DHB - cheers! I dont bottle carbonate. Personally, at 1.002 I'd cold crash it now while it still has some of the original apple sugar and then either keg it or bottle it flat or hit craigslist and ebay to find a keg.
If you want to bottle carbonate and like the way it tastes now, I'd recommend searching the forum for "bottle pasteurization" which looks to me like the most simple and reliable way of getting a sweet or semi-sweet bottle carbed cider without the risk of bottle bombs.
If you like it drier and havent crashed it, you could probably just bottle it and use the existing yeast and residual sugar. The SO4 will go right down to 1.000 and maybe a little lower, depending on your juice. It will be like a dry sparkling white wine with some apple finish. It will still have some residual apple taste, but probably not nearly as much as now.
If you backsweeten, even for priming, I'd recommend a mix of 2/3 turbinado and 1/3 dextrose or original juice over just dextrose. Dextrose ferments out a little beery tasting, which works great for beer and OK with cider and US05 but not so much with S04 and Nottingham.
I just wanted to register to thank you for this amazing post. As a direct result of it, my second batch of cider is about a hundred times better than my first! We've been getting apples from Henley's Orchard (usually Stayman/Winesap/Rome), but was interested to know if you are aware of any local sources for heirloom cider varieties. Next year, I'm making a lot more, although I'm not sure I can keep up with you!
Henley's has good apples. They're probably you're best bet in terms of variety of cider apples, and this was a good year. This fall I helped some friends press apples from Henleys and got 10 gal for myself. The mix I did was Cameo, Fuji, McIntosh, Gala, Jonathan, Grimes Golden, Winesap, and Granny Smith. We also used some Rome and York. It came out great.
You can get pretty much anything you want for a great cider mix at Henleys if you are willing to pay the regular bushel price, but that is steep. They usually have a lot of good #2 cider apples, which are very reasonable if you buy a truckload. We just missed being able to get Northern Spy #2s and we were too early for Black Twigs, which are both really good. The BTs are considered vintage. I heard someone else had Albemarle Pippin #2s, but I did not pursue it as I had no extra capacity at the time.
I'm going on my last run of the season to Showalters tomorrow. The mix will be Stayman, York and Empire. Those are commercial crop apples but are vintage cider apples as far as Central Virginia is concerned. I went to a cider workshop that made a mix from Grimes Golden, Albemarle Pippen and Hewes Crab, which is a sorta local 'vintage' recipe. It was great stuff, but I think the juice I get from Showalters is just as good.
You might want to check with Vintage Virginia - they have great juice. I suspect they will be diverting it all to their Cider Works next year but if they have a real bumper crop and its more than they can ferment, that could be good for local home cider.
Getting new juice tomorrow, so I have to make room. These 6 batches are from the November 24 pressing - Stayman and Pink Lady. Two are already in kegs, the 3068 batch and a malt cider. The malt cider is sortofa lazy man's Graff. 3lbs of muntons amber malt in the cider and US05. This came out a lot better than my previous malt cider attempts. It has a nice body and this malt taste works a lot better with the sour apple finish. The 3068 is reliably tasty. I made this batch with no sugar.
Its been really cold. Two batches arent ready to crash yet, even though its been seven weeks. You can see they are the ones a little lighter i in color. Both of those batches have honey added. The one with S04 is almost ready, the one with 3638 can probably go a couple more weeks.
The other four batches have been crashed and racked to secondaries. I added raspberries on two of these (the two in the middle) S04 and 1010 yeast, both with no sugar. They both taste great. The S04 tastes more like a raspberry wine. I realy like the 1010 with the raspberry. I still think my favorite to use with raspberry so far is the one I made the previous round with US05 and 2lbs turbinado.
The 2001 with no sugar batch on the far left came out pretty good. Its still a little stinky but has a lot of apple taste. The US05 +2lbs turbinado batch on the far right tastes great.
Of the 15 test batches I did this last round, I liked the Ritchie's Ale and Youngs Ale the best. Most of the others were poor to middlin, although some might improve with age
Showalters is doing their last pressing of the season tomorrow - Staymans Yorks and Empires. I'm planning on getting about 65 gallons for myself and another 60 for friends. I'm not sure where I'm going to put it all...
Last edited by CvilleKevin; 01-13-2010 at 12:19 PM.
I'm going on my last run of the season to Showalters tomorrow. The mix will be Stayman, York and Empire. Those are commercial crop apples but are vintage cider apples as far as Central Virginia is concerned.
There is a lady at the local farmer's market who just called me and said she can get more juice for this weekend. She thought that the cider press was done for the season, but they told her that they had "one more big order" so she could get one last batch. She's bringing 6 gallons to Richmond Saturday for me. I really wonder if you are the last "big order" and she is getting it from Showalters. I'll ask her Saturday.
