Has anyone made Cider out of Cherries?

[Chalkyt]

It is mid-summer here in Oz and my three cherry trees are awash with well ripened cherries. They need to be picked now!

We have preserved them, frozen them, eaten them, given them away and have run out of ideas.

There are recipes for cherry wine on the internet but I thought I would ask if anyone has made cider from cherries only. Yes, I know it won't really be cider (no apples) but a type of low alcohol cherry wine however I thought I would ask, as the wine recipes all call for added sugar plus water and I wondered if anyone has tried using just juice as we would with cider.

I haven't juiced any to measure SG yet, but some quick research suggests that SG might be in the order of 1.040 - 1.060 and TA anything from 5.3 - 15 or so. i.e. not unlike apples.

I understand that cherries are high in malic acid so maybe cider techniques work. I will probably use EC1118 as I have that on hand (as well as a couple of red wine yeasts that I used for last year's blackberry wine and I will be in Canberra next week where I can get a different yeast if I need to. I had planned on trying DV10 for my next ciders when the apples ripen in about 3 months time).

Fermenting temperature might be a problem as my coolroom is around 18C (65F) in summer (the outside temperature is around 27C (80F) today) and I imagine that at this temperature fermentation will be quick, possibly stripping flavour. By the time we get to mid Autumn (Fall) the coolroom is typically around 10C (50F) so doing cider low and slow isn't such a problem.

Anyhow, I thought I would ask. Any advice on how you did it will be more than welcome. I guess as a fallback I can try cherry wine or maybe freeze some more cherries to add to cider in the future. (the downside is that SWMBO will want a new, bigger freezer!)

 

[madscientist451]

Yes, I've done it with sour cherries. The "cider" came out very tart and didn't taste like cherries at all. I tried adding various cherry flavors on the back end and DID eventually drink it all, but considered the experiment a failure.
I didn't have a press back then, I de-stoned the cherries, which mashed them up a bit, placed them in bucket and then mashed them up some more with a potato masher.
I then placed the cherry pulp in a bag and let it sit in the juice while fermentation was going on. Can't remember the temperature, but it was in the summer here so it was probably in the 70's down in the basement. Can't remember if I added water, but I don't think I did and no sugar, just straight cherry juice. I picked the cherries, did all the processing, it was a lot of work for not very much actual volume. I think a 5 gallon bucket of cherries produced maybe 1.5 gallons of juiced.

One thing you could try: Get both sweet and sour cherries, freeze the sweet ones and ferment the sour cherries until its done. Then stabilize the cherry cider, and use the juice from the frozen sweet cherries to add flavor and sweetness. I haven't tried it myself, but when cherry season comes around here, I might give it a go.
So in my book, cherries are best used as an additive to beer, and can work especially well in a mead. In beer you can use the tartness of the cherries to play against a malt presence, and the acidity seems to meld well with honey in mead.
I've added cherries to secondary in an apple (hard) cider, but I felt the cherry tartness becomes overwhelming so you have to keep it very minimal.

 

[Yooper]

I'd suggest using 71B for the yeast- it metabolizes more malic acid than other strains, so you may find that it comes out really great. I did a sour cherry wine, but it could be done with a lower ABV for sure.

 

[Chalkyt]

Happy New Year! Thanks for the replies.

Mine are all sweet cherries (one is a Stellar and the others are unknown varieties) and I don't have access to any sour cherries.

I have made a cherry liqueur in the past by steeping them in vodka and/or brandy, but this doesn't use a lot of cherries. It works quite well especially if the pips are left in, with the cherries cut open to give the pips exposure to the alcohol. You get a subtle slightly bitter "almond" back taste especially after it has matured for a while, so I suspect that leaving pips in a cider should be avoided as you suggest.

Now that I know someone has tried cherry cider with at least questionable success, I will probably go down the cherry wine path with the bulk of the fruit but with an experimental 2 litre (1/2 gallon) cherry cider batch using 71B to dryness, then sugar or cherry juice to taste and stove top pasteurisation or campden to kill the yeast and preserve any sweetness. Wish me luck!

 

[MarkKF]

Are we talking just cherry juice and no apple juice?

 

[Chalkyt]

Yes, cherry juice only (but I could bring store-bought apple juice into the equation). I have a surplus of cherries which are really ripe due to the summer heat, but apples are still a few months away. Just looking for something "ïnteresting" to do with the cherries. They are just about at the over-ripe stage so we are picking and freezing pending figuring out what to do with them... we have eaten, preserved, stewed, cooked, given away all that we can.

I probably still have about 10 pounds to pick but they will take up more freezer space than we have left.

 

[Owly055]

Yes, cherry juice only (but I could bring store-bought apple juice into the equation). I have a surplus of cherries which are really ripe due to the summer heat, but apples are still a few months away. Just looking for something "ïnteresting" to do with the cherries. They are just about at the over-ripe stage so we are picking and freezing pending figuring out what to do with them... we have eaten, preserved, stewed, cooked, given away all that we can.

