Woodchuck Draft Cider

I am in the process of brewing my second batch of beer, an Irish red ale and drinking an lovely cider my friends left on New Years Eve.

This one is Woodchuck Dark and Dry. They also have an amazing Grannysmith that's nicely sour. Can someone guide me on how to clone these?

TIA
Ray

Woodchuck is generally very sweet, so you'll probably need to look into potassium sorbate and sodium metabisulphite to keep the yeast from attenuating too much. Otherwise, I would imagine they're quite proficient at blending and back-sweetening. So I guess what I'm saying is that I have no idea how to make it, but it's likely fairly complicated.

As sonet mentioned, ferment your cider normally, then stop it short (around 1.030 or so) with preservatives. Add flavor syrup for taste if you want (some commercial cideries do this). Filter it (<1 micron or whatever you can buy at a reasonable price) and carbonate it in a keg. If you want it to be in bottles, you can use a beer gun or a counter-pressure bottle filler. You can forego the syrup and filtering if you want, but it depends on how close of a clone you want to be.

Also it is important to get the apple variety correct. The Woodchuck Granny Smith is pretty straight foreward.

rcreveli said:

This one is Woodchuck Dark and Dry.

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Hmm, we have a Spire Cider Dark and Dry out here in WA. I wonder if they are alike at all? Funny thing is, it is not a "dry" cider, as it is sweet. I don't know how to clone it, but I do know ours uses molasses and brown sugar, hence the color.
http://www.fishbrewing.com/spire-mountain-cider/dark-dry-apple-cider/

Teromous said:

Filter it (<1 micron or whatever you can buy at a reasonable price) ... You can forego the syrup and filtering if you want, but it depends on how close of a clone you want to be.

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Filtering takes labor and risks of air exposure. I have not had any problems throwing a little bit of pectic enzyme into a batch at the beginning and having it clear. Teromous is probably correct that this is not how Woodchuck does it.

CandleWineProject said:

Filtering takes labor and risks of air exposure. I have not had any problems throwing a little bit of pectic enzyme into a batch at the beginning and having it clear. Teromous is probably correct that this is not how Woodchuck does it.

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Yeah, I added the bit about filtering because my Woodchuck has always been clear without sediment or anything.

just thougthI would throw this in.

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f32/woodchuck-draft-cider-154933/

Makes a woodchuck ish type cider. You can play with the flavor profile by adding in malic acid etc, as per your tastes. It is kind of like cheating, but I thought it was a great cider fixer.

Based on this recipe and its relative success with SWMBO, I have started to look for apple flavoring additions. If I could find some good concentrates, it might be super easy to replicate other styles. The recipe I attached is more like an amber woodchuck, to sparkling appely cider.