Couple questions about adding honey

[de5m0mike]

First off, this is my fist batch of cider. I've brewed lots of beer, but never a cider. Anyway, I have 4 gallons of cider that has been happily fermenting with Lalvin D47 for about a week now. Just today, I was offered 5 lbs. of pure honey from a friend at work who keeps bees. Can't turn that down. So I'm wondering, is it too late to add some of this to my cider to bump up the ABV a bit? Also, how do I calculate how much honey to use if I decide to use some of it to carbonate. I was thinking I would save as much as is needed to carbonate, and just add the rest to the fermenting batch.

BTW, I do have beer alchemy which has a carbonation calculator, but I'm not really sure how to use it for cider.

 

[frydogbrews]

add the honey! i would just dump it all in and stir the heck out of it to dissolve. d-47 shouldn't have any problem eating all that as long as its healthy. i would guess that would come in at around 13% abv as 4.5 gallons of juice with 5 pounds of honey usually hits 12%.
i suggest sparkling it for sure. i rarely bottle, but any ciders or things like that i usually add 1 full cup of corn sugar as you generally want them more carbed than beer.

also, if you do this, you will have made a cyser, not a cider. appe juice mead basically. the cysers i have done with d-47 require about 2-3 months of aging time.

 

[gratus fermentatio]

If I remember correctly, it's ABOUT 1.25lbs honey to equal 1 lb cane sugar. Regards, GF.

 

[Golddiggie]

I second adding the honey to the batch.. For how to figure out what it will do to the batch, honey is about 80% fermentable sugars. So, if you factor using 1.25x the sugar you would have used, in honey, you'll be on target/par with using sugar. Depending on the batch's OG, you could add a pound of honey in a few more weeks. Let it ferment out, then use more to carbonate when bottling.

I'm trying to contact a local apiary to get some good regional honey too. I want to get at least a gallon, or two, for both some mead and to use in a wee heavy.

 

[de5m0mike]

So from what I gather, for sparkling cider you usually want about .5 – 1.25 cups of honey for 5 gallons? If that's the case, I would think I would be pretty good to save 1 cup of honey for my 4 gallons and put the rest of the honey in now.

 

[DeNomad]

Just add the honey right in there!

I would use the SPREADSHEET on the following link to take a stab at your fermentables, it's helped me a lot with my first cyser. I am using it for a mead soon.
SPREADSHEET LINK: http://home.comcast.net/~mzapx1/FAQ/Honey.xls
Mead FAQ's: https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f30/sticky-mead-making-faqs-83030/

Also for the spreadsheet, you can tweak the numbers if you do a small scale experiment... meaning take a cup of your cider and measure the gravity, add a measured bit of honey and measure the gravity. Then adjust the sugars so it matches before and after.

 

[Golddiggie]

NEVER use volume measure for sugars, especially honey. They are worst than worthless. ALWAYS go by weight.

 

[frydogbrews]

NEVER use volume measure for sugars, especially honey. They are worst than worthless. ALWAYS go by weight.

i second this! i do use volume whenever (rarely) bottle carb, but tha't just laziness. big bowl and a scale when measuring honey always.

 

[Ickythekid]

Along these same lines;

True or False

Once your cider has fermented out adding honey is a way to back sweeten your cider with little worry of creating bottle bombs because the yeast can't 'switch' from eating the apple sugars to eating the honey sugars.

I have a hard time believing this, but it's what a very knowledgeable employee of my local HBS told me.

I would think that the yeast just see "Sugar! Nom nom nom."

 

[frydogbrews]

Along these same lines;


I would think that the yeast just see "Sugar! Nom nom nom."

yeah, yeast will eat it no matter what. the especially love apple sugar and honey sugar because it contains so few unfermentables.
it woudl be bottle bomb city.
probably kill the yeast with sulfur, although that can be unreliable at best, or bottle pasturize. there is a sticky about it, truthfully though i have never backsweetened anything because i like things dry.

