First cider recipies/experience, and finally a few questions.

[TAPPAR]

Hello all, making this thread to say hello to everyone, introduce myself, and to chronicle my first experiences with making cider. I have no prior experience brewing anything so any constructive criticism is welcomed and encouraged.

What prompted me to start trying to make some cider was an overabundance of apples/apple trees in my backyard. There are only so many apple pies a person can eat, but it seems the amount of cider a person can drink is a bit higher lol.

Since I have no idea what I am doing I am making a bunch of very small batches. I had 3 growlers sitting around from a couple local brewpubs so I decided to use those. I thought they were a gallon when I started them but it turned out they are 1/2 gallon jugs, so I used the incorrect amount of a few ingredients. All of them were washed, ran through the dishwasher on sterilize, then rinsed with bleach, then rinsed thoroughly with as hot of water as my tap would provide.

All of the apples are from my back yard. The wife and I borrowed a counter top juicer, picked up all the fallen apples, then cleaned and started cutting out all the bad spots. Takes a bit of time but seems to get a good amount of liquid out of the apples. The first batch I just used everything that came out unfiltered but there was a lot of "apple foam" in it that would separate out after it sat. For these growlers I just stirred it all up and put it in.

The second juicing I strained everything through a fine mesh food strainer, and afterwards put the apple foam and solid waste from the juicer in cheese cloth and squeezed all the juice out of it. There was probably about 8 cups more juice hiding in there and very little solid apple foam has formed on top of the sitting juice.

I used one campden tablets for each growler (about a double dose now that I realized they are 1/2 gallon) then waited about 18 hrs to pitch the yeast.

For the first three 64oz growlers I put a teaspoon each of cinnamon, cloves, and allspice. I also added a cup of white sugar to each. Two of them I added 1 cup brown sugar, and since I ran out of that I added a cup of molasses to the last. I capped the growlers and shook everything as well as I could to mix and aerate it.

For yeast I used half a package of red-star Cuvee Champagne yeast for the molasses and one of the brown sugar growlers. On the remaining growler I used Safeale us-05.

I put the yeast in three separate containers with warm water for about 1/2 hour, and then pitched them in. Growlers started bubbling within about another 1/2 an hour. Seems to be bubbling at about 5-10 bubbles per 10 sec since 8-28-12 with the ale yeast being at the slow end.

The latest two growlers I bought are clear 1 Gal. I like these much better as you can see what’s going on in them, not sure how I am going to rack the brown ones. I bought a hydrometer and the SG of the pure apple juice from the tree plus one cup honey is 1.08. I also did a gallon with some wine grapes the family had growing on their land. It was about 4 cups grape juice, remainder apple juice and 1 cup of honey, sg 1.09. I used the rest of the safeale-05 fo these batches.

The original three have significantly slowed their bubbling; I tasted and tested the SG of the first three

Safeale 05 and brown/white sugar SG is .99 as of 9/15. Taste is sour, not really any apple taste left. Bubbling about once a minute. Cloudy and yellowish, worst tasting of them all at this point.

Cuvee brown/white sugar is SG of 1.02 taste is slightly sour, Lots of sediment in this one, hard to get a clear sample. Color was a bit richer, bubbling about once every 30 sec.

Cuvee Molasses, sg 1.10 Best tasting by far, very little sourness. Can really taste the molasses and see it, much darker brown, least sediment. Bubbling about every 10 sec now.

My questions so far:
I am thinking about straining them to get all the sediment out and perhaps transferring them into clear containers so I can rack them, any harm in doing this?

They are all undrinkable in this state other then perhaps the molasses batch. I have read that people use concentrated apple juice to back sweeten them, will this make them much more palatable?

How long can I leave them in the fermenters to mellow out? In my reading it sounds like a lot of the bad parts of the taste I am describing will mature out as it ages.


Thanks everyone for any input and reading through the novel, I'll add some pictures and keep this updated.

 

[TAPPAR]

Decided to strain the crap out of the 64 oz growlers, get a bunch of the apple foam (for lack of a better word) out of them. This is the amount of apple foam from just one of them:

I filtered it out through the strainer, then let it settle in the other container, then siphoned it back into the (cleaned) growler trying to get as little of the stuff that settled out onto the bottom. To sweeten it up I added half a cup of brown sugar dissolved in enough water to replace what was lost in the filtering.

The new gallon jugs are percolating nicely, about a bubble every one to two seconds. All apples:

Apples and grape

And finally the whole happy family

All of the pulp I filtered out I ended up squeezing through cheese cloth for kicks, blended it together and let it sit for a day. Racked it to a sealed plastic container and a glass bottle. Let it sit for a couple days and it actually had a very nice carbonation and taste with a bit of sweetening. I did the stove top pasteurization for the bottle and it is aging, going to enjoy the rest soon

I am still wondering how much longer I should leave the 64 oz batches in the fermenter, any suggestions? They are still bubbling about once every 30 seconds, no change after the filter/racking.

 

[Wayneh]

Rack them. Let set for 3 weeks then open; they should be ready and carbonated. If they are really carbonated get them in the frig to stop the yeast. Or let them keep fermenting until there's a bubble every min and a half. Then you can carb or not.