Wild yeast cider, tastes awesome, 7% ABV, better than "proper" cider yeast!

I got a mixture of apples from a local orchard and pressed them, pitched a Bayanus cider yeast into most of the batch, but left literally just a litre bottle of the same juice as-is and put an airlock on it just to see what happens as I have never tried brewing with wild yeast.

Once it got going it was fermenting great, all by itself, all done in just a few days, from about 1.052 down to about 998. I make that about 7% ABV.

And though it smelt and tasted a bit funky just after primary was finished, even a week later, it is tasting amazingly good, I mean better than the Bayanus batch, which has some overtones I can only describe as "vaguely fruity but not apple".

Is that a typical result with wild yeast? I have to say I am quite surprised - at the taste, and the attenuation (was expecting 3 or 4% abv or something, like you get with yeasts with low alcohol resistance, like bread yeast). I have washed some yeast from that wild batch to keep, but I daresay using apples from the same orchard would produce a similar effect again next year.

I noticed the same thing. A small, gallon jug that I put an airlock on has action that is equal to the carboys which contain champagne yeast. While I haven't even finished my first batch yet, something tells me that with cider, less is more.

I always used wild yeast for my barrels of cider that I use to put up , they turned out great . I started using carboys to experiment with and tried one with a cider wyeast one with a beer yeast and one with wild yeast , the wild batch is 10 times better !!

Best batch I ever made was with wild yeast.

Spontaneous fermentation in Colorado tastes like medicine. It's too bad cause I wanted to try and keeve a cider this winter.

Yeah, I haven't spent much time on the wild yeast forum, but I imagine from what I have read that local strains really do vary considerably. Sounds like if you land on a gem you should roll with it. Next year I will almost certainly do it this way again, making sure I get apples from the same orchard.

If it worked out, why not wash the yeast and freeze it?

jlh42581 said:

If it worked out, why not wash the yeast and freeze it?

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I have indeed saved some, though there is not much of a cake from my litre or so, but I suppose it would get a starter going. But I just wonder if there is any point, probably the good result has everything to with an auspicious yeast, or combination of them, from that particular orchard, and I would get pretty much the same result from the same apples, in fact it might be more reliable that way than reusing an old yeast. Don't know, like I say, one for the Wild Yeast forum perhaps.

BTW, you mention freezing, I had a batch of washed beer yeast freeze on me (left it in an outdoor cupboard, it got down to -20C over the winter) and I couldn't get it to activate again. Though I may not have left it for long enough before giving up, still, my feeling is that the freezing killed it?

If you didnt add glycerin to your vial before freezing it probably exploded the cell walls of the yeast.

jlh42581 said:

If you didnt add glycerin to your vial before freezing it probably exploded the cell walls of the yeast.

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Ahh, sure I knew there must be a trick with glycerin there, I know animal and plant cells aren't really up to being frozen. Once thawed, do you wash the yeast again to lose as much of the glycerin as possible (if that even works..?), or just leave it in as a harmless additive?

I asked my sister (micro biologist sisters are nice to know)
She said you probalby wouldnt want lab glycerol in a food product. But there are food grade glycerins.

I have never tried to save yeast, but if I did she said I should try something that is really viscous with a low freezing temp.
Her suggestion.....Karo syrup

Food grade glycerine is often added to homemade liqueurs to provide a little body. It just tastes a bit sweet, not objectionable.

Thanks for going to extra mile in your research . Funnily, some friends made a cake last weekend for their child's first birthday and made coloured icing sugar according to some recipe that requires glycerine to make it malleable and able to be formed into little toy cars and pigs and princesses or whatever. Well, they told us AFTER we had all eaten some that they had got this glycerine over the counter in the chemist's (that's a pharmacy across the Pond) and the pharmacist had raised an eyebrow when they said what they needed it for. There don't SEEM to have been any ill effects, but I wish they'd mentioned that before! I GUESS it's for internal use, so... maybe that's the stuff I need

I wouldnt go as far as washing it again. Theres a thread on here on how to make a yeast bank. Just make a starter, pour off the liquid and then pitch it.

I just plopped 3 gallons of local raw cider into a 3 gallon carboy and let it go last weekend. Boiled about a pint of a separate gallon with 4 oz of brown sugar and poured it in, just to give it a kick. Sitting at about 50 degrees F and chugging away. The cake is now above the first ridge on the carboy. I am super excited to try this stuff. Also excited to wash this yeast and try it out on a basic wort. To date I have never frozen yeast, I just star san jars and follow the sticky thread steps for yeast washing. But shouldn't wild yeasts be more able to weather cold storage, perhaps even keep longer? The wild animal is always more resilient than the domesticated one.