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kissajew86

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All - I wanted to try some cider but didnt want to invest a lot of money so i got 5 gallons of hytop apple juice from the store...cost$20.

I also added 1 lb of honey , which was another ~$4.

I let it sit in the primary for about a week, racked it to a secondary and have let it clear and age for 3 weeks.

I put it in the keg after that, it settled in and carbinated in about 3 days...it tasted fairly good but it was missing something.....i started reading up and from what i could gather i needed to add some acid....so i ordered an acid blend for wine/friut, added a small amount and wow what a diffrence....

the cider came out to about 5%, but you cant really taste the acohol....it is VERY smooth...

the acid gave it just the right amount of sour/bitterness to make it a GREAT brew....

so it you ever want to try apple cider for cheap, i would recomend this, i will definatly be doing it again!
 
What kind of yeast did you use? What do you use to carbonate? Corn sugar? I'm about to try my first cider and I've only done wine and mead so far and no beers yet.
 
Just about any wine/beer/cider yeast will work. I use nottingham. Corn sugar, table sugar, more juice to carbonate. Nothing is simpler than cider. Shoot, if you get freshly pressed juice, you don't even need yeast.
 
If you carbonate is it safer to bottle in beer bottles, or does it matter? I only have wine bottles and corks and a nice corker, and I dunno if I really want to buy a capper, caps, and beer bottles yet.
 
Keln said:
If you carbonate is it safer to bottle in beer bottles, or does it matter? I only have wine bottles and corks and a nice corker, and I dunno if I really want to buy a capper, caps, and beer bottles yet.
Click to expand...


Carbonation will push the corks out. If you don's want to buy a capper, get some used champagne botthes and buy push in champagne corks (usually plastic) and champagne wire(to hold the corks in)

This site has the corks for $0.15 and the wires for $0.15. I get allot of my beer making stuff from them because there is no local homebrew shop for me.

http://northernbrewer.com/wine-bottling.html
 
I used a standard wine yeast for firmentation...

I have a keg setup so i force carbinated :)
 
kissajew86 said:
All - I wanted to try some cider but didnt want to invest a lot of money so i got 5 gallons of hytop apple juice from the store...cost$20.

I also added 1 lb of honey , which was another ~$4.

I let it sit in the primary for about a week, racked it to a secondary and have let it clear and age for 3 weeks.

I put it in the keg after that, it settled in and carbinated in about 3 days...it tasted fairly good but it was missing something.....i started reading up and from what i could gather i needed to add some acid....so i ordered an acid blend for wine/friut, added a small amount and wow what a diffrence....

the cider came out to about 5%, but you cant really taste the acohol....it is VERY smooth...

the acid gave it just the right amount of sour/bitterness to make it a GREAT brew....

so it you ever want to try apple cider for cheap, i would recomend this, i will definatly be doing it again!
Click to expand...

Did you get much sweetness? Or do you not need it with the Acid? What's the brand name of the acid you bought. I made one very similar to yours except with 5 lbs of brown sugar and cider yeast. It turned out very alcoholic and is just now getting drinkable after about 9 months. Not a bit of sweetness.
 
Interesting - I've made the exact same recipe, but without the acid, and I used an ale yeast (wyeast 1056). I also thought it was missing something - I'll have to give it a try.

Oh, yeah - how much did you add?
 
I made mine in the 1Gal glass jugs the juice came in. Added half a vial of WL0001 to each. To one of them I added 1/2 c. brown sugar and a cloth bag with 5 cloves and 2 cinimon sticks.
The one with out the added stuff was better. Fermented down to almost exactly 1.000. Quite dry, but very tasty.
 

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