Strawberry Cider

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HAREEBROWNBEEST

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2.5 lbs organic berries

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Washed and sanitized with Star San

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Added to two gallons of cider in it secondary stage. One concern I have is I did not add any Campden tablets. I did add 1 tsp. of pectic enzyme. Should I be concerned?
 
I work at Baxter Healthcare in Cali. They put 500 ppm sodium hypochlorite solution in them (6.15% bleach with glacial acidic acid). It's harmless, unless you drink it:) I triple rinse the chit out of em, there perfect for small batches, like 3 gallons.
 
HAREEBROWNBEEST said:
I work at Baxter Healthcare in Cali. They put 500 ppm sodium hypochlorite solution in them (6.15% bleach with glacial acidic acid). It's harmless, unless you drink it:) I triple rinse the chit out of em, there perfect for small batches, like 3 gallons.



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Got this bad boy too. It's a five gallon with spigot.

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Makes this easy:)
 
Dang way Cool And here all I do is cut up pork :-( well at least I do get a small discount on most pork products Farmland foods sells :)
 
Hmmm Maybe we could work out some kinda trade ;-) Not sure how I could ship ribs but Im sure there is a way !!!!!!
 
One concern I have is I did not add any Campden tablets. I did add 1 tsp. of pectic enzyme. Should I be concerned?

Probably not. Although I would recommend quartering the berries, more surface area that way. And you could have soaked the berries in a cheap vodka for 10 minutes, that would kill anything on them.
 
I freeze then thaw my berries then force them thru a funnel. The yeast makes fast work of them then. I add fruit to the primary with juice and camden. I add the yeast 24 hrs later.

I wanted to add the fruit a week later but wanted to have them in the juice with the camden. I'd be afraid to add Camden after a week of fermenting.
 
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What I got left and the left over strawberries(if you want to call them that). Now I cold crash for a couple days, back sweeten if needed and bottle:)
 
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I'm not going to lie, it got more bitter, I can taste the strawberries but it needs to be back sweetend.
 
thanks for the strawberry cider idea HAREEBROWNBEEST, just boiled up 250g worth of strawberries on low heat for about an hour and got an amazing syrup out of it, around 1.5 cups worth. When I added it to my demijohn (only experimenting at this stage) it didnt kick up the gravity reading at all. No biggie though, keeping it sweet, FG was 1.022 down from 1.054, so looking forward to a sweet, carbonated strawberry cider!
Will post pics soon
 
I have a gal in the secondary now. Maybe 2 weeks. It is sooo clear I can read thru it. Gonna bottle soon. Will post a pic if I can capture the beauty of it.
 
Here is the Strawberry with help of backlighting you can see how clear it is.

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By comparison here is my Peach, started on the same day. Still hazy and still bubbling a bit.

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Both are secondary. Racked and removed the fruit after 10 days I think.
 
I put my strawberries in secondary because of that reason. The flavor of the berries was there, but the cider got more bitter.
 
I did primary from the start before but now I'm gonna try adding to the primary after a week or so when active fermentation slows down.
 
This was the result of my first strawberry batch, pictures as promised........
Tasted it last night, so so impressed with the outcome! Strawberry is not overpowering, the colour is spot on, and carbonation perfect, very happy with myself right now :)

Now it's time for a 5 gallon batch :)

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I let the syrup do it's magic. After adding it, gravity jumped 4 points. I racked at 1.02 anyway, so was still very sweet without the strawberries. Only needed 24 hours to carb up
 
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Back at it today!

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I found 10 caps and bottles and a 1/2 gallon bottle that held some BBQ sauce. I got 1,000 or so caps on order they just won't be here until Wednesday:)
 
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This close up you can see the strawberry fragments floating around. I back sweetend the 2.5 gallons with 2 cans of concentrate and also added some concentrated apple flavoring, 1/2 an ounce.
 
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