I made an apple ale with a basic wheat recipe. Mixed 50 percent beer after 3 weeks and 50 percent pure apple juice. Had to wait another 3 weeks because fermentation started back up. Tasted it yesterday and it is very tart. How do you get any sweetness back into it? Without using artificial sweeter?
I'll list my recipe below as I had a very similar experience the first time I did an apple ale/graff like this. I will qualify this first off with, my beer turned out pretty high gravity/ABV, it finished 1.010ish, so my experience was I had to make a relatively big beer and mixed it with cider at 3 gallons of wort with 1 gallon of cider. If you want to skip my recipe and notes and stuff, go to the bottom for my 'solutions' to the dry apple ale/graff problem as my first apple ale attempt ended up too dry.
6# Golden Promise
.5#Biscuit
.5#60L (or English Medium Crystal)
5oz UK Brown Malt
.25#Carapils
1#Sugar (late addition near the end of the boil)
30ish IBUs of EKG (I split this between a 60min addition and a 5 minute addition to try and pull some of that honey/spice aromas you can some times get from EKG)
I ended up with around 1.085 for the wort at 3 gallons, then threw 1 gallon of cider (unpasteurized, no preservatives, picked it up during an apple festival in northern Wisconsin). I did not take a gravity reading of the cider, it could have been 1.040, it could have been 1.060 (I have seen people report both extremes for cider gravity, its entirely up to the weather so I'm not gonna get my panties in a bunch over what the 'true' gravity was of the cider).
I figured if the cider was 1.050 and I mixed 1 gallon with my 1.085 wort, if I did my weighted averages correctly, I would have had around 1.076 for the entire batch. Before I sent this one to secondary it was already crystal clear, and very dry with 1.012 on the hydrometer.
I just cracked the first bottle yesterday, the cider dominates the tongue with dry alcohol. The beer part of it is all on the nose and back end. Its a tiny tiny bit alcohol hot right now but not unpleasantly. I think a lot of the sweetness is coming from the alcohol in fact. I fermented with S04 so theres definitely some left over maltiness.
Like I said though this was the solution I came up with to the super super dry apple ale/graff problem.
1. Mash high, I figured I'd just skip the messing about and went straight to a single infusion at 158F
2. I used an english ale yeast S04 since I've had good luck with this leaving a nice maltiness behind, it will ferment the cider dry, but itll leave the maltiness/sweetness from the high mash temps alone.
3. I went with a 3 to 1 ratio beer to cider. 3 gallons of beer to 1 gallon of cider. The cider will ferment out super bone dry so at 50/50 I think this ends up causing the entire beer to be very dry, first attempt at 50/50 had lots of crystal malts in an attempt to head this off (something like 15-20% of the bill was crystal malts), I used barely any in the 3/1 attempt and its much sweeter.
4. Expect the cider to ferment very dry so I made the beer big to tucker out the yeast. I didn't get close to the alcohol tolerance of S04, but it will leave malty-sweetness behind in a bigger beer.
My next attempt I might try and go back to the 50/50 beer/cider ratio, but I will use the same grain bill but keep the batch to 2 gallons wort to 2 gallons of cider. Most of this was what I came up with since I do not keg yet, and wanted to avoid bottle pasteurization or using non fermentables like xylitol. I thought of maybe using lactose but this may have made the flavor/mouth feel funky. A darker amber/brown/ruby red belgian candi sugar may bring some nice unfermentables and keep it sweet, but will still contribute a good deal of dryness.
Edit: I threw pectin enzyme and a campden tablet into the cider and left it overnight. It was unpasteurized, and no preservatives, I poured the cider in while my kettle spigot was emptying the wort into the fermenter.