Cider Idea, Your thoughts

So i'm making a cider and i might switch it over to the seconday in a day or two, but i was thinking this and just wanted your opinions. I want to take 2 or 3 cinnimon sticks and steep them in 3 to 4 cups of hot water, after about 30 mins or so i would add 2 cups of brown sugar. Once disolved add this to my secondary (after cooled of course) then add cider from primary hoping to add flavor to the cider as well as additional fermentation. What are your thoughts?

Yep! Done that before. Doing this will give you a interesting flavor which is great for a warm cider on a cold night. I have actually just tossed in a cinnamon stick in the secondary and left it there for a couple months. The brown sugar also gives an aded depth to the flavor! Hey, you are talking about a 5 gallon batch, right? That would be fine for a 5 gallon batch but a bit less on the cinnamon for smaller batches.

Strictly a personal opinion, but I wouldn't do that.

Try JK Scrumpy Farmhouse Cider. I bought this not knowing that it was spiced (cloves and cinnamon?). I couldn't drink it all, even though I could tell that the underlying cider was a quality product and that I would have liked it had it not been spiced. If you like the JK Scrumpy Farmhouse Cider then you'll probably like what you're talking about doing.

If you make plain cider you can always mull it with spices later.

Hello,
The JK Scrumpy cider is made only from Pure juice that we grow and yeast. There are no spices added to the cider. Its possible that you somehow got a bottle a bad bottle.
Bruce

Scrumpy said:

Hello,
The JK Scrumpy cider is made only from Pure juice that we grow and yeast. There are no spices added to the cider. Its possible that you somehow got a bottle a bad bottle.
Bruce

Click to expand...

Well that would certainly explain why I didn't see any notice of spices on the bottle!

Are you fermenting with yeast that produces clove flavors?

I will say that the yeast in the bottle was more stirred up that I would have liked it to have been. Perhaps that affected the flavor?

I'll give it another try under better conditions and see what I think. I was trying to reccomend your cider as an example of what I thought was a quality spiced cider, even though spiced ciders are not to my taste. Thanks for setting the record straight. I'll report back when I've tried it again to let you know if I had a bad bottle.

Hi Again,
There should only be a light yeast sediment ( some of the sediment is pectin) in our cider. Once in a while a bottle ot two will get out with a little to much sediment.
As far as yeast we use a strain of Champagne, traditonaly the cider should ferment from the wild yeast on the skins however you can imagine how hard this would be to control.

All our juice is grown at the farm the cider is also fermented and hand bottled on the farm
Go here for a little more info
http://www.michiganhardcider.org/ha...hp?p=287&sid=a61bcf937737432a784da927b8281fe7

or my site is www.organicscrumpy.com

Also the amount of CO2 present in the final product is subject to diffent Federal tax. the tax ranges from .22 up to $4.80 per gallon. We have just received a better understanding of the law and will be increasing our CO2 levels to just under the $.22 thershold this will give a little more bite to the cider

Cheers

DO you use open fermentation for your Scrumpy? I wen to a LHBS a few years ago and the owner had a carboy of open fermenting cider on the counter which he called scrumpy. It looked pretty foul, and had what looked like mold growing on the top of about 5 inches of crystal clear golden liquid. He said it would be about another month or two before it was ready. It sounded interesting, but looked liek it would be very hard to rake without getting some of that moldy stuff into the finished product.

New2HomeBrew said:

DO you use open fermentation for your Scrumpy? I wen to a LHBS a few years ago and the owner had a carboy of open fermenting cider on the counter which he called scrumpy. It looked pretty foul, and had what looked like mold growing on the top of about 5 inches of crystal clear golden liquid. He said it would be about another month or two before it was ready. It sounded interesting, but looked liek it would be very hard to rake without getting some of that moldy stuff into the finished product.

Click to expand...

Not me!! Open fermentation is dangerous! Anything could grow that is hazardous to your health! Wines have access to O2 during the primary ferm. but they are covered with a breathable cloth. With ciders I attach the air lock right away and then don't touch it for at least 6 weeks. It is usually very clear and ready either to bottle or go into another keg or carboy for some aging.