How Is Clear Cider Even Possible?

[jivesucka]

was at a pub and thought i'd try the monteiths crushed apple cider. it looked like lemonade, there was absolutely no cloudiness or colour to speak of. it was a clear fizzy apple drink.
i got home and had a long hard think about it and it continued to confound me. does one use a 60L fermenter and rack about 9 or 10 times to acheive such clarity?
you can also get a clear cider at hart's pub in essex st in sydney.
i know for certain the brigalow or blackrock cider kits could never produce such a product. so how can it be done?

 

[Thirsty Boy]

Filter

 

[roo_dr]

I managed to get a really clear (almost crystal) with the Blackrock kit with 2ry chilling, letting the bottles sit in the fridge for a few days prior to drinking, and careful pouring / handling. You'd barely notice a difference between mine and Magners when it came to clarity.

 

[beerdrinkingbob]

We were at true south a little while back and apparently it's exposure to oxygen that causes the yellow colour, so there are ways around it.

 

[waggastew]

My Dad brews alot of cider. He does a very dry style using champagne yeast and it comes out crystal clear and a very light colour. He uses unfiltered juice bought from a fruit market and leaves it on primary for at least 4 weeks. As Roo_dr says it is also important to let the bottles sit upright for a week or so in the fridge to let the yeast sediment well.

 

[DU99]

Type yeast might be an issue

 

[jonocarroll]

I've made a bottled clear, sweet, sparkling, un-oxidised cider on wild yeast - beautiful stuff. Look around at 'keeving' methods. It does involve racking a couple of times, but no crash chilling, filtration or pasteurisation.

However, for the rushed - as TB points out, filtering the bejeezus out of it would probably get you the 'clear' side of things just fine.

 

[Thirsty Boy]

I wasn't recommending it - just commenting on how its probably done by monteiths/magners/bulmers etc etc

 

[jonocarroll]

And I wasn't saying that you recommended it.

Sorry, perhaps I clearly missed the emphasis of your one word post.

 

[ekul]

All the apple ciders i've made have been clear. I just use apple juice from the supermarket (the cheapest money can buy) and add 'wine yeast' from the lhbs. I don't even use temp control, i figure the worst that will happen is apple flavours.

In the glass it looks like any sparkling wine, so i call it apple champagne, the girls love it.

 

[Bribie G]

Black Rock seems to be the kit of the moment, plus supermarket apple juice and a kilo of dex - courtesy of Dave round the corner
I don't brew cider myself and limit myself to the odd donation from Dave, as my hiatus hernia would complain - much as I love the stuff <_<

 

[manticle]

I've made a bottled clear, sweet, sparkling, un-oxidised cider on wild yeast - beautiful stuff. Look around at 'keeving' methods. It does involve racking a couple of times, but no crash chilling, filtration or pasteurisation.

I do something a bit similar in the first stages of my cider to get the brwn cap then rack from that.

I'm very interested in your success with wild yeasts QB. You sent me alink in regards to keeving a while back and I've just been reading the Proux and Nicholls book on cider.

In that they suggest that despite very good cleaning regimes, breton/Normandy cidre houses contain the desirable yeast cultures and that the apple skins contain only very small amounts and in most cases undesirable ones.

Obviously in your case the natural yeasts were enough. Do you mind telling me what blend of apples you used and from where they were sourced?

Someone also suggested to me recently that reculturing from a bottle of anneville cidre bouche (for example) might be a good way to go about it although how easy is that kind of yeast to revitalise?

For what it's worth to the OP - time, cold conditioning and fining all work with cider the same as beer. The first two are enough.

 

[Tanga]

Just found something interesting while reading up on Malolactic fermentation:
http://www.brsquared.org/wine/Articles/MLF/MLF.htm
A reduction in colour intensity can be caused by MLB directly (not because of pH increase). This is due to the metabolic activity of bacteria on phenolic compounds [Lonvaud-Funel, 1995]. MLF has been shown to change colour hue (lower 520 nm) [Riesen, 1999].

So that'd definitely change the colour.

 

[Thirsty Boy]

And I wasn't saying that you recommended it.

Sorry, perhaps I clearly missed the emphasis of your one word post.

i know you didn't - I was clarifying with more words because one was plainly open to an interpretation that I didn't want made.

goddamn it - see what happens when I try to be brief...... Maybe I should work on a happy middle ground??

 

[MHB]

When they are making clear apple juice from the cloudy pressings its just run through a centrifuge.
Going back 20 years, I saw the one at the Berry processing plant God it was huge, sounded like a 747 spinning up.
MHB

 

[SuiCIDER]

My cider resembles a slightly golden lemonade.

 

[kevin_smevin]

I do something a bit similar in the first stages of my cider to get the brwn cap then rack from that.

I'm very interested in your success with wild yeasts QB. You sent me alink in regards to keeving a while back and I've just been reading the Proux and Nicholls book on cider.

