Regarding the chemistry of aging cider

[hroth521]

I've read numerous ideas on this forum regarding aging ciders. Opinions range from racking off the lees after 2 weeks and aging in carboys for 6months (or longer) to simply racking off the lees into carboys and immediately bottling. Almost uniformly everyone agrees that aging cider is a good thing but there is no consistency in what "aging" means. My question is this: does anyone know the chemistry of aging? What happens when cider ages to make it taste better. And as corollaries, does it make a difference whether the cider is aged in bottles or "bulk" aged in a carboy? If so, why?

I've got my first batch of apflewein that I primed and bottled after 2 week primary and 2 week secondary fermentation and I plan to taste 1 bottle every week after new year just to see what happens. No way I could be patient enough to watch it for 6 months in a carboy. Still, it would be nice to know the science if anyone does.

 

[gregbathurst]

I don't know of much research into ageing cider, but there is a lot known about ageing wine. Also apfelwein is different to ordinary cider, and then you have the difference between fresh juice and storebought. With wine a lot of the ageing is large molecules joining together (polyphenols) . This produces softer flavours and some molecules precipitate out. You see this with the loss of pigment (anthocyanins). Then you have oxidation, which happens slowly in barrels. Racking produces a small amount of oxidation which probably helps ageing. Whether ageing in bulk is better, thats a good question.

 

[hroth521]

Thanks Gregbathurst. I get the feeling that in spite of how ancient the art of cider is, we are really at the infancy of it's development. So much work to be done regarding selecting and blending apples for tannin/sugar/acid balance. So little understood about ageing. I hear very little if anything discussed about terroire as it is with wines. Too bad about work getting in the way of my hobbies!!

 

[gregbathurst]

Yes, the simple nature of cider doesn't lend itself to a lot of objective research. If you make artisan-style cider, every batch is different and people don't take it a seriously as wine.
Industrial cider is a standardised mass market product, much like cheap wine.
Still, I think you can get just as much enjoyment from a good cider as a good wine.

 

[warispeace]

Cider is way underrated, I actually prefer a good aged cider to an expensive wine.

 

[gswartz]

I agree with warispeace. While I have enjoyed some expensive wines, they are always for a specific moment. A good aged cider seems to be more enjoyable over many more events, times of day, etc...

In regards to aging of cider, I am not too well versed but do remember that some yeast strains generate unwanted by-products, such as sulfur for the English Cider yeast I've been using lately, and some aging is required to allow their removal, either through precipitation or out-gassing (according to what by-products are generated, of course).

 

[Yan]

You can make some rational assumptions of what's going on with apple must when it ferments and ages based on it's similarities to grape must. I haven't seen any research on apples specifically, but I have an idea. A well made apple wine can taste remarkably like a grape wine depending on the apples and how it was made, which suggests that apples have more than a few things in common with grapes, chemically speaking.

Most important is the fact that apples, like grapes contain tannin, pectin and malic acid. As in wines like chardonnay, malic acid can give an excessive tartness to the cider which often takes age or malolactic fermentation to round out. Apples can also be very tannic, which can give cider an astringency. Apples are selected based on this. Some traditional cider makers add crabapples to their cider for added tannin, since they are often very high in tannins. A well rounded blend of tannin, residual sugar, alcoholic strength and acid in an all-apple cider often comes down to apple blending, where with a varietal wine it often has much to do with terroir. Thus a cider maker has control over these factors, and can select characteristics from different apples to get a proper balance of sweetness, tannin, acidity and fruit aroma. Then the cider is subjected to some age to round out and mellow the harsher flavours. It's quite parallel to what goes on in wine, really. Only with apples, so there are a number of differences. But the main ideas are really the same. Cider is more prone to spoilage during aging, though, because it's lower in alcohol than wine.

 

[gregbathurst]

I do think ciders have terroir - apples from warm dry climates will ripen quite differently to cool moist climates. Then there is the tremendous number of apple cultivars available, many of which are suited to different climates. Most professional orchardists are growing cultivars for the market requirements rather than what suits their area, but an artisanal cider grower can use varieties suited to his locale to make a distinctive cider with terroir.
I myself have raised a seedling from a crab apple that grows and bears really well and produces juice with high tannin and sg levels. Because of the high tannins the local birds and fruit fly leave it alone so it suits me very well, and makes a very distinctive cider when blended. I like to think this is the sort of thing that used to happen when cider production was more traditional.

