Hot answers tagged cider
6
I'm an inexperienced ciderist and I've been researching this very question for around two months.
Many renowned cideries use champagne yeast. The thing to remember here is that champagne yeast is very aggressive and should ferment your must to total dryness (little/no sugar remaining, specific gravity below 1.000) So you may need to back-sweeten to achieve ...
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The residual sugar in the cider will ferment, as will the sugar added to sweeten the cider. It doesn't matter that the apple juice is pasteurized, as long as there are still yeast in the cider you're adding it to. To have a sweet cider you need to remove or kill the yeast before you sweeten.
You can use filtration or chemicals (potassium sorbate and ...
4
I would use gelatin, isinglass or cold crash. If the apple juice was clear to begin with then the only particulate is the yeast, which you can either leave to settle out, or use finings to cause it to settle out faster.
For tips on using gelatin, and other finings, see Fining Agents, improving beer clarity.
4
That's a lot of questions. Here we go:
I have taken regular apple cider, added spices, and fermented it. It works fine. If spicing yourself, the advantage of adding spices after fermentation is that you can periodically taste and add more as needed, or rack off of the spices when you reach the desired level. Since you're using pre-spiced cider, the ...
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I've used champagne yeast, but I find it dries the cider out too much. To reach an acceptable level of residual sweetness you have to back sweeten. That means either disabling the yeast (potassium sorbate, pasteurization, or cold crashing) and then carbonating and sweetening. Or you could add sweetener to each glass you pour. Either way, it's a PITA.
I've ...
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I make semi sweet sparkling cider often. After trying a few different types, I find that Danstar Nottingham is the very best. I make mine with table sugar and treetop pasteurized apple juice from Costco. Ferment it out to ~1.010 in primary, bottle (prime with table sugar as you would a pale ale) and then cold crash or pasteurize within about 10 days (when it ...
3
K-meta alone will not. You need the one-two punch of Potassium Sorbate (to prevent the yeast from reproducing) and Potassium metabisulfite (to kill existing cells). Note that this will take a bit of time, so you should expect to see a bit more of a gravity drop in the mean time. Using cold to slow yeast growth at the same time is advised.
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Pasteurize your bottle product after you've added the sugar for sweetening. Place bottles in a 165F water bath for 20 minutes. That will inactivate any yeast in the bottle.
This will produce a still cider obviously.
If you want carbonation, you can experiment with opening a bottle every day until the carbonation is good. Then pasteurize as described ...
3
Other than cold crashing and maybe filtering (although I haven't heard of anybody who has ever bothered to filter), I don't know of any other techniques. Do you think the cloudiness is from the juice (ie, was it there from the very beginning?) or residual yeast in suspension? Residual yeast is more responsive to cold-crashing, while protein/fruit ...
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"We want to made sweet low ABV cider" - Then you don't REALLY want to ferment straight apple juice. I would recommend making a "Graff", which is a low-ABV "malted cider". Basically its a cider that uses ale yeast and a small portion of malt extract to add some unfermentable sugars and to round out the flavor.
Here's a great read on it: ...
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Other options include:
filtration. This technique has the disadvantage of removing some flavour along with the yeast.
addition of potassium sorbate and sulfite. This one adds some undesirable flavours.
For these techniques, you'll need to carbonate mechanically from a CO2 task, as the yeast have been disabled.
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I use lactose, and I think it is one of the easiest solution. All natural sugar will be convert into alcool. And you will have sparkling cider by adding a little more sugar before bottling. Lactose will give a good taste (not like splenda). You can put 1kg of lactose for around 23L of cider.
The only problem is that lactose is not cheap (around 10$ for 1kg) ...
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My advice is to dump all three batches. It could be that the mold is non-toxic, but I personally would not be willing to take that chance. Besides, it's probably going to taste dreadful.
For future reference, if you suspect your juice is not entirely fresh, you can add sulphite at the rate of 1 campden tablet per gallon. This will knock back microbial ...
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Airlocks aren't really a great indicator as far as determining when fermentation is finished, so don't rely entirely on that. Also, Sometimes you may not see much krausen during fermentation, other times it will explode!
Your delicious beverage could still be fermenting at a slow rate -- so slow that you might not notice it.
This is where a hydrometer ...
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Sulfites don't actually kill yeast. They only inhibit it for a while. The yeast will eventually recover. Sulfites are used in winemaking to knock out the wild yeasts long enough so that the cultured yeast added by the winemaker eats up most of the sugar. So, when the wild yeasts recover, most of the sugar is gone and they end up contributing little or no ...
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To get the bubbles you want, you'll probably have to rely on yeast attenuation. Get a low attenuating yeast so that it stops fermenting when there's still a decent amount of sugar left. When bottling, add some more sugar to wake them up and carbonate the bottles.
If you want more sweetness, use a non fermenting sugar like lactose or splenda. I use ...
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