Man, I love Apfelwein

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EdWort said:
Drink a quart of water and take 3 aspirin before going to sleep tol help reduce the effects of excessive Apfelwein consumption as well as the urge to call EdWort a M'F**kR the next morning![/B] :D
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This stuff is amazing.....
 
Denny's Evil Concoctions said:
"Ed's Pantystripper - for those that don't have an F'ing clue how to mix Gin"

Available in quart and demijohn.
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And now in handy 750ml bottles...
IMG_0021.JPG
 
Ed, I am drinking my first batch. Guuuuuuuuud stuff.

Now I see why so many folks make it. It tastes a little like riesling to me.
 
EdWort said:
Looking good!!!! Nice stash! Now let them age till about 8+ months old before drinking or giving as gifts.
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AHA... AHAHAHAHA.... HAHAHAHAHAHHAHHA..... AHHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAAHAHHA

Stop it Ed, you are going to make me piss myself..... HAHAHAHAHAHHA

"Let it age 8+months" He says.


HAHAHAHAHAHAAHHAHA


Like this stuff lasts 8 DAYS in my house, much less 8 weeks or 8 MONTHS!!


AHAHAHAHAAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHHAHHA

Ow! I'm hurting.....

Ren_Hoek_by_YaiChan-755888.jpg
 
AHA... AHAHAHAHA.... HAHAHAHAHAHHAHHA..... AHHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAAHAHHA

Stop it Ed, you are going to make me piss myself..... HAHAHAHAHAHHA

"Let it age 8+months" He says.


HAHAHAHAHAHAAHHAHA


Like this stuff lasts 8 DAYS in my house, much less 8 weeks or 8 MONTHS!!


AHAHAHAHAAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHHAHHA

Ow! I'm hurting.....
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Only way your gonna age that stuff is if you get deployed like me!
 
PeteOz77 said:
Stop it Ed, you are going to make me piss myself..... HAHAHAHAHAHHA

"Let it age 8+months" He says.
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Yes, grasshopper, the goal does seen so outlandish that it can make one wet himself profusely, BUT it can be achieved if you build up a 30 gallon stockpile and put some away just to see the difference. It is a worthy goal and the rewards are great!
 
I recently finished and bottled my first batch of apfelwein made almost exactly to the recipe in this thread with sucrose and lalvin dv10 yeast instead. I bottled it and primed it with dextrose and a small amount of lactose and it turned out SOUR. It's not a terribly pleasant sour either. I did at one point siphon by mouth before I was about to get a proper sterile siphon-starter. Is that would could have made it so sour? I am not sure what it is supposed to taste like and it is my first homebrew ever, so I have no idea.
 
DV10 is considered a clean fermenter that respects varietal character and avoids bitter sensory contributions of other one-dimensional 'workhorse' strains such as Prise de Mousse. It is classified as a Saccharomyces cerevisiae bayanus."


I dont think the Sucros was the culprit. How long has it been fermenting? What temp? It may just be too early
 
It fermented about 6 weeks total and has been in the bottles about 3. Most likely too soon to really tell what it should taste like but it has a long way to go before I'd consider it "good". I did not have a thermometer on the carboy itself but the room it was kept in was about 65 degrees for most of the fermentation, maybe as much as 70 at times.
 
I did drink it cold and it was much better that way, warm it was pretty much undrinkable. Also a strange thing happened when I put a bottle in the freezer and then took it back out and put it in the refrigerator. The sour taste was more powerful than even when warm. Not sure how to explain that.
 
MikeFlynn74 said:
hrmm... what kind of Juice did you use?

Also did you ever check the gravity?
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I used TreeTop apple juice. Pasteurized and came in big 1 gallon plastic jugs. I took gravity reading up until the point where it stopped changing for a week.. It started at 1.076 and quickly went down to about 0.992 where it stayed for another week and a half and I stopped measuring it.
 
