# Killing yeast in cider



## navarau (2/11/15)

After reading threads on cider making for hours I still cant seem to find an answer to my question.

What I want to do is make apple and pear cider and give it away in stubbies. The problem I have is that I want it to be a sweet carbonated cider but not a bottle bomb. In order to achieve this I have done the following.

1. Put 16.8L of apple and pear juice into a fermenter with 7g yeast nutrient and a packet of US-05
2. Fermented for 6 days to achieve the desired sweetness and ABV.
3. Put contents of fermenter into corny keg.

Now the questionable bit!

4. Placed keg into my boil pot at 80Deg C for 20 minutes. (hoping to kill yeast) (keg was completely submerged to the level of the cider inside)
5. Placed keg into fridge and got temp down to 2.5deg C.
6. Carb'd keg for 4 days at 40Psi to over carb it.

This is where I'm currently at and propose to do the following.

7. Bottle into stubbies knowing that I've over carb'd and that the carbonation will drop off once bottled.

Will I be creating bottle bombs or has heating the cider to 80DegC for 20 minutes been enough to kill off the yeast?


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## TimT (2/11/15)

I would have thought 80 degree would kill it off, not sure. But the other issue is you may have caused a lot of the cider sugars to change and you may lose a lot of the fruity qualities of the cider.


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## tugger (2/11/15)

Should be right as long as your over 60 degrees for 20 mins. 
That's 20 pasteurising units. 14 pu will do the job. 
I would carbonate before pasteurisation to drive out as much oxygen as possible. 
The pasteurisation process will cause a reaction with any oxygen.


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## navarau (2/11/15)

Thanks for the reply Tim T.

You have hit the nail on the head with the lack of fruitiness. I tasted it yesterday and compared to a sample I put into a PET bottle before I heated the keg it has lost quite a bit of the fruit taste. 

It's still not a bad drop but it just isn't as good as it could be. The wife still likes it so if I end up not bottling and giving it away it will still be drunk.

I'm currently experimenting with Campden tablets but they don't seem to be doing as they should. 1 tablet in 4L of cider and it was still fermenting two days later.


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## TimT (2/11/15)

Oh yes. And won't the alcohol be lost at 80?


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## michaeld16 (2/11/15)

potassium sorbate? if that's what it is called I cant remember I have never made a cider but I listened to an old brewing network show a while back on making ciders it dosnt kill the yeast but sort of put it to sleep to allow back sweetening to not ferment out.


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## NealK (2/11/15)

If you are unsure then you should use PET bottles.


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## navarau (2/11/15)

I would really like to use glass bottles as I am giving them as gifts. The actual bottles I'm using are old glass crown seal Coca Cola bottles.

I'll look into the potassium sorbate.

Thanks guys.


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## TimT (2/11/15)

I think you should look at other ways of sweetening cider. 

The thing is, when I make cider the starting gravity usually comes out at about 1.055. And that's almost all fermentable sugar, so very little sweetness remains. But it does age after a few months into a lovely wine with apple qualities. 

You can add a non-fermentable sugar to sweeten your cider: eg lactose, aspartame, or sorbitol. Or just add a sugar right at the end. 

You can also consider tinkering with the yeast you use and the varieties of apples and pears that go into your cider. Some yeasts will leave more sweetness behind, and some varieties of fruit have unfermentable sugars or sweetness in them. Cox's Orange Pippin apples apparently leave a sweetness behind; apparently some pears have sorbitol - unfermentable - in them. 

And, on a slightly more esoteric level, if the cider has pleasant esters or smells, sometimes that may make it seem sweeter. For instance, cinnamon to me always makes a drink taste sweet. 

If you're just using apple and pear juice from the shops, definitely consider buying apples yourself and pulping and pressing the juice out of them and then fermenting that. If you get a variety of apples and pears, including some tanniny varieties (granny smiths), better. Store juice just isn't good - it's usually made out of very simple sugars that will be entirely fermentable and leave little apple quality behind, and it will probably have already been pasteurised - meaning when you pasteurise it you're pasteurising it again. 

The very first post in this thread is a good place to start.


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## Nurple (2/11/15)

After reading two blog post's on Brulosophy.com (this one about dry hopping cider) he uses a mix of potassium metabisulfite and potassium sorbate to kill the yeast.

He puts the two powders in for 24 hours before dry hopping or if not dry hopping before racking.

I've bought both and will be giving it a go hopefully this weekend.


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## navarau (2/11/15)

I stumbled across this thread today and will be reading it over the next couple of days. It is 124 pages long so a lot to take in.
http://www.homebrewtalk.com/showthread.php?t=193295


I will be moving on to crushing my own fruit in the near future and also trying to buy freshly squeezed juice from the local orchard.

