theDarkPint
Active Member
When I first got into homebrewing a little over a year ago, I knew I wanted to make a hard cider. Fast forward to last Saturday when I happened to be at a local orchard where they had freshly pressed cider for sale. Fast forward just a little bit further to see me wearing a stupid grin walking to the car with 5 gal of unpasteurized cider and my wife shaking her head.
I had done some research, but figured I'd go with the RDWHAHB mentality for my first batch. If you know me, you know this was freakin difficult. I prefer to know EXACTLY what I'm doing and have a very precise plan in place before moving forward. But I digress...
I'm hoping to order a kegging system soon, so I knew I couldn't pasteurize at the end (at least not easily). I improvised and heated the cider to ~190 for 10 minutes (like you would if the finished product were in bottles) and called it done. I then sat around for hours waiting for this stuff to cool. I'd forgotten how painful it is when you can't use a wort chiller. In hindsight, I probably should have bought pasteurized cider but hey, I was shooting from the hip here.
Anyway, I had 5 gal of pseudo-pasteurized cider sitting in my carboy down to around 75-80ish degrees (ran out of patience). I had 1.060 SG on the nose without adding any sugar. Sweet. Added some yeast nutrient after aerating the heck out of the "wort" then pitched a very bloated Wyeast 1098 British Ale yeast as I'd read good things online. Nine hours later, my decision to go with a blowoff tube was justified. I had some angry yeast!
The plan is to switch to an airlock after a week and take a gravity reading. I'm hoping to get it down to 1.014ish and then cold crash it and rack it into a secondary. It'll stay in the secondary until the sulfur smell is gone or about a month - whichever is longer. After that, I may pull a gallon off into a tertiary for long-term conditioning and rack the rest into a keg.
So that's my tale. If anyone has suggestions, pointers, prophecies of doom let me know. I'm hoping for a basic, no frills hard cider. Something along the lines of Strongbow or Original Sin. Cheers!
I had done some research, but figured I'd go with the RDWHAHB mentality for my first batch. If you know me, you know this was freakin difficult. I prefer to know EXACTLY what I'm doing and have a very precise plan in place before moving forward. But I digress...
I'm hoping to order a kegging system soon, so I knew I couldn't pasteurize at the end (at least not easily). I improvised and heated the cider to ~190 for 10 minutes (like you would if the finished product were in bottles) and called it done. I then sat around for hours waiting for this stuff to cool. I'd forgotten how painful it is when you can't use a wort chiller. In hindsight, I probably should have bought pasteurized cider but hey, I was shooting from the hip here.
Anyway, I had 5 gal of pseudo-pasteurized cider sitting in my carboy down to around 75-80ish degrees (ran out of patience). I had 1.060 SG on the nose without adding any sugar. Sweet. Added some yeast nutrient after aerating the heck out of the "wort" then pitched a very bloated Wyeast 1098 British Ale yeast as I'd read good things online. Nine hours later, my decision to go with a blowoff tube was justified. I had some angry yeast!
The plan is to switch to an airlock after a week and take a gravity reading. I'm hoping to get it down to 1.014ish and then cold crash it and rack it into a secondary. It'll stay in the secondary until the sulfur smell is gone or about a month - whichever is longer. After that, I may pull a gallon off into a tertiary for long-term conditioning and rack the rest into a keg.
So that's my tale. If anyone has suggestions, pointers, prophecies of doom let me know. I'm hoping for a basic, no frills hard cider. Something along the lines of Strongbow or Original Sin. Cheers!
