Caramel apple cider

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Chaos_Being

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Like many others here I'd bet, I got my first experience in making cider by trying EdWort's Apfelwein recipe. It turned out really well, but I'm one who likes to experiment and try new things, so lately I've been thinking, "what next?" Thus, I want to try to make a sweeter, caramel-flavored cider for my next cider batch.

I already have an idea on how to do this, but to make sure, I've been reading through a LOT of cider threads to see what other people have tried (surprisingly, I found very little about this particular idea.) I saw a few mentions of using wheat malt, which reportedly turned out bad. I also saw a mention of someone using caramel syrup, which seemed to have worked fairly well, but the flavor did not last. I also saw it suggested once to steep crystal, and I found one report elsewhere of someone who did this with great results.

The latter is what I had initially thought of, and which after my research, I am going to stick with as my plan. I'm thinking of steeping some (~2lb) crystal malt (probably a blend of 20 for sweetness and light caramel taste, and 60 or 80 for a more pronounced caramel flavor) in 3-4 gallons of water, cooling that, and adding enough concentrate to go with that amount of water to bring it up to the gravity of normal juice. I'll top it off with bottled juice/cider. For yeast, I'll either use WLP300, or Danstar's Windsor Ale. I want to use an ale yeast to help prevent the cider from drying out, and with the unfermentable sugars from the crystal malt, I'm hoping that it will have a nice caramel, slightly sweet apple flavor (the lower ABV vs. Apfelwein should help this too.)

I don't have the equipment to keg yet, so I'm trying to work around the difficulties of making a sweet-ish, but bottle-conditioned cider. Adding a little lactose at bottling (milk and caramel...sounds good) isn't out of the question either, but seeing as how my wife is lactose intolerant, it isn't that great of an option. I've tried some splenda in my apfelwein, and didn't like the taste.

I'll probably be trying this fairly soon, as I clear up some carboy space (or even sooner, if I just use my Ale Pail.) If anyone here has tried anything similar (or simply has feedback,) I'd love to hear it :)
 
Only one suggestion, why not use all juice instead of water + concentrate? Other then that, I will wait to see other's responses because this sounds delicious, and just the thing to get SWMBO hooked on my hobbies!
 
The main reason I was thinking of doing it that way was so I could steep the crystal in plain water, rather than heating up juice and having the deal with pectin haze. All juice would work too though I'd assume, I don't mind it if my drink is a little cloudy.
 
How about steeping your crystal in half a gallon of pure water, then add that to your carboy which is full of juice?
 
Ok, I'm going to be doing this in the next week or so. I'm going to go with my plan of concentrate and cider, but in different proportions. I'm going to steep 1 pound of crystal 20, and 1 pound of crystal 60, in 2 gallons of water. I'll add enough concentrate to this to get it to "normal" juice concentration, and then top it off with 3 gallons of cider (I'm going to try Musselman's- they sell it at the grocery store near me, and it's the only cider- not juice- which does not have sorbate added to it.) I'll be fermenting this with WLP300 Hefe yeast.

I'm hoping this will turn out well!
 
I got the crystal malt and the WLP300 today...now I'm just waiting on the delivery of a new 6g Better Bottle (I didn't want to use my ale pail- which I am going to start using to just store stuff in- and I didn't want to wait for my other 6g BB to get freed up.)

Updates next week!
 
"Hefe" is German for "yeast", it's meant to be used in beers that don't clear out too quickly so that you can make Hefeweizen with them.
 
I think I've read that the hefeweizen yeast will eventually settle out, but since most of my juice is going to be a cider which is already cloudy, I'm not betting on a clear beverage. So long as I can get the taste right, I won't really care :)

This will also give me the chance at a lot of easily harvested yeast, for some real hefeweizens that I want to brew in the near future...
 
I think I am going to try a version of caramel apfelwein. I will overcarb the apfelwein (like a champaigne) and then add a tbsp or so of caramel sauce to the bottom of my flute or pint glass(depending on how shnukered I want to get) and do it almost like a champaigne coctail. that sounds really good!!!
 
Ok, it's in the primary...now to wait a long time to see if it comes out good :cross: The must definitely had a carmelly, slightly malty/grainy backtone to it, with of course a lot of apple up front. We'll see how this flavor profile changes as it ferments.

