Hard Apple cider. Help!!!!

[DreBourbon]

Decided to Brew 3x 1 gallon batches of Hard Apple cider. Used canned apple juice with no preservatives or any added stuff. Did 1 with 1 cup of dextrose, 1 with half dextrose/half brown sugar and added 2 cinnamon sticks and 1 with all brown sugar. It's been sitting for 2 weeks and it's still slightly bubbling. I decided to taste batch #2 today and it's very sour, no sweetness at all. I figure that all the sugar was eaten by the yeast in the fermentation process but how do I make my cider sweet? Add more sugar when priming? Help!

 

[_BullDog_]

There is a lot of good advice in the Cider forum..... but until you find it ..... here are a few points...

The yeast will ferment all sugars in cider. If you add more the yeast will convert it to more alcohol.

You can back sweeten after the fermentation is done if you kill the yeast first.

You could also sweeten with no fermentable sweetners

Now go find the cider forum and get better advice than mine.

Also cider needs time after fermentation for the yeast to clean up. Give it a couple months and the taste will improve

 

[homebrewdr]

Which yeast did you use? Champagne yeast will bring it super dry. I think US-05 gives it a bit more sweetness than champagne yeast. However, I actually prefer my cider dry. They usually finish below 1.000

There is a process called back-sweetening when it comes to cider making. I encourage you to read into it. Basically, you kill off the yeast and then add more of your juice. I think this is only possible when either kegging (and force carbing), or bottling and leaving the cider still (uncarbonated). If you have fermentables and live yeast inside of closed bottles, you will have bottle bombs. Another possible way is to go ahead with sweetening at bottling, and then perform a short heat pasteurization in a day or 2 to kill off the yeast...but this can be tricky to get your desired level of carbonation and IMO a little risky. I've never performed either of these methods.

In your case however, I would recommend letting it sit for another week (or ideally more). In my experience, super dry ciders begin to lose that sour/tartness and more apple flavor comes in more time. Once I made a strawberry apple cider with saison yeast (yeah im that crazy experimentalist) that I thought I needed to dump because it was so sour. I bottled it anyway. After a week or so it was actually pretty good.

I've read that traditionally, German "apfelwein" is really dry with almost no sweetness. Those who want it to be a little sweeter add a splash of lemon-lime soda right into their cup. This could also be an option for you and probably the easiest

 

[DreBourbon]

Great advice. Tks guys.