Full Title: Isaiah Thomas, Junr’s Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire and Vermont Almanack, With an Ephemeris, for the Year of our Lord 1804: Being Bissextile or Leap Year, and Twenty-Eighth of Columbian Independence. From Creation, According to the Scriptures, 5766. Fitted to the Latitude and Longitude of the Town of Boston, but will serve without essential variation for the adjacent States. Containing, besides the more than usual Astronomical Calculations, a large Quantity and greater Variety, than are to be found in any other Almanack of Matters Curious, Useful and Entertaining. Printed at Worcester, Massachusetts, by Isaiah Thomas, Jun.
A NEW METHOD TO PRESERVE CIDER.
The green and defective apples should be first made up and the cider sent to the distillery, to make brandy, which is a very good cordial, if softened with a little sugar, and kept until matured with age. The good and found apples, should be kept till they begin to grow mellow, then ground fine and the cider pressed out. It should be strained through a hair sieve when put into the casks, which will take out the gross parts of the apples. The casks should then be removed home and set on skids at the North end of a building, or some other cool place (but not in the cellar) where being placed a little slooping, the bungs should be taken out and filled up daily with cider, so that all the scum may go off. When the liquor is fine or clear, which will be in four or five days, it should be drawn off in clean casks, bunged up close, and stowed away in the cellar for future use.
It will be much softer and pleasanter than when preserved in the usual way; and the reason is plain; for all the fermentation in cider proceeds from small particles of apples remaining in the liquor. In the above method they are mostly separated very soon and thereby the cider is prevented fermenting so far as to make it sour.
The cider that is designed to be kept after June, should again be racked off in March; and if a match of brimstone is burnt in each cask and a quart of cider brandy added to each barrel, and is kept quite tight bunged, it will keep good two or three years.
There is considerable saving of casks in the above method, as each may be filled quite full of good cider, without any sediment at the bottom, or space at the top after the cider is wrought. — The emptyings or sediment that is left, will answer for the still.
INNOCULATION OF TREES.
August and September, are the proper months to innoculate or graft most kinds of Fruit Trees — Prune your Trees in the month of March, without any regard to the moon — when you cut off large limbs, the stumps should be carefully plastered over with cowdung, and a little salt, to keep out the air.
Eighteenth-Century Reading Room 