Cider thoughts and ideas...

[Deep End]

Teasing title might get me a few results lol

Anyway after much putting off of doing it I have gotten round to having all the ingredients at hand to put a few more batches of cider down.

While I was juice shopping I noticed something on the shelf I hadn't seen before; Bickfords overpriced pure, preservative free juices. I grabbed 2 bottles of pomegranate juice as it seemed the most appealing, but there was cloudy pear, berries and acai, and prune available. I left the prune alone as I have no issues with bowel movements and the acai one was about 60 percent grape juice so left that too as I'm making cider not wine at the moment. Cloudy Pear I'll try next time, but a 6 bucks a litre its not really something I'm prepared to do consistently unless the results are remarkable.

So anyway I have 2 litres of pure unadulterated pom juice. My questions are, will two litres in a 23L batch make any noticeable differences in appearance and flavour? Or should I get another litre or two. It will be going in the fermenter pre yeast addition so it will get the same treatment the apple juice does. What do you reckon?

Apart from that just going do bung a good ol apple cider down.

Cheers

 

[superstock]

I'd put the pom juice in after about 5-7 days, when the apple ferment has died off. Probably get more character from the pom juice that way.

 

[LiquidGold]

I once did some 4L batches to experiment with different juices, one being made up of 3L apple juice to 1L pomegranate juice but because I fermented it all together from the start I couldn't really taste the pomegranate at all. Same result with cranberry juice. The 3rd I did was 2L apple juice and 2L apple and blackcurrent which was the only one that had a noticeably different flavour to my previous pure apple juice batch.

I am currently doing tastings of my follow up experiment where I fermented a full batch of apple juice and then split it into 4 smaller batches and added pear juice, apricot nectar, mulberries, and vanilla and cinnamon respectively.

Pear tasted alright yet still hard to distinguish but the apricot has come through pretty nicely.

 

[LiquidGold]

Mulberries also came through quite nice but the cinnamon and vanilla is lacking in cinnamon and a bit heavy on the vanilla which is my fault as I took the cinnamon out heaps early due to tasting and thinking it was overpowering and then left the vanilla in for ages before getting around to bottling.