cider!

[michaelesler]

i know its not exactly wine, but the principles are the same basically does my plan of action below sound ok?

so, whilst checking my wine the other day I noticed one of my protein jars was nearly empty and its slightly bigger than the demijohn. so I decided that it would make an excellent primary fermenter. its big, food safe and empty!

i went to tesco and bought 5 litres of apple juice. it was quite cheap at 56p a litre. poured it into the container and measured the SG. sitting around 1045 which hopefully will give me around 7% alcohol. I planned to use cider yeast, but my homebrew store was out of it. I had to use champagne yeast instead, but they were out of lalvin, so had to make do with young's. after using lalvin yeasts for the first time with the wine kit i have decided to try and use them wherever possible!

so i didn't add any sugar to the juice and added the yeast leaving it for 15 minutes before i stirred it in. it has been fermenting away for a couple of days now, getting quite a strong cidery smell and plenty of nice fizzing! will test the SG in a couple of days. i plan to rack to secondary when it gets to about 1015 SG

 

[Arne]

If you are not planning on storing it too long, you should be good with the 1.045. If planning on storing it for a while, you ought to up the s.g. to get more alcohol. If you would take your present reading and add enough simple sugar to bring it up about .040 or.045 more, you should get enough alcohol to help keep it in storage. My last batch of cider, I decided to start it out about 1.095. When it finished, I added a half gallon of cider to it for flavor and backsweeting. It needed a little more sugar, but has great flavor now. Fermenting seems to take a lot of the apple flavor out, but it doesn't take too much to bring it back. Mine was 5 gal. and the extra high s.g. was toned down with the addition of the extra cider. If I remember right it wound up around 1.080. Arne.

 

[michaelesler]

not planning on keeping it that long, been following a pretty basic recipe that advised me not to add any sugar and age for about 6 months. sound feasible?

 

[joea132]

I'm doing a similar project. Started around potential 6.5 ABV and I'm hoping to bottle it in beer bottles and carbonate it. I'm going to back sweeten with lactose as it's a non-fermentable sugar. Then prime it and hope it doesn't explode.

I never thought about using cider to backsweeten it. That's a great idea! Won't work for mine though, I'm bottle carbonating it. Ka-boooom!

 

[michaelesler]

I'm doing a similar project. Started around potential 6.5 ABV and I'm hoping to bottle it in beer bottles and carbonate it. I'm going to back sweeten with lactose as it's a non-fermentable sugar. Then prime it and hope it doesn't explode.

I never thought about using cider to backsweeten it. That's a great idea! Won't work for mine though, I'm bottle carbonating it. Ka-boooom!

how do you carbonate it? would be interested to try this myself

 

[JohnT]

I have been doing much the same.

I have a friend that is allowed to do a late harvest raid at a buddy's apple orchard. He fills up a pickup truck every weekend in november. He then takes em to a 100 year old apple grinder/press. A whole group of us help out and then get to take fresh apple juice home.

Last year I experimented with apple wine and actually ended up with something that I consider drinkable. I also made a carbonated cider that was just to die for! Very yummy!

Here how I did the cider... I adjusted the apple juice acid level to be appropriate for fruit juice, then adjusted sugar to a brix of 22%. I open fermented with EC-1118 in buckets. When the sugar got just down to 0.5%, I spiked the mix with 1 lb of sugar per gallon and transferred to a sealed korny keg. I let that ferment until I had about 60psi pressure, then placed the Korny Keg into a beer cooler for a couple on months. This kept the cider at 35 degrees, allowing the CO2 to go into solution.

It ended up sparkly, sweet, keeping much of the apple flavor while not being too strong. It was great.


This year I have two working. One made exactly like I did it last year, and one where I took... 2 cups of raisons, 2 cimimon sticks, some nutmg, and a couple of whole cloves.. Then bioled the mix with about 2 cups of water. I let the mix cool, then added to my primary after the yeast had taken hold. When it came time to transfer to the korney keg, I substituted 1 pound of the white sugar with brown sugar. I am attempting to get something like "apple pie". We'll see.

 

[michaelesler]

still looking for an answer to my questions. planning to age the cider for about 6 months. sound ok?

and how would i carbonate it as mentioned in one of the above posts?

 

[Arne]

You ought to be just fine. I usually give it a little more sugar and let it age int the carboy longer than that. If it is clear by then or if you don't mind it a little cloudy, you should be good to go. Good luck with it and be a little careful with it. At that ABV, it will probably drink kinda like soda pop. Arne.

 

[JohnT]

I assume you plan to cabonate the "alod fashioned way". Meaning that you plan to have a secondary fermentation.

The only issue or problem I see is getting the cider to ferment again. If the APV or amount of free SO2 is too high, you may run into problems getting the thing to kick back off.