Very novice question on wild yeast flavor

Outcider · 08-04-2008, 04:51 AM

Greetings all! I'm new to cider making... just started my first batch a couple weeks ago! Obviously it's nowhere close to being finished yet, but I'm already planning on the recipes/mixtures I'd like to try next.

Which brings me to my main question... I've been reading Correnty's The Art of Cider Making. Lots of great info for a newbie like me and some tasty-sounding recipes. However, a lot of his recipes are based on fermentation of unpasteurized juice using the wild yeasts. I'm not sure I want to play around with that sort of thing (knowing my luck I'd grow plague in mine) and I don't have a source for unpasteurized juice locally anyway. So, if I were to use dry yeast, should I modify the recipes in any way? I've heard/read that wild yeast behaves slightly differently than its "domesticated" counterparts, and also that it creates a noticeably different flavor in the finished product. Is there any particular yeast you'd recommend for use in a recipe built around wild, or does it not really matter? Thanks for the input!

z987k · 08-04-2008, 09:32 AM

simple, go get an organic apple off the tree and culture the yeast off the peel.

**Yooper** · 08-04-2008, 11:43 AM

I'm not lucky enough where I live to have "good" wild yeasts, so I haven't tried cider with wild yeasts. We don't live in an area where there are apple orchards and cider mills- we're way too far north. It would be a good experiment, but I'd hate to waste a batch trying!

I just use cider or wine yeast, along with the juice. I haven't really noticed much of a difference in the different wine yeasts, but I did like the Lalvin 71B-1122. That left some fruitiness in the apple wine I did. It can also metabolize more malic acid (and apples tend to be a malic fruit), so it was smoother, I thought.

Freezeblade · 08-04-2008, 02:32 PM

+1 on the 71B-1122 if you like less sharp cider/wine. I've got a batch of cider that used wild yeast going right now from a organic peach I picked up from trader joes. I just took the peach, skinned it then placed it into a sugar solution with a stopper, let it get going (took 5 days) then pitched it like a starter into the juice (I used cheapo treetop)

Outcider · 08-06-2008, 02:25 AM

I hadn't thought of cultivating my own wild yeast strains (I'm new to brewing in general; just Googled and found a bunch of pages on how to do it). Great idea! Thanks for the advice. I'll let you know how it turns out.