Ahoy!
We have an 18 acre apple orchard in North Carolina. We currently grow about 180 different heirloom varieties, with an emphasis on regional and hard cider cultivars. We have made hard cider recreationally for years and favor English farmhouse styles. Recently, I became interested in using one of our orchard products to create a graf.
Over the years, we have had interest from breweries in using our apples to create an apple beer. As I understand it, however, the regulatory lines between cider, wine, beer, etc. can be difficult to straddle for businesses, and it's not quite so simple for an existing brewery to simply cross the line from beer into cider territory. Once you introduce cut fruit, higher alcohol content, etc., there's a lot more to consider, and for a brewery just wanting to create a seasonal apple brew, it may not be worth going through the regulatory hoops.
At our orchard, we make something called apple cider syrup. Similar to the way one might make maple syrup or sorghum syrup (aka molasses), we start with a naturally sweet juice, in this case, fresh apple cider, and boil it down for hours until it is reduced by about 10 times and has reached syrup status. We don't add sugar or anything else to sweeten the syrup; it's just apple cider, boiled down. This is actually an old traditional product, and I've heard some people call it apple molasses. This past fall I got to wondering about the feasibility of making beer from it, as a way for breweries to create apple beer from apples, but without regulatory hassle and reliance on artificial flavor. Being a complete brewing novice, I started by looking up recipes for "molasses beer."
I used the simplest recipe I could find, subbing cider syrup in for so-called molasses (some folks mean sorghum syrup, and others, proper sugarcane-derived molasses). This was very basic, utilitarian stuff: cider syrup, corn sugar, Pilsen Light concentrated brewer's wort, yeast, and not much else. My goal was simply to see how the flavor of the cider syrup translated into a beer, and in that department I was rewarded. Cider syrup is sweet-tart to taste, and very tangy, with a distinct caramelized apple flavor. Even when we add hot water back to a few spoonfuls to make a mug of something like instant hot cider, it tastes very different from sweet cider. So I was shocked at the wonderful fresh apple taste that came through in my beer -- it tasted as if I had reconstituted sweet cider back from a concentrate, which is essentially what the syrup is, after all. I also loved the color -- dark brown with reddish tones. But unsurprisingly, my graf was lacking in just about every other department, particularly with regard to head and bitterness. I did end up setting up half the batch to coferment with some redfleshed cider apple pomace before bottling, hoping to enhance the reddish tones, as well as add in some tannic qualities. Results of the pomace coferment were ho-hum, but definitely pushed the flavor in new directions. But overall, the results of my molasses beer experiment were very encouraging.
In researching grafs in general, I came upon this forum and was delighted to find the pioneering graf recipes generously shared by so many of you. I'm finally getting back around to formulating a proper recipe for an apple cider syrup graf, and decided to join up, since I've learned so much here already. Thank you all for such quality discussion surrounding homebrewing! I no longer think of my apple cider syrup beer as a one-off experiment. I'm also interested in playing around more with our apple pomace, but beyond that, I actually look forward to exploring beer-making for its own sake, and not just the apple potential therein.
Pleased to meet you and to be here,
-Brittany
We have an 18 acre apple orchard in North Carolina. We currently grow about 180 different heirloom varieties, with an emphasis on regional and hard cider cultivars. We have made hard cider recreationally for years and favor English farmhouse styles. Recently, I became interested in using one of our orchard products to create a graf.
Over the years, we have had interest from breweries in using our apples to create an apple beer. As I understand it, however, the regulatory lines between cider, wine, beer, etc. can be difficult to straddle for businesses, and it's not quite so simple for an existing brewery to simply cross the line from beer into cider territory. Once you introduce cut fruit, higher alcohol content, etc., there's a lot more to consider, and for a brewery just wanting to create a seasonal apple brew, it may not be worth going through the regulatory hoops.
At our orchard, we make something called apple cider syrup. Similar to the way one might make maple syrup or sorghum syrup (aka molasses), we start with a naturally sweet juice, in this case, fresh apple cider, and boil it down for hours until it is reduced by about 10 times and has reached syrup status. We don't add sugar or anything else to sweeten the syrup; it's just apple cider, boiled down. This is actually an old traditional product, and I've heard some people call it apple molasses. This past fall I got to wondering about the feasibility of making beer from it, as a way for breweries to create apple beer from apples, but without regulatory hassle and reliance on artificial flavor. Being a complete brewing novice, I started by looking up recipes for "molasses beer."
I used the simplest recipe I could find, subbing cider syrup in for so-called molasses (some folks mean sorghum syrup, and others, proper sugarcane-derived molasses). This was very basic, utilitarian stuff: cider syrup, corn sugar, Pilsen Light concentrated brewer's wort, yeast, and not much else. My goal was simply to see how the flavor of the cider syrup translated into a beer, and in that department I was rewarded. Cider syrup is sweet-tart to taste, and very tangy, with a distinct caramelized apple flavor. Even when we add hot water back to a few spoonfuls to make a mug of something like instant hot cider, it tastes very different from sweet cider. So I was shocked at the wonderful fresh apple taste that came through in my beer -- it tasted as if I had reconstituted sweet cider back from a concentrate, which is essentially what the syrup is, after all. I also loved the color -- dark brown with reddish tones. But unsurprisingly, my graf was lacking in just about every other department, particularly with regard to head and bitterness. I did end up setting up half the batch to coferment with some redfleshed cider apple pomace before bottling, hoping to enhance the reddish tones, as well as add in some tannic qualities. Results of the pomace coferment were ho-hum, but definitely pushed the flavor in new directions. But overall, the results of my molasses beer experiment were very encouraging.
In researching grafs in general, I came upon this forum and was delighted to find the pioneering graf recipes generously shared by so many of you. I'm finally getting back around to formulating a proper recipe for an apple cider syrup graf, and decided to join up, since I've learned so much here already. Thank you all for such quality discussion surrounding homebrewing! I no longer think of my apple cider syrup beer as a one-off experiment. I'm also interested in playing around more with our apple pomace, but beyond that, I actually look forward to exploring beer-making for its own sake, and not just the apple potential therein.
Pleased to meet you and to be here,
-Brittany
