How To Make Great Cider. Easily.

[DanBrewer]

Simple tutorial with simple recipes: How To Make Great Cider

I'm not sure what the equivalent of Trader Joe's (grocery store) throughout Australia is... Maybe something like Mountain Creek Whole Foods in Canberra? Basically, the only thing you'd need it for is buying quality, 100% juices for a decent price. Maybe the supermarket would do the trick-

 

[Airgead]

Much as I hate to blow my own trumpet...

http://aussiehomebrewer.com/topic/72201-how-to-get-started-in-cider-the-definitiveish-guide-to-beginner39/

You can get good apples from farmers markets (in season), direct from the growers (if you are close by) or from you local wholesale fruit market (flemmington in Sydney).

But only in season. Cold stored apples (ie: anything you are buying now) are less good for cider. The go all floury and starchy and lose sugars.

Cheers
Dave

 

[TimT]

Make your own juice. It's not just preservatives that might be a problem in juices from the store - they could be old as well. Fresh is always better.

And juices in the store are made to be drunk pre-fermentation, so will tend to be pressed mostly from apples that don't have much tannins or acids or the other complex flavours that stand out in the final cider.

 

[DanBrewer]

"Your regular cidermaking has translated into regular sex with your significant other. Other men regard you with a mixture of awe and terror." Lol!

 

[Bribie G]

Trader Joe's in the US is a subsidiary of Aldi, that we have in the Eastern States of Australia. I make cider using their clear apple juice, some malic acid, yeast nutrient and a proper cider yeast.

It makes a decent drinkable cider, as good as most of our mainstream ciders such as Bulmers and is a good quaffing drink. However as Airgead and Tim say you can really raise the quality by going into fresh apples.

The "perpetual" cider mentioned in the article is precisely what I do. I have a dedicated cider fermenter and just tip fresh apple juice in for the next batch. This is quite acceptable for ciders as, unlike beer fermenting, there's no krausen ring round the top of the vessel and the yeast deposit is very thin and firm on the bottom, when fermentation has finished.


Another trick - because I keg not bottle - is to only brew up 17L of cider till it's dry then run it into the cornie keg with two litres of juice, to produce a medium sweet cider. Even at keg fridge temperatures the cider keeps working slowly and not only dries out but produces a fair amount of bonus CO2. Then I can top up with yet more juice. When I was just brewing beer, a 10kg gas cylinder would last me about 7 months. I've been on my current bottle for 18 months.

edit: It's a 3 keg setup with two beer and one cider and the gas supply is off a common line. So the cider feeds gas to the system as a whole and often I can run the whole lot with the main tap on the cylinder shut and even have to "spund" off some gas on occasion.

 

[DanBrewer]

How many generations will you use the same yeast with the perpetual cider method? Do you ever notice a change after a certain number of batches?

 

[Bribie G]

I normally do three or even four, I play it safe and renew the yeast then - probably a hangover from my beer brewing methods.
The yeast works out about a dollar a brew so not worth risking $20 of juice plus the hassle of maybe tipping it or getting a general brewery infection.

 

[Forever Wort]

I just tasted a cider I did last night. I used Woolworths Apple & Blackcurrent and Apple juice with 250 grams of coconut sugar. Fermented with CL23.

Came out at 4.8% and tastes incredibly neutral. It is really lacking flavour. You smell it, you think yep, wine, yep OK - cider. But the taste is so muted. It is dry but not harsh, just watery.

The last batch I did I used a beer yeast, about 250g of rice maltose and some sodium saccharine. I appreciated the sweetness in that batch but did not like the subtle malt flavours.

Not sure which I prefer now. Next time I think I will try to condense down the juices by boiling, perhaps? And then a little sodium saccharine again, with CL23.

 

[manticle]

If you boil, you'll get something like stewed apple.

 

[Forever Wort]

I am thinking of boiling 2 litres of juice and mixing that with another 18 litres of unadulterated juice.

 

[Airgead]

Not sure which I prefer now. Next time I think I will try to condense down the juices by boiling, perhaps? And then a little sodium saccharine again, with CL23.

That would be a Very Bad Idea. Apple sauce.

Great if you want apple sauce. not so good if you want cider.

The best (only) way to get more apple flavour in cider is to use better apples. Ones with flavour. Cheap juices are generally from cheap apples which are basically bags of sugar water.

A lot of cheap commercial ciders use cheapo juices and concentrates then add back an over the top apple flavour using essences. You could try that sort of thing but its probably only economical at scale.

Cheers
Dave

 

[Forever Wort]

Cheers Dave, how about the post above that, boiling say 10% of the juice? Ever done that?

