I was making some apple vinegar and decided to just try and make a bit of apple "cider" while I was doing it.
I'll be honest its not really cider. I just have pulped a few apples mixed in a bit of water and honey and added that to a couple of glass bottles and covered with a cloth and elastic band.
This is probably more of a prison brew than cider.
My question is simple - will it work or just wasting my time.
Thanks,
Richard
Sounds like a "ciderkin", which originally was a very weak beverage of around 1% ABV made from adding extra water to pressed apples to produce a beverage suitable for children to drink (hence the "kin" part of the term -- think "kindergarten" or some other German words).
Yes, you'll get a fermented cider-like beverage from this.
Make what you like. We all have our own tastes. Cheers to that.
When I was growing up, my dad had a few apple trees and could borrow a cider press to crush the apples. We would simply crush the apples, press out the juice, and put the juice in gallon jugs.
Nothing else!
The wild yeast on the apple skins would turn the juice, first into cider, then into apple cider vinegar if we didn't drink it before that happened. We didn't know anything about stopping fermentation, or back sweetening.
I have no idea what the ABV might have been, perhaps 3% to 4%, but as I remember it tasted better to me than a lot of commercial hard ciders I've sampled.
It is very hard to predict exactly what you will get, but simply mixing fruit and water is pretty much the basis of most brewing, historically.
It is only relatively recently that humans figured out what yeast was let alone started using it. Apples, grapes and other fruit contain 'wild' yeasts which is how fermentation used to be done - the question exactly which yeast(s) you get make the process quite varied!
Today, some people still make cider and wine this way without adding any yeast at all. If the sugar levels in your 'must' are reasonable and you can prevent infection, you may well get a fermentation and an alcoholic beverage... of some sort!
