Improve Honey/Apple Cider Recipe

I was wondering if anyone would know any improvements to this recipe. I made it once before and I liked the taste from the honey vs. sugar that I have used before. I do not bottle my cider. After initial fermentation in a glass carboy I rack into a bucket with airlock and a spout. When I want some cider I just pour myself some instead of having to open a bottle. The cider is not going to be getting aged for months before it will be drank.


5gal apple Juice.
2 tbsp yeast nutrient
2.5 cups honey
1 pkg RedStar Champagne Yeast E491

When I made this before I racked it two weeks after I initially made it. It looked as though after one week the fermentation may have been done.
Starting gravity was 1.058 and ended at .996 measured about 3months later.

I'm curious to see what the recommendations are. I'm about to make almost the identical cider (cyser?), but I'm going to try Safale S-04 English Ale yeast for a change. It's supposed to finish not quite as dry as wine or champagne yeast.

My plan is to primary for 2 weeks, rack to secondary for 2 weeks, prime and bottle, and condition for as long as I can stand it. I'm only doing a gallon batch to see if I like it.

Hi Kevin, I guess I wonder why you think that S-04 would not be able to ferment dry a cider with a starting gravity of 1.058 or about 6 percent ABV?. Do you have evidence that S-04 is a yeast with such low tolerance for alcohol?

bernardsmith said:

Hi Kevin, I guess I wonder why you think that S-04 would not be able to ferment dry a cider with a starting gravity of 1.058 or about 6 percent ABV?. Do you have evidence that S-04 is a yeast with such low tolerance for alcohol?

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S-04 has good tolerance for alcohol - for an ale yeast. I use it pretty often for that. It has a typical attenuation of around 75%, so I would expect a 1.058 OG to finish around 1.013-1.014, so yeah, right around 6%. I have no problem hitting those numbers with ales.

My last cider had an OG of 1.065 and finished at 1.000 using Red Star Côte des Blancs. That was really tart and dry, not to mention quite a bit more potent than I was shooting for. I don't have much experience with ciders, but I'm trying for a sparkling cider with some residual sweetness. I don't want to backsweeten or worry about bottle bombs. Someone on this forum wrote up a sticky that has a massive amount of experimental data on yeasts so I figured I'd give it a try.

I thought attenuation for yeast applied only to beer and ale because of the complex sugars that the yeast is being asked to ferment. Fruit sugars are essentially 100 percent fermentable. That's why when you read specs on wine yeasts there is to the best of my knowledge no reference to attenuation. My guess is that when you ask ale yeast to ferment fructose and sucrose the attenuation rate is 100 percent. The only problem that a yeast might have is if the alcohol content is too high for the yeast and 6 percent is not even too high for bread yeast, or the sugar concentration is so high that it pulls liquid from the yeast cells (think of undiluted honey) . My guess is that your yeast will ferment the cider dry. But I'm always more than happy to be wrong and learn from my mistakes.

You're probably right. I'm a beer brewer, and my cider attempts have resulted in, well, meh. OK, but not something a beer drinker would suddenly convert for. Generally just what you described, though they've all been with wine or champagne yeasts. I just read the sticky the other day and the author indicated that the ale yeasts didn't dry it out quite as much. Don't know what his OG was, though.

That's one reason I'm only going to do a 1 gallon batch. I don't generally drink much cider. Kid #2 does from time to time, but not much and not often. My last batch finished at almost 9% ABV, which for her was a half a bottle and sleepy-time. I'm shooting for the cider equivalent of the refreshing lawnmower beer.

Though my method is a tad more complicated, I use Notty on all of my cider batches and they are drinkable immediately. I tried S05 but I didn't like the mouth feel as much. never tried S04.

Here's a link to the sticky that talks about the different yeasts:

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f32/results-juice-yeast-sugar-experiments-83060/

Here's the part I was interested in:

Safale S-04 – This is becoming my new favorite. It has a little fruitier taste than the Nottingham. It cold crashes well with any juice. If you use sugar and bump sg up to at least 1.060, then you can stop fermentation with pasteurized juice by racking. With unpasteurized juice, if you don’t cold crash and just let it ferment out to dryness, it leaves more of the apple taste than the Nottingham. It also works better for unpasteurized cysers. I haven’t tried a pasteurized cyser with it yet.

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So it will ferment dry, but allegedly have a little fruitier flavor.

Yeah, I was reading through that sticky a few weeks ago. I find it interesting how he specifies pasteurized v unpasteurized juice. Unfortunately I don't really have access to unpasteurized... I get all my juice from Sprouts. I'll have to put s04 down for a 1 gal experiment to see if I can tell a difference.