Cherry Cider: When and where to rack cherries?

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SirCaptain

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So I'm attempting to make a 5 gal batch of cherry cider.

My recipe:
5 gal of bottled apple cider (american cider)
6 lbs of light brown sugar
1 vial of white labs english cider yeast

I made this on Sunday (3 days ago). It's fermenting in the primary just fine.

I want to add crushed cherries to make it a cherry-apple cider. I haven't found a consistent amount of cherries to rack onto. i've pretty much seen between 1 and 2 lbs of cherries/gal of cider.

also, it seems as though a lot of people like to rack the cider onto the cherries in a secondary fermenter. the problem is that i only have a 5 gal carboy so I think i wouldn't have room for the cherries as well.

so my questions are
1) how many cherries should i use for 5 gal of cider
2) how do i solve my volume issue/is it ok to just add the crushed cherries to the primary?

thanks
 
For #1 - you could go anywhere from 1lb to 5lbs or more. There isn't a set standard for cider...but like you said, it brings up space concerns....

For #2 - what I often do with meads is to make an extra gallon (separately) of the same recipe so I can use that to top off with whatever I lose to fruit.
 
thanks for the reply. I'm not overly worried about losing cider to the fruit. though i was wondering if you would think it was ok just to add the fruit to the primary...or keep some of the cider that doesn't fit into the secondary (because of the fruit addition) and then add it when ready for bottling?
 
there doesn't seem to be much of a consensus on this, at least from checking previous HBT threads... i was trying to see how kriek is traditionally made, and i *think* that sour cherries are added after the primary fermentation, and that certainly picks up the essence of the fruit; if you have ever had the real (non-backsweetened) stuff it is an incredibly sour slap across the face, which, after your face un-puckers, you realize was loaded with cherry flavor. some posts on this site have suggested that if you add to the primary you lose a lot of that 'cherryness', which was not really the case in my one and only trial so far, so please let us know what you decide and the result!
 
I would make this the same way the newell woodchuck amber clone works. Get your cider dry and age it as long as you like then:

1: rack off cider to a bucket - add sorbate and (sulfite if desired).
a. take 2lbs cherries and chop them up roughly and put in a muslin bag. Steep and mash them untill they have well integrated with the cider. If you need more cherry flavor, add more cherries.
2. Sweeten the cider to the desired sweetness 1.029 or less with Apple juice concentrate.
3. Put into keg and carbonate and bottle or serve on the draft.

If you add the cherries to the primary you will lose much of the fresh fruit flavor compared with what you would get if you added them to the secondary. If you add to the bucket as I described, you will get a phenomal fresh tasting fruit (at least I did when I tried this by steeping frozen (thawed) raspberries). I added Raspberries at 24oz to 5 gallons.
 
adding whole frozen black cherries for a week after racking to secondary just worked well for me, got a lot of the dark color and a good cherry punch of flavor, but most striking is the cherry aroma, like chapstick. i think i will age half dry, and backsweeten half for girl-friendly sweet and fizzy. and hope the cherry flavor stays put
 
1: rack off cider to a bucket - add sorbate and (sulfite if desired).
a. take 2lbs cherries and chop them up roughly and put in a muslin bag. Steep and mash them untill they have well integrated with the cider. If you need more cherry flavor, add more cherries.

Cidahmastah: if I understand you correctly, take cider out of primary (off the yeast) and then steep the cherries. my question is how long are you talking about steeping?

adding whole frozen black cherries for a week after racking to secondary just worked well for me

dinnerstick: i'm assuming the frozen black cherries were thawed when added? (just making sure)

Thanks for your help guys (and girls if there are any)
 
Cidahmastah: if I understand you correctly, take cider out of primary (off the yeast) and then steep the cherries. my question is how long are you talking about steeping?



dinnerstick: i'm assuming the frozen black cherries were thawed when added? (just making sure)

Thanks for your help guys (and girls if there are any)


