Anyone ever use caramel in a cider?

Swmbo is starting to take a liking to my apfelwein that I just started brewing a few days ago and when I asked her if she wanted to formulate her own. She asks if she can make it with caramel and toasted pecans. Sort of a caramel apple pie.

Caramel is just sugar, butter and heavy cream. Its still sweet, it still has sugar, but will the yeast be able to ferment the sugar in it? Would it be better to try to dilute the caramel in some applejuice over low heat. She is not a huge fan of dry so the caramel would add the sweet and flavor she would want.

Has anyone else tried it or know if it will work? I have an extra packet of yeast and SWMBO can whip up some caramel in a few min depending on what yall think.

Should I use the normal amount of sugar to let the yeast ferment that and have the caramel for flavor and as a sort of a back sweetener?

Thanks in advance, and I know, lots of questions....
ArXiX

Yeah there was a lot of talk about this a while ago, and people were looking at caramel apple cider recipes. It boiled down to not using actual caramel, but vanilla and malt extract instead. The main issues were butter and milk in the brew.

i haven't actually recieved it yet, but i ordered a caramel flavoring thats supposedly 4x stronger than normal store bought flavorings. Once it comes in, i plan on making a vanilla/caramel cider. so i'll post back when i start that batch.

link to the flavoring: https://www.lorannoils.com/p-8298-caramel-flavor.aspx

Caramel syrup is easy to make at home, though it is easy to burn if you aren't careful. One of them is sugar and heavy cream, but the one you are probably most interested in is sugar and vanilla like they use for flan. Though, my grandpa, when he was alive, would sometimes add Kahlua instead of vanilla when he made flan caramel syrup. Maybe this is the answer to the problem? Or maybe it funked up the sugar to much and would be better as a back sweetener?

That flan syrup sound perfect and I have made that before. But, will it ferment out or can I use it to backsweeten?

I just started a cider, graff to be more specific. For the small wort portion i used 2 lbs of 2 row, 1lb of crystal 20, and 1 lb of crystal 40. I pulled a portion of the first wort and boiled it down, sorta like scottish kettle caramelization. i'm hoping for good caramel flavors

BaronIV said:

i haven't actually recieved it yet, but i ordered a caramel flavoring thats supposedly 4x stronger than normal store bought flavorings. Once it comes in, i plan on making a vanilla/caramel cider. so i'll post back when i start that batch.

link to the flavoring: https://www.lorannoils.com/p-8298-caramel-flavor.aspx

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how much of that would be needed to flavour a cider after fermentation? I've been looking for something like this for a while! never thought to look on candy websites...

i never added caremal to the fermentation. I like to take icecream caremal, pour into glass, pour a woodchuck on top of it.The wife and I really like it.

RobWalker said:

how much of that would be needed to flavour a cider after fermentation? I've been looking for something like this for a while! never thought to look on candy websites...

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To be honest i haven't recieved my shipment yet. My first two ciders i make are going to be a butter rum (added before the yeast it pitched) and a normal (no sugar/flavoring added) cider. but i will comment back on how strong the caramel flavor smells/tastes once i recieve them in the mail.

p.s. if you click on the list of candy flavorings, if you click on "item details" it says all the ingredients and whether or not it is water soluble. If you order from this site, only use the water soluble flavorings

Update: i recieved my flavorings in the mail today and made my butter rum cider (smells declicious) anyways, i ordered a caramel as well. This bottle smells majorly strong and you shouldnt need more than 1 dram to flavor a 1 gallon batch. I opened the butter rum to smell it and swmbo came in about 5 minutes later and asked what smelled so good...

OK, good news everyone! Caramel does not ferment out as far as I can tell.

Disclaimer: I am not a professional and I was not scientific in my testing.

So, I followed a website that had found, http://www.baking911.com/candy/chart.htm , and made a small batch of caramel with just water and sugar, I let it go somewhere between medium and dark which is to far in my opinion for a cider. As soon as I had the caramel, of just sugar and water, I let it cool just a little until it started to harden like a candy and I added apple juice and stirred the crap out of it to evenly dilute the caramel in the juice. If you let it fully cool you will perminantly have dark rock candy in your pot....forever. When you add the juice it will steam and you will instantly boil some of it away but keep adding it and it will hopefully dilute and cool evenly.

So for my testing I put about 2/3 of the caramel solution (about 1/2 of a liter) into the 1gal jug that I took the juice out of which left me with with 8oz left which I put strait into a sanitized beer bottle. So this left me with 8oz of a SUPER strong caramel solution and just shy of a gallon of a mild dilution that I added just a little Red Star Montrachet dry yeast I had from when I bought a 2nd packet for Apfelwein.

I let them go for about 2 weeks (I know its a not much time but I could watch them ferment and I watched them stop a few days ago). The mild dilution ended up at 1.030 (OG was 1.068) and the strong dilution stopped at 1.090(didn't take OG). The strong dilution was WAY to sweet and the mild dilution was almost too sweet as well but its all up to your taste buds.

When I do this again I think I am going to have to pay more attention to how much caramel I use: how much sugar I start out with, how much apple juice I add to dilute the original mix and how much that yields. Then I will have to figure out how much of that to add to 4.5-5 gal of just juice or juice and dextrose. What temp should I let it hit before I turn it off as 370* is too dark for my taste. Before or after primary fermentation or even as a sweetener once it has been poured into the glass.

This is a start but there there are still many questions that I need to figure out myself and if anyone wants to give this a go I would welcome in the input. Hell, for all I know caramel does ferment out and I just goofed something up royally!

So, any thought or input?

-ArXiX

OK, After some more tinkering I have found that 1 cup of sugar/gallon of apfelwein is a great starting point. I took 4 24oz bottles to a party 2 nights ago and it was a huge hit (all gone before anything else was)! Not to sweet and it let the apple still come though. I took sugar to a light-medium color in the pot before adding water back in to re-dilute it to a liquid form.

-ArXiX