I've seen pretty much everyone advise not to let your juice boil if you ever make cider. One reason I believe was that it will get cloudy. Is this the only reason? Will it still be fine fermentation wise? I don't care how it looks, just how it tastes.
Boiling when brewing
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UpstateMike
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Just curious as to why you would even want to boil cider.
Why were you even heating it up? Is it scortched? You could cook it for a while and caremalize the sugars in it and make a fire cider. I know beer brewers like to heat everything up even if they think they are just pasteurizing the juice but its so much easier to just add some potassium metabisulfite to knock out the bad bugs and help fight oxidation. WVMJ
I heat up a portion just to add sugar. Heat it up below 170 Deg. Remove from the heat source. Add the sugar and stir. Then mix it back in. Also helps get the refrigerated cider up to cellar temp. faster.
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That's your choice, of course, but pectic enzyme is as innoculous as can be.
Just to split hairs, making cider isn't "brewing". When people see the word "brewing" in a title, they immediately think that you are brewing (beer). Cidermaking is very much like winemaking, and generally winemakers and cidermakers don't heat their musts because of a cooked flavor in the result.
Think of a crisp apple from the tree. Then think of an apple from an apple pie. There is a distinct difference in the flavor, and not just the texture. The crisp apple has a tartness and "bite" to it that a cooked apple (even without sugar) does not. That's the basic difference between cooked fruit and fruit juice vs not cooking.
When I've made cider and my grandson was very little, I did pasteurize the juice very briefly because his mom was worried about ecoli. To do that, just like with pasteurizing milk, go to the lowest possible temperature that is effective. For milk, it's 160 degrees for 30 seconds (and then immediately plunged into an ice bath to cool) or 140 for 30 minutes.
I no longer do this, as my daughter relaxed after her next kid came along, and we don't pasteurize our drinking cider for the little ones but we are very careful not to use contaminated apples (we have a lot of deer, and under the apple trees there is a lot of deer poop!) and wash them as well.
I was under the impression that brewing was when you heated it up. Some wine snob pointed that out to me a while ago after I used the word as it apparently bothered him. But I just kinda throw the word around on here cause this is a home brew forum.
I follow a lot of peoples recipes from YouTube and ciderup.com but they all usually involve heating it up. That's why I've been doing it so much. I use table sugar and For some reason I was led to believe you have to heat that up with water or juice
I follow a lot of peoples recipes from YouTube and ciderup.com but they all usually involve heating it up. That's why I've been doing it so much. I use table sugar and For some reason I was led to believe you have to heat that up with water or juice
When I add sugar to my apple juice to pump up the SG, I just slowly add it in and mix til it's dissolved, I've never heated mine.
