Six Minute Scrumpy

[Bribie G]

Buoyed by the yummy kit + juice + dex cider I've made, I decided to go supermarket juice for my new batch.

Ingredients:

• 18 L Coles Apple Juice no preservatives
• 750g dex
• cider yeast from previous brew
• 1 tsp Craftbrewer yeast nutrient nuked in microwave with some juice
• Extra apple juice to backsweeten in keg

Method:

Combine all ingredients in fermenter, run at 22 for 10 days
Crash chill 2 days. Keg and gas up. If you like farmhouse scrumpy you can drink immediately.

Notes: due to the quite different fermentation using cider yeast (no krausen as we know it, yeast drops like a stone and you almost have to scrape it off the bottom to save the "cake" so you can get virtually all of the brew into the keg) I decided to use my 20L Boating Camping Fishing Lagering vessel instead of one of my beer FVs and just plugged the hole I'd drilled in the lid with a cotton ball. This should give an ideal keg quantity when the backsweetening juice, around a litre, is added.


Edit: total cost around $22. The yeast came from the Black Rock Kit.

 

[manticle]

You've seen the 'simple cider' thread haven't you Bribie?

 

[Bribie G]

No - I'll do a search. The current foray into cider is new to me, so as usual I'm going at it like a bull at a gate - might upgrade my funeral plan
The thing that always put me off was the cost of the kits compared to beer, and I didn't realise how cheap supermarket juice had become.

 

[brettprevans]

Bribie if u recon its good with dex try sugar. I like using brown sugar.

Theres like 10seperate cider threads in the first page of non bbeer brewing section to browse. Airghead aamd I have a few threads and experiments if ur interested in reading.

 

[manticle]

http://aussiehomebrewer.com/topic/32364-simplest-cider/?hl=%2Bsimplest+%2Bcider

Cider really is one of the easiest drinks to make. No need for a kit, especially if you don't mind dry and the quality of a supermarket juice based cider is comparable to many of the mainstream commercially available ciders.

I prefer cider with more character - a lot of the better known brands are the bland cider equivalent of low end pale lagers but a few are starting to appear here (henry harcourt isn't too bad, didn't mind bress, two metres tall or prickly moses when I tried them). I started a thread recently about adding funky sediment from french ciders to get that character in there. i also use malic and tannic acid to try and replicate some of the characters of cider apples as the supermarket stuff can be missing that.

As a refreshing keg filler that's no fuss and cheap to boot, 20 L of juice + yeast and nutrient is hard to beat.

 

[Bribie G]

The only reason I use dex is to increase the original alcohol content to compensate for the added back-sweetening juice. I'll certainly be trying variations - I like the look of the apple/blackcurrant mix which is around the same price. Also I expect I could back sweeten with just about anything - cranberry, pineapple, St Agnes Brandy.

h34r: