Has anyone ever tried Stopping the carbonation of their cider by heating in oven

[eegopa]

Stopping the carbination of their cider by heating your bottled cider in the oven? I have always done the stove top method put forth by this forum about 3 days after bottling which has always worked but can be time consuming.

If the temperature at which yeast die is roughly 140f why cant you just shove all the bottles in the oven and crank it up to 200 degrees for a period of time? I understand water is a better conducter of heat and that you may have to oven heat the bottles for a longer period of time to get the same effect. I am just wondering if anyone here has tried this. I am thinking of experimenting with a few bottles but would appreciate any advice about a temp/time combo that has worked for others.

 

[phendog]

Perhaps not what you are looking for, but if you want to stop the yeast/fermentation/carbonation, why not just put the bottles in the fridge. I know some Champaign yeast will still continue to ferment at very low temps, but if anything else I think you may be ok. There are chemical methods of doing the same thing, like Campden,... AND the oven thing sounds like a hassle - plus,.. not sure how the high temp would impact the flavor.

 

[ericbw]

They're talking about stopping it completely - pasteurization. The fridge will cut it way down, but heat kills it.

You'd need to. Measure the internal temp (one open bottle) to be sure when it hits the temp. And prob let it cool in the oven before removing to the cold air.

 

[eegopa]

Ive been using ec-1118 which is a champagne yeast and made the mistake once of trying to crash cool....it was the only time I have had bottles explode when opening them and lost the entire batch. Appearantly the coldest setting on our dedicated beer fridge was not enough!

I am going to run a few experiment bottles at 200f for 1 hr and let cool in the oven over night. I will report back my findings with time.

 

[EagleScout]

I would think it depends on what the lowest temp your oven can do. Stove top pasteurizing calls for 190f for 10 minutes so in theory if you can set your oven close to that temp it should work.

 

[Yooper]

I've seen people do that in the dishwasher, in the 'sanitize' setting, but I'm not sure about the oven. It might take a really long time for the liquid inside the bottles to reach oven temperature, and the bottles would have to cool in the oven (to avoid temperature shock) so I don't think there would be any time savings at all.

 

[bernardsmith]

Sounds to me that cooking cider is a wonderful way of damaging the taste of the cider and risking exploding bottles so perhaps pasteurization is the preferred method of brewers rather than folk who consider themselves wine makers, after all brewers like heat.
But rather than apply heat to kill yeast why not apply cold to put yeast into an inactive stage during which they will fall out of suspension. You then rack the cider off the flocculated yeast and repeat that process several times over several weeks. If you cold crash near freezing temperatures and hold those temperatures for two or three weeks - repeating this procedure two or three times I think that you will have racked off just about every yeast cell in the cider without cooking the wine or subjecting yourself to flying shards of glass.

 

[ericbw]

Sounds to me that cooking cider is a wonderful way of damaging the taste of the cider and risking exploding bottles so perhaps pasteurization is the preferred method of brewers rather than folk who consider themselves wine makers, after all brewers like heat.
But rather than apply heat to kill yeast why not apply cold to put yeast into an inactive stage during which they will fall out of suspension. You then rack the cider off the flocculated yeast and repeat that process several times over several weeks. If you cold crash near freezing temperatures and hold those temperatures for two or three weeks - repeating this procedure two or three times I think that you will have racked off just about every yeast cell in the cider without cooking the wine or subjecting yourself to flying shards of glass.

Pasteurizing is not exactly cooking. The juice that many (most) of us use is probably pasteurized. Unless it's UV pasteurized, that means that it's heated to the right temperature to kill the yeast and bacteria in it.

Crashing and racking will force the yeast to the bottom, and eventually you'll have bone dry, clear cider that you can bottle, but it will be still, not sparkling.

Here, we are (I think) talking about sparkling cider, which can't be made in the bottle if the yeast has already dropped out. To make sweet, sparking cider in the bottle, you need sugar for the sweetness, and yeast for the carbonation. You then have to kill the yeast after carbonating. (Yes, you can simply refrigerate and hope to drink it before it starts fermenting again, but that's risky.)

So the best solution is to ferment to the taste you want (or ferment dry and backsweeten), then bottle carbonate, then pasteurize the bottles.

No one seems to have any evidence of ruining the flavor of the cider by pasteurizing it.

 

[ericbw]

Pasteurization is based on temperature AND time. There is high heat/short time or low heat/longer time. It will work at 145 for 30 minutes, for example. Or it will work in 15 seconds at 161. At boiling, it is almost instant.

But most of us will take some time getting to temp, and boiling takes the longest, which will damage the cider. So the "best practice" seems to split the difference. Raise the temp to 160 and hold for 30 seconds. Then let it cool. It's spent enough time over 145 as it heats and cools to kill stuff.

(Technically, you could heat to 161 and hold for 15 seconds.)

But remember that this is the temperature of the liquid in the bottles. So you need to leave an open bottle filled with cider (water is probably close enough) in the pot with the others, and monitor the temp in that open bottle.

I know there are instructions/a sticky here that says heat to 190 and hold 10 minutes, and in all likelihood, that will do the trick and it's simpler to do.

To make a shelf stable sparkling sweet cider, you have to either do it like this OR filter the fermented cider with a "sterile" filter (I think that's less than .5 microns) and then force carbonate.

You COULD check the cider as it ferments, and when it gets to your liking (still a little sweet), bottle it, wait a couple of days (or use a separate plastic bottle to monitor carbonation), then pasteurize. This seems like it adds an extra step of trickiness rather than backsweetening.