 

[TimT]

Luke noooooooooooooooooooooo!

You'll probably get a little more flavour by allowing the cider to age, and more on top of that by using a better quality product - ie, juice from fresh apples, even if you only use them as an adjunct. Boiling will cause an already poor quality product (juice) to lose more quality.

I'm putting it out there again, we've got an apple mill and a press at our house that we're happy for all club members to use....

 

[Airgead]

Cheers Dave, how about the post above that, boiling say 10% of the juice? Ever done that?

No... but from first principles its unlikely to do what you want.

If there aren't many apple flavours in the juice, concentrating won't help - you can't concentrate whats not there.

Worse still, boiling may actually reduce the apple flavours. A lot of them are volatiles that will get boiled off, others will be altered to give that cooked apple flavour. You will concentrate sugars but also caramalise them so you will get a bunch of caramel type flavours rather than apple.

You could try using juice concentrate rather than concentrating your own. I know that sounds counterintuitive but commercial concentrates are often made through low pressure boiling which preserves the volatiles better and doesn't caramalise the sugars as much due to the lower temps. They also capture and re-add some of the volatiles that do escape.

Increasing the sweetness can often increase the perceived apple flavour (a lot of what people perceive as 'apple' is actually just sweet).

Cheers
Dave

 

[Bribie G]

Bung in some Soda Stream Apple concentrate. All natural and bursting with vitamin C B)
I might try some myself, favourite cider at the moment is Somersby in the can. Pure lolly water but when you crack the can it's like someone started peeling a Granny Smith. Obviously use of essences but it works.

ed: Somersby has started appearing on tap round here, yeah :beerbang:

 

[DanBrewer]

I have done a side-by-side comparison of unfiltered, quality, no sugar added apple juice fermented with low attenuating English Ale yeast, and then a second identical batch, except I reduced 2 pints of cider on the stove down to an apple caramel, and the latter proved to have a more robust apple quality. Both were 1 gallon experiments.

I admit, I was myself skeptical about boiling apple juice into a caramel because I thought that boiling would drive-off flavor or make some disgusting, bland, burnt apple goop. But quite the opposite happened. There was a noticeable caramel quality to the second batch, but there was also a richer (less watery), fuller flavored, apple character with a more balanced sweetness (not as dry as the regular cider).


Perhaps this was the key: I allowed a standard 1 gallon cider to ferment out over the course of about 2 weeks. Then, I made the apple caramel which I then diluted with another pint of apple juice. I dumped that mixture back into the already fermented 1 gallon of apple cider, and allowed to re-ferment for only four days, then bottled. I only bottle carbonated for four days, then placed this "apple caramel" cider into the refrigerator to prevent the yeast from tearing through any more of the apple sugars.

Bottom line was the apple caramel cider was clearly better and yielded those lost apple characteristics that seemed to be missing in the standard cider. And this may have been due to the fact that I refrigerated the cider possibly before the yeast had fully completed fermenting.

The only way you'll know is by doing a side-by-side and seeing if you notice a significant improved difference. I did.

 

[Mutaneer]

Step 1. Find a local farmers market.

Step 2. Buy fresh pressed juice, unpasteurised, with VitC added direct from the grower.
IF you're lucky, they will have some good "cider" varieties, my grower has a limited amount of Orage Pippins and are an excellent variety for cider

Step 3. add nothing but yeast

Step 4. bottle condition, 4-6 weeks minimum, everything mellows and rounds out nicely and apparent sweetness increases

 

[pk.sax]

Long life juice made cider is really only good for drinking half fermented. I refuse to do more than a juice bottle worth of that hooch, the closest it gets to anything commercial is apfelschorle - sparkling German/Austrian apple juice - but with an alcohol kick.

Even supermarket brand fresh squeezed cloudy apple juice makes a better cider than commercial strongbow/bulmers and it can be aged a bit.

 

[DanBrewer]

"Even supermarket brand fresh squeezed cloudy apple juice makes a better cider than commercial strongbow/bulmers and it can be aged a bit." Well put.

 

[Alex.Tas]

I'm not going to enter into the boiling can reduce the apple flavours discussion, but...
I made a cider with OzTops (i know - i'm lazy when it comes to cider) last year where i boiled up some of the juice and then steeped some jasmine/green/pear teabags. Jasmine tea is typically green tea with jasmine added to it. This one was a fancy one with some sort of pear in there too. The pear probably added nothing in the scheme of things though.
I added some lactose while it was still hot and then added it back to the bottle. Something from the tea gave it a nice rounded edge. there was definitely some silkiness from the jasmine. I guess the green tea helped with adding some tannins?
Either way, thoroughly recommend using jasmine tea in your cider.