First Cider

[Canadian Brewer]

Hey there guys, I've got a few beers under my belt now and the missus has expressed interest in a cider and for her continued tolerance of my hobby I think it best to make one for her!

I have picked up 20 liters of Aldi apple juice but I want it to come out as a sweeter cider with a fruit addition.

The plan as it stands now is to ferment about 16 liters (having used about a liter to start my yeast and pitch it in the next day), add about 1 kilogram of fresh raspberries and let it ferment out. Once completely fermented, I plan to add the other 4 liters (I can tune that number depending on the gravity of the juice) in a secondary to batch prime right before bottling. After I have bottled I will pasteurize the bottles when the level of sweetness/carbonation is appropriate.


A few questions though:
1. I plan on using a Mad Millie cider yeast or the Mangrove Jack M02 cider yeast, does anyone have a preference? I have only used US-05 so my experience is a little limited there.
2. Do I need to sanitize the raspberries in any way? I will be using frozen (which will be thawed before addition) and thought to add them a day or 2 after pitching to let the yeast kick in and prevent infection.
3. Has anyone pasteurized before and have advice? I plan to use my 40L brew kettle with a false bottom to keep the bottles off of the direct heat.
4. Should I add more than 4L of juice so that I can have a good level of both carbonation and sweetness? My girlfriend likes cider sweet and fizzy!

Thanks for any and all info guys!

 

[yum beer]

I can't offer any advice but would like to know how you go with the whole process.
Sounds like a process I would like to try, i too would prefer a sweeter cider than the dry cider you normally get in the home environment.
I'm sure someone will chime in with some good advice and/or knowledge.

 

[Airgead]

Hey there guys, I've got a few beers under my belt now and the missus has expressed interest in a cider and for her continued tolerance of my hobby I think it best to make one for her!

I have picked up 20 liters of Aldi apple juice but I want it to come out as a sweeter cider with a fruit addition.

The plan as it stands now is to ferment about 16 liters (having used about a liter to start my yeast and pitch it in the next day), add about 1 kilogram of fresh raspberries and let it ferment out. Once completely fermented, I plan to add the other 4 liters (I can tune that number depending on the gravity of the juice) in a secondary to batch prime right before bottling. After I have bottled I will pasteurize the bottles when the level of sweetness/carbonation is appropriate.


A few questions though:
1. I plan on using a Mad Millie cider yeast or the Mangrove Jack M02 cider yeast, does anyone have a preference? I have only used US-05 so my experience is a little limited there.
2. Do I need to sanitize the raspberries in any way? I will be using frozen (which will be thawed before addition) and thought to add them a day or 2 after pitching to let the yeast kick in and prevent infection.
3. Has anyone pasteurized before and have advice? I plan to use my 40L brew kettle with a false bottom to keep the bottles off of the direct heat.
4. Should I add more than 4L of juice so that I can have a good level of both carbonation and sweetness? My girlfriend likes cider sweet and fizzy!

Thanks for any and all info guys!

1 - Sorry... can't comment. I haven't used either

2 - Nope. They should be fine. I've never sanoitised a fruit addition. There is enough active yeast to outcompete anythign the fruit brings with it.

3 - My views on bottle pasteurization (ie: that its dangerous and a poor substitute for other methods) are well known.

4 - You are asking for bottle bombs there. Especially if you then pasturise. You may end up with overprimed bottles that you are then heating. Bad combination.

Doing a sweet cider safely without force carbonating is really hard.

Cheers
Dave

 

[Mutaneer]

My advice,
After recently being in a similar sitaution (new to cider)

Do your first batch with nothing but juice and yeast.
Bottle condition for 6-8 weeks then drink it.

you'll be suprised at how nice the drink is in it's purest form,
IF it's still too dry, top up in the glass with fresh juice.

 

[Canadian Brewer]

Thanks for all the tips guys! I have decided to split the batch, still planning on using the raspberries (was a request from the missus) but I will only try to pasteurize a portion of the bottles. The yeast and a couple other goodies have just arrived from the brew shop and I'm ready to go. Apparently they ran out of Mangrove Jack M02 cider yeas but replaced it with a Mad Millie cider yeast and threw in a SN9 on top to boot!

I just cracked a bottle of juice and in a separate container pitched the yeast with about a liter of juice, I will pitch tomorrow at high krausen. Does anyone know what the sugar content should be? SG read at 1045 (it's Aldi brand apple juice) and from what I've read most of the sugars are simple and will ferment out, but I need to get a rough estimate of how many grams/liter there are for my priming/overpriming (I know that some of you will cringe at that) and pasteurizing calculations.

Thanks for any and all info!

 

[Tahoose]

I'd work on 4-5g per litre for bulk priming, but make sure it's completely finished.

I'm with Airgead and if your a kegger then force carbing is the best option. My last cider was an 8 ltr batch once fermented out, kegged with 1 litre of fresh juice and some sugar syrup. Have one made 3 ciders but this has been the best.

