iamjerico
Member
So I am just shy of a week into my primary fermentation, of my first cider. Looking ok so far I think. Tomorrow night I will take a SG reading and give it a taste. Original gravity was 1.07.
I got the juice from a local apple orchard - 6 gallons of cider (pasteurized but not preserved). I warmed that up (about 40m at 185) thinking I'd kill off some of the wild yeast, which in hindsight I don't think was necessary. But I was thinking that if this batch goes ok, I could try another with a different commercial yeast and compare the taste, with reduced impact from wild yeasts. We'll see.
From there I let it cool down added 2 lbs of dark brown sugar and then my yeast (SafCider AB1). I forgot to add liquid to the airlock until the next morning, at which point I added vodka. It has been bubbling away since then - initially pretty slowly, say 1 bubble ever 5m or so - but just now I went for a look at it is bubbling a lot more, like once a minute. It is still quite cloudy (maybe from the heating, but I kept the temp well below boiling, and used a sous vide circulator to target the temp). We'll see if it clears, but for this batch I'm not going to worry too much about clarity.
After this fermentation, I'm thinking of bottle into 1 liter glass bottles and introducing some ginger-infused simple syrup for some secondary fermentation, and thinking of letting the bottles age (and opening one every so often to take notes on the impact of aging). Still researching that and thinking about it though.
I'll post a bit more as things progress - but wanted to leave a message of update, and to thank everyone here as I've been scouring the posts since registering the other day!
I got the juice from a local apple orchard - 6 gallons of cider (pasteurized but not preserved). I warmed that up (about 40m at 185) thinking I'd kill off some of the wild yeast, which in hindsight I don't think was necessary. But I was thinking that if this batch goes ok, I could try another with a different commercial yeast and compare the taste, with reduced impact from wild yeasts. We'll see.
From there I let it cool down added 2 lbs of dark brown sugar and then my yeast (SafCider AB1). I forgot to add liquid to the airlock until the next morning, at which point I added vodka. It has been bubbling away since then - initially pretty slowly, say 1 bubble ever 5m or so - but just now I went for a look at it is bubbling a lot more, like once a minute. It is still quite cloudy (maybe from the heating, but I kept the temp well below boiling, and used a sous vide circulator to target the temp). We'll see if it clears, but for this batch I'm not going to worry too much about clarity.
After this fermentation, I'm thinking of bottle into 1 liter glass bottles and introducing some ginger-infused simple syrup for some secondary fermentation, and thinking of letting the bottles age (and opening one every so often to take notes on the impact of aging). Still researching that and thinking about it though.
I'll post a bit more as things progress - but wanted to leave a message of update, and to thank everyone here as I've been scouring the posts since registering the other day!