homebrew/cider noob recipes!

revkev6 · Sep 20, 2013

my plan is to use the 5 day country cider recipe which stops the fermentation early for natural sweetness. I will rack it when it hits about 1.03 then bottle it right away. bottles will be plastic soda bottles. when they feel hard (carbonated) I am going to cold crash them in the fridge. they will stay there until I drink them. that is the great thing about only doing gallon batches, they fit in the fridge. expect about 5% abv on this one.

I have heard cold crashing is extremely hard with wine/champagne yeasts though. I have nottingham going for the sweet cider and ec-1118 for a harder fully fermented cider that I will let go all the way. this should be a full 10.5% when done. I will probably back sweeten non fermentables to the wife's taste then prime and bottle.

I don't have a capper so no glass bottles yet for me. means I cannot pasteurize to kill the yeast after bottling.

Snow4phil · Sep 20, 2013

That sounds like a good plan. Seems like I had this'll worked out in my head but once I started it was like, what page had that info again. I hope it turns out well.

Snow4phil · Sep 20, 2013

I think why I keep confusing myself with the over carbonating concern and pasteurizing the cider, is I don't see that having to be done with Beer, which I am starting as well.

revkev6 · Sep 21, 2013

well, I checked my 5 day country cider SG this morning and it had hit 1.025.. I was aiming for 1.03. so it took from tuesday night to sat. morning to get from 1.072 down to 1.025..

here's the problem.. it tastes like butt. I pulled a sample and it is super tart like biting a crab apple. the cider that I started with was pretty tart to begin with... it also smells super yeasty.. kind of funky. I tried to sweeten it with stevia and it tastes sweet and tart.. but still not good lol. I decided not to sweeten the batch it and bottled. it has been carbing up for 2.5 hours now and I think I will cold crash it within another hour or so... the soda bottles are getting pretty firm already.

so here's the question. will the flavor change during bottling in the fridge?? if this is the way the batch will taste I'm probably going to end up just pulling it back out of the fridge and let it ferment out more to see what changes.

ericbw · Sep 21, 2013

revkev6 said:
well, I checked my 5 day country cider SG this morning and it had hit 1.025.. I was aiming for 1.03. so it took from tuesday night to sat. morning to get from 1.072 down to 1.025..

here's the problem.. it tastes like butt. I pulled a sample and it is super tart like biting a crab apple. the cider that I started with was pretty tart to begin with... it also smells super yeasty.. kind of funky. I tried to sweeten it with stevia and it tastes sweet and tart.. but still not good lol. I decided not to sweeten the batch it and bottled. it has been carbing up for 2.5 hours now and I think I will cold crash it within another hour or so... the soda bottles are getting pretty firm already.

so here's the question. will the flavor change during bottling in the fridge?? if this is the way the batch will taste I'm probably going to end up just pulling it back out of the fridge and let it ferment out more to see what changes.

we had a batch that was dark brown and really bad last year, left it for a year, and it's super clear yellow, and it tastes just "not good." But it was horrible going into the bottles, so thats An improvement! That took a year.

revkev6 · Sep 23, 2013

well, I checked my second batch which I had intended to be edwort's apple wine recipe. it was at 1.021 and tasted delicious! almost no yeast smell, could still taste the apple and it was a little tart! best part was it was all the way up to 10.78% abv. I bottled it up! plan to make another batch of that for sure, maybe even try bumping the SG up a bit more and hitting 12%. I used EC-1118 and white table sugar in this batch as opposed to the nottingham and brown sugar in the batch that tasted horrible.

extremely happy with this and plan to make a bigger batch for my halloween party this year!