For my bit, you are correct. Take cider out of primary (cold crash the primary if possible to knock the yeast out of suspension). Sorbate and sulphite as you desire (I do 5 rounded 1/4 tsps of sorbate and camden at 30 PPM free SO2 - 5 camden tablets for 5 gallons). Rack into your bottling bucket and steep. As for steep time, with the raspberries (they were thawed) I just kept smushing them in the muslin sack and dipping them like a teabag until the fruit appeared to look washed out. It couldn't have been more than 15 minutes, when I was doing other stuff, walk back and smush, tea bag style dip it and leave it for a minute, repeat, etc. You can taste the effects, which is nice, because if you use too much fruit, you can halt the steep. If you take a guess, you might have too much or too little fruit/sugar flavor.

Be sure to do your steep first, then take your gravity and adjust with any concentrated AJ after. Cherries are sweet and you might not need additional concentrate, though it would add to the cider aspect.

You may want to roughly puree your cherries to help with the steep. Then used a muslin or strain them out before kegging. You will get a pectin/fruit particulate sediment to settle out in the keg over the next few days. The first 2 pints off the keg had fruit particulate and pectin (looks clear/hazy),definitely drinkable, but not crystal clear). However after those pints the rasp cider was crystal clear with a reddish/pinkish hue from the raspberries. If I had waited a week, I likely would have gotten all the new sediment/particulate from the steeping out in the first pint. SWMBO loves this one.

Remeber if it is too sweet, you can back it off with a little malic acid to give it a cider flavor and balance the sugar. I think any more than 1.029 is too much sweet, but try it and taste for yourself.

Sounds like a lot to do, but it is really straight forward.

Good luck!
 
hi, thawed-ish. the amount of cherries was so small that they would have thawed pretty quickly in the room temp cider even if frozen solid; 250g for 5L. i mentioned that they were frozen because freezing and thawing disrupts the fruit structure, probably allowing more flavor and color to be extracted. good luck
 
thanks for the info from both of you. one more question.

i just happened to think, will steeping the cherries add fermentable sugars? i'm a bottler (no kegs, at least not yet) and fermentable sugars might turn into bottle bombs for me if i don't let it ferment. thoughts?

thanks again
 
Ah yes it will definitely! So if you plan to carbonate by bottle this is a bad idea. If you plan to drink it still the cold crash/sorbate/sulfite should handle the yeast.

note: I did my raspberry and woodchuck clone batches several weeks ago and put two of the bottles near my coal furnace (to encourage a referment). The bottles are still there and no bottle bombs yet. I almost think this was 3-4+ weeks ago, so those bottles should have popped by now with the ideal fermentation temps.

If you can, you might want to consider getting a simple keg set up. One keg/regulator and party tap. You can do so much with that as a tool. I usually bottle ciders and beers, and only leave the fast flowing stuff on tap (IPA's, etc). My wife likes the cider but drinks less often than me. Cider making becomes really fun when you can force carbonate.

FYI - putting cherries in period will lead to fermentable sugars. In the secondary, it will cause a restart of fermentation.
 
i am also an obligate bottle carber. would love to have CO2 and kegs (have had them in the past) but living in a medieval city center comes with severe spatial constraints. so it's small batches and bottles for me, with the occasional harrowing stovetop pasteurization session mixed in. there is indeed sugar in the cherries, and in the juice i added to top up after i got rid of them, but that will have finished fermenting long before bottling
 
well, at least i'm starting to understand this whole brewing process. i guess for now i will do with dinnerstick's process, but will keep cidahmasta's process in mind for WHEN i get a kegging system.

thanks for all of your help
 
Good luck! Just be sure to let the cider ferment out the cherry sugar in your secondar before you bottle.

Another interesting thought I had was... Why not puree and strain the cherry juice, then add it to your bottling bucket until you get your desired gravity that you would use to carbonate. i.e. use the cherry juice as priming sugar. You would certainly get aroma from the cherries, I would think anyway. As long as you brought the gravity to what a priming sugar would, you wouldn't have bombs.

That said, that may be for another day!