 

[Yan]

Terroir is certainly relavent; no sane farmer would even think of growing a Cortland tree in British Columbia or Washington, but they grow into absolutely wonderful apples in colder, more humid regions. And so really, it's a combination of farmers growing for market requirements and their area. Since the advent of high-density apple growing, a tree will mature to production in five years, where full size trees on old rootstocks take twice as long to fruit. This allows farmers more room to experiment and find out what works for their region, sometimes at considerable risk. Since the end of the nineties, when the dwarf planting started, I've seen a whole lot of losers and winners go through people's farms and packing houses.

What I meant to say is that it works differently with apples than it does with grapes, because there is such a wide variety of apples and less rigid established conventions surrounding their blending. It's perfectly acceptable in some traditions to blend all sorts of eating varieties with specific cider varieties, and even crabapples, but if you use anything other than vitis vinifera grapes to make wine in the EU, it's almost treated as illegal. I think that because cider is so variable in this way, and much less common or widely produced than wine in many places, it lacks the kind of standardization to really understand the effect of terroir on the character of the cider, more the quality. Good apples make good cider. Anything else is sort of hard to guage, in my opinion. I know that they make cider with Spartan apples from England, which is a cooler, moister climate. The Spartans grown in my region are not nearly as good as the fully coloured, sweet ones grown in cooler, wetter parts, so you could say that there is a very obvious, qualitative effect of terroir on these apples, but we're talking about a specific variety and a question of qualities that are more than subtle (sugar and amount of flavour).

 

[gregbathurst]

Yes, the orchard industry is certainly challenging. In Australia the trees for planting are whips rather than feathers, so high density planting is uneconomic. There is a fairly small number of varieties used, whatever the conditions.
The largest producer is now china by a fairly big margin which makes me wonder how much cheap chinese juice goes into commercial ciders these days.

 

[Yan]

Yes, the orchard industry is certainly challenging.

Certainly. I'm right in the middle of it and what I often see defies logic and goes far beyond wastefulness.

The largest producer is now china by a fairly big margin which makes me wonder how much cheap chinese juice goes into commercial ciders these days.

Lots I'm almost sure, since the bulk of juice concentrate comes from there. "The economic dowturn" was a reason for Canadian food processors to switch over to Chinese suppliers for their juice concentrate, effectively harming the economy of Canada's orchard communities. Recently, the local packing co-op started warning farmers that they might get charged for every pound of juice-grade apples that they have to sort out of their bins, where previously they used to be able to sell them.

 

[hroth521]

You can make some rational assumptions of what's going on with apple must when it ferments and ages based on it's similarities to grape must. I haven't seen any research on apples specifically, but I have an idea. A well made apple wine can taste remarkably like a grape wine depending on the apples and how it was made, which suggests that apples have more than a few things in common with grapes, chemically speaking.

Most important is the fact that apples, like grapes contain tannin, pectin and malic acid. As in wines like chardonnay, malic acid can give an excessive tartness to the cider which often takes age or malolactic fermentation to round out. Apples can also be very tannic, which can give cider an astringency. Apples are selected based on this. Some traditional cider makers add crabapples to their cider for added tannin, since they are often very high in tannins. A well rounded blend of tannin, residual sugar, alcoholic strength and acid in an all-apple cider often comes down to apple blending, where with a varietal wine it often has much to do with terroir. Thus a cider maker has control over these factors, and can select characteristics from different apples to get a proper balance of sweetness, tannin, acidity and fruit aroma. Then the cider is subjected to some age to round out and mellow the harsher flavours. It's quite parallel to what goes on in wine, really. Only with apples, so there are a number of differences. But the main ideas are really the same. Cider is more prone to spoilage during aging, though, because it's lower in alcohol than wine.

