Using juice concentrate instead of other sugars?

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Brewkowski

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I was planning on my first attempt at a cider and lots of recipes call for brown sugar, honey, or molasses, what about using undiluted juice concentrate as a sugar? I know with beer people warn of using too much sugar due to poor tastes, but several cider recipes call for 2lbs or so of additional sugars. I guess cidery off flavors for a cider might not be a concern? Anyway, I was curious if anyone had done this, and if so, did you take gravity readings of the concentrate for calculations?
 
I've made cider from concentrate using half the required water, worked fine. Concentrate does contain a lot of water, so you need to allow for that in your final volume. You can get a good idea of how much sugar is in a can by multiplying the grams of carbs per serving times the number of servings in a can. The 12 fluid ounce can of Tree Top that I have says 30 grams and 6 servings. About 6 ounces by weight.
 
I'm actually planning on doctoring up half a batch of Apfelwein. The recipe is the same as Edwort's except I used honey instead of dextrose... so it's "Bumpus' Apfelwein" but I'm not a huge dry cider person (I describe this stuff as more like white wine). So I'm going to bottle 2.5 gallons of this, and then start adding apple juice concentrate. I figure the nice size motrechet yeast cake (once swirled back into suspension) will start taking care of the sugar in the concentrate, and I'll keep adding concentrate till they are pooped out by the alcohol tolerance, then I can sweeten to taste and bottle (after quite a long conditioning time)
 
I've made some pretty strong cider with concentrate. I believe my last 5 gallon batch was 2 gallons of concentrate and 3 gallons of regular apple juice. I started with the 3 gallons of apple juice fermenting, and once it was going I added 2 cans of concentrate a day until it was gone.
 
2 GALLONS of concentrate? As in like 20 or 30 cans?


no joke... thats gotta be a typo. I did 4 16 ounce cans of concentrate in a 5 gallon cider as a substitute for sugar and got a pretty respectable (Seat of the pants of course - I use no hydrometer) ABV. with very appley flavor - my current batch in primary is six 16 ounce concentrate to 4.5 gallons of juice.

20-30 cans would either end up as sorta apple flavored rocket fuel (it you could a yeast that could eat it dry or if not, some sort of alchoholic apple pancake syrup...
 
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