Funny thing happened today

So, several months ago I tried my first shot at brewing hard cider. After fermenting, bottling, and waiting a couple weeks, my family and I tried it. The general consensus…not good. The best word I could use to describe it was “musty”. Not very pleasant at all. I couldn’t bring myself to dump it all so I’ve had almost the whole batch just taking up room in my closet since then. I also tried it a couple other times and it still was not good.

Now I’m getting ready to try my hand at it again, so I decided to go into the brew store and have them taste it to tell me what might have gone wrong. The shocker is…today it was not bad. I might even actually call it good. And all three of the staff tried it and liked it. Needless to say, I was surprised.

So what gives? This was a pretty dramatic change. I’ve heard of letting cider sit for several months to let the apple flavor return, but this was more like going from bad/musty to fairly good.

For what it’s worth, the recipe was something like:
- 5 gal Murray’s cider (no preservatives)
- 1.5 lb brown sugar
- 0.5 lb dark local NC honey
- Some Red Star wine yeast (don’t remember the type, but not champagne yeast)
Fermented in carboy for 4-6 (ish) weeks, bottled in early March 2010. Sorry I lack more details.

Any thoughts?

With all that added sugar you made something closer to apfelwein than cider. As the posts in that linked thread note, it takes 6+ months to taste good, and some people don't start drinking it until 9 months have gone by.

If you removed the added sugar I imagine you'd have a drinkable product much sooner.

Thanks for the reply, slowbie. So where is the cutoff between hard cider and apfelwein? (how much added sugar, in whatever form) Is cider generally ready to drink after carbonation has finished in the bottle? I'm about to do another round and had been planning on adding 2 lbs of turbinado sugar. If I do that, am I looking at another 6-9 months before it's ready? Thanks for the info.

I'm not a cider expert by any means, and am just getting into it myself, but this is what I do know: If you want carbonated cider but are not kegging, you have to make dry cider. If you make dry cider, the more sugar you add, the longer it will take before it tastes good. I recently started two batches, one a copy of EdWort's recipe, and one with no added sugar. The hope is that the sugarless batch will help me not drink the apfelwein until it tastes good.

The 2x batches sounds like a good plan for those of us who lack 6-9 months worth of patience. I just did a new batch of (I guess) Apfelwein tonight. 4.5 gallons juice (no preservatives), 0.5 gallons Trader Joe's Spiced Cider (no preservatives), 2 lbs Turbinado sugar, and 1 packet of Cote de Blancs wine yeast. Perhaps I'll do also another batch that doesn't require so much patience. Thanks again.

slowbie said:

I'm not a cider expert by any means, and am just getting into it myself, but this is what I do know: If you want carbonated cider but are not kegging, you have to make dry cider. If you make dry cider, the more sugar you add, the longer it will take before it tastes good. I recently started two batches, one a copy of EdWort's recipe, and one with no added sugar. The hope is that the sugarless batch will help me not drink the apfelwein until it tastes good.

Click to expand...

Bad? news. The sugarless ones get better and better over a year too.