The final recipe was:

1 lb crystal 60, 1 lb crystal 20, steeped at 150F for 45 min in 2 gallons of water
6 cans of apple juice concentrate
3 gallons Musselman apple cider (which has a GREAT apple taste btw)
1 tsp yeast nutrient
1 vial WLP300 (pitched directly @ 64F)

The apple cider I used was unfiltered and cloudy, with some sediment on the bottom of the jugs. I shook the sediment back into suspension as I added it to the primary, thinking that it would 1) provide extra nutrients for the yeast, and 2) possibly add to the flavor. The resulting "concoction" is cloudy and light brown in color. In fact, here is a picture of my brewery as it is now-


DSC00195.jpg



From left to right, is the caramel apple cider, barleywine, amber ale, and chocolate stout (as seen in my sig.) The amber ale and chocolate stout are both going to be bottled this weekend hopefully, but at least I got a nice picture of 20 gallons of booze all lined up :drunk:
 
so this may be just me, but wouldnt making a caramel, adding some water to it and using that give you more caramel flavor, and be cheaper
 
I thought about that but i'm assuming you'll need to caramelize some kind of sugar that will impact the flavor... perhaps Demerara? I plan on experimenting with this process soon.
 
savion47 said:
so this may be just me, but wouldnt making a caramel, adding some water to it and using that give you more caramel flavor, and be cheaper

Carmel is nothing but melted sugar, meaning that if you added it to it to cider it would most likely ferment out and you would be left with little to no caramel flavor.
 
it is so strange that you were asking about this... I am making my first batch tonight and I decided to use a caramel flavoring also. I used Torani caramel flavoring syrup that is used for coffee. I hope it works... I think it would be a great flavor!
 
Watch out for the syrups, I received a lot of flavorings and syrups from an old friend of mine and I can't use them because they contain Potassium Sorbate. I'm sure you can get around it but naturally the Potassium inhibits yeast activity (or so i've heard)
 
Kimsta said:
Watch out for the syrups, I received a lot of flavorings and syrups from an old friend of mine and I can't use them because they contain Potassium Sorbate. I'm sure you can get around it but naturally the Potassium inhibits yeast activity (or so i've heard)


Its probably in a high enough concentration in the syrup to stop yeasts growing but when diluted down significantly in a 5 gallon batch i don't think the small amount of K sorbate present will even slow the yeast down.
 
Man i hope your right... I woke up this morning and thought ooohhh man I bet that syrup I used has Potassium sorbate in it... and it did... I'll keep ya posted on what happened!
 
There no way to tell if it will prevent fermentation but to wait. If you still don't see signs of fermentation after say, 3 days, then you can start thinking about either overpowering the preservative with a big starter, or dumping it and starting over. But give it time before you freak, you may be ok. Especially since there was only preservative in the caramel, there's no way to know if it was enough to prevent any fun.
 
so far so good! I came home this weekend and fermentation has taken off! Man Im glad that worked out!
 
Ooompa Loompa said:
Carmel is nothing but melted sugar, meaning that if you added it to it to cider it would most likely ferment out and you would be left with little to no caramel flavor.

That's why I didn't want to do it that way- mainly because of the "ferment out" part- I am trying to make this a lower ABV, hopefully more flavorful (in terms of apple flavor,) in comparison to my Apfelwein which tastes like strong white wine :)

However, I may try adding some carmelized sugar, or better yet, some carmelized malt extract, to another batch of cider if this one doesn't turn out the way I want it to.

On a side note, hefe yeast is some potent stuff- I figured that it was going to foam up some, but it ended up blowing off pure yeast off of my cider, and it was in full krausen all the way up to the neck of the BB for a week. There is still some krausen now, but it's only an inch or two thick.
 
At 2.5 weeks in the primary, the gravity is sitting at 1.006- hopefully it won't change much from that, as I wanted it to have a little bit of body (the crystal malt should provide that nicely.)

Of course, I had the taste the hydro sample, and phew, was it sour! I'm hoping this is just because it's still pretty green (and there was a lot of yeast suspended still,) and not because of a poor choice in juice/yeast, or an infection. It did taste pretty decent with a little splenda added. Not much for caramel taste, but hey, it's still green as heck... I didn't taste my apfelwein until well after a month of fermentation, so I have no idea what really green cider is supposed to taste like.
 
Well, the krausen had died down to almost nothing for a few days, then suddenly started growing until it was 1.5 inches thick or so, and is starting to die down again. This is proving to be a pretty weird ferment. We'll see how it goes!
 
An update...

It's been in the primary for about a month now. I took a hydro reading tonight, and it was at 1.004. The taste has greatly improved, with a lot of the sourness diminished, and a slight amount of sweetness starting to show through.

I know a lot of people have left Apfelwein in the primary, on the yeast (wine yeast), for several months. Can the same be done with hefe yeast, or should be be getting this in a secondary soon? I definitely want to give it a bit more age before I bottle, as the taste has been improving so far.
 
Caramel extract- no extra sugars- NICE! I may have to order some of that and add it and a little sweetener (lactose or splenda) at bottling to get that sweetish caramel apple taste I am looking for.

The sweet mead yeast is a neat idea too. At least with my addition of crystal malt, I have some residual sugars- that and the hefe yeast I used should have been less attenuation than say, Montrachet :p
 
I just came across this thread this morning. I made a 5-gallon batch of caramel apple mead a year ago and it turned out great. I steeped 3 pounds of 60L crystal malt at 155F for 45 minutes in pure apple juice. I then stirred in a couple of pounds of light DME, 6.5 pounds orange blossom honey, 2 pounds alfalfa honey, and a pound of buckwheat honey. The OG was about 1.112 and I pitched wine yeast, racked to secondary about a week later and added four vanilla beans. After two months I backsweetened with a pint of buckwheat honey.

