Uncommon Crop Cider - Persimmon

About

The American Persimmon (Diospyros virginiana) is a tree native to North America, and while the related Asian persimmon is much more well known and commonly grown, the American Persimmon was popular among Native Americans. The trees are just hardy enough for Southwestern Wisconsin. The fruit take some time to ripen, and they are unpalatably astringent before they are ripe (lesson learned the hard way on that one). When ripe, they have a sweet, rich, custardy interior, almost like fig jam.

Growing American Persimmons

American persimmons haven’t undergone extensive breeding or selection for cultivation, but there are a few varieties available. The late bloom of persimmons helps them evade some of the late frosts that have hampered some fruit crops, especially in recent years, and being a native fruit tree, there has been some renewed interest in growing them. Carandale Fruit Farm, our partner on the project has experience growing persimmons, and they provide greater insights about it here: http://uncommonfruit.cias.wisc.edu/?p=237

Making the Cider

Persimmons don’t lend themselves well to pressing out any juice since their ripe interior becomes rather jelly-like. We froze the persimmons to break down cell walls and hopefully help extract more juice and flavor. We then mashed them up by hand and put them in fine meshed nylon bags that we steeped in the cider during fermentation. We sourced the persimmons from Carandale Fruit Farm where they only have a couple trees. It therefore wasn’t a large addition of persimmons to the final cider. We lightly sweetened this cider with maple syrup hoping that it would play well with the ripe fruit, lightly spiced, and caramel-like flavors of the persimmon.

Tasting the Cider

In the customer survey, the Persimmon Cider scored a 6.8 out of 10. While it wasn’t up with some of the higher scoring ciders, it wasn’t too far behind either. The persimmon provided a subtle but pleasing dried fruit note, kind of like raisins or figs, and it seemed to impart some body and mouthfeel to an otherwise thin cider. One member of our focus group that tasted the cider remarked that this was his favorite of them all, and others remarked that it could have been even better with a larger persimmon addition. Overall comments from the focus group tasting are included in the apple word cloud below.

Conclusions

While the Persimmon Cider wasn’t among our highest scoring ciders overall, people did like it, and it seemed like it could have been even better with a heavier application of persimmons. The fact that persimmons are a native fruit makes them quite interesting from the perspective of a grower, and we hope to see more growers experiment with them so that we can experiment with bigger persimmon additions to our cider. With their rich, ripe fruit flavors there seems to be more potential that could be unlocked if we explored the crop further.