I started a coupla experimental microbatches; two 1/2gal jugs with varying amounts of organic cranberry juice in there with the treetop. I rehydrated the montrachet in 95F canned/sterile tap water mainly because I wanted to be able to measure/pour off the yeast for the smaller batches.

batch[4] = 1/3 Whole Foods cranberry, 2/3 treetop apple on the left in the pic
batch[5] = 1/4 Whole Foods cranberry, 3/4 treetop apple

In both cases I pitched about 20% of the yeast slurry volume. This would be a 2.5x overpitch, but I figured the cranberry acidity would hamper things. And what the hell, it's an experiment and I'd been drinking.

the 1/4 cranberry was airlock bubbling by the next morning, while the 1/3 showed the slightest bubbles in the jar. By today (2nd morning) it is up to full speed with the other batch.

I also wanted to do 1/2 and 1/5 crannberry, but ran out of jugs. Just bought a half dozen off NB and they are on the way. Their presence may inspire me to play with mead or something.
 
Richard said:
Can anyone recommend me something to buy that tastes decent and has bottles that work well for Apfelwein?
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BEER

Any flip off bottles will work. Some use twisty's, but I personally avoid them. I bottle the A-wine in 22oz'ers.
 
Richard said:
Can anyone recommend me something to buy that tastes decent and has bottles that work well for Apfelwein?
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Buy Tecate or Carta Blanca in the 32 oz. bottles. Don't for get the lime.

They make for easy bottling.
 
Hello! I've read most of this thread and followed the directions perfectly. However, I am coming up on four weeks and I swirled the fermenter the other day to try and get the yeast to start working again. My problem was when I did this my fermenter bubbled quite a bit. I decided to take a sample, and it tastes great with still a bit of sweetness. My concern is that the sample was slightly carbonated. Is this normal, or does anyone know why this would happen? Thanks!!
 
terrapin421 said:
Hello! I've read most of this thread and followed the directions perfectly. However, I am coming up on four weeks and I swirled the fermenter the other day to try and get the yeast to start working again. My problem was when I did this my fermenter bubbled quite a bit. I decided to take a sample, and it tastes great with still a bit of sweetness. My concern is that the sample was slightly carbonated. Is this normal, or does anyone know why this would happen? Thanks!!
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What temperature is it fermeting at? Has it dropped clear yet? Swirlling will cause outgassing of the CO2, so that was normal.

Have you taken a hydrometer reading yet?
 
terrapin421 said:
Hello! I've read most of this thread and followed the directions perfectly. However, I am coming up on four weeks and I swirled the fermenter the other day to try and get the yeast to start working again. My problem was when I did this my fermenter bubbled quite a bit. I decided to take a sample, and it tastes great with still a bit of sweetness. My concern is that the sample was slightly carbonated. Is this normal, or does anyone know why this would happen? Thanks!!
Click to expand...
I bottled my first batch in Heineken beer bottles, and I didn't prime at all. I didn't expect it, but I get a small hiss when I open these bottles. It's suspended CO2 from fermentation. This last batch I just bottled I put in wine bottles with regular (Nomacork, anyways) corks, and I wanted to make sure I don't have any corks popping out, so I degassed the AW. It's simple process, really. In my case I used a "Mix Stir" device with a power drill and simply stirred up the AW enough to release the light carbonation, but not enough to get a real whirlpool action going, which would be aerating your wine and oxidizing it, which is undesirable. You could probably do the job just as well with a big sanitized slotted spoon.

The action of stirring up your carboy the other day did the same thing.
 
Hey, anyone know what the deal is with "Low acid" Apple juice?? Allens makes some. It this better or worse for cider and apfelwien?

Also, and significant difference between using pasteurized juice made from concentrate vs regular juice? The juice "made from concentrate" is always really cheap.
 
I made a batch of this following Eds instructions and it is 4 weeks old. It is clearing up very nicely and has slowed down to about one bubble every 30 seconds or so. After it slows down a little bit more I will grab a gravity reading and see how we are doing. If this turns out good I will be experimening with ciders and cysers a lot in the future.
 
Denny's Evil Concoctions said:
Also, and significant difference between using pasteurized juice made from concentrate vs regular juice? The juice "made from concentrate" is always really cheap.
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You could probably think of it like all grain vs. extract. With the pasteurized juices you have a better chance for it to be more fresh and never frozen, but just like extract beers there are some very high quality from concentrate juices.
 