 

[Golddiggie]

Be like a small child having a sugar bomb.

The yeast will happily eat through the honey (its about 80% fermentible sugars) and then go to sleep.

Chemically stabilizing can be tricky the first few times you do it. Not sure I would do the bottle pasteurization method either (140F + honey + good apple flavors = bad things IMO/IME). I know of several mazers (in my neck of the woods) that simply give their mead enough time for the yeast to all flocculate out. Or at least enough that its no longer an issje. They also don't backsweeten thei batches. So its even less of an issue.

 

[frydogbrews]

yeah, i never stabilize my meads. just let them sit long enough until gravities are lgood and dry. sure, sometimes, they still drop a point or two in the bottle, but then i have surprise sparkling mead, which is always a bonus. there;s not enough remaining sugar at that point to create enough carb to push out a wine cork. i'm talking about gravities around .995-.993
if it's been there for 4-6 months, you're usually fine to bottle and as i said, the worst that happens to me is random sparkly batch.

 

[beansbrews]

I am totally psyched, the annual cider pressing is tomorrow at my parents' farm (Arctic Organics in AK)! We have an orchard of about 100 trees, ranging 10-20 years in age. They are all varieties that do really well in AK, which generally means they amazing... they are intensely sweet and/or tart, depending on the variety, and most are small but the size is made up for by massive quantity (300-400 apples on some trees). In any case, we have about 20 varieties to choose from, so while pressing I get to choose my mix for this year's cider batches. Last year was my first time making hard cider, and it came out after about 4 months tasting like a fine dry champagne with a pronounced but pleasant apple tartness. I didn't really do any gravity calculations or anything, basically just made sure everything was very clean throughout the process, fermented with wyeast champagne yeast, added a rather small amount of sugar, did not filter, and bottled with a little sugar which produced very nice fine bubbles that last about 30 minutes in the glass. So I don't know what the ABV would be, but it is certainly enough to sense a buzz after most of a bottle.

My father also keeps bees, and although this year wasn't a big one for honey he may be convinced to lend a few pounds to the cider. I would like to try it, but my concern is that it would actually end up tasting more like mead with too much honey, especially because this honey always tastes very honey-ey. I would like to get a little bit higher ABV and some honey flavor might be nice, so should I combine sugar and honey, use a different yeast, etc? Maybe I'll try to do a batch the same as last year and another batch of more of a cyser. Nothing like homegrown apples... Somebody liked ours so much they stole almost the entire crop from the second orchard in the middle of the night. Damn.

 

[de5m0mike]

Just as an update, I added 2 lbs. of honey to my 4 gallons of cider today. I still have 4 lbs of honey left. I think I'll reserve a pound for bottle priming. I may not use it all though—still have to calculate how much is needed to avoid bottle bombs. This way I can save the other 3 lbs. of honey for another batch. I know I could have used it all but I decided I didn't want it to come out too sweet, or too strong for my first batch.

One more quick question. If I want sparkling cider, is there a way to determine when to bottle based on S.G. rather than letting the yeast finish and then adding more sugar?

 

[de5m0mike]

Finally got around to bottling this today. Almost two months later. I didn't really have a way to weigh the honey for an accurate measurement so I decided to just use the whole bottle, which is suppose to be one pound. I boiled it in some water and then added it into three gallons of cider. I know this is way too much honey for that amount of cider, but I was thinking I could bottle pasteurize them after a few days to kill off the yeast and hopefully stop them from blowing up. I filled one 16 oz water bottle with the cider so I could keep an eye on the carbonation level. I'm thinking in a few days, or when the water bottle seems to firm up, I'll crack it open and see if it is to my liking. If so I'll go ahead and pasteurize the rest of them.

So I've been doing some reading and this seems to be the best way to go about pasteurizing them. What do you think?

Put all the bottles into the oven at room temperature, slowly raise the temp to 150F, hold for 25 minutes, turn the oven off, open the door and allow the oven & bottles to cool to room temp again, then chill.