It finished at about 14.5% and, as I said, it turned out great! It's beginning to drink very well after a year.
 
I have wanted to make something like this for a while now too, what I finally decided to try is apfelwein with some Vanilla Caramel Cream Ale from a stout faucet on top. It will be a while before I get to try this since I don't have a stout faucet yet but I think it will be worth the wait
 
An update...

It's been in the primary for about a month now. I took a hydro reading tonight, and it was at 1.004. The taste has greatly improved, with a lot of the sourness diminished, and a slight amount of sweetness starting to show through.

I know a lot of people have left Apfelwein in the primary, on the yeast (wine yeast), for several months. Can the same be done with hefe yeast, or should be be getting this in a secondary soon? I definitely want to give it a bit more age before I bottle, as the taste has been improving so far.

I've been following up on this thread and wondering how the taste is mellowing out :confused:... It's something I've been wanting to try and have been holing off on for a while.

Michael
 
I've also been following this thread for a while and am curious how the flavor is progressing. I wanted to brew a cider but when I saw this topic it was like a light bulb went off "Caramel? Genius!" I'm thinking about brewing with your recipe and I want to add the lactose at bottling like was mentioned in the first post. Would you use that instead of priming sugar? And would it be a direct replacement using the same quantity, or is the lactose in addition to the priming sugar? Thanks.
 
Wouldn't you want to use both a priming sugar and the lactose? I do believe lactose is an unfermentable sugar.
 
Wow, people have still been watching this thread? :D

Well...things have been extremely busy lately, and this cider is actually still sitting in the primary :eek: I haven't really had the time or the energy to mess with any of my brewing stuff lately.

This means, that it will either be really nicely aged, or it's going to taste horrible because it's been sitting on the yeast for months :eek: I will probably be bottling it very soon though, as there are several beers that I meant to start a while ago which I plan to finally start in the next few days, and I need the fermenter space. I did remove the airlock very briefly a couple of days ago to get a whiff, and it still smelled like hard cider and not vinegar, so that's a good sign!

I'll let everyone know how it finally finishes out, I'm probably just going to carbonate it as is and see how it tastes. Then I can experiment with extra flavorings and whatnot on the next batch ;)
 
Wow, people have still been watching this thread? :D

Well...things have been extremely busy lately, and this cider is actually still sitting in the primary :eek: I haven't really had the time or the energy to mess with any of my brewing stuff lately.

This means, that it will either be really nicely aged, or it's going to taste horrible because it's been sitting on the yeast for months :eek: I will probably be bottling it very soon though, as there are several beers that I meant to start a while ago which I plan to finally start in the next few days, and I need the fermenter space. I did remove the airlock very briefly a couple of days ago to get a whiff, and it still smelled like hard cider and not vinegar, so that's a good sign!

I'll let everyone know how it finally finishes out, I'm probably just going to carbonate it as is and see how it tastes. Then I can experiment with extra flavorings and whatnot on the next batch ;)

Bump.
What's the story on this?
 
Has anyone tried the caramel extract before in a cider?

Do you just use it at bottling or put it in the secondary(if you use one), most of them say no sugar so they should not ferment out.

Just curious because the caramel smell when drinking could be very interesting(and tasty)
 
Okay... Here's yet another bandwagon that I've jumped on. Yesterday I cranked out:

1 lb crystal 60, 1 lb crystal 20, steeped at 150F for 45 min in 1 gallon of water
Sparged with another .5 gal
2 cans of apple juice concentrate
4 gallons Treetop apple juice (which has a GREAT apple taste btw)
1 tsp yeast nutrient
1 package US-05

This morning it is bubbling away nicely. Got a good smell in my laundry room.

Anyone else made this?
 
I'm gonna try something like this this week. I want it sweet though.

3 gallons fresh cider from the mill.
.5lbs crystal 40
.5 crystal 80
wlp011 yeast

Steep the grains in a gallon of water for 40 mins then let it boil down a little. Add everything in a carboy. See what the SG is and add some sugar if needed. In the secondary I am thinking of putting in 1tsp ground nutmeg, 1 tbls ground cinamin, and 1 cup brown sugar. I'll make a little tea of it and let the whole thing sit in secondary for a while then bottle. It sounds like the WLP011 will keep things sweet.
 
I would recommend against ground spices. Whole work much better in my opinion. The ground nutmeg and cinnamon will just get mixed up and become part of the sediment. Where as if you use whole spices you can choose to siphon off of them, just making it cleaner and easier. Also, this allows you to better control the level of spice you add to your brew.
 

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