Good luck
 
Another interesting thought I had was... Why not puree and strain the cherry juice, then add it to your bottling bucket until you get your desired gravity that you would use to carbonate. i.e. use the cherry juice as priming sugar. You would certainly get aroma from the cherries, I would think anyway. As long as you brought the gravity to what a priming sugar would, you wouldn't have bombs.
Good luck

Ooohh, i like that idea. it's just enough engineering/science to make my nerdiness enjoy this even more. thanks for the idea, i think it's great!
 
interesting idea. i might try running some cherries through my juicer for priming this current batch, at least some of which is going to be semi-sweet + sparkling. then maybe it's time for some side-by-side trials; added in primary vs. secondary vs. at bottling
 
Dinnerstick - If you do please let us know how it turns out.

My two questions are, 1. how much of the cherry juice can you use to get to the right priming amount? 2. Based on that amount, is it enough to impart a nice cherry flavor?

Definitely worthy of some experimentation. It might also lay some of the myths to rest about each.
 
i am about ready to bottle this test batch. it is crystal clear, medium maroon, fermented dry. i got 750g frozen dark cherries, thawed, into the juicer. they juiced ok but not great, a thick syrupy elixir oozed out. the waste stuff was still very wet so i ran it through a second time and then pressed it by hand with cheesecloth. the juice (nectar) was very thick so i tried to filter it through cheesecloth- nope, too thick. so i squeezed it once through cheesecloth to get the big stuff out of suspension. recovered somewhere around 750 ml juice. it tastes kind of interesting, medium sweet up front, sort of bland cherry flavor followed by a slightly surprising tannin-like bitterness at the finish. stuck it in the fridge to see if it clears at all, but i don't think it will. i often use freshly juiced apple juice for bottling, since it clears really nicely over a few hours, so i sort of hoped cherries might behave similarly. no dice. now i'm of two minds what to do since i don't want to have 1cm of sediment in the bottle. i want it semi-sweet (to taste at bottling, probably in the neighborhood of 1.008) carbed up and pasteurized. i think (but i have all day to decide) i will mix cleared apple juice with the cherry to thin it to where i can filter it somewhat, then experiment by mixing and tasting. updates to come, straining/filtering suggestions very welcome
 
after an hour in the fridge the cherry "juice" has become a gelatinous mass!! you can slide it like a jelly piston up and down the bottle
 
Must be a ton of pectin in those Cherries! I would add it to to the bottling bucket so as you said, it thins out. Do you have a kegging system? If you do, keg it, then let it rest a week. pour off two pints (or until the draft is producing clear product). Then bottle.

All the fruit particulate should settle out.

Between if you have to go another route (no kegs) don't worry, store your bottles vertically, if you let the wine hang out a month or so, the lees will compact and you will be able to pour off with little or no lees interfering.
 
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Haha too funny, looks like cranberry in a can!

Look at all that goodness!
 
Personally - I would warm your lump up to room temperature to make it liquid and add 1 campden tablet. Let it sit overnight and add some pectic enzyme... Stir it good and see if it thins out.... Let it sit over night again, then add it to your must.

Thanks
 
Sorry I didn't see this sooner. I fermented 5 gallons of juice for about 10 days, then racked onto 9 lb frozen sour cherries (from a friend's tree). This caused immediate clearing. Someone suggested I had "cold crashed" it on the frozen cherries. Let it alone for 10 days then racked again and left it alone for 2 months. Just backsweetened with 2 lb honey - drove my sg up to 1.016. Bottled and tasted every 2 days. Just finished stove-top pasteurizing. it is sweet (sweeter than I like but my wife loves it), pink, fizzy and delicious. There are clearly apple cider flavors and sour cherry flavors and aromas. This is a keeper.
 