Mike - the juice might be coming from Showalters, but I'm not the big order. They usually press close to 1000 gallons in a day. I got 122 gallons, which is starting to be a significant percentage, but not the main one. I think it was one of their distributors that was the main order - hopefully their Richmond distributor, because it was some good juice today.
I dont know for sure whether Showalter's distributes to Richmond or not. Their Central Va distributor is Cavalier Produce in Charlottesville. You might want to give them a call to see how far East they go or you could call the orchard to see if they have a distributor in Richmond. The juice going to the stores will have some yellow delicious, because its table juice, but there is relatively little YD in this batch. They had a few bins of YD that they were adding later, but most of the bins were Stayman, York and Empire.
Here’s the last batch of juice for the season. Its my favorite mix so far this season. It’s the same mix of apples (Stayman, Empire, York) that I got on Oct 8. That was the start of the harvest for those apples. The juice had great midrange flavor, but not a lot of sweetness up front. OG was 1.054.
Three months later, same apples, but they were on the tree longer and in cold storage for a couple months. Same great flavor and much sweeter. There is a lot of skin in the taste, like the first part of biting into an apple.
The two carboys on either end are from the last batch – still fermenting after 7 weeks. The 7 carboys in the middle are all new. The raw juice was fairly light in color – almost as light as the fermenting batches. I’ve also got a wild yeast keg batch that is on my back porch. It gets real cold there but doesn’t freeze – at least not so far – so 8 new keg batches total.
OG of the raw juice ranged from 1.064 to 1.068 , ten to fourteen points higher than a few months ago.
The variability in sg is because when I got to the press they were just starting up. Since I had to get back to town, I didnt want to wait for them to press and mix all the good cider apples, so I started filling my carboys after a bin (22bushels) of Stayman and another bin of mixed Empires and Yorks were pressed. While I was filling, they pressed a third bin that was a mix Empires and Yorks and started on another bin of Staymans after that. I’m not sure which bin or bins were sweeter and I cant really tell the difference in taste, but the hydro sees a difference.
Since the SG was so high, I only added sugar to two of the keg batches. I’m using US05 on both of those, one of which I plan to add raspberries before I crash it. I only used 12 ounces – a very small bump for the US05. I added a pound and a half of orange blossom honey to another batch with Wyeast 3333. Everything else is no sugar, just yeast. Wyeast 3068 and 3056. SO4 and Nottingham.
The test batches this round are WLP005, WLP320, WLP500, WLP565, Wyeast1099, Wyeast1275 and Wyeast1968. Three gallons of each. One with no sugar, One with 1.5oz turbinado, 0.75oz dextrose, One with 3oz Sage honey, except 320 which got orange blossom honey. 24 hours later, the keg batches and Wyeast test batches have all started. The White Labs batches haven’t started yet. All of the 1275 batches needed blowoff tubes.
I just crashed a wild yeast gallon batch that I had on my back porch from the Nov 24 pressing. It’s OK, but I wish I had crashed it a week ago. Three weeks ago it was good and appley but still too sweet. SWMBO liked it. I was going to check it again last week but forgot. It’s still at 1.022 but it picked up this taste that is like a sour from a slightly unripe peach, like a peach cider. If I had made it from peaches I’d probably be happy, but to me it conflicts with the apple taste. SWMBO liked it tho, said it was tangy. Maybe it will grow on me. Must be some sort of fruit acid that the wild yeast releases.
This same sour peach taste was a lot of the UK yeast gallon batches that I did last round. I think it probably came from the wild yeast, since it’s the same taste and I didn’t sulfite the test batches. However I didn’t get any of that taste in the keg batches – probably because in all of those batches I was using yeasts that I know either get along pretty good with the wild yeast (the wheat yeasts) or overwhelm them (the ale yeasts). The UK ales mostly were OK - Richie, Youngs, Gervin and Brupaks were the ones I liked. The Morgans Ale had the peach sour as did all of the lager yeasts. The Youngs lager was the least objectionable of the lagers. The Youngs cider got drier than I wanted. It went all the way to 0.998 It doesn’t have the peach sour and has some decent apple in the finish so it might be OK in a few months.
A few weeks ago I made a batch with Store bought Simply Apple Juice. I cold crashed it at 1.024. I has stayed at room temp since then and is still stable but still seems like it is missing some apple flavor. Since this is stable can I back sweeten with a can of frozen apple juice without having to stabilize this?
On a side note when I hear you talk about the cider you get from the press my mouth just waters. I have 2 presses near me, about 45 min away unfortunatly they close early to mid november and dont open back up til about may, so Im stuck with store bought juices now. Are there any store bought juices you have used that seemed all right?
Thanks to this thread you have helped me with several questions Ive asked you over the past 4-5 months. My summer ciders turned out really well. Cheers!
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