I probably still have about 10 pounds to pick but they will take up more freezer space than we have left.

When I was 12 years old, my buddy and I made wine from Bing Cherries...... secretly. We obtained wine yeast and cambden tablets, and used sparkloid to clarify it. We even had a hydrometer, and we did it all "sub rosa". As I recall, it was drinkable, and "whoop ass" strong, but nothing to brag on. We both lived in "teetotal" households, and nobody ever caught us. We weren't supervised very closely, and both lived in basement rooms we could access without going through the house. I remember getting S__t faced on the stuff and laying on the lawn looking at the constellations and inventing new ones, while laughing uproariously. Most outrageously, I repeatedly shot out the street light with 22 bird shot in the middle of the night so we could see the stars. The city finally gave up on the light and took it down. Young and a bit crazy............ our exploits were the stuff of local legend, and we never got caught at anything. We loved to antagonize the cops and get them to chase us on foot into the acres of blackberry vines that grew wild for example..... the crashing and thrashing and cursing were priceless. We also made any gallons of blackberry wine.

The Jewish drink Vishnek (spelling), (Ashkenazic I think) involves soaking cherries in vodka and sugar. The liquid turns pale red, and the cherries turn extremely pale internally. The result is interesting, and it seems that the vodka gravitates to the flesh of the cherries, making them extremely strong. Not quite like the "cherry bombs" that a local bar used to serve, but I guarandamntee that you won't eat many at a sitting ;-)

H.W.

 

[GeneDaniels1963]

I make a low ABV wine/cider from berries. It sounds like about the same as what you want to do with the cherries. Should work fine. I can give you my recipe if you like

 

[Chalkyt]

Thanks Gene
I would like to see your recipe. I have found quite a few recipes on the web for cherry wine (Jack Keller, Kraus, Drinxville, etc). They all seem to be much the same with 6 lbs of fruit per gallon, crush the fruit, add water and 2+lbs of sugar and some citric acid (boil or campden to sanitise and kill wild yeast), then add yeast and into primary for a week or so, then into secondary until down to FG 1.000 and bottle.

Except for the water and sugar it sounds just like making cider although I don't know how many cherries I would need to get a gallon of juice (my apples run to something like 100 apples per gallon of juice). Despite that, I was wondering if just straight cherry juice would work. The added sugar for the wine recipes seems to be there just to push the OG up to 1.100 or so for a 12%+ ABV beverage... quite a bit stronger than a nice sipping cider.

Just to experiment I am even thinking about splitting whatever I do into still and carbonated. The main show-stopper seems to be pitting four squillion cherries to avoid the almond taste from the pits.

I plan to pit and crush some cherries tomorrow to see how much juice I end up with and how long it takes to get it. That might well make up my mind for me.

 

[Chalkyt]

Re the Vishnek. In order to use up some cherries I made some Visinata a couple of years ago (I think it is Polish) which sounds more or less the same... Cherries covered in sugar until the liquid leaches out and dissolves the sugar then starts to ferment and is finished by macerating in vodka... blows your head off if left for a few months, especially the fruit with ice cream. It certainly isn't cider!!!

 

[ong]

Re: pitting, I’ve had good luck just whizzing a bunch of cherries in the blender until they’re mostly broken down into pulp. I don’t try to liquify them, and it’s just a cheap old blender, not one of the crazy new powerful ones. The stones remain intact for me after pulsing them for 30-40 seconds, and I can proceed with winemaking.

 

[Northern_Brewer]

The Jewish drink Vishnek (spelling), (Ashkenazic I think) involves soaking cherries in vodka and sugar. The liquid turns pale red, and the cherries turn extremely pale internally. The result is interesting, and it seems that the vodka gravitates to the flesh of the cherries, making them extremely strong. Not quite like the "cherry bombs" that a local bar used to serve, but I guarandamntee that you won't eat many at a sitting ;-)

There's all sorts of variations on that theme across Northern Europe. The German Rumtopf involves layering summer fruit as they become available, in a special pot which is topped up with rum. You then eat the mixture as a dessert (or with icecream) at Christmas. The British emphasise the liquid aspect in things like sloe or damson gin, where you rack off the infused spirit and it's drunk as a "winter warmer" when outdoors in winter. But you can also use the leftover fruit for chutneys and the like. A company called Pinkster make a raspberry gin, and selling the leftover "boozy raspberries" is a significant income stream for them.

 

[Chalkyt]

A bit of an update...

A two litre (roughly half a gallon) trial batch is under way. The first lesson is that nobody makes pure cherry cider because the juice yield is quite low so it takes forever to get any. You get lots of pulp but not much juice. Whereas pommace will yield 50-60% juice, two litres of mashed cherries drain to about 200ml of quite thick juice (probably twice that if the mash is squeezed through a filtering bag i.e. only about 10-20% yield at best). To get something workable you have to add water.

