Help with making hard apple cider

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delzac

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Hey,

Is it a must to use the juice only when making apple cider. Thats the impression i have after viewing the forum, where most people just fermented the juice only. I tried fermenting the juice and the fruit (blended into a mash of course), but the whole thing turn sour after one month. Any ideas?

Delzac
 
If I understand correctly, you've been fermenting apple cider on the fruit pulp? If that's the case, you'll get much better results by pressing the pulp to extract the juice & ferment the juice without the pulp. You can also just buy the juice in the store, as long as there are no preservatives, you should have no problems fermenting it. Regards, GF.
 
I have never heard of anyone ferementing with the apples present before. I wonder if oxidization of the apples (turning brown with air exposure) is part of the reason it turned sour.

There is a process called keeving that does allow the juice to stay with the pulp for 24 hours. The effect is that the pulp with its pectin reabsorbs nutrients out of the juice. They then let it ferment at 5 degrees C (about 40 degrees F) for a really long time. The result is a naturally sweet cider because it is so nutrient poor with less than ideal temps. I bring this up because I also wonder if the apple fruit is kind of messing with the nutrients, though it is still there. Maybe I'm way off base here. See French & English Tradition - http://www.cider.org.uk/part4.htm
 
You can leave small pieces of fruit in the must for the entirety of the fermentation without it damaging the cider, so long as the fermented cider is racked off when complete. It's not uncommon, expecially with people doing wild yeast fermentation. The key point when doing this is to make sure that the must is not too dense for the yeast.

Two things come to mind that could have caused your cider to turn bad. One is a bacterial infection, which is what it sounds like to me. The other is the introduction of nitrates into your cider which can be caused by even a small piece of a rotting apple.
 
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