Miked berry cider

[Marches2]

Hey guys

I'm looking at doing a batch of mixed berry cider once the blackberry and wild strawberry comes out.

I'm planning to you 5l of apples juice and 5l of pressed mixed berry juice.

However somebody mentioned I should use the unpressed berries to flavour the batch in secondary fermentation as the juice of berries may ferment differently and not have much flavour.

Has anyone had any experience with this?

Thanks

 

[Longbear]

If you ferment berry juice you will be left with something that is not entirely reminiscent of the juice from whence it came.

If you add the juice in the secondary after racking, or add berries in secondary after racking, or backsweeten with berry juice you will retain a lot more of the flavors.

 

[bkboiler]

Id try to research which yeasts leave the most flavor intact...
For instance nottingham does well for this...
But d43 and ec1118 strip a lot of flavor as far as im aware...

 

[Chalkyt]

My experience with berries/fruit is that adding them to secondary fermentation works well. For Cherry Cider I add 500g of cherries and juice (frozen and pitted) to 4+ litres of normally fermented cider when I transfer it to secondary at around 1.020 (the cherries top up top up the 5 litre secondary carboy). After about a month it is bottled at 1.005 or so, to result in a petillant carbonated cider with good cherry back notes (i.e. as Longbear suggests, the cherry flavour hasn't been stripped out). In fact it won at the regional rural show in 2018 scoring 48/50.

I haven't made it for a year or so but next time I will probably increase the amount of cherries.

 

[Marches2]

If you ferment berry juice you will be left with something that is not entirely reminiscent of the juice from whence it came.

If you add the juice in the secondary after racking, or add berries in secondary after racking, or backsweeten with berry juice you will retain a lot more of the flavors.

OK thanks for that, and what about a ratio of say 3:1 apple/Berry juice for fermentation then adding extra berries to secondary.

Any ideas what weight of berries per gallon of juice?

 

[Marches2]

Id try to research which yeasts leave the most flavor intact...
For instance nottingham does well for this...
But d43 and ec1118 strip a lot of flavor as far as im aware...

I was actually planning to stick with the wild yeast of I can