Diluting MJ's cider pouch

[Suicid]

Hi folks,
I've made several batches using MJ's cider pouches and those turned out great (even their "sweet" variants).

Now I'm looking for a "lower alcohol" summer drink (to be able to consume more at once), and got the idea to make MJ's pouch into roughly 10 gal (38L) of the water.
"Normal" 23L batches had OG 1.043, thus calculator gives me it should be 1.026 for 38L.
Previously M02 yeast had about 80-85% of attenuation, so this should make roughly 3% ABV cider.

But what its gonna be flavor-wise?
Anyone tried this before and what was your figures and results?

TIA!

 

[Chalkyt]

I've never used the pouches since I press my own apples but I expect that adding too much water would make it a bit wishy-washy and the yeast would still ferment all the way down to dry (but the alcohol would be diluted by the water... you could end up with low alcohol lightly cider flavoured water). I notice that Andrew Lea (Craft Cidermaking) suggest that adding some water to dry pomace and re pressing can be worthwhile (i.e. you get a somewhat diluted second pressing), but I haven't tried this.

My take on it is that for around 3% ABV you need to ferment down from your OG by 0.020 - 0.030, i.e. in your case down to something like 1.020. This will be a somewhat sweet but full flavour cider since a lot of sugar will remain unfermented. To stop the action there, you would need to kill the yeast, say by heat pasteurisation for 10 minutes above 65C.

At that point you could test the result by adding water if it is too sweet for your tastes, but still retain some reasonable level of flavour.

Maybe aiming for 4% ABV (i.e. heat pasteurise at 1.012 -1.015) would give you a medium-sweet/medium-dry cider that could be reduced to 3% ABV by adding a smaller amount of water without losing too much flavour.

Anyhow it sound like experiment, experiment, experiment, perhaps in 1 gallon batches.

Good luck!

 

[Raptor99]

I have not used pouches either, but most grocery store apple juice will be around 6% ABV if you let it ferment dry. You could do that, and stabilize with potassium sorbate and Kmeta, and then add an equal portion of unfermented apple juice. That should give you an ABV around 3% without diluting the apple flavor. You could experiment adding different amounts of apple juice to get a balance of ABV and sweetness that you like. The flavor would be different from the pasteurization method suggested by @Chalkyt. You could try both methods and see which one you like best.

 

[Chalkyt]

Raptor99's method also sounds good. This is probably a case where adding store bought juice with preservative is a good idea. T think that you would have to keep an eye on any refermentation from the store juice just in case the sorbate and Kmeta ( which I haven't used) plus the preservative doesn't do the job.

Please post the outcomes as low alcohol beverages seem to be increasingly popular.

 

[Kees]

How about keeving? Or racking the fermenting juice a couple of times?