My first cider brewday!

Using Brandon O's "Graff" recipe as a base, I bought some apple juice that was on sale at the local grocery store, took what I had at home, and brewed up a 5.5 gallon batch of cider last night.

Here's the final recipe I ended up using:

Steeped these at 155*F for 30 minutes in .75gallons of filtered tap water:
7.4oz Crystal 20L
1.5oz Crystal 120L
1.5oz Flaked Barley

Sparged with ~.4 gallons of water at 170*F.

Boiled these for 30 minutes:
Wort from above process
17.3oz Light DME (all that I had on hand)
12oz Pure, natural, unfiltered honey
0.25oz Amarillo @ 8.2%AA

Added to fermenter:
Wort from above process
4.5 gallons of apple juice
1 package of Safale US-05 dry yeast, directly pitched (not re-hydrated)

Pictures:

Bottles of juice



Heating the water and sanitizing the carboy. Homebrew pale ale along for the ride.



Grains for steeping



Steeping grains action shot



Boil additions



Not fearing the foam



Ready for fermentation



Shot of my brewing storage area


I'm really looking forward to trying this in a month or so.

What was your starting gravity? Just curious with all the different types of fermentables what it came out to. That's some good looking Pepsi. My dad has huge Pepsi fridge similar to that one and I'm gonna try cold crashing a Westvleteren clone in it with a Ranco temp controller. Does yours have a temp controller?

mnm129 said:

What was your starting gravity?

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D'oh! I knew I forgot something.

mnm129 said:

My dad has huge Pepsi fridge similar to that one and I'm gonna try cold crashing a Westvleteren clone in it with a Ranco temp controller. Does yours have a temp controller?

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The gray box on top of the fridge is my home made temp controller. I also have a Ranco that isn't being used at the moment but I wanted to play around with the custom box. When I checked it this morning, ambient air temp was at 57*F and the temp sensor taped to the side of the carboy was reading 67*F. Working fine so far.

Nice! I bet that honey will make a worthy addition to your Graff.

So how did it turn out? Did you like the honey addition to the graff?

It turned out really well. A bit too tart and maybe a little dry, but I was pleased with the results. I got a lot of positive feedback too.

Next time I'll stick to the original recipe instead of subbing honey for DME. I had an opportunity to do a side-by-side with someone who brewed the original recipe and I liked his version more...very similar, but a little sweeter/less dry and maybe less tart as well.

Thanks for the feedback FreddyB.

FreddyB,
Can you post a picture of the finished product? I am definitely interested in trying this out. Thanks!

Eric

Sorry Eric, I can't post pictures because we polished it off a few weeks ago.