More cider on the way!
So the cider that we made recently has fermented out to a nice dry drink! Last time I checked it, it was around 6.9% ABV and very dry, so I transferred it into the kegs. I ended up with about 12.5 gallons of that batch (single varietal Gravenstein). Of course, that wasn’t enough, so in mid-October, we went out to Kiyokawa Family Orchards and picked up another 310 lbs of mixed apples from their juice bin. This was added to about 40 lbs of apples from a wild tree I raided near work (not crab, per se, but not a specific variety that I know of), yielding about 350 lbs total. The apples from the orchard included a wide range of dessert and baking apples, such as Granny Smiths, Golden Delicious, Newtown Pippins, maybe some Stayman Winesap, possibly some Mutsus, and maybe a few others. I’m not entirely sure of the blend, so it’ll probably be super-tasty and completely unrepeatable! Ah well. We spent about 6 hours cutting, grinding, and pressing (I was graciously helped by my lovely wife and her sister) and then the juice was pasteurized to 155 °F and allowed to cool overnight. All told, there was 24 gallons that went into the fermenters. The pH came in at 3.4, and the original gravity was 1.050.
The next day I added some pectic enzyme (although I somehow managed to add 3× too much by confusing tablespoons and teaspoons!) and let them sit for another 12 hours. After that, I put in some English and American ale yeasts (I typically use the Fermentis S-04 and US-05 dry ale yeasts) and the juice fermented out over the next two weeks. Now it is in secondaries, clearing out nicely and waiting for my decision on what to do next. I have a few options, including back-sweetening with some honey after kegging, grinding up some ornamental crab apples from a neighbors tree and adding them to one carboy for some continued fermentation (probably better would be to ferment the crabs out in their own container and then blend in), back-sweeten with some pressed cherry juice, or just keg them dry. Or, I could do all of the above and see which is best for next year! Tough decision on that…
 Washing the second round of apples. |
 Apples on the porch, awaiting their destiny. |
 Veronica, taking on a lot of the apple cutting... |
 ...and her sister, Susie, equally pulling her weight for apple prep! |
 Bin full of sliced-up apples, waiting to be ground and pressed. |
 As-pressed juice, flowing freely! Tasty, too! |
My next cider endeavor (probably for next year, although I might just have to sneak out and make a batch this next week!) will be to try a wild fermentation. Based on what I have read, I think I could just press the juice into a bucket, add a bit of sulphite (the amount depends on the pH, but probably needs to be around 50 ppm) to kill off the non-beneficial yeasts, and then let the remaining yeasts kick in over the next few weeks to ferment it. That could actually be a lot of fun. Certainly something to think about, and there are still some apples available at the orchard!
No related posts.
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
Loading ...