Backyard Chickens & Bees

This is part two of the first chapter in the 2011 cider-making escapades! The last section was more about the new press, the grinder woes, and the HDPE fermenting barrels that I’m using for the larger batches this year. This part will address more of the apples that were used, the yeast strain I pitched on the sweet cider and other fermentation-related stuffs, and what’s coming next for rounds two and three!

Gravenstein and Dolgo apple blend

James and Dave grinding apples to make cider!

The apples that I used for this first batch of cider came from three sources: the apple tree next to my parent’s house that I have spoken of before (and made a very good dry cider from last year), boughten apples (all seconds and culls) from Kiyokawa Orchards in Parkdale, Oregon, and from some Dolgo crab apple trees that are located in the parking lot at my work.

The tree next to my parent’s house yielded about 300 lbs of apples, which was pretty good considering how much we’d pruned it this past spring. The pruning must have really spurred it along for production this summer, and will hopefully make it even more fruitful next year. The apples were pretty wormy, however, and a few had to be tossed for rot, but mostly they were all nice, big apples! After harvesting (we got almost all the apples out by vigorously shaking the tree and dropping the apples onto tarps), these apples sat in my basement for about a week to “sweat” and ripen a bit longer. They were perfect after that, and very ready to be pressed. The apples from my work were also harvested by shaking onto tarps, but there were only about 40 lbs of them. They were ready a week before the gravensteins, so they had sat in cold storage (i.e., my kegerator) for 2-3 weeks before being pressed. Some of them got pretty squishy during that time, so a few more had to be culled than I would have preferred. The Dolgos are very tasty right off the tree, and I’m hoping they’ll add just a bit of bitterness. The remainder were bought out at Kiyokawa, where I like to go for any apples I buy.

Pomace.

Anyway, the apple pressing was shown previously, but the details are below. My wife and I started out the day working on the cutting up of the apples so that they would fit into the grinder. This is long, tedious work that goes very slowly when there’s only two people doing it. We got the first round through the grinder after about 2 or so hours, and then some friends showed up (a big thank you to Dave, James, Laura, and Rachel for their assistance) and we were able to get through the next two grinding and pressing cycles in half the time! The disposal grinder makes a nice, fine mash that works well with the hydropress, but it’s slow and, even with the new-and-improved shop-vac cooling set-up, tends to overheat and shut itself off for a bit. Fortunately, this only happened two or three times, but it was still annoying enough (coupled with the small opening that requires cutting up the apples) that I don’t really care to use it again.

The juice we pressed out had a starting gravity of 1.052, which will ferment to an ABV of around 6.7%. I used an acid titration kit that my sister-in-law had bought for me last year to determine the titratable acidity as being 7.7 g/L (0.77%) malic. That’s just about right where I want it, and matches well to the pH of 3.4-3.5 that I measured with the test strips. Overall, we got 36 gallons of juice from 503 lbs of apple mash (weighed after pulling out the bad parts and grinding), which gives an efficiency of 63%. Not super great, when compared to what you might get from a rack and cloth press (a good one will yield around 75%). But… the hydropress is easy to use (even for one person!), and apples are fairly inexpensive at these volumes, so I am quite happy with it.

Sulfites, yeast, and fermentation

Given the pH of 3.4 to 3.5, I used 90 ppm of SO₂ for this batch. This is based on the sulfite chart given on Andrew Lea’s site, and the calculations from the cider-making class I took with Peter Mitchell. The sulfites were added as 21.7 grams of KMS (potassium metabisulfite) dissolved in a small amount of tap water. After that sat for about 24 hours, I pitched the yeast. I used a new yeast—the AWRI 1503 yeast from AB-Mauri—for this batch, as it sounded like a very interesting hybrid yeast that has been successful for producing wines. Basically, it’s a non-GMO hybrid of the standard S. cerevisiae coupled with Saccharomyces kudriavzevii. I know that success in wines doesn’t necessarily correspond to success in cider, but I liked the idea that it could increase mouthfeel and the complexity of the flavor and aroma, so I thought I’d give it a try for this season. Anyway, I pitched 35 grams of the dry yeast, rehydrated per the directions, along with 7 heaping tablespoons of yeast nutrient (I know, not very scientific to not take a weight or more accurate measurement! Blah blah blah.).

Foaming cider all over the place!

The cider then proceeded to ferment out at around 66 °F. (I would have preferred it to be closer to 60 °F, but my basement wasn’t in a mood to cooperate on temperature.) After two days, it was fermenting very vigorously, and overwhelmed the little cylindrical air lock I had fitted in place. Apparently, the 3-4 inches of headspace wasn’t enough to keep the frothy, foaminess from expanding through the top. The foam is probably due to a high concentration of pectins still in the juice that foam up in a similar way as the proteins in a vigorous beer fermentation (i.e., the krausen) will do. They oxidized quite readily after being ejected from the air lock, turning it the dark brown you can see in the picture. Probably adding some pectic enzymes along with the sulfites would help this by breaking down the pectins prior to the fermentation. The next batch will have this!

After about a week, I started to notice a bit of an “eggy” smell. This wasn’t a full-on H₂S funk, but seemed to be heading that way. I added 60 grams of DAP at this point (again, dissolved in water), which quickly corrected the smell, and the fermentation proceeded out for another week to completion. In this case, completion was at a final gravity of 1.002. Thanks to the opaqueness of the white barrels I was using for fermentation, I was able to see the level of the lees at the bottom, which made racking the fermented cider into a secondary barrel a bit easier. Racking was done through a small diaphragm pump I had ordered from MoreWine, using racking wands to pump from the bottom of the first and into the bottom of the second without any splashing (and after purging the secondary with CO₂, of course!).

So now the cider is maturing in the secondary barrel, sealed with a blanket of CO₂ for a few months. I’ve been checking on it pretty regularly, but should probably just leave it alone! I did add 30 ppm of SO₂ after racking, so as to avoid any potential oxidation problems and/or malolactic fermentation (MLF) down the line (the SO₂ will kill off any lactic acid bacteria that might cause MLF or other problems). The next step will be the sweeten it up a bit (e.g., to a medium dry range) to balance the acidity and put the bulk of it into bottles with some sort of counter-pressure filler apparatus. They’ll have to be pasteurized for long-term storability (we don’t want any explosions, of course!), but that’s a few months away…

Next round, new grinder?

The next round will probably be coming up soon enough. Well, in another month or so, as I am waiting on the delivery of a new HDPE grinder from OESCO, Inc. Since it looks like I’ll need around 500 lbs of apples for each batch (three pressings fills a barrel and a carboy nicely), I’ll be purchasing a half ton around that time, probably a blend with Ashmead’s Kernel, Cortland, Winesap, and some russets. I’m very excited about the new grinder, since it’ll run through about a bushel of uncut apples every 90 seconds! This will, in principle, cut the time down from several hours per pressing, limited by the grinding, to a half hour per pressing, limited by the press. Of course, if it all works as planned, that means I can make even more cider next year!

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