Posted on 09/05/2012 3:10:02 AM PDT by djf
Ping Knews_hound above. He has some excellent documentation relating to home brew techniques and recipes.
No how did this have more than 20% alcohol by volume. But oh, was it tasty.
While this is not particularly sweet, if I want sweet apple liquor, I prefer Apfelkorn, which is right tasty as a digestif after a big holiday dinner. Yum!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apfelkorn
As a youth, I remember the signs posted in several of the local pizza joints in Connecticut:
“The consumption of alcoholic products other than beer or cider is prohibited on these premises.”
I had wondered why none of these pizza parlours offered cider as a drink.
Cider is extremely easy to make.
1 - Get the best, freshest juice you can find. Fresh pressed is preferable. Since it is 99% of the finished product, its quality is key. If you cannot get fresh pressed you can use store bought but the quality will suffer.
2 - We want the cider to ferment with the yeast of our choosing, not what randomly appears in it. I pretreat with potassium metabisulfate...also known as k-meta or campden tablets. It will kill off any of the wild yeast. I add this the day before I intend to pitch the yeast.
3 - If you dont care if it is clear, skip to step 4. If you do want it to be as clear as possible, then you need to add some pectic enzyme to eliminate pectin haze. I add 1 tablespoon per 5 gallons and let it sit overnight. It will cause the pectin to drop out.
4 - 24 hours after adding the Campden tabs, rack off the juice, being careful to leave the trub in the bottom. Add your yeast and cover with an airlock or other cover. I have had good luck with nearly any quality ale yeast. SA05, SA04, WLP001 or WLP1028 have all made excellent cider.
5 - Wait. Patience is key. It ferments somewhat slowly compared to beer. figure 2 - 3 weeks to finish.
6 - It will finish extremely low, 1.005 is not uncommon. It will be extremely dry at this point. If you like it dry, Transfer to a second container, prime with sugar and bottle. You are done. If you want it a little sweeter, I backsweeten with apple juice concentrate. It adds more apple flavor and supplies the sugar it needs. I use 2 cans per 5 gallons or more, depending on how sweet I want it. I transfer it to a second container, add the concentrate and keg or bottle.
7 - Let it sit at or near room temps. It will restart fermentation with the sugar or concentrate you added. If you added sugar it will be ready to drink in 2 - 3 weeks. If you added concentrate, watch it like a hawk after a week. Pop a bottle daily until it is at the desired carbonation. Once there, refrigerate ASAP and keep it cold. If you do not, it will continue to ferment, making bottle bombs.
8 - Enjoy. I prefer mine ice cold on a hot day.
Questions?
Feel free to ask.
Cheers,
knewshound
We make (or made) apple wine - Melrose & Granny Smith. It was our biggest crop & one year we made 70 gallons. We got tired of it, too. Now the apples become apple sauce, or dried apple chips & maybe a pie or two. We still have about 20 gallons of ‘05 & ‘06 & it still tastes good. We break it out when company comes over.
What %ABV do you end up with?
Also if a person used either Fleishmann’s bread Yeast or Distillers Yeast, would it make a big difference?
Bread yeast is, well, used for bread, not cider or beer. It WILL ferment, but the quality will suffer bad. At 3 bucks a package, it isnt worth not using brewers yeast.
Distillers yeast ferments like crazy but, since the finished product is typically distilled rather than being drank, it is not your first choice. Distillers yeast sacrifices flavors for alcohol content. The esters they produce are typically not desirable.
The alcohol content is of course, dependent on the sugar content of your juice. Mine usually start at 1.050 (ish) and finishes at 1.005 or lower for a ABV of 6.5% or so. If you want more alcohol, adding corn sugar prior to pitching the yeast will bump it up. Figure 1 lb will add 1%. Try not to exceed 10% ABV as the yeast will start to stress if you go much higher producing off flavors.
In any case, try to keep the temp below 70 degrees at all times. Warmer will make it ferment faster but at the cost of off flavors.
Cheers,
knewshound
But the last batch I got was at the Villa Market about Soi 33 and Suk in Bangkok.
Most folks think it would taste like apples and are surprised when it actually tastes like a very good grape based white wine. the bouquet and mouth feel are always surprisingly pleasant and white wine like too. apples really do make a great wine. I suspect the wine snobs prevent it from really taking off. It’s great to cook with too. My next project is going to be a 45-50 blackberry wine. Should be quite special.
Thanks. I’ll check the major stores around here. Also thanks in case I wake up in Thailand someday. :)
The recipe book we started with was trying to make a fruit wine that tasted like a grape wine - light on the fruit flavor. We bumped up the amount of fruit used & got a true flavor. Of course, it depended on whether the fruit had a good flavor. One year the apples were rather blah, so I finished by adding Allspice to the carboy for a few months. That had a very light apple flavor & a nice spice. Most of our Melrose is really strongly apple-tasting.
We also do blackberry, among others. We have a big blackberry bramble on our property & we pick about 40 lbs a year, all going into wine. That usually makes a starting volume of 12 gallons. On cooler years (like this one has been) the berry flavor isn’t as good. But we’ve had a batch or two that were shear heaven! :-)
What is your definition of excellence? If excellence is defined as quality, then the free market always delivers the highest quality.
If you are headed to the beach, a plastic 32oz covered soda with a straw is far superior to an 8oz Waterford crystal glass full of fine champagne, even at the same price.
The proliferation of hard cider was mainly an issue of preserving the apple crop. Once that changed, many people preferred beer that they could afford to cider that they could not.
Additionally, there is no reason that you can’t purchase whatever level of excellence you are after in a free market.
I’ll even do it for you, shall we discuss price?
Sounds like a fun project!
Sounds like a fun project!
yep, you will never be able to buy a commercial blackberry wine that is anywhere near as good as what a half ways experienced home winemaker can produce from the blackberries in his backyard. Many of these so called wine connoisseurs have no idea how good wine can really be when it’s made by hand and in small batches by a craftsman who is dedicated to producing quality over quantity. Now, for my apple wine, I just use the cider that’s available from area orchards. It’s typically $4-5/gallon typically-probably more this year though. these folks take a lot of pride in their apple cider and it really shines when you ferment it. I know it’s controversial but I sugar that stuff up to a potential alcohol of about 13% to 14% and then ferment it with Lalvin EC1118 until it’s dry as a bone. I’ll add an acid blend and some tannin and yeast nutrient too. with my next batch I’m going to introduce a secondary bottle fermentation inside champagne bottles and then use the methode traditionelle to produce apple champagne. Should be interesting.
isopropyl alcohol is cheaper. I’m an RN and use those alcohol wipes on the hubs of IVs and on IV line spikes and such. I figure if they’re considered safe enough for sick people, they’re safe enough for my purposes and I do take care to ensure that no isopropyl alcohol is ever introduced to my final product. I don’t think a tiny bit of it would matter one bit but I still go to lengths to ensure it doesn’t happen. I go through lots of scalding water too. Those carboys are completely sterile when I’m done and I keep them that way throughout the fermentation and bottling process. My bottles are just as sterile as the carboys too. I briefly soak my corks in alcohol initially and then wash them off with scalding water. I then soak them in a sodium metabisulfite solution and I make sure they’re still wet from that when the cork goes into the bottle. that’s the only metabisulfite I add to the wine. I like to think that my great pains at maintaining sterility precludes the need for excessive metabisulfite. Ya know, I think I’m going to open a bottle up. It’s 1:41 and I don’t have to work tonight. cheers.
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