Backyard Chickens & Bees

Disgorging is messy business!

In 2010, I made a batch of cider using the “juice apples” available at Kiyokawa Orchard in Parkdale. It was good cider, although a bit bland due to the dryness, mild acidity, and lack of tannins. So I thought I’d make it a bit better with some bottle conditioning to produce a true “sparkling” cider in the méthode traditionalle (i.e., the way that Champagnes and sparkling wines are properly made). This process basically involves a secondary fermentation that results in a very high CO₂ concentration (and bottle pressure, which is in excess of 6 bars, or about 90 psi), and aging on the secondary lees for 12-24 months to develop the flavor. As a result, this requires heavier sparkling wine bottles that can take the pressure (and cost a significant amount more than your standard 22 oz bottle). Anyway, despite that, I put up four cases of the cider from that batch (roughly 10 gallons), and tried my best to forget about it over the year, even though all the kegged cider was gone and I was having to actually drink boughten cider! Thanksgiving was approaching (at the time) and we were expecting a large crowd, so I thought it’d be fun to take some out of the aging process to make it ready for the Thanksgiving day table…

The basic instructions for making sparkling wine can be found online. I pretty much went along with what these directions specified, as this was my first attempt at the process. They only recommend 18 g/l of sugar in their liqueur de tirage, but typical sparkling wines will be primed at closer to 24 g/l of sugar to yield the 6 bars of pressure that gives the high carbonation level and fine mousse. Of course, the higher pressure means a greater chance of bottle bombs, which one should always be mindful of. For my cases, half of the cider I was bottling was primed with fresh-pressed apple juice and EC-1118 yeast, while the rest was primed with about 20 g/l of sugar and EC-1118 yeast, plus a small amount of bentonite for assisting with the riddling. Other flavorings can be added to the liqueur de tirage, as demonstrated in Canon Jean Godinot’s account of Dom Perignon’s recipe, containing a bottle of wine, a pound of sugar, 5-6 pitted peaches, powdered nutmeg and cinnamon, and a half bottle of brandy.

After filling, I used crown caps on the bottles to seal the top. After bottling, the cider was left to age, horizontally, for most of the year (about 11 months) before I started riddling a dozen or so bottles as a test. The juice-primed bottles seem to be woefully under-carbonated, so probably won’t be as good for disgorging, but the sugar-primed bottles are great. Anyway, riddling was done by slowly (i.e., over the course of 3 weeks) tilting a box holding the bottles from horizontal to vertical, all the while turning the bottles about 90 degrees each day. It’s a long, slow process, but resulted in all the yeast being moved along to the top of the bottle by the cap.

The next step was to formulate a recipe for the liqueur d’expédition, disgorge the cider, add the liqueur, and recap the bottles. I could, if I wanted to be more fancy, have used corks and wire cages on the bottles at this point, but that seemed like too much work for a test, and I went back to the crown caps. The recipe I used (for 12 750 ml bottles, at 30 ml per bottle) is:

• 2.25 ml SO₂ (10% solution)
• 90 g sucrose
• 9 g malic acid
• 50 ml port or rum (optional)
• water to 360 ml

This will provide 10 g/l sugar (brut) and 25 ppm SO₂ per bottle. I used some cognac for the optional liquor, which was great for some added aromatics, and the malic acid was to add a bit more bite. At 10 g/l of sugar, the cider is still very dry, so I might even increase it to 20 g/l for the next attempt.

For the disgorging step, I used a heavy brine solution of 23% by weight of salt and placed this in my meat freezer that was at 5 °F, or -15 °C. The brine is still liquid at this temperature, so can be used as a medium to freeze the yeast and cider in the neck of the bottle. The bottles of riddled cider were placed (still pointing down) into a refrigerator to chill them to about 35 °F, or 2 °C, before putting them down into the brine in the freezer. Only the neck of the bottle was submerged into the brine. It turned out that the optimal time for freezing the neck is 20 minutes at these temperatures, which gave a nice plug of ice. As shown in the video, this was then taken outside to pop the top off and eject all the yeast. Disgorging is a tricky thing to do in order to avoid having all or most of the liquid shoot out of the bottle!

After the pressure and foaming subsided, I added the liqueur d’expédition and recapped the bottles. These were then allowed to sit for a day or more before we enjoyed them for the days surrounding Thanksgiving. It was definitely a unique way to provide some cider for my family! And yes, I will do it again…

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