Cider?

[andrewtrsmith]

Hey guys,

Has anyone here tried making cider just from apple juice? I've been doing some reading on HBT and one of the guys has had good luck with WYeast 3068 which i currently have working on my wheat beer. I was thinking of just chucking 10 cans of graves AJ on top of the yeast cake once i rack into the secondary for a nice cheap experiment. I've got a 3gallon carboy that i'll rack into for a secondary.

Any advice?

Thanks
Andrew

[Jimmy]

Last year I tried to make a cider similar to the Stutz with the graves canned apple juice. I added brown sugar (can't remember how much), and used Nottingham yeast. It actually turned out decent, better than I expected!

[Jimmy]

Oh right, you were looking for advice. Don't let the fruit flies in your primary, they ruined my first attempt at cider

[andrewtrsmith]

Brown sugar eh? I think i read something about adding honey about 3 lbs for 5gl but not sure how that translates to brown sugar.

[Jmac00]

I've made a derived version of the apfelwein recipe on HBT with using brown sugar instead of the corn sugar, and using Nottingham instead of the montrachet...turned out decent. Never really had cider aside from Strongbow, so not much to compare it to....but ppl have told me that this is similar to strongbow.

[andrewtrsmith]

Cider is officially on the go. The final recipe I came up with is pretty basic, and i'm still a very new homebrewer and even newer cider brewer but the whole experiment costs about $20 so even if its a total loss i'll learn a lot.

10 cans Graves Apple Juice - not from concentrate just AJ and Vitamin C
250grams of pasteurized honey
250grams of dark brown sugar

pitched onto the primary yeast cake from my wheat beer (WYeast 3068)

O.G. of just the apple juice was 1.044 and with the addition of the honey and brown sugar came to 1.058

I've got it in a plastic fermenter for now but will move it to my 3G carboy for the rest of the fermentation.

[HotBreak]

5 Gal of unfiltered, unpasteurized sweet apple cidre from footes family farm in the valley, 1Kg of their unpasteurized honey and a package of champagne yeast. Bring your own bucket to footes and it is even cheaper. Mix together, pitch yeast, secondary after a week and let age for a month or two. Best cidre you ever tasted....

[Graham.C]

Brown sugar eh? I think i read something about adding honey about 3 lbs for 5gl but not sure how that translates to brown sugar.

I see you already have it rolling, in the future you can always use the got Mead calculator for such conversions.
http://www.gotmead.com/index.php?option ... &Itemid=16" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Its a great little web-script.

I would also stick with unpasteurized honey over sugar any day, unless you want that caramel from the brown sugar. If its good honey, not the costco crap, the flavor will transfer into the cider without the sweetness, adding a really nice complexity. Then there is cyzer... but that's another monster altogether.