after a day of sitting in the fridge some of the juice settled away from the pectin puck. since what i wanted was raw cherry flavor to add at bottling, for a very small experimental batch, i decided to punt on the pectins and "concentrate" (pun) on the nice clear juice. were i using this in my primary i would definitely use the whole thing and add enzyme, but at bottling i had to choose my battles carefully. i also juiced a few apples to get the gravity up, and i "washed" the pectin puck with the apple juice, strained it off through cheesecloth, the cherry and the cherry/apple juice went into the bottling bucket (i don't have kegs).
this experiment had no control- i was curious as to when to add the cherries, at primary as juice, at secondary by racking onto whole fruit, at bottling as juice or as an unwieldy cylinder of shimmering polysaccharide? whether the stuff added at bottling gives it a cherry character that it retains remains to be seen, however, like hroth521 i found that racking onto the fruit for a week or 10 days really picked up cherry flavor aroma and color. after three weeks of post-cherry aging it was all cherry smell when i opened the airlock. but these were supermarket black cherries- sweet dessert cherries, a strong almost artificial cherry aroma but lacking on taste, sweet but no acidity whatsoever. cherry taste but no punch.
i think i am closer to knowing what to do this coming cherry season. for a really small batch it might be worth it to add cherry juice at bottling (will report back on that) but for a large batch i don't think i have it in me. unless fresh sour (or just normal sweet-ish) cherries have Much Less pecitn, but i know nothing about cherry pectin levels. racking onto the fruit is looking like the horse to back. still i hope to do a side-by-side experiment of very small batches before cherry season comes around.
thank you for your support
 
Pectin puck - just a great way of phrasing it ha!

I think despite your reintroduction of the cherry, you will have a clear product if you give it a few weeks. I have never used pectinase or pectin enzyme. All my wines and ciders have cleared without it.

Thanks for the write up regarding the flavor changes within 3 weeks. Ii is informative, and I know with my own fruit ciders, they change a lot in three weeks. First they taste like a mouth full of the fresh fruit used. Then they back off and become more aromatic but do contribute to overall flavor.

Dinnerstick/hroth - do you have cherry trees? Curious what variety cherries you work with to make wine. I have three varieties of cherry trees and assume the sour mixed with some sweet would be the ones to use, but haven't tried it yet. I have bing (sweet), tartarian (sweet) and richmond cherries (sour). Dinnerstick- Of course being in the netherlands probably means you have different cultivars than what we have in the u.s. ;)
 
i don't even have a yard. urban dwelling. the countryside near here grows a lot of plums and cherries (and, fortunately, apples) but i don't know what cherry varieties. i looked around online to see what variety is used in belgium to make kriek, must be very sour, and only got as far as wikipedia telling me that it is Schaarbeekse krieken so there you go.
 
these bottles carbed up very quickly and i pasteurized them. it tasted pretty nice at bottling; again, lacking tartness to some extent but very cherry indeed, and i possibly overdid it with backsweetening but that's a separate issue and was probably related to the quantity of cider that i took onboard while cleaning bottles etc. the only problem with the cider itself was a persistent yeasty aftertaste, despite being very clear. only right at the finish. i have never had a clear cider still carry a yeasty taste before.
priming with fresh juice was always going to lead to more sediment than from priming with sugar, and indeed while pasteurizing (70 deg) there was a lot of "flocculation" i love that word, coming to the top and eventually settling; that was to be expected, and i hope some of the yeasty notes settle out as well. now to age for a few months
 
Pectin puck - just a great way of phrasing it ha!



Dinnerstick/hroth - do you have cherry trees? Curious what variety cherries you work with to make wine. I have three varieties of cherry trees and assume the sour mixed with some sweet would be the ones to use, but haven't tried it yet. I have bing (sweet), tartarian (sweet) and richmond cherries (sour). Dinnerstick- Of course being in the netherlands probably means you have different cultivars than what we have in the u.s. ;)

I can find out. They are sour, not sweet. They come from two trees in a friends yard. She is always asking me if I can use them because they take up so much room in her freezer. I can tell you I will not know how the flavor of my cherry apple cider changes over the next few months because my wife loves it and it will not last until summer. Next year I'll need to make 10 gallons rather than five! :ban:
 
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