First taste of a recent experiment, cider on skins

Hi Everyone,

The grocery store had organic red delicious apples on sale recently so I bought a bushel. I read recently that red skinned apples had most of the tannins concentrated in the skins and seeds, so I figured this would be a perfect opportunity to see what would happen if I fermented on the skins. My wife and I peeled the apples and ran them through the juicer and stuffed everything into a 6.5 gallon carboy. Since it seemed like a ridiculous ratio of peels to juice, I added some more juice (from concentrate) to top it off. I also added some pectinase.

It's been fermenting with White Labs English Cider yeast for about a week. I just took a sample. The gravity is still pretty high (about 1.040). The color has really started to come out of the peels so the cider looks more like ruby red grapefruit juice, and I definitely taste tannic compounds. It will be interesting to see how it turns out in the end! I plan on fermenting it until dry and racking it into secondary to age for a while.

Has anyone else tried this before?

 

Here's a picture of the cider after aging/bottling/etc. You can see that the color is a reddish orange. There's a strong aroma and a good flavor, far better than a cider made from just plain apple juice. Next time I'm considering having it on the peels in secondary instead, as when primary fermentation was complete and I racked it off the peels, there was plenty of flavor left in the peels.

 

Nice looking cider, is it a still cider? What was your F.G.? The next time I juice apples, I will be adding skins to the fermenter like you did.
Great job!

 

No, it's carbonated, but it hasn't fully carbonated yet. FG was pretty much right at 1.00.

 

Yeah, I couldn't find any local sources of good tannic apples, but I got a good deal on the red delicious and I had read about the tannins in the skins so I figured I would give it a try. Next time I'm going to freeze the peels and add them to secondary instead.

 

Very interesting.

I wonder if steeping crushed apple pulp or apple skins in a pulp bag in the cider would have a similar effect? I'm thinking of those Wine Expert kits where you add crushed grapes in a pulp bag.

 

If it works for Yooper, it works. Period. Her decades of experience are priceless to those of us in our first decade.

 

Wonder how adding maybe a pound of crabapples to a 5 gallon batch of store-bought cider would work? Obviously you'd want to rinse and maybe soak the crabapples in some star san before grinding them up.