manticle
Standing up for the Aussie Bottler
This is something I am very interested in experimenting further with.
Those of you who see cider as a bit more than thin, apple flavoured alcoholic soda water with some artificial sweetener (or as a drink for the girls) may be familiar with some of the more complex funky French style ciders from Brittany and Normandy and so on.
These use the yeasts that are naturally found on the skins of the apples to ferment and give flavours that range from wine cellar to blue cheese. An acquired taste perhaps but one that I enjoy far more than pipsqueak or bulmers or dirty Granny.
Prickly Moses make a cider in this way.
I'm not really set up to make cider from apples, so like many I make mine from preservative free store bought juice. I like it dry so I just use juice - no lactose, no kegging early, no back sweetening, no artificial sweeteners, etc.
Last year, I splashed out and made a couple of ciders from a variety of tastier, more expensive juices and got a better result. I also started to play around with malic* and tannic acid additions to add some complexity.
However the point of this thread is that, in discussions with another brewer about the funky french yeasts, the idea of using or re-culturing bottle dregs from commercial French cider came up.
My last cider was fermented using about 80% preshafruit juice (granny smith and pink apple) and the rest berri cloudy juice so the resulting cider is cloudy. I used a dry cider yeast I bought from punkin (I think - was a while ago) and added about 5g of malic and tannic acid at the beginning.
When the cider had fermented out, I swished out the last bit of a commercial French cider along with the sediment and pitched it in. I also added about 10g of toasted oak chips.
Upon bottling, the cider tasted like a dry, slightly tannic beverage as I would expect but the funk from the French yeast is slowly starting to come through and seems to be increasing.
I make my ciders in the cooler weather so I probably won't knock another one out till next Autumn but I am intending to start experimenting with small batches and reculturing and storing some interesting yeasts (beer yeast is so readily available in so many strains that I rarely bother anymore). Hopefully I can work out which commercials will give me a good result and do a full batch using a starter made from that (no dry yeast or other commercially available yeast to be used). I have hopes for something from cidrerie d'Anneville.
Thought the idea may be of some interest to some of you. Kudos to Vitalstatistix for suggesting the idea in the first place.
*Not sure the malic adds much unless I were to add a culture to trigger malolactic fermentation - something I'm yet to play with as the amount I need to buy is much more than I need. Might just try tannic next time.
Those of you who see cider as a bit more than thin, apple flavoured alcoholic soda water with some artificial sweetener (or as a drink for the girls) may be familiar with some of the more complex funky French style ciders from Brittany and Normandy and so on.
These use the yeasts that are naturally found on the skins of the apples to ferment and give flavours that range from wine cellar to blue cheese. An acquired taste perhaps but one that I enjoy far more than pipsqueak or bulmers or dirty Granny.
Prickly Moses make a cider in this way.
I'm not really set up to make cider from apples, so like many I make mine from preservative free store bought juice. I like it dry so I just use juice - no lactose, no kegging early, no back sweetening, no artificial sweeteners, etc.
Last year, I splashed out and made a couple of ciders from a variety of tastier, more expensive juices and got a better result. I also started to play around with malic* and tannic acid additions to add some complexity.
However the point of this thread is that, in discussions with another brewer about the funky french yeasts, the idea of using or re-culturing bottle dregs from commercial French cider came up.
My last cider was fermented using about 80% preshafruit juice (granny smith and pink apple) and the rest berri cloudy juice so the resulting cider is cloudy. I used a dry cider yeast I bought from punkin (I think - was a while ago) and added about 5g of malic and tannic acid at the beginning.
When the cider had fermented out, I swished out the last bit of a commercial French cider along with the sediment and pitched it in. I also added about 10g of toasted oak chips.
Upon bottling, the cider tasted like a dry, slightly tannic beverage as I would expect but the funk from the French yeast is slowly starting to come through and seems to be increasing.
I make my ciders in the cooler weather so I probably won't knock another one out till next Autumn but I am intending to start experimenting with small batches and reculturing and storing some interesting yeasts (beer yeast is so readily available in so many strains that I rarely bother anymore). Hopefully I can work out which commercials will give me a good result and do a full batch using a starter made from that (no dry yeast or other commercially available yeast to be used). I have hopes for something from cidrerie d'Anneville.
Thought the idea may be of some interest to some of you. Kudos to Vitalstatistix for suggesting the idea in the first place.
*Not sure the malic adds much unless I were to add a culture to trigger malolactic fermentation - something I'm yet to play with as the amount I need to buy is much more than I need. Might just try tannic next time.