Thanks everyone for your input, I think it's time to experiment


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## Dave70 (3/11/15)

Have a look at this.
Dug it up looking for a answer to age old sweet cider problem.

https://www.mainbrew.com/fermenting_hard_cider-ExtraPages.html



*The only way around this - the only way to have sweet and carbonated cider - is if you have a keg. (On the commercial side (Seven Sisters or Hornsby's), they kill their yeast, sweeten their cider slightly and then force-carbonate it with CO2. With a keg, you can do the same.) Kill your yeast with Sorbistat, rack it into a keg, and then add your frozen apple concentrate to taste. Force carbonate under high pressure and serve: you now have alcoholic, sweet hard cider with as much fizz as you desire - it will resemble many of the bottled hard ciders that you can buy these days. This is the best way to do cider, from the consensus that I have see*n.


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## Airgead (4/11/15)

Sorbistat doesnt kill yeast...it prevents yeast from dividing. So if you have a low yeast count and you add sorbistat and sugar there wont be enough yeast to ferment it all out. If you have a lot of yeast and add sorbistat and sugar the existing yeast will ferment out all the sugar.

If you want to chemically kil yeast, you need sulphite and sobistat. The sulphite kills most of the yeast and the sorbistat stops what remains from re populating.

Cheers
Dave


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## seamad (4/11/15)

The French ( and those english swine) have been bottling sweet ciders for ages, the process is called keeving, it's not straight forward by any means, but have read about some home efforts.
Article on keeving http://www.cider.org.uk/keeving.html


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## Airgead (4/11/15)

Thats a good article. There are about 200 things that can go wrong with keeving though and the solution to all of them is to ferment out and bottle as a dry cider.


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## Airgead (5/11/15)

btw... just reading back over this. A a comment on the original poster's pasturisation method...

While 20 mins at 80c is more than enough to kill yeast, if the technique was, as indicated in th epost, to submerge a keg in 80c water for 20 mins then almost certainly, you have not achieved 80c for 20 mins in the bulk of the liquid. Heat transfer takes time in a bulk liquid. I'm guessing that the centre of the liquid would barely have reached 40 or so. Unless you had a temp probe in the centre of the keg and waited for that to hit 80 before starting the clock.

There is no forced mixing going on here so the outside of the keg will heat up and there will be a temp gradient across the liquid. It will not all heat nicely to 80.

In commercial pasturisation setups, they don't pasturise bulk liquid, they pass it through an array of thin tubes in a heat exchanger for this very reason.

I would be very wary of bottle bombs here. You have probbaly killed a bunch of the yeast but it only takes once cell to survive and multiply. My guess would be that there would be significant yeast survival in the bulk of the liquid if pasturisation was done as indicated in the OP.

We do home pasturisation all the time for preserves and jams. The techniques there are to submerge in boiing water for periods of around an hour. And thats for small jars not big kegs. What you end up with is very distinctly cooked. This is OK for preserves but not so much for cider and beer. As a brewing technique, home pasturisation is very, very dodgy.


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## GalBrew (5/11/15)

Yeah, I would go with the potassium metabisulfite/potassium sorbate combo to be sure.


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## barls (8/11/15)

Sterile filter it but be prepared u will lose some flavour as well in the process


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## Rodolphe01 (9/11/15)

I agree with above comments about whether you would have actually achieved pasteurisation. I can't really see how you can effectively pasteurise at home in the bottle/keg without cooking the flavour. You could try all sorts of experiments with coils etc to reduce contact time, but the penalty for failure for your gift recipients is high in terms of exploding glass... As already stated, in my opinion you are better off using a chemical to kill yeast, experimenting with different yeasts or artificially sweetening.

I bought this yeast the other day for cider http://vintnersharvest.com/products/vintners-harvest-wine-yeast-cy17 i'm yet to use it, and I back sweeten and serve in a keg anyway - but the notes are interesting with respect to maintaining some sweetness.


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## wynnum1 (9/11/15)

Gamma irradiation treatment would that kill the yeast without affecting the flavor.


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## GalBrew (9/11/15)

True, but I'm not sure many homebrewers posses the ability to 'hulk' their ciders.


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## Mutaneer (9/11/15)

I've got a stack of old Smoke Detectors....


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## seamad (9/11/15)

Put it in a keg and electrocute the little feckers *

* I'm not an electrician so make sure you're wear safety thongs


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## scmgre (10/11/15)

wynnum1 said:


> Gamma irradiation treatment would that kill the yeast without affecting the flavor.


depends on the thickness of the steel keg or you go up to 11 on the gama ray gun dial.


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