ale; then champagne yeast?

Hey folks.

Farmers market had unpreserved flash pasteurized cider at $4/gallon today so's I thought what the hell.

All I have at home now is some nottingham dry ale yeast (my emergency stash.)

Anybody have any ideas about using the ale yeast to get it started today and adding champagne yeast when it calms down (or in secondary) to dry it out?

I don't have fridge space to keep the cider cold until I get the champagne yeast. I need to get it working today.

thanks guys.

I've read instructions indicating to use ale yeast, but never heard to use both.

Depends how you treat the champagne yeast i guess. Adding it later will surely dry it as you suggest but increase alcohol to wine levels for a strong dry still 'apple wine'. If you're planning on Sparkling Cider and bottling it off with the yeast i'm not sure that enough sugar will have been converted already by the ale yeast. Might have cider grenades on your hand with the champagne yeast having too much sugar to convert!

I was gonna let it finish fermenting w/the champagne yeast, then prime it and bottle like with beer.

Sounds good in principle, but use good bottles Fella! Champagne yeast as you know has a high alcohol tolerance and can produce plenty of CO2 doing so. it'll may need plenty of aging too as it sounds like you're looking towards a wine than beer!

I used Champagne Yeast in my hard lemonade over the summer. Fermented so quick, I never even noticed it....didn't hurt the bottling, either....just have to make sure you don't over do it on the priming sugar...

...on that note, I'm note if I would even bother priming hard cider....but that remains to be determined. I was actually at a toss-up between using champagne yeast, or a wine yeast used for fruit wines....

Yeah, I've stopped priming hard ciders. Because I now age them all for at least 3 months, they end up with some sparkle anyhow. There's just enough sugar left to carbonate well. Not as precise but I've had good results.

You can always ask yourself...does it really need carbonation?

homebrewer_99 said:

You can always ask yourself...does it really need carbonation?

Click to expand...

yes it duz. i want the 'sparkling cider' type of cider.

Swervo Maneuver said:

yes it duz. i want the 'sparkling cider' type of cider.

Click to expand...

What I meant is you could do both - bottle "still" cider before priming and sparkling after priming.

FWIW, I bottled sparkling in Grolsch bottles and never had an explosion.

Ive heard of using using champagne yeast to restart stuck fermentation. Seems pretty much the same.

Oddly enough, my current batch of blackberry cider was made with nottingham dry ale yeast. Came out very dry (1.062 to 0.98) after three days and a bit harsh. I'll give it a couple months in the keg to settle. If necessary, I'll add some sugar & champagne yeast or maybe some mmilk sugar just to sweeten it a bit.

Yeah, my first (and only) experiment with blackberries yielded an unbelievably harsh and astringent stout.

with time, though (months, I think it's 9 or 10 now) in the bottle, it's really sublime. fantastic. and good.

mmmmm