Apfel wine or cider with beer/Ale trub?

[Nubiwan]

Almost certain I read a post on here where someone claimed they simply poured 5 gallons of 100% apple juice over the trub from an ale they just bottled in order to make an Apfel Wine.

I tried to search the same post again, but have been unable to find it.

So, my questions is obviously, does this work? Will the yeast reawaken and ferment the sugars in the Apple juice? Will the end result be a cider, or a wine? Or a load of crap?

If it does work, then do I need to agitate the trub at all to get the "yeast activated"? Stir it up type thing? I assume no point in taking an OG (perhaps from the Apple juice directly).

Do I need to add more or different yeast? What about more fermentable? Can I just add 2 or 3 gallons of Apple juice, instead of 5, and get a similar tasting end product?

Before someone suggests it, I know there is a post dedicated to making Apfel wine, but it's not quite the same as I am asking here, as I think it suggests using wine yeast, if I am not mistaken.

Anyway, thanks in advance.

 

[morbster]

Would it work? I would say so. Would it work well? I'm not convinced; that's probably subject to your opinion of good apfelwein.

In my opinion, the dry, crisp taste of apfelwein is what makes it so delicious. Your ale yeast isn't going to attenuate nearly as well as the recommended champagne yeast, which will take your gravity below 1.000 over time. Additionally, while I don't worry too much about off-flavors from yeast cake, you may run into issues if you reuse your yeast in the fermenter. Apfelwein benefits from a nice, long fermentation. Leaving it on all those dead cells for a few months might produce some off-flavors.

I'm a bit of a free-spirited homebrewer, so I say go with it. It'll probably give you some weird ciderlike product, and it may take a while to chomp through all those sugars in the apple juice. The only additional recommendation I would have is to consider racking to a secondary fermenter after a few weeks to allow the apfelwein to bulk age on a smaller layer of dead yeast.