is inevitable in life, and it will happen whether you go with it or fight it. Flexibility is essential to adapt to the change that is always taking place in any relationship, and it allows you to grow together through both the good times and the bad.
Of all the fermented beverages that have taken up space in my fridge, counter top, garage, and barn, apple cider must be my favorite. It's a perfect blend of anticipation and fulfillment, effort and enjoyment. The way we do it, it is also a beautiful excuse to spend time with friends and transform the process, from labor into love.
It begins in the fall. Or rather, it begins with the planting of a tree. It begins with the earth and water, and years of attention. But circles being what they are, it can be hard to choose a starting place, so I will just say: it begins in the fall.
In the fall apples hang on the trees in such abundance that even the bugs and the birds and the deer and the worms cannot eat them all. Baskets in hand, we gather in the orchard. Sometimes a single tree can provide enough cider for several gallons, but we are blessed to live in an area that was for a time known as apple country. Many of the old orchards are gone now, replaced with more high-value crops, like berries and lettuce; still some of them remain, gnarled old limbs still bearing ripe fruit, green and yellow and red.
The best way to pick apples is with a glass of last year's cider in your belly. The best way to pick apples is by lifting them gently upwards, rather than yanking down; when they are perfectly ripe, the stem breaks cleanly above the top of the fruit. The best way to pick apples is with friends, and children, and a few orchard ladders, and an old truck or two to carry it all back home.
However you pick them, the apples are best let to sit for a week or two after being picked. Known as 'sweating,' this time off of the tree produces changes in the apples. Their cell walls begin to relax, making the juice easier to press from them. A waxy, or oily coating will begin to bloom on their skin, signaling that they are ready. An apple that has sweated for a week or two will produce perhaps 25% more juice than apples fresh from the tree.
When it comes to pressing your apples into juice to be made into cider, there are a lot of options, and we've tried nearly all of them. Hand mashing, manual presses, electric presses... you can choose whatever method you prefer. The next part of this series dives into some of the experiences we've had with different ways to press your apples for cider, what your options are, and our personal recommendations.
The pressing of the apples is another fabulous excuse to gather friends and willing hands. And to drink some more of last year's cider, if there is any left. The apples are first inspected for rot and damage. Minor blemishes are acceptable, but any soft spots should be considered breeding grounds for acetobacter, and cut out or discarded. (Acetobacter are the bacteria that make vinegar, not desirable in an alcoholic ferment.)
The wooden press we rent out here at the store has a crusher attached to the press. It is essentially a toothed drum with a hopper above it to feed apples into, one or two at a time, which is powered by a hand-turned crank. There is something deeply satisfying about manually crushing the apples, a visceral pop as they are caught and crushed, that feels both ancient and new. If you've picked the apples, and have a few pairs of willing arms to take turns at that cast-iron crank, this is the way to go.
If, on the other hand, sheer practicality trumps artisanal nostalgia in your book, we also rent out an electric crusher and a bladder press. Gleaming in stainless steel and shiny red paint, the electric crusher looks and operates much like a small yet powerful wood chipper. The cleaned apples are fed down a tube to the sharp blades, powered by a strong motor. A low hum as the apple is diced into hundreds of tiny pieces and deposited into a waiting pot.
Whichever method you fancy, the next step is to press the apples. We like to wrap the crushed apples in cheesecloth or nylon fruit-pressing bags. The less fruit you put in the press at a time, the more juice you will get from the apples. (Too much pulp at one time acts as a kind of shock absorber, protecting the middle of the pulp from the full pressure exerted by the press.)
Being down home low-tech folks, we usually opt for the manual press. A wooden follower sits atop the bundled apple mash. We crank that press screw down until juice starts to flow in a steady trickle. Once a good flow is happening, it's best to wait a while before tightening the screw further.
The juice runs off the edge of the pressing tray and is caught either by a carboy with a funnel on top, or by a non-reactive metal pot that is then emptied into the fermenter. A plastic strainer, or a slip of cheesecloth, is useful to catch any stray apple chunks or yellow jackets that may have found their way into your delicious juice. Once your carboy is full to the shoulder, it is time to consider the next step.
A hydrometer is an instrument that measures the density of liquids; a sweetened liquid (or one with as-yet-unfermented sugars) is necessarily more dense than than pure water. This measurement is known as specific gravity.
Many hydrometers have several scales on the same instrument, which will give you not only the specific gravity, but the alcohol potential as well, which saves you a multiplication step in the math which will follow.
Even brief contact with the air can result in contamination from dust and wild yeasts. For that reason it is especially important to do all bottling and racking procedures in as clean an environment as possible.
Make sure the area you are working in is clean, and try to limit air flow as much as possible; no open windows nearby and no fan, no sweeping or vacuuming in the same room as your brew during any part of the process.
For the racking and bottling procedures, this will mean swishing a sanitizing solution, such as Star-San or Iodophor, around inside the carboy, as well as running the same solution through the siphon hose.
If you plan to use a commercially available yeast, the next step after pressing, or otherwise procuring your juice, is to add sulfites. This will knock back, if not completely destroy, the thriving population of wild yeasts that live on all apples. More on this in just a moment. 152ee80cbc