Recent content by zadamxtr

Pretty sure it was Saccharomyces cerevisiae.

Wanted to make a sweet Apple Wine, so took about 10L of juice and added 2kg of white sugar, and added some general white wine/champagne yeast. I had always heard that wine yeast can usually handle up to about 14% alcohol so by my rough calculations if my brew topped out at 14% there would still...

I recently purchased a small apple press online, but it broke after one use. I ended up having a look at a few simple designs for building your own press, and was able to make my own, much stronger press with mainly just spare bits of wood and other bits and pieces that I had in my garage, and...

Safcider AS-2 yeast seems to leave behind a little residual sweetness, not enough for me to call the result a "sweet cider", but it certainly is a lot mroe mellow than the bone dry cider I get when using something like a champagne yeast.

You can store it in the fridge, thats the best place to store it. However as mentioned, if you are going to carbonate some of it, you wont be able to carbonate it in the fridge, let it carbonate when warm and then store in the fridge after.

Interesting that you don't use a secondary. I had read in some places that having the cider sit in contact with the lees for a long time is bad for the flavour, is that not the case?

I have several cinnamon sticks and was contemplating whether adding them to my cider would be a good idea. Anyone tried this before? I was also wondering at what stage would be best to add them, I'm thinking maybe in secondary, or maybe even in the bottle?

Thanks Maylar. So in your experience it is worth aging it for quite a long time in secondary?

OK so I have read quite a bit of contradictory info about how long to leave cider in each stage. Some say they only leave the cider in primary and dont bother with secondary. Some say to wait until the bubbling stops in primary, then wait another day or 2 or 3, then transfer to secondary...

If you chopped the apples a lot smaller maybe they would release the flavours faster?

If that method gives you the flavour you want, then stick with it! You could try using the apple juice approach just so you can compare results for yourself. Sounds like you extract the apple flavour by boiling the apples in water rather than juicing them, then adding some extra spices for...

I added it through a small funnel and a teaspoon.

Nope, the juice came pasteurised already, so no need to boil it as it is already boiled and sealed in the bottle so no contaminants can get in. Thats why the juice stays good in the bottle for months without refridgeration despite not having any preservatives in it.

I find most store bought Apple juices give me a starting gravity around 1.042 or so, so you can probably use that for your calculation as an approximate. Better yet, if you get some more of the same juice you can take a gravity reading.

Don't worry about exploding bottles if you only add the correct amount of sugar. If your cider is dry then there should be no sugar left, the only way you could cause a bottle explosion would be if you gave the yeast too much sugar to work with.