This year, over winter, I successfully bottle carbonated my cider using the Brewers Friend calculator. Spring has just started so any more apples are six months away. Nevertheless I am already thinking about next year's crop. I juice my own apples from our small (8 tree) orchard.
There seems to have been a fair bit of discussion on the forum about using apple juice concentrate for flavour and/or bottle carbonation. So, I plan to try using a concentrate to see what effect it has on the "äppleness"of some of next year's batches.
The plan is this... and while you are all in the cider making part of the year I thought now is the time to pick a few brains. All comments and advice are welcome.
I find that using EC1118 my FG didn't go below 1.004 even after two months, whereas with Nottingham it was 1.000. In both cases adding sugar to get 2.5 vols of CO2 produced a nice "mouthfeel" without being too fizzy.
So, if I freeze some juice then collect the concentrate as it melts, I would hope to get a concentrate of something like SG1.080 (don't really know, just taking a guess). This should contain sugars and flavour molecules, leaving a lot of water behind... at least that is what I hope.
If I take a gallon less a bit of sediment (say, 4 litres) of Notty cider at 1.000 and add 0.25 litres of juice concentrate at 1.080, do I get some maths that looks like 4 x 1.000 = 4.000 plus 0.5 x 1.080 = 0.270 making a total of 4.270 divided by 4.25 (litres) = a SG of 1.005 for the batch?
On the basis that 1 gravity point fermented = 0.5 vols of CO2 (this seems to quoted quite often), do I then end up with 5 SG points x 0.5 vols = 2.5 vols of CO2 (plus possibly 0.9 vols or so already in the juice).
Man, that all does my head in... but is it right? I am not too fussed about the absolute precision of the maths, rather than if this is the right approach since the idea of bottle carbonating with apple concentrate rather than just plain sugar seems "nice".
There seems to have been a fair bit of discussion on the forum about using apple juice concentrate for flavour and/or bottle carbonation. So, I plan to try using a concentrate to see what effect it has on the "äppleness"of some of next year's batches.
The plan is this... and while you are all in the cider making part of the year I thought now is the time to pick a few brains. All comments and advice are welcome.
I find that using EC1118 my FG didn't go below 1.004 even after two months, whereas with Nottingham it was 1.000. In both cases adding sugar to get 2.5 vols of CO2 produced a nice "mouthfeel" without being too fizzy.
So, if I freeze some juice then collect the concentrate as it melts, I would hope to get a concentrate of something like SG1.080 (don't really know, just taking a guess). This should contain sugars and flavour molecules, leaving a lot of water behind... at least that is what I hope.
If I take a gallon less a bit of sediment (say, 4 litres) of Notty cider at 1.000 and add 0.25 litres of juice concentrate at 1.080, do I get some maths that looks like 4 x 1.000 = 4.000 plus 0.5 x 1.080 = 0.270 making a total of 4.270 divided by 4.25 (litres) = a SG of 1.005 for the batch?
On the basis that 1 gravity point fermented = 0.5 vols of CO2 (this seems to quoted quite often), do I then end up with 5 SG points x 0.5 vols = 2.5 vols of CO2 (plus possibly 0.9 vols or so already in the juice).
Man, that all does my head in... but is it right? I am not too fussed about the absolute precision of the maths, rather than if this is the right approach since the idea of bottle carbonating with apple concentrate rather than just plain sugar seems "nice".
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