My Cider Experiment

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denimglen

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Was bored today and had a bit of cash so I tried making a cider from scratch.

Roughly following a recipe from a friend, here's what I did:


Ingrdients
Approx 6 kg Apples (around 30 medium-big sized ones)
3 kg Cane Sugar
3 x Cartons of Apple Juice Concentrate (Each carton makes 1 L)
1 Sachet Champagne Yeast
4 tsp Yeast Nutrient

Method

1. Cored and sliced each apple into 8 pieces.

2. Put the apples into the freezer for about an hour.

3. Poured the concentrate juice and 1/3 of the apples into a pot with about 3 L water in it. Let it boil. At the same time had another pot with another 1/3 of the apples and 3 L water to boil as well.

4. While this was on the boil a put in about 9 L hot water into the fermenter and all the sugar.

5. Let each pot boil for about 5 minutes.

6. Added those two pots (water and apples) into the fermenter.

7. Set the last 1/3 of the apples to boil in about 2 L water.

8. Scooped most of the apples into the fermenter tipped the water out as the fermenter was getting really full with the displacement of the apples.

9. Let the must cool.

10. Made a starter for the yeast when the must was cool enough. Pitched yeast. OG of 1.062.

Five hours later it's bubbling away nicely.

I'm not sure what type of apples they were, they had 'NZ' in the name so I'd say elsewhere in the world they go by a different name. They were yellow to red in colour though. The concentrate was called 'Old Fashioned Apple Juice', again not much help, but they had red apples on the picture haha.

I know I should have used dextrose but I was at the supermarket and wanted to see how it would turn out with just cane sugar.

Hopefully I haven't done anything too wrong. It will be interesting to see how it turns out because it only cost about $3 less than buying a cider kit. And the cider kit is a lot less work.

I'll update this when it's finished, cheers for reading.

-denimglen
 
Well after only four days I racked to secondary, a little early but hydrometer reading was already at 1.016 and I just emptied out the alcoholic ginger beer that was in the secondary.

I removed the apples that were on the top before racking, I took a bite out of one, they had pretty much no flavour at all except for a bit of a 'bite' from the skins. Also the apples were starting to fall apart and small pieces of apple were floating around, tried to transfer as little as possible of those bits.

The skins had barely any red colour left in them. They didn't go brown like apples do when left out at the open, must be because of the boil or the absence of oxygen in the fermenter.

At the moment it smells appley but has a bit of an 'after-smell' of old apples, not unpleasent but not the greatest aroma either.

Tastes good, a strong apple flavour kinda similar to the apples.

The colour at the moment is not the greatest, kind of a greyish colour, not as unappealing as it sounds haha.

The annoying thing is because of the displacement of the apples only about 18 L ended up in the secondary.

So yeah, probably get about 7 more days in the secondary, hopefully it will finish up soonish, I've got an ale that I'd rather have in the secondary hehe.
 
Just a quick note - with you using Champagne Yeast it should still continue to ferment out to dry. Don't try and bottle it too soon in a hurry to free up a fermenter, It could easily still finish with a gravity below 1.000. All sounds good so far though denimglen!:mug:
 
Yup, cheers for that. I was gonna try and go for a drier cider hence my choice in champagne yeast over a cider or ale yeast.

Just took a hydrometer reading today out of intrest, already at 1.004 and still fermenting away strongly, haha, looks like the ale's gonna spend a bit longer in the primary.
 
Yesterday I bottled it, FG was 0.990. The air lock was still bubbling a little, once every two minutes or so, I bottled into plastic just to be on the safe side.

Bottled about 24 750mL bottles ie a total of about 18 L or 4.8 US Gallons. It smells better than it did before, tastes quite good as well, but it's about 9 - 10 % so tastes a bit 'winey'.

I'll update this in about couple of weeks when I crack the first bottle open.

Cheers for reading :mug:
 
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