I just finished assembling my first batch of apfelwein, took me less than five minutes.

I'm starting out with a one gallon batch to see how me and the misses like it. I used 1 gallon of Mott's applejuice, 1 cup of packed brown sugar, and 1 packet of montrachet yeast. Removed 4 cups juice from container, boiled 2 cups of the juice and dissolved the brown sugar then poured it back into the jug, shook, added yeast, and topped it off with the remainder 2 cups of juice. Got it setup with one of my homemade airlocks sitting in the bathtub with my other wine and beer. Hydrometer read SG at around 1.065...slightly lower then my other wines, hope this will work.

I'm gonna do a half carb half uncarb batch to see what we prefer; i'm sure we'll end up sticking to the carbed and chilled variety.

Thanks for this great recipe ed.

-mrhead
 
EdWort said:
It gets much better with age. Bottle, Fermentor, keg...All work well.
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What do you think the limit of improvement over time would be? A couple of years? I guess it depends on how long you've been making this stuff.
 
What do you think the limit of improvement over time would be? A couple of years?
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Laws of diminishing returns IMO at 1 yr or greater.

Besides this stuff never makes it longer than 2 months in the Flynn house
 
Well my first 2.5 gallon batch of Apfelwein is coming along well. It went into the Mr. beer fermenter on the 25th of last month and I had a couple of concerns about temperature regulation (it spent over a week outside).

Well I took a hydrometer reading (the hydrometer is located in my belly) last night and I found it was coming along nicely! Not sweet at all any more, no longer fizzy when poured, but still a bit fizzy in the mouth. It has begun to clear up, but in a wine glass you notice it's still translucent.

If nobody told me it was made from apples, I would have assumed it was a light white wine, like a pinot grigio or something. Very good stuff, can't wait to try the final carbed product later!

*edit*

Oh, I was planning on bottling in ~1 liter glass screwcap bottles. At safeway they have the Organics soda in the perfect bottle for this, but they're like 4.50 each and I'm not gonna drink 3 gallons of pomegranate soda. A cheaper alternative would probably be the 32 or 40 ounce ghetto beer bottles (MALT LIQUOR), but I'm concerned that I'll look like a retard buying them and they don't look very classy sitting around either. Can anyone recommend a nice, cheap, glass bottle of around a liter that will hold pressure for this?
 
I've found that there are two good places for me to get bottles cheap, but it may be different in your area.

One, there's a World Market near me. This means lots of hand-blown glassware from around the world, saki setups and stuff like that. They have tons of cool shaped large bottles capable of storing wine in, and it's not too expensive.

Next to that, obviously, is the brewing store in the city centre. Basically, they'll sell around 20 different types of wine and beer bottles, in sets. I'm about to spend $25 on 12 Grolsch style bottles with the EZ-Cap that you can keep putting on and off.
 
So, i promised myself i wouldn't post an 'is something wrong with my apfelwein' but i have to i feel.

I followed the recipe, but didn't get enough dextrose in the mixture (had measuring issues), so my starting gravity didn't seem to be high enough to produce the 8.5 % abv that Ed said i should expect. No really worries there, though.

I made my batch on march 8th, went through my 4 weeks and it was still very cloudy. It has since started to clear, but i don't get a good sense of how clear it should get before it's ready. I took a hydrometer reading sunday and it said 1.002, so no the 'below 0.099' predicted. The temperature in the room where my fermenter lives did fluctuate with the changes in weather we've been having lately, so i know that could be a factor in all this.

When i look at the better bottle i still see bubbles coming out of the solution to the top, but i don't really have any airlock activity anymore. Is that a sign the yeasts are still working? I assume it is since i hadn't hit the final gravity yet.

So, my question is if there is anything wrong, or do i just need to give it more time? I'm going to check my gravity again soon to see if it's moved at all, but i don't know if it's too soon for any real change.

Really, this is mostly about the fact that i need the better bottle for a batch of beer i want to move to secondary.

Thanks for any help you can offer.
 

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