How can I make it sweeter?

[Tieme]

Hey everyone. First shot at making cider here. I don't have the recipe we used it but was something like 4 gallons of cider and 2 lbs of brown sugar. The yeast we used wasn't quite what we needed since we don't have a local shop and decided to use what we had. We used a wine yeast in hopes that it would be close but it ended up being far too dry. Right now we are waiting to bottle because we want it to be much sweeter. I had heard there was a certain sugar that yeast won't metabolize but I can't remember what it is. I thought maybe corn syrup. Is that correct? How can I make this sweeter but we still want to bottle and sparkle it. Any ideas? Thanks in advance.

John

 

[RICLARK]

You cant make it any sweeter, My advice is to just bottle it and Drink it and use a diffrent yeast next time like a English Ale or Mead yeast, I normally use Pasteur Champagne yeast and it makes my cider quite sour, but I noticed it isn't Quite as sour if it is aged for a bit.

 

[Hell Brew]

You could back sweeten with splenda or lactose. Neither are fermentable. Good Luck

 

[c.n.budz]

I use 4oz of lactose at bottling/kegging per 5 gallon batch and it sweetens nicely. Use more or less depending on how sweet you like it

 

[Yooper]

Lactose would also be my first choice. Sweeten it a little at a time, until you like it. Then you can prime and bottle it to carbonate.

 

[RICLARK]

Dont put Lactose in the whole batch if you dont know if your Intollerant, but if it doesn't bother you than it will be fine.

 

[Tieme]

Wow thanks for the responses everyone. I had thought there was some other more common household sugar that was unfermentable but I guess not. After I used the search term unfermentable I got all the results on google that I wanted.

We ended up putting in some more sugar for now to get a higher alcohol content since that also was lower than we wanted. I went ahead and tasted it to check the falvor and even though it was sweeter now like I wanted, it was terrible tasting still. It was too dry for me before but there was also another bad taste that I didn't figure out because I thought it was just because it was so dry.

It was a foul bitter background/after taste. We never used campden (sp?) tablets because we have always made stuff without them and never noticed a real detriment to the taste. Do you think this could be the cause? Wild yeast? I used real, fresh apple cider with no preservatives, unpasteurized.

What do you guys thing the cause of that was? The yeast was not fully settled do you think that could be it? When we make wine and beer I have never noticed yeast in it giving it a bad flavor. Maybe a little strange but nothing like what I experienced in this cider.

But yeah, any ideas on what it could have been? We ended up dumping the batch because it wasn't even drinkable.

John


EDIT: Going to go ahead and move this new question to a new thread.

 

[1fastdoc]

Adding more sugar to increase the alcohol content will also increase the dryness.

I debated between lactose and splenda with the last batch I made and went with the splenda. It adds a bit of a wierd taste that is tolerable but I won't be using it again.

A friend of mine used a fresh apple cider as the base for his hard cider and it tasted absolutely awful for months. Around the 4 month mark it was tolerable and by 6 months it was actually kind of good.