That sounds good, with Nottingham the final gravity must be higher. Do you find that you need to sweeten it when it's fermented out? Would you mind telling me your malt free recipe?
Thanks
The final gravity still gets pretty low with Nottingham. I just looked over my brew log and all my variations of this recipe finish in the area of .995 That's a little above what Lalvin estimates, but not much.
I definitely back sweeten with Nottingham--it still needs it.
My recipe is really simple and I'm happy to share it. It came about from browsing the frozen juice section thinking "I wonder if I could ferment that?". I opted for blueberry / pomegranate juice and apple / cherry juice. Here's my one gallon recipe (simply the original recipe, minus DME, with extra sugar and juice concentrate).
2 cans of frozen concentrate
1/2 lb of sugar (I used 2 oz corn sugar and 6 oz table sugar--although I'm not sure why I did that)
1/2 package Nottingham
Bring 6 cups (see notes below) of water to a boil, stir in the sugar until it's dissolved, mix with the frozen concentrate, top off with water, make sure your juice mixture is at the right temperature and pitch the yeast. It's really simple.
I usually take really good notes, but on these experimental batches I missed a few things....One is that I don't know how much water I brought to a boil. I usually scale things exactly from recipes I've already done--assuming that's that's the case I would have boiled 5 1/2 - 6 cups of water. All this really affects is getting the juice mixture to the right temperature to pitch the yeast. There is a magical combination of boiling sugar water, frozen concentrate, and room temperature water that gets you to the proper pitching temperature--I just don't have that information...so you'll have to either warm or cool the mixture as needed to get it to pitching temperature. (For what it's worth, I re-hydrate Nottingham before I pitch it)
I waited 27 days before I bottled it and then back sweetened with:
1/2 can concentrate
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup water
It tasted really good, but it actually tasted best when I sampled it 7 days in (and it was already at 7% ABV at this point). What I am going to try on my next batch is to start sampling it at 5 days into fermentation. I'll sample daily until it's to my taste liking and at an ABV i like. Then I'll just kill the yeast at this point. No back sweetening.
Well I've been drinking and typing for a while now, so I apologize if this is confusing. It makes sense to me right now, but I'll double check it tomorrow to make sure it actually makes sense
I corrected to the fact I only used half a lb of lme. If you go read the cider forum they talk about off flavors from sorbate a few times. Seems with the dissipation if you even get the flavor to begin with you just condition it a week and ita gone
