Chicha de Manzana

The farmhouse cider of southern Chile: sharp creole apples crushed, pressed, and left to ferment on their own yeasts, drunk young and cloudy

Origin: Chiloé & Southern Chile

From the journey of Apple.

Chicha de manzana, apple chicha, is the cloudy, lightly fermented cider of southern Chile, and above all of the Araucanía and the archipelago of Chiloé. In the Andes chicha is a word for fermented drinks of many kinds, most famously of maize; in the Chilean south it means the drink made from the fruit the Spanish brought. It is made on the farm from old creole apple varieties with names such as Limonera, Camuesa, and Poto de Mula, crushed, pressed, and left to ferment with nothing added, and it is drunk both sweet and barely working and after a few weeks, when it has turned dry and sharp. Apples reached Chile with the Spanish in the sixteenth century and took so readily to the cool, wet south that they ran wild in the forests. On Chiloé the apple tree became property of real consequence. The historian Amalia Castro San Carlos, studying the wills and inventories of the archipelago between 1849 and 1924, found apple trees recorded, valued, and divided among heirs, some of them classed simply as trees for making chicha. The drink has been made on the islands for more than three centuries, through their incorporation into the Viceroyalty of Peru in 1768 and into the Republic of Chile in 1826. The pressing is a social occasion. At the maja, neighbours gather to shake the trees onto sacks, grind the fruit, and turn the wooden screw press, and the chicha is what holds the gathering together. Some families still bottle the new drink and bury it in the shade to keep it for the national holidays of September.

Ingredients

  • 6 kg sharp, firm apples, ideally a mix of tart and sweeter varieties (Chilean creole apples such as Limonera or Camuesa; elsewhere, a mix of Bramley and a sweet eating apple)

Method

  1. Leave the apples in a cool, airy place for 3 to 4 days so that they ripen evenly. Wipe them clean but do not wash them.
  2. Cut out any bruised or rotten parts. Quarter the apples, leaving the skins and cores, and crush them to a coarse pulp in a mincer or food processor, or pound them in a wooden trough, as the Chilote dornajo is used.
  3. Press the pulp in a fruit press, or wrap it in muslin and press it under a heavy weight, collecting all the juice. You should have about 3 to 3.5 litres.
  4. Pour the juice into the sterilised demijohn, leaving at least a quarter of it empty. Cover the neck with a clean cloth or fit an airlock, and leave at a cool room temperature, out of direct sun.
  5. Within 2 to 4 days the juice will foam and begin to work. At this stage it is chicha dulce, sweet and barely alcoholic, and it can be drunk straight away.
  6. After about 15 days, when the bubbling has slowed, pour the chicha into strong bottles, leaving the sediment behind, and close them. Store somewhere cool and drink within a few weeks.

Notes

Equipment: a mincer, heavy food processor, or wooden trough and mallet for crushing; a fruit press, or a large muslin cloth and a heavy weight; a sterilised 5-litre glass demijohn or food-grade fermenting bucket; and strong swing-top bottles. Chicha de manzana is unfiltered and unpasteurised, so it is always cloudy and it keeps working. Refrigerating the bottles slows it down. It is a different drink from the chicha de uva, the grape chicha of central Chile, and from the maize chicha de jora of the Andes. The strength depends on the sugar in the apples and the length of the fermentation; a dry chicha of several weeks is roughly as strong as a farmhouse cider.

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