First Juice of 2008 est Arrivé! (+pic)

Last year, I paid $7/gallon for unpasteurized cider. Too damned expensive. But this year...this year is different. Got my first 5 gallons of Jonathan cider today, unpasteurized, for $2.85/gallon. $14 for a batch? Hell yes. At this price, I'll be getting more when the Staymans come in in about a month. :rockin:

So here she is. Just dumped some crushed campden tabs in there, gonna ferment it with S-04 this time. The SG right now is 1.051, so I think I'll add some dextrose to bump it closer to 1.060. Not that I'm looking for more alcohol necessarily, but with the S-04 (unlike last year's british cider yeast, which finished around 1.000), I'm expecting some residual sugar, so I could use a little more fermentable material.

That looks damn fine- time to start hitting the farmer's market for some local cider! :rockin:

I refuse to take the time to read a post by anyone that has taken the trouble to include an acute accent over the letter e in the title simply because he wrote two words in French. That's just too nerdy and unamerican. Sorry.

I've got access to 6 apple trees which are LOADED with juicy apples. My main problem at the moment is finding an apple press. I've asked nearly everyone I know and still can't find one! I might just have to go to the farmer's market and buy some.

Big10Seaner said:

I've got access to 6 apple trees which are LOADED with juicy apples. My main problem at the moment is finding an apple press. I've asked nearly everyone I know and still can't find one! I might just have to go to the farmer's market and buy some.

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I posted some info I found on building your own press here, https://www.homebrewtalk.com/851641-post12.html

Laughing_Gnome said:

That's just too nerdy and unamerican. Sorry.

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Wait ... aren't you a Brit?
Also, your sig's hilarious, gotta think of a better one now ...

(mild hijack, sorry Evan!)

That looks good and all, but I don't plan on venturing that far in the process. I was wondering how much a PITA picking all the apples and making cider was going to be let alone building the press.

I'm making a trip up to the Apple zone here in Southern California (up in the mountains) to get a bunch of apple cider coming up in a few weeks. I plan on adding "Julian Apple Yeast" to my wild yeast bank I've got going. Well, and grab a bunch of tasty cider in the meantime.

I'm kinda new to the cider side of things, and I've been planning to do almost exactly the same thing you have here Evan!. Just so I understand what you're doing here, you added the campden tablets to kill off anything wild before you pitch the yeast? For some reason I thought it was just used to halt fermentation. How long do you have to wait to pitch?

Coastarine said:

I'm kinda new to the cider side of things, and I've been planning to do almost exactly the same thing you have here Evan!. Just so I understand what you're doing here, you added the campden tablets to kill off anything wild before you pitch the yeast? For some reason I thought it was just used to halt fermentation. How long do you have to wait to pitch?

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You only need to use campden tabs / potassium metabisulfate if it's unpasteurized juice, which this is. There is so much wild yeast and bacteria on apples (and thus in unpasteurized apple cider), it's really pretty necessary unless you want to take a chance with wild fermentation---which I don't. At least not on this batch. The PM pretty much kills every little piece of wild yeast and bacteria in there.

Yeah, so you crush up 5 campden tabs (1 tab per gallon) and add that to the juice. After 12 hours, you add pectic enzyme if you want. That will help clear up the juice in the long run. My cider from last year is now crystal clear. Anyway, 12 hours after that, or 24 hours after you put the PM in there, you can pitch the yeast.

How much age do you get on your ciders before you consider them quaffable? I've wanted to do a proper cider for a while now.

flyangler18 said:

How much age do you get on your ciders before you consider them quaffable? I've wanted to do a proper cider for a while now.

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It took at least 6 months before the sulfur blew off...but that was with the WL English Cider yeast, which is stanky-dank. We'll see what happens with the S04.

Hmmm...I'm trying to concoct a drink that would be more like the hot spiced unfiltered juice (american cider) but with a bit of an ale flavor. In other words I'll serve it still (probably right from the better bottle), hot, plenty of residual sweetness, and I wouldn't mind keeping the cloudiness. Any recommendations?

Big10Seaner said:

I've got access to 6 apple trees which are LOADED with juicy apples. My main problem at the moment is finding an apple press. I've asked nearly everyone I know and still can't find one! I might just have to go to the farmer's market and buy some.

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Just to warn you pressing apples is a pain in the a$$, I did it last year and it took a lot of effort and a lot of apples to make 5 gals of juice, and I have a large press.

Coastarine said:

Hmmm...I'm trying to concoct a drink that would be more like the hot spiced unfiltered juice (american cider) but with a bit of an ale flavor. In other words I'll serve it still (probably right from the better bottle), hot, plenty of residual sweetness, and I wouldn't mind keeping the cloudiness. Any recommendations?

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I did this last Christmas. The only way (that I could come up with anyway) was to ferment out the cider, kill off the yeast, and then mix to taste with unfermented cider. It made for a great spiced hot cider. Some yeasts might be less attenuative and leave more residual sugar, but mine fermented all the way out. Thus the back-sweetening with straight cider.

Chad

Chad

Chad said:

I did this last Christmas. The only way (that I could come up with anyway) was to ferment out the cider, kill off the yeast, and then mix to taste with unfermented cider. It made for a great spiced hot cider. Some yeasts might be less attenuative and leave more residual sugar, but mine fermented all the way out. Thus the back-sweetening with straight cider.

Chad

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This was my plan. I'm going to give it a try with some s-04.

Evan!, let us know how much attenuation you get from s-04.

Edit: Actually, I'll probably just mix it as I drink it. At first I was thinking I'd back-sweeten the whole batch at once.

Laughing_Gnome said:

I refuse to take the time to read a post by anyone that has taken the trouble to include an acute accent over the letter e in the title simply because he wrote two words in French. That's just too nerdy and unamerican. Sorry.

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Don't you mean accent egu?

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pB79iHm3DAM&fmt=18]YouTube - OVHA Ciderfest 2008[/ame]

Our local brew club did this last weekend..pretty neat video.

Then again there's always this method.

[youtube]bokq7t2aIWc[/youtube]

All is well, so far. Pitched some rehydrated S-04 onto it roughly 30 hours after first adding the campden tabs. Over the weekend, I got a scummy krauesen, but very little offgassing. This morning, the krausen had dropped and now I've got millions of little bubbles rising up and some good airlock activity.

And even better: my brewery smells like rotten eggs.

Evan! said:

All is well, so far. Pitched some rehydrated S-04 onto it roughly 30 hours after first adding the campden tabs. Over the weekend, I got a scummy krauesen, but very little offgassing. This morning, the krausen had dropped and now I've got millions of little bubbles rising up and some good airlock activity.

And even better: my brewery smells like rotten eggs.

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The rotten eggs I used to get with my wild cider ferments, but I've found a little bit of yeast nutriant speeds up the ferment, and takes away the sulfur "rotten egg" smell.