Holiday Cider with mulling spices

I've got a holiday experiment good enough to share. It's basically Upstate Mike's but with a different back sweetener. I put 5 gallons of apple juice in a corny keg with 2lbs of dextrose and some Nottingham yeast for two weeks. OG 1.070, FG 1.020. Then racked it off the lees in to another corny and cold crashed for about 4 days. At this point the cider was quite dry and tart.

I steeped several spoonfuls of mulling spices in about a quart of water. I was trying to make it strong to get plenty of concentrated flavor without diluting my ABV. The spices were large chunks not tea bags, which should be fine too. I had a glass jar of the spice from William Sonoma, and used about 1/4 of the jar. I used a wire mesh flour sieve kinda like a tea bag. After about 20 min, it had reduced and I tossed the spices and added a few heaping spoonfuls of honey (half a cup?) and turned off the heat. Then I boiled a one pint ball jar (to sanitize) and poured the hot tea in to the jar and I let it cool over night. It didn't all fit in the jar, so I enjoyed a cup of the tea.

The next day I used the pint of cooled tea to back sweeten the cider. The taste was good but still young (a tad yeasty). I did the Knox gelatin treatment for clarity and let it sit for a couple more days. Tapped the keg and tossed the first two pints of trub/gelatin. It was good at this point (week 3) but not yet carbonated and still young. I force carbed and gave it another week and now it's really starting to shine. It's lite, crisp and slightly sweet with the mulling spice flavor I was looking for.

SWMBO, who is a hop head and doesn't care much for ciders, enjoyed it and exclaimed "that's good and it tastes like the holidays!"


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I have been looking for a great mulling spice story. I think I am going to give this a try. I have cider that has completed fermentation. Just need a spice recipe to try! Thanks.

 

Make a Cider Wassail.
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I guess I don't understand how apple juice with a starting gravity of 1.070 ends with a final gravity of 1.020. What is unfermentable in apple juice and what yeast cannot ferment dry 70 points of sugar? But then you say that it was fermented dry which suggests that the final gravity is not 1.020 but 1.000 or even lower. So your post is unclear...

 

And 1.020 is not usually tart. Was it 1.020 after backsweetening?

 

Clearly, I did not let it fully attenuate. Although, I no longer remember why. My "dry" reference was a subjective assessment of the taste, not the level of attenuation.

 

So, just so I understand! You fermented a full corny keg? No headspace?

Hope I've got this right!