First Cider - Is this normal?

Hello,

On sept 30th, I started two batches of cider (My first time from the juice).
One was made with only Apple juice and, in the other, we added strawberries (not pressed) to the apple juice.

About 8 days ago, a white foam appeared on the batch with the strawberries. It was solid. The cider smells fine.
We got scared and decided to go forward with a first filtration.

Image 1 & 2 are what it looks like 7 days after 1st filtration.


My questions are:

- Is this Krausen or did it just re-start fermenting .... 35 days later?

- Does Krausen happen with cider? If so, should it happen? (My other batch didn't do it)

- When should I bottle my cider? Should I wait until it becomes clear like my other batch? (See image 3)




Thank you.
Richelle

I went to the specialist shop near my place (Atelier Bière et Vin - Mtl South Shore) and they helped me with this mystery. Actually, they told me to do something REALLY obvious: re-take the density!

• 
  Before the filtration it probably was krausen.

• After the filtration, I stirred up some of the sugar from the strawberries and the fermentation took off again. Although I put clarifying agents in it... I must admit that I may have been a little cheap with them

• 
  The density went from my wrong final reading of 1.004 to 1.000.

• Now that I'm sure that it was fermenting, I let it go for a while but the cider was still very opaque. I filtered it again yesterday and it's now very clear! I'm letting it sit a little before bottling.

Hopefully this will help some of you beginners out there with some similar myterious problems

Cheers
Richelle

I had the same thing occur in my first two batches of cider. My instructions said to move to secondary once the cider stopped fermenting. I got two readings of 1.009 three days apart, so I assumed that they were done so we racked to secondary. About three weeks later I noticed new bubbles so I checked the gravity and it had dropped to 1.004. We just bottled this past weekend and it had dropped even further to .996.

We added tart cherry juice to try to get something akin to a Cherry Bomb by Julian and can't wait to see how the finished product turns out. The samples tasted pretty great.

What might have avoided the white film would have been to add strawberry juice instead of whole strawberries... We had drank a little and it was mystifying

It's exciting when you find out that your cider will be a couple of % higher than expected.

Richelle said:

It's exciting when you find out that your cider will be a couple of % higher than expected.

Click to expand...

Haha...I know what you mean. I drank half of a bomber of Great Divide's Fresh Hop before we started bottling and finished it afterwards and was a little surprised at how buzzed I was.

It then occurred to me that I had taken several samples of the cider during the bottling process. At that point I calculated the ABV of the cider and we're at just a hair under 7%.

Richelle said:

... We had drank a little and it was mystifying

Click to expand...

Hey Richelle! Did the strawberry-apple turn out well? Dry? Sweet? Any hint of strawberry? And just out of curiousity, did you prime/carbonate it before bottling?

I've got 3 1-gallon batches fermenting right now <https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f32/1-gallon-apple-cider-experiments-3-batches-pomegranate-cranberry-orange-368863/>. I'm new to cider, so not exactly sure what to expect!

popej said:

Hey Richelle! Did the strawberry-apple turn out well? Dry? Sweet? Any hint of strawberry? And just out of curiousity, did you prime/carbonate it before bottling?

I've got 3 1-gallon batches fermenting right now <https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f32/1-gallon-apple-cider-experiments-3-batches-pomegranate-cranberry-orange-368863/>. I'm new to cider, so not exactly sure what to expect!

Click to expand...

Hi there,
I just bottled it and... it tastes like water (even though it's about 7.5%). I'm gonna surf around the forums to see what I should do next time. I didn't carbonate it.

Maybe it will be okay after a couple of months.