My thoughts are ferment out completely, bottle with the appropriate priming amount, serve and sweeten in the glass.

Sweeten with, juice, cordial, fruits, sugar syrup, whatever you want really.

 

[H0U5ECAT]

Adding any more juice to the batch and the yeast will just eat up the sugars.

 

[Canadian Brewer]

I wish I had a keg setup however my place is too small for that.

So if I read your post correctly, there is only about 4-5 grams of sugar per liter of apple juice? Isn't that a little low? Unless you mean that's how much I should put in to bulk prime, however I would like to prime with applejuice instead of adding sugar.

 

[Tahoose]

I meant, that's how much sugar you would need to prime. I haven't primed with juice before but I'm sure it could be worked out.

I would, for example find out the SG of the juice, which I think might be 1.040.

Then dissolve, say 5g sugar per litre in water (100g) and dilute until that solution is 1.040,

Measure that amount of liquid, and use an equal amount of juice to prime.

There might be an easier way but I'm not too sure.

 

[Mutaneer]

adding juice to prime won;t really give you any added flavour or sweetness (unless you use a juice with non-fermentables like pear juice)
but then you don;t know what the actual fermentable percentage of sugars are.

keep it simple.
plain white CSR sugar dissolved in water.

 

[Canadian Brewer]

To the best of my knowledge, the sugars in apple juice are almost all fermentable. I know that adding more sugars will not make the cider sweeter unless I halt fermentation which I plan to do with 10L of the batch via bottle pasteurization. It's a heck of a learning experience for me at the moment!

I also did a little more searching and found that the average sugar content of apple juice is sitting somewhere around 110g per liter, something very similar to coca cola. I thought I would have to add up to 6 liters to get the results I wanted but I can sort this out with less that a single bottle.

 

[Mutaneer]

yeah, my fresh juice has been nearly 16% sugar.

unless you're tried the full dry cider with a good amount of bottle conditioning (like 8 weeks) then don;t worry about pasteurisation until you have.
I assumed mine would be too dry, and it was at bottling time, but the longer in teh bottle it mellows a lot and tastes more and more appley the longer you leave it

 

[stakka82]

Yeah agree with that, i've only done 2 ciders and both have benefited immensely from extended conditioning time.

 

[Canadian Brewer]

Holy cow! I just added about a kilo and a half of raspberries which I had warmed to room temp from frozen and did the cider ever take off! I added the thawed slurry to the fermenter as gently as possible careful not to introduce oxygen, and bam, the fermenting cider (which has been going for 2 days now) looked like someone had put baking soda into vinegar. I screwed the to back on the fermenter and put the airlock back into place and it blew out all of my starsan solution.

Has anyone else experienced anything like this before? Is this the yeast going to down on the sugar slurry that came from the frozen fruit?

I guess I'll have to wait until that dies down a bit so I can fix the airlock situation before I go to sleep tonight.

 

[Airgead]

Nucleation sites. You gust introduced a huge number of nucleation sites. Pulls all the dissolved gas out of solution.

 

[Canadian Brewer]

Duh! Like a mentose in diet coke, I hadn't even thought of that at the time.

According to the package there is only about 70g of sugar per kg of raspberries, so I'm looking at something like a 105g addition to the 19l batch. Assuming at all ferments out, would that even add .1% to the ABV?

 

[Canadian Brewer]

Hey guys, got back today and noticed that airlock activity has slowed down significantly, not unexpected as this is day 5 after pitching (day 3 after the raspberries went in) but I decided to take a look.







The attached photos are what it looks like on top, is that normal? there was very little foam when it was just apple juice, but now that the raspberries are in there (I can also see a couple poking out the top of the foam) it has this less than pleasant looking growth on top. I am worried that this could be infected, it smells like fermenting fruit but as this is my first go I can't really say for sure.

I hope someone out there can put my fears to rest or tell me the bad news gently!

Thanks for any and all info.

 

[Airgead]

Yep. Normal.. That's the raspberries floating on top. they do that.

The ones on top will go manky if you leave them too long. I usually leave mead or cider on the fruit for 2 weeks max (1 more usually) otherwise I pick up off flavours from the fruit starting to rot.

Unless you have some way of keeping it all below the surface of course. You won't get much flavour extraction after the first week anyway.

I'd transfer to secondary over the weekend. It will be fine though.

Cheers
Dave

 

[Canadian Brewer]

I do not have a second fermentor unfortunately, the name of the game is to transfer to my bre kettle, clean out fermentor, then transfer back to the fermentor.

Probably better than trying to skim everything off the surface though.

Next time I think I'll try adding the fruit addition in a hop sock with some weights : /

Thanks for all the info by the way, you guys have been immensely helpful!

 

[Airgead]

The more you move it the more chance you have of o2 getting to it.

Might be time to invest in a second fermenter...

Cheers
Dave