jwynia
Well-Known Member
Yesterday I made a "bochet" cyser. I'm waiting to see how turns out before posting it in the recipes section, but thought I'd share the details here now.
The basic recipe was 4 gallons of "bottom shelf" apple juice from Costco and 5 pounds of caramelized/"burnt" clover honey, fermenting with Irish Ale yeast.
To process the honey, I put 5 pounds of it in my 10 gallon pot over a burner in the back yard. I cooked it until I just started smelling burnt marshmallow, at which point it was pretty dark.
To ensure I could pour it later, I added half a gallon of water to the burnt honey. If you do this, be VERY careful in that step as it spatters a fair bit and boiled honey is like napalm (though I had no problems when I did it).
Since there were quite a few bits of solidified/caramelized honey on the bottom/sides of the pot, I decided to add more liquid, add heat and dissolve them. Rather than adding more water, I just added one of the gallons of apple juice.
From there, I went fairly normally, putting the remaining 3 gallons of juice in the fermenter, adding the juice/honey blend on top and pitching the yeast.
While I would normally add things like vanilla, I'd like to enter this in competition (I have high hopes for it) and the cyser category is supposed to be just apples and honey as ingredients, so I held off from any other additions.
It's now in the fermenter and is the darkest cider I've ever made/seen.
The basic recipe was 4 gallons of "bottom shelf" apple juice from Costco and 5 pounds of caramelized/"burnt" clover honey, fermenting with Irish Ale yeast.
To process the honey, I put 5 pounds of it in my 10 gallon pot over a burner in the back yard. I cooked it until I just started smelling burnt marshmallow, at which point it was pretty dark.
To ensure I could pour it later, I added half a gallon of water to the burnt honey. If you do this, be VERY careful in that step as it spatters a fair bit and boiled honey is like napalm (though I had no problems when I did it).
Since there were quite a few bits of solidified/caramelized honey on the bottom/sides of the pot, I decided to add more liquid, add heat and dissolve them. Rather than adding more water, I just added one of the gallons of apple juice.
From there, I went fairly normally, putting the remaining 3 gallons of juice in the fermenter, adding the juice/honey blend on top and pitching the yeast.
While I would normally add things like vanilla, I'd like to enter this in competition (I have high hopes for it) and the cyser category is supposed to be just apples and honey as ingredients, so I held off from any other additions.
It's now in the fermenter and is the darkest cider I've ever made/seen.