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justbrewit

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i'm sorry if this has been touched on before but i'm about to make my first cider and i have no clue where to start. i am an all grain brewer and a noob meader, cider is my next adventure and i'm making a peach cider for my first one. the peaches are just about to come into season and i'd like to do a bit of reading up on it before i start. i have a cider book but it is mostly a history of cider. good info but doesn't help me make it. any and all help will be appreciated.
 
Simple answer for a batch of plain apple cider is to make a batch of apfelwein and skip the corn sugar. That would give you a 5% abv drink that's quite tasty.

http://winemaking.jackkeller.net/reques26.asp has all kinds of tried and true recipes.


For snitzengiggles I made peach wine from Welch's 100% Peach concentrate (NO corn syrup). It was good, a nice table wine, but not super high quality. Actual peaches would have been better.
 
i guess i should have been more to the point.

since i'm going to be making peach cider from fresh peaches, which i'm going to skin, de-seed, pasturize and puree, then i'll put them in a grain bag to press the juice out. do i need to heat the juice? do i need to mix any water with the juice? boil it? is there any thing besides yeast food that i need to add before i add the yeast? should i use an ale yeast, champ. yeast? these are the big questions that i am looking for answers for. thanks for the reply
 
On the question of yeast, I went with (after talking to the person at my local homebrew shop) a wine yeast rather than champagne. From what he told me the champagne yeast may make it a bit on the dry side, where as the wine yeast will give it a bit of sweetness.
 
i used a champ. yeast in my cyser and its starting to turn dry, which is ok because it has a very nice up front sweetness and finishes out dry. very tasty. i just made a new melomel using a less tolerant yeast(14%) and i'm going to see how that turns out.

what is the average alcohol % in a cider? is it around the same as a beer? that will help me figure out what kind of yeast to use.
 
Well, I can't help you much with peach cider, as I tend to make wines. But, do NOT boil your fruit. You'll set the pectin (think peach jelly).

I recommend following basic wine practices- that is use some pectic enzyme in all fruit, and use campden to kill wild yeasts and bacteria. Here's what I'd do- I'd follow a peach wine recipe, but don't use all the sugar called for. Here's a link to Jack Keller's peach wine recipes: http://winemaking.jackkeller.net/reques26.asp

If you make your SG about 1.070 or higher, you're in wine territory. 1.045-1.065 is cider-ish. Some fruit wines are best at no higher than 1.085 or so, and I would guess that peaches would fall into that category. Peach flavored rocket fuel would not be good!

Oh, and champagne yeast IS wine yeast. Any wine yeast will ferment this dry- you can sweeten it when it's finished by stabilizing and then sweetening. You could use a yeast like cotes de blanc that might preserve most of the fruit bouquet, but most wine yeasts will be pretty interchangeable. Any recipe under about 12-14% ABV will finish dry, no matter what kind of wine yeast you use. I use champagne yeast often- it's a clean fermenting well attenuating yeast.
 
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