I don’t often quote Ned Flanders, but I cant help it this time. Attributed to the nerdy do-gooder neighbor of Homer Simpson is the following: “If it’s sweet and yella, you’ve got juice there fella’…if it’s tangy and brown, you’re in Cider Town !” I suppose that is true but this is a beer blog and Homebrewing is the topic today.
At one level, the absurdly simple recipes for making Apple Cider can be very attractive to novice and experienced home-brewers alike. I mean think about it. Adding yeast to apple juice that doesn’t have preservatives in it and wait and… And Nothing That’s it.
When compared to brewing beer, you’ve got the first several steps already done for you. you don’t have to grind the apples into grist, you don’t have to soak the apple pulp in 150F water, you don’t have to lauter, sparge, vorlauf any of that. You start, with what you work a few hours to get with beer. Namely a solution of simple sugars at interestingly about the same specific gravity that an Amber, or Hefewizen or pale ale would be. 1.05ish
Now to be fair, saying that making hard cider is a simple as what I laid out in the beginning would be kind of like saying playing the guitar is easy. You just pluck the strings at this end and move your fingers up and down the neck on the other end. I play a little guitar and I am sure even those who do not, would agree that it is just simply not that easy. Technically you are playing the guitar..but noone would want to listen to you long, and in the same way, making cider that tastes like something you would want to share or even show off a little, takes a little more work as well.
I made a batch the other day and I complicated matters a bit, trying to get a more easily shared finished product. I wanted a dry cider, which is not the hard part, as the sugars in Apple juice ferment so completely you can easily end up with a gravity of 1.000 and a very dry tasting beverage indeed. I also wanted a lot of classic apple flavor. Almost a sour apple candy flavor like a Jolly Rancher almost. My first thought was that I would have to have some sugars remaining in the cider for it to taste like this and this would mean somehow stopping the fermentation process early, or by sweetening it after, which also has some complications.
I then stumbles across a thread in one of my favorite HomeBrewing websites where someone had used several different kinds of yeast with an otherwise identical recipe. His results suggested that this fruity apple candy flavor could e achieved, or nearly so, simply by using the right kind of yeast. You can read his experimentation parameters in the first post of this thread.
So, encouraged by this, I rounded up the ingredients for my cider.
- 3 Gallons of “natural” apple juice. Costco’s Kirkland brand. No preservatives. Not from concentrate.
- 1# of raspberry Honey (I am assuming the name is from the kind of flower, not from adding raspberries to it)
- 2# of Granny Smith apples. Chopped and blended to a puree
The honey was mainly just for another source of fermentables, hoping for it to be a little less 1 dimensional, and the Grannys were also just to add a little complexity and tartness. I split it into two kettles and added the honey in to one and the crushed Grannys into the other and brought both to a low boil for about 10 minutes. Partly to kill off any bugs I may have introduced with the other two ingredients and also to get this back down to 3 Gal.
I chilled the kettles by immersing into an ice water bath and poured it all into a 3G Glass carboy, Granny sludge and all, and it barely fit. I poured off a little to taste and take a gravity check. 1.066 A little higher than I had hoped/expected. I was definitely sweeter than normal Apple Juice and it was apparent that Honey was part of it.
I had activated a Wyeast smack pack a couples hours before of 3068, typically used for Wheat Beers, and it was ready so I poured it right in the fermenter. No starter. Zero activity until about 6 hours and then it really took off. There was not much head room in the fermenter so I am glad I used a blow-off tube. It has been going strong for a couple days now and I can see about 3-4″ of loose apple trub at the bottom. I am a bit worried that I will loose to much cider in all the muck when I transfer the batch to secondary. I guess we’ll see.
