How To Mull Appley Things

Like by adding spices and heating them up, not just thinking about them quite hard for a while.

Double-whammy tonight:

How to make Hot Mulled Cider

How to make Hot Mulled Apple Juice

I've already had my first haggis supper of the year. There are going to be many more.

This is a picture off the internet. Thank you, Internet. There might yet be a way of making a haggis dinner look pretty, but I sure ain't found it.

Next Weekend is Burns Weekend. Sunday to be precise, but Burns was rather more of a Saturday night man, by all accounts. This Saturday I'm looking forward to a Burns Lunch, followed in very quick succession by a Burns supper. Two rounds of haggis, neeps and tatties in one day. Stay upwind of my house on Sunday.

The Lunch is a Church thing, so I think my remit is show up - try not to swear too much - eat - and leave.

The Supper is a rather more involved affair. Amongst the jobs I've volunteered for is providing the Welcome Drink. The main purpose of offering this welcome drink is to use up the case of cider that's been hanging around since the summer when no-one drank any of it.

8.8 litres of the stuff.

So on the menu shall be, an alcoholic Mulled Cider, and a version using Apple Juice and cutting out the booze.

I am planning a test round at these to get an actual handle on quantities, to then scale up without having to keep tasting it. But that hasn't happened yet. It might happen on Friday, this week is rather full. We'll see. For now, and guessing from our many past exploits in to the world of whisky punch, here we go.

Cider

• Cider
• A little Apple Juice
• Ginger wine, if we have any in. [Ed - L checked, we do. Phew]
• Splash of Drambuie (boring cheapo medicinal whisky would be the proper thing here, but we have a Drambuie backlog)
• Honey
• Spices: Cloves, Cinnamon sticks, cardamom and allspice
• Chopped up apple or pear if I get a chance to go shopping before the weekend.

The Apple version

• Apple Juice
• Ginger beer or ginger ale. There's currently a whole bottle of frozen* ginger ale in our fridge, maybe I'll whack that in somewhere?
• Maybe some of this ginger stuff L and I got for Christmas. 

Hello - Did you buy us this? If you did, thank you - it looks very exciting. Please reveal yourself, oh mystery ginger-giver.

• Honey
• Spices: Cloves, Cinnamon Sticks, Cardamom and Allspice
• Chopped-up apple or pear

All prepared. Yes, that is our spare bed, a totally normal storage solution.

Instructions: 

• Stick it all minus the honey in a slow-cooker, or in my case two different and very clearly labelled slow-cookers, 
• Turn it on to medium and wander off. 
• Remember about it after a bit and come back add some honey, tasting for sweetness as it goes in. 
• Get someone else to taste it for sweetness just before you think it's quite sweet enough. 
• Serve up through a sieve** in to a 4p Poundland paper cup, and enjoy. 

My next question: giving alcohol to "the Public". Now this is a fairly in-house event. 50-ish people, and if I don't know someone, I'll know the person who has brought them, so it's not quite "the Public". Either way, I'm giving them alcohol, and I want to be responsible about it and give it out with an idea of either the percentage or the units in a glass.

How much alcohol will be left in that mulled cider once it's been in a hot slow-cooker for an hour?

The cider starts out at 4.5%. I guess I'm aiming at about 4 parts cider to 1 part juice to a splash of Drambuie and and slightly bigger splash of ginger wine. The Drambuie is damn well near as strong as whisky and comes in at 40%, and ginger wine is normally about 6%. Actually, let's swap out the ginger wine for the Rochester stuff - that cuts out a bit of booze. Averaging those things very roughly I would call the whole cold mix in at about the same as the cider itself, 4.5%

Given that as a start point, if I've got this stuff warming in a slow cooker for an hour before anyone gets a sip, am I able to take anything off that number?

The internet seems to just be bickering with itself on this one. There's this table, that the Americans have come up with, suggesting that if I get this mix hot enough to call it a simmer, it might loose some of its strength.

I'm a bit of a "Can I count it?" scientist. I do big stuff like rivers and glaciers and peat (also little stuff like pollen and fossils, but still very much in a "find it, count it" style). So I'm putting this question to my more chemically-minded friends out there. Do I play it safe (my inclination at this point) and tell folks that this comes in at about 5% and to think of it as a grown-up alcopop***, or can I mentally subtract a tiny bit for any "burning off" that might be happening?

This time next week, I will be able to report back, maybe even with pictures on my Burns adventures. The rest of this week features a cinema trip and a quiz night and as ever, no room for catching my breath, so I'll be blogging again before I can blink.


*Yes, frozen. Yes, in the fridge. Yes, this is a problem.

**Because I have tried to chew a clove before, and while interesting, it's not the sort of thing I'd want to creep up on someone with. 

***Remember those? Smirnoff ice and that red/purple-y WKD one. All drunk through spikeys because, well, Sunderland.