Tart Cherry Juice - Ready for Autumn!

Homebrew Talk - Beer, Wine, Mead, & Cider Brewing Discussion Forum

Help Support Homebrew Talk - Beer, Wine, Mead, & Cider Brewing Discussion Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

MtnGoatJoe

Well-Known Member
Joined
Jul 30, 2015
Messages
116
Reaction score
18
So, I finished picking my mom's tart cherry tree yesterday. I tried using my Kitchenaid juicer attachment, but I found the strainer attachment (pictured) worked better.

I ended up with about 3-4 quarts of juice that I'm going to freeze and use in my cider in a few months. I'm thinking to do two 1 gallon test batches, the first will have a pint of cherry juice, and the second will have 2 pints. I really have no idea how much to blend, so if anyone has any thoughts, I'd love to hear them! I'm generally using sweet apples (Jonagold, Honeycrisp, Gravensteins, and other random sweet apples).

IMG_8341.png
 
With my last cherry cider I fermented not so sweet eating apples (pippins, pink lady, gravensteins... because that's what I had) with 20% pears for the sweetness from sorbitol. At 1.015 I transferred to secondary and added a bit over 10% sweet cherries and juice that I had frozen some months before.

I racked off the cherries and bottled when it was around 1.005 (fermented with S04) for carbonation. Scored 48/50 and a big blue ribbon at the regional show... shame I had to sacrifice a bottle for the judges!... yum, yum, yum.

I do think that it could have handled up to 20% cherries (so did one of the judges...his score sheet is attached) so your plan seems to be fairly sound.
 

Attachments

  • Doc_20210720_001.pdf
    47.8 KB · Views: 12
With my last cherry cider I fermented not so sweet eating apples (pippins, pink lady, gravensteins... because that's what I had) with 20% pears for the sweetness from sorbitol. At 1.015 I transferred to secondary and added a bit over 10% sweet cherries and juice that I had frozen some months before.

I racked off the cherries and bottled when it was around 1.005 (fermented with S04) for carbonation. Scored 48/50 and a big blue ribbon at the regional show... shame I had to sacrifice a bottle for the judges!... yum, yum, yum.
Interesting. I had planned to add the cherry juice before fermentation. There's not a "lot" of sugar in these tart cherries, but some. My plan, such as it is, is to add 1 pint of tart cherry juice to a 1 gallon batch of cider, add enough honey and sugar to up the SG to 1.070, ferment down to 1.020 and pasteurize. My second batch, will follow the same process, but with 2 pints of cherry juice.

From what little I can find on tart cherries, it seems like some folks add the juice before primary, and some folks add it in secondary. Maybe the tart cherries are too tart if fermented in primary? I really have no idea, but Imma gonna try!
 
I ended up with 4.5 pints. I pasteurized it this morning and put it in the freezer to await the cider season in a few months. It took a fair bit of work to get that much cherry juice, so I hope it's worth the effort.

IMG_8342.png
 
It might be worth doing a bit of trial blending. High acidity blends can indeed take a some extra sugar to offset the acidity. Your target of 1.020 could well be "on the money"although at 50 g/L of sugar it might be a bit sweet but your target ABV of 6.5% should help a bit. Typically, off-dry to off-sweet ciders would be in the range of 12g/L (SG 1.005) to 25g/L (SG 1.010), so a bit of tasting on your part and adjusting the FG should get the result you are after.

I understand that the"ideal"acidity for cider is around TA 5 - 7%. Apples typically range from 5g/L for sweeter varieties to more than 10g/L for cooking apples and crabs, whereas tart cherries range from 10g/L to 15g/L.

So if my arithmetic is correct, a pint of tart cherry juice at say TA 14g/L added to a gallon of apple juice at TA 5g/L would give you a TA of 7% and two pints of tart cherry juice would result in 8%. Of course this all depends on the actual numbers.

Have fun!
 
Last edited:
Hmm. Just been scratching around on the internet and I see that tart cherries have about the same amount of sugar as apples. Maybe their relatively high acidity masks this potential sweetness. Anyhow, just another variable to throw into your deliberations.
Cheers.
 
Dude if I had those Cherrys I would make a melomel or lambic with them. Let us know what you make with them and enjoy your labor.
 
Back
Top