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That is good to know. I have three oak trees, a pin oak and two others and occasionally have to remove lower branches. I had pondered drying them out and turning them into chips... glad that I didn't. It seems that chips give up their flavour quite quickly and it is easy to over-do it (probably...

Given that the apple blend is quite unremarkable, there is a subtle and reasonably pleasant flavour that I have to assume is due to the powdered tannin. As I said above, there is unexpected mouthfeel and body. The approach that I have taken is to make something that is repeatable or at least...

This is all subjective, of course, but I am just about to bottle three batches of cider using the same culinary apple juice blend. However, each batch has a different level of added tannin so, I thought it worth sharing the outcome since this should also relate to ciders made from “store bought...

Long answer to a simple question, but bear with me. It might help. The blend back in 2020 worked O.K. and is a good fallback. This year, once again I had an apple shortage due to a heavy frost just as the fruit was forming in Spring. All part of the fun living high in the mountains... when...

Getting terribly academic here... Attributed to Peter Ducker "if you can't measure it, you can't improve it" or the other version "if you can't measure it, it ain't real", IME certainly applies to making cider. Hence measuring and knowing the SG, TA, pH etc, etc, then adjusting them, certainly...

The "Grahams" suggestion is a good one. I have made it, and the method that I outlined is very similar except for my addition of fermenting some sugar for carbonation and sweetness (I am not a big fan of the non-fermentable sweeteners which don't seem to add any body to the cider, but some do...

Sorry, I have been off on a few other things for a few days. like most of us I have been through the adventure of making rubbish cider and have finally gathered enough knowledge and skill to make a half decent beverage (actually won the recent rural show for cider this year), so I thought it...

2 trial gallons using Bellvue Orchards "Summer Snow". 17.5+2=19.5

It is not unusual for it to take a few weeks for "normal" AJ to ferment from 1.050 down towards 1.000. In your case the starting FG was probably a lot higher than this because of the added sugar. Also, the other stuff (cinnamon and cloves) could have some effect on SG. Because these are...

As fluketamer said... "Yes it can". Sorry if this gets a little technical, but it is worth understanding what goes on so you can deal with a stalled fermentation (if indeed that is your problem). If I read your numbers right, your original SG 1.050 juice would have about 110g/L of fermentable...

Sounds like it stalled, possibly because of preservatives as suggested above. The other issue with bought juice is that it can be low in nutrients because of the apple type or storage time. As suggested above, try pitching new yeast and add a nutrient like DAP, then monitor SG with a hydrometer...

I tried adding blackberry once. When the sugar has been fermented out, what is left is awful! With hopped cider you need to be ready to take the hops out as soon as the flavour profile is right as a day or two makes a heap of difference. I don't want to sound like a grouch but that is my...

I have sometimes added DAP at about 0.5g (1/10 teaspoon) per gallon (5 litres) halfway through fermentation to ensure complete fermentation, or sometimes even lower SG if stalled when using S04 (a high nutrient demand yeast). Small quantities of Fermaid (repackaged into 100g packets) have...

Sorry it didn't work out. The following might be useful for another occasion. This is mildly technical, but to give you a guide on DAP (this information mostly comes from Claude Jolicoeur's and Andrew Lea's "experiments" as outlined in their books), yeast need nutrients of about 10ppm (mg/L) of...

If it is only sugar and water and it has stalled, the yeast might have used all the nutrients. I suggest try adding a bit of DAP ( for some yeast assimilable nitrogen) or similar to see if it kicks along again.

Thanks DaveC73... good stuff! From my scratching around, I rather suspect that there is a little bit of non-linearity in the sugar-acid relationship, but I really haven't done any comparisons over a range of acid levels. Looks like you have come up with "Dave's Rule of Thumb". Cheers!

“Just for fun” since the weather wasn’t too good on Sunday, I decided to back track through the last couple of years’ cider to see if my various notes could shed some light on the ratio of sugar to acid for the ciders that I liked. As with everyone, I sometimes come up with something that isn’t...

Sounds like a plan!

Your dilemma started the brain cells ticking over. I had a bit of an overnight think about how to end up with something like a BJCP Medium-Dry cider (up to 1% residual sugar). I wonder if anything less than this might not overcome the acidity According to BJCP, my acidic Pink Lady mentioned...

This isn’t super scientific, but it might help. A couple of years ago I measured the SG, sugar, acid, pH of my apples to help with blending. The sugar is based on the SG according to Proulx & Nichols P47 which gives g/L of “sugar” rather than the usual “total solids” (total solids are usually...