In that they suggest that despite very good cleaning regimes, breton/Normandy cidre houses contain the desirable yeast cultures and that the apple skins contain only very small amounts and in most cases undesirable ones.

Obviously in your case the natural yeasts were enough. Do you mind telling me what blend of apples you used and from where they were sourced?

Someone also suggested to me recently that reculturing from a bottle of anneville cidre bouche (for example) might be a good way to go about it although how easy is that kind of yeast to revitalise?

For what it's worth to the OP - time, cold conditioning and fining all work with cider the same as beer. The first two are enough.

Hey Manticle.

I'm really interested in keeving etc. I've read all about it and know how it works. I gave it a shot the other year with some fresh juice from Kellybrook cider festival but had no luck, no brown cap formed. Do you use commercial juice or crush your own apples? Then do you simply add CaCl and wait until the brown cap forms?

 

[jonocarroll]

Obviously in your case the natural yeasts were enough. Do you mind telling me what blend of apples you used and from where they were sourced?

I sourced mine from the Adelaide Hills - the local club organised with a grower to have a crush day, and he rounded up his leftover stock which we purchased for ridiculously low prices. I probably got lucky with the wild yeast, but as per the keeving recommendations I sulphured off roughly half the yeast to begin with to get a nice slow ferment.

I'm really interested in keeving etc. I've read all about it and know how it works. I gave it a shot the other year with some fresh juice from Kellybrook cider festival but had no luck, no brown cap formed. Do you use commercial juice or crush your own apples? Then do you simply add CaCl and wait until the brown cap forms?

Bit of a contradiction there.

For the uninitiated (or those who know how it works, and yet at the same time, don't) the keeving process involves forming a krausen-like gel on top of the juice in which nutrients get trapped and thus become unavailable to the yeast, stalling the ferment. This leads to sweet cider without back-sweetening. The top layer also protects the juice from oxygen during the slow ferment, and clears up the cider to crystal quality. The gel (chapeau-brun, or 'brown cap') is formed from the pectin in the cell walls combined with calcium chloride. In order to get the pectin to free itself up you need an enzyme - pectin methyl esterase (PME) - which occurs naturally in apples anyway (which is why cider makers will leave the crush overnight before pressing; to let this enzyme do some work breaking down pectin and releasing more juice) but can be added by hand if you can source it in a pure enough form (*any* of the wrong enantiomer will ruin the reaction). I managed to get my hands on a decent sample amount, and would be happy to pass on the info to anyone interested who PMs me.

When done properly, the ferment takes about 2-3 months, followed by another 6 in the bottle to carbonate (no priming), resulting in sweet, clear, carbonated, unoxidised, bottled cider. I added a small amount of Nelson Sauvin hop tea to my best batch and managed to impress a commercial cider maker.

 

[Tim]

Pectin often causes haze and pitching some pectinase clears this up.

For those interested in keeving, Andrew Lea has a good explanation in his book "Craft Cider Making". I havn't tried it, but I think you need to add the calcium salts and sulphite immediately after pressing, so there is no pint if you are using a kit or bought juice.

 

[kevin_smevin]

I sourced mine from the Adelaide Hills - the local club organised with a grower to have a crush day, and he rounded up his leftover stock which we purchased for ridiculously low prices. I probably got lucky with the wild yeast, but as per the keeving recommendations I sulphured off roughly half the yeast to begin with to get a nice slow ferment.


Bit of a contradiction there.

For the uninitiated (or those who know how it works, and yet at the same time, don't) the keeving process involves forming a krausen-like gel on top of the juice in which nutrients get trapped and thus become unavailable to the yeast, stalling the ferment. This leads to sweet cider without back-sweetening. The top layer also protects the juice from oxygen during the slow ferment, and clears up the cider to crystal quality. The gel (chapeau-brun, or 'brown cap') is formed from the pectin in the cell walls combined with calcium chloride. In order to get the pectin to free itself up you need an enzyme - pectin methyl esterase (PME) - which occurs naturally in apples anyway (which is why cider makers will leave the crush overnight before pressing; to let this enzyme do some work breaking down pectin and releasing more juice) but can be added by hand if you can source it in a pure enough form (*any* of the wrong enantiomer will ruin the reaction). I managed to get my hands on a decent sample amount, and would be happy to pass on the info to anyone interested who PMs me.

When done properly, the ferment takes about 2-3 months, followed by another 6 in the bottle to carbonate (no priming), resulting in sweet, clear, carbonated, unoxidised, bottled cider. I added a small amount of Nelson Sauvin hop tea to my best batch and managed to impress a commercial cider maker.

No contradiction. Just didn't feel like explaining the whole process, there is no info in there i didn't already know. Without crushing my own apples i was simply hoping there would be enough PME in the juice to do the job. I tried to ferment it wild - i got no brown cap and very little fermentation so i ended up pitching some yeast. Where did you get your PME. I could only find a supplier in France - couldn't read the website.