And... pitting cherries isn't as much fun as grinding apples!

So, the fallback is to follow the Keller/Kraus cherry wine trail. The mash plus juice plus water plus sugar plus citric acid has resulted in an OG of 1.090. The rest of the process will be the same as making cider so I don't know if I will end up with a strong cider or a medium alcohol wine. Sorry, I don't know the PH etc because I don't have anything to measure it with (it is coming), so for this one it is monkey see-monkey do just following Dr Googles various advice.

I added half a campden tablet and some petinase. I am going off on a tangent and will add VR21 yeast which is supposed to preserve fruit flavours (because I have it) after 24 hours. This is all a bit experimental so it might end up great or horrible... who knows?

The taste of the must is O.K. but a bit thinner than AJ. So, maybe on another occasion about half the water and sugar might result in something that is a bit like apple juice and hence cider at around OG 1.050-1.070. We'll see!

 

[NosArtur]

Freezing the fruit might result in a bit more juice extraction since most of the fruit would self macerate. Letting it sit on some sugar for a couple of hours would then get just about all of it out. Of course some water would still need to be added more than likely.

 

[daft]

Getting back to using up surplus cherries, instead of forcing a round peg into a square hole you could start with conventional easy-to-make cider and pour it over frozen,de-stoned cherries. If the alcohol level is low and the freeze is deep, the cherries will pick up a soft coating of cider. Stir it a bit and it will form a dreamy soft sorbet, where the sumptuous antifreeze quality is formed mostly by alcohol rather than sugar overload.

Alcohol is not unheard of for sorbet softening, but your typical apple cider may overdo the softness. I have been cheating by also adding applesauce which gets stiff in the cold. I used to use only frozen blueberries (and crangrape cider) , but now use frozen mixed berries which come spiked with cherries during the season. It is a fantastic combo, since cherries alone are kind of one-note but play off other things great (and freezing then half thaw seems to bring out more flavor than fresh).

 

[Chalkyt]

Thanks for your suggestions. We do indeed have several kilograms of pitted frozen cherries (in 1/2 kilogram or 1 lb packs) which SWMBO uses to make jams throughout the year. The rest have been preserved or stewed and frozen ( great on your morning corn flakes!)

We finished picking yesterday in 35C (95F) heat... a bit of a change from the -10C we can get here in the mountains in winter. The cherries are very ripe and have gone straight into the freezer.

The first trial batch mentioned above is bubbling away nicely but might end up fairly high ABV, so I am thinking of thawing and mashing one of the frozen packages with some added water (but no added sugar) to get around a 1.050 juice, then going down the cider track with bottle carbonating... just for fun. This will be a "suck it and see" exercise as I don't really know what the sugar content of the cherry juice really is as it is too thick for a hydrometer to work properly.

I guess that ultimately when the apples ripen in a few months time I will look at a batch of apple cider with added cherries.

 

[Kerryon]

I've made two batches of 2 gallon each of Cherry-Apple cider. The cherries were a mix of Bing and sour. For my first batch I suspended about 10 lbs of pitted, mashed, fresh cherries in the primary with apple juice, but found most of the cherry flavor disappeared with the fermentation. So I killed the yeast, back sweetened with cherry juice concentrate (which I made myself) and forced carbed it. Turned out very nice and you could taste and smell a nice bit of cherry.

Second batch I skipped adding the cherries to the primary and just used apples. I then added my homemade cherry juice concentrate after. For this batch I bottle carbonated it so I added more of the concentrate to bring the FG up high enough to get the carbonation and have a bit of residual sweetness (I cold crashed it once it got to the carb level I wanted). Still turned out with a nice cherry flavor. The plus of the second method is not wasting those valuable cherries on the primary fermentation where very little cherry flavor remained after fermentation.

 

[gunhaus]

I have for many years made an apple cherry blend we call Cherry Darling. Being near Traverse City in Cherry country myself, I have messed with this a bit. We have used apple juice as the liquid to help "cider" the sweet cherries. (This was on the advice of an outfit we used to buy cherry cider from in TC.) the straight "cherry cider" made this way was quite pungent and very tasty, but I never quite liked the hard cider it made. We are at about a 20% ratio of cherry cider to apple juice in what we do now. FWIW

 

[bmd2k1]

Without access to a harvest of fresh cherries....I've enjoyed 100% tart cherries in some of my ciders by using concentrate from Brownwood Acres near TC...so far I've been using an ounce/gal in secondaries...

 

[MarkKF]

I used to add cherries to the primary then backsweetened with more cherry juice. Now I add cherries to the secondary and backsweeten with more cherry juice. Next year I’m switching to concentrate.

 

[Jako]

i made one with tart cherries from costco. turned out good but it was my first one so i learned tons and cant wait to make another.