I'm a newbie cider maker but my reading and your comments lead me to believe that while you can make a drinkable cider with any juice, the best cider will come from sourcing the best apples/juice. So that is the challenge for me, I live in the city of Chicago but there are numerous orchards in the midwest for me to investigate. Might need to build my own press?

 

[Yan]

Well, where there are orchards, there are likely to be presses. There often are fruit farmers who have a press and a small juice business. I'm lucky enough that I work for an organic orchard with many different varieties, so I get free apples every season, and the farmer next door has a press and will press fruit for a very reasonable price.

An electric juicer works well enough, but you have to skim and filter the juice, and 5 gallons is more than an hour of labour, but it was always worth it for me when I used one. Just a bit of a pain in the arse.

If you can possibly source good, fresh apples, for sure do it. I know that farmers grow some stuff in the eastern states and provinces that would make a wonderful cider.

 

[hroth521]

Well, where there are orchards, there are likely to be presses. There often are fruit farmers who have a press and a small juice business. I'm lucky enough that I work for an organic orchard with many different varieties, so I get free apples every season, and the farmer next door has a press and will press fruit for a very reasonable price.

An electric juicer works well enough, but you have to skim and filter the juice, and 5 gallons is more than an hour of labour, but it was always worth it for me when I used one. Just a bit of a pain in the arse.

If you can possibly source good, fresh apples, for sure do it. I know that farmers grow some stuff in the eastern states and provinces that would make a wonderful cider.

I'm certainly going to try. I contacted one orchard and he wanted 22.50USD per 1/2 bushel for "cider" apples. Seemed like a lot. I'll keep looking.

 

[RugenBrau]

This thread seems to drifting a little bit so I would like to go back to the first post. I don't really know if there is a difference between bulk aging and aging in the bottle. The advantage to bulk aging is that you're doing less handling of the cider so you you have less chance of contamination. I always leave my in the carboy. Just make sure you use glass. When I started I left mine in plastic carboys and in one year they were putrid.
As for leaving it on the lees, I wouldn't but I don't know how much of difference it really makes. One year I had to leave and 5 carboys sat for over a year on the lees. Everything was fine......maybe it was luck, I don't know.I will guarantee you that the longer you can leave your cider the better it gets. I have some cider that I have had setting for three years and it taste nothing like it did at six months. One of my best surprises this year has been 5 gallons made with Saflager25. I started it in October of 2008racked it the secindary after 4 weeks and after 4 months was downright disgusting. Over the summer I was surprised how much it had improved and we tried it the other night and it is fantastic!

 

[hroth521]

Just make sure you use glass...When I started I left mine in plastic carboys and in one year they were putrid.

In your experience does that exclude Better Bottles as well?

Your recommendations/observations re: aging are encouraging and consistent with others on this forum. My problem is I like the stuff soon after bottling and know I will not have the patience to wait that long. My solution is to brew a bunch of stuff and hopefully my supply with outlast my desire to drink it. I'm going to brew a batch of "Graff" next as most of the comments regarding it imply easy early drinkablility. That will still leave two 5 gallon batches to age until next spring at least.

 

[Yan]

I always thought that the advantage to bulk aging was a consistency in aging. If you age in the bottle, each bottle could possibly age somewhat differently, but if you do most of your aging in bulk before bottling, the effect of the aging is likely to be more even throughout the batch.

 

[RugenBrau]

Yan, that is true. that is one of the advantages. I don't know how i left that out.
I have never used the better bottles. They are suppose to keep the oxygen out and if they do, then they would be fine. I always make more than I can drink. Thats how I can keep it around

 

[gregbathurst]

There is a big difference between still and carbed cider. If you are making still cider you need to give it plenty of time to degas and stabilise in a carboy. If you are carbing it is better to do it before most of the yeast cells have dropped out and you may have problems getting them to carbonate.

 

[hroth521]

There is a big difference between still and carbed cider. If you are making still cider you need to give it plenty of time to degas and stabilise in a carboy. If you are carbing it is better to do it before most of the yeast cells have dropped out and you may have problems getting them to carbonate.

Not necessarily chemistry but here's a real data point on which to make the decision. Thanks, good point.