Brewing BIG Ciders

[craven_morhead]

I'm all for experimentation, I'm just saying that you're getting into a pretty extreme realm of brewing at this point. (Is it called brewing if it's a cider? Anyway...). If you want to experiment down this path, I think it's worth doing a fair bit of reading about babying your yeast, instead of just loading it up with 20# of sugar out of the gate.

 

[miloa]

Next year I'm going to have all the free cider I want to experiment with, so if this fails this year I wont mess with it next year,but if it does,I'll try both ways next year and see if one is better or easier.

 

[Yan]

Yeah, I get lots of free or ridiculously cheap fermentables myself. That's why I'm always pro-experimentation!

Some people have to pay for their apples, though. Where I live, people have to get rid of a lot of them for free every year, because they can't sell them all!

 

[miloa]

Yes the only thing better than cheap fruit is freeee.I've got access to alot of different fruit like white peaches,yellow raspberries.sweet and sour cherries,pears,plums and strawberries. I want to do something with them all! not sure what yet.Hoping to turn them to wine and then mix with hard cider for flavoring. Bythe way do all fruits have wild yeast like apples?

 

[Yan]

Yeast will live where there is fruit for sure, but some of the yeasts living on the fruits might not be very... nice. Most fruits have wiled yeasts growing on them. Apples apparently can have four or five different species on them. I read a list of them somewhere once. Not one of them was s. cerevisiae, if I remember right. From what I understand, brettanomyces is pretty ubiquitous everywhere.

A good friend of mine for her first batch of raspberry wine fluked out and didn't use yeast at all though, had a good fermentation and had it taste great. She didn't know what she was doing back then, and wonders to this day why it turned out so good.

 

[miloa]

I've had great luck with wild yeast and my ciders although the are more like wine,the wild yeast in my area takes cider to 10or 11% and tastes great even without aging.

 

[homebrewer_99]

I brewed one of my last ciders on 4 Sep 2009. I used 4.5 gal AJ, 4 lbs, Corn Sugar, 2 lbs Dark Brown Sugar, and 3 lbs Honey. My OG was 1.126.

I used Lalvin K1-V1116 yeast. Depending on where you read it, this yeast is good to either 16 or 20%.

At present my cider is 16.013% ABV. I don't think it's going any further.

 

[miloa]

16% doesnt sound to bad what it taste like? I've been reading about distilliers yeast and as long as it dont give it a bad taste it could work.

 

[MartyB]

Miloa,
You need to stop thinking only in terms of % ABV. Given an acceptable environment, yeast will consume the sugar available up to their tolerance level. Saying natural yeast takes it to 10-11% doesn't mean much without the final gravity. Without FG, we don't know if it really did conk out at 11%, or if that's just the potential of the cider you had to begin with.

Flavor of a product has a lot more to do with the overall ingredients and the residual components left after fermentation, than it does on just the yeast.

Take Homebrewer_99's recipe (which sounds delicious by the way and I'm going to try it). The corn sugar provides an alcohol boost, but doesn't provide anything in the way of flavor of the final product, nothing except burn.
The molasses in the dark brown sugar and the honey lend a carmel-like and honey flavor and scent. With a SG of 1.126 at the beginning of September, and currently just over 16%, we can calculate that the gravity is probably down between 1.004 and 1.005. With K1-V1116, thats doing well at almost 97% attenuation, but at only 3 months old, it may not be entirely done yet.

And while the residual sugars and flavorings from the mix of ingredients will help make this drinkable younger, at 16% it'll probably still be a year for the burn to mellow and all the flavor profiles to meld. My guess, at x-mas 2010, this will be putting all Homebrewer_99's houseguests UNDER the tree!

With your 20# of sugar you're looking at close to 35% potential. Nothing out there will ferment that out. Even distillers yeast drops out at 23%, that's why they distill to reach the higher ABV content.

 

[miloa]

My first batch of cider just finished, SG of 1.095, FG 1.010, just a touch sweet but very drinkable,as we found out last night. We got to sampling it,and boy it packs a punch around 11% but i used 1118 yeast I expected to go lower,cant say as I'm unhappy just curious. Managed to put the keg back together and now ON TAP, telling ya kegs are the way to go.The more you tear em apart and put them together the easier it is.

 

[homebrewer_99]

16% doesnt sound to bad what it taste like? I've been reading about distilliers yeast and as long as it dont give it a bad taste it could work.

I took some samples to Something's Brew'n (HBS in Galesburg, IL) earlier this afternoon. It was the first bottled emptied. It is actually very smooth with very little heat on the end.

 

[miloa]

When you made it , did you kill the wild yeast before you started,and did you add all the sugar at once ?

 

[miloa]

The last few days i've been wondering if brewing big was such a great idea,most of the guys on this website think i'm nuts for trying to take my apple wine (guess its not hard cider after 10%) as strong as i was trying to do. I went to a wine website from Washington and i corrected a few problems i had and everything is going nicely now,my blueberry cider i made a 1118 starter yeast, added zest from 2 lemons and juice and it is now brewing like crazy,the Big cider in raised the temp to 75 and added high gravity yeast (WLP099) and it is now going strong. I'm thinking of adding lemons to this also but will wait till it slows down a little. All in all i'm happy with the way they are brewing right now but it will take a while to find out how what the end product will be. Keep you posted.

 

[NoRoom4Error]

Miloa -- so how did your BIG cider turn out? (if you can remember)