First attempt at cider.

[lektoraj]

Making a first attempt at cider (in fact first attempt at home brewing at all). Any comments or tips would be very welcome.

Equipment: I have a 30 litre white plastic fermentation bucket with tap, airlock, some stirrers.

Recipe used:
About 20 kg of apples, run through a normal kitchen juicer (I don't recommend this as it took ages to do and made a mess of the kitchen).
About 8l of water (boiled to remove chlorine though max chlorine here is 3 ppm anyway)
1 kg of white sugar.
One bunch of dark grapes, also run though the juicer to act as a yeast nutrient (is this too little nutrient - will I get fusel alcohols?).
Yeast: Gozdawa French Cider G1 (dry powder) (tolerates up to 9% alcohol, 10-30 degrees C fermenting, optimal 22-26, we have had about 28 in the kitchen over the weekend but now down to 25 degrees)

Other info: I'm British but physically located in Slovakia (hence the need to home-brew cider, as Strongbow is the only one on sale here) but I can order stuff on the internet as required.

Start: After letting it stand with the cover on (no airlock) for a few hours I followed the rehydration instructions of the yeast and put it in on Thursday night. I heard a few bubbles that night and by morning it was bubbling away nicely.

As of today (Monday) it is about one bubble per 4 seconds. As the container is partly transparent and there are markings on it, I can see that there is dark stuff up to about the 17.5 litre mark, then there is lighter stuff (foam?) up to the 20 litre mark (was 20.5 litres). Is this too much headspace?

Initially I had water in the airlock but then I read on an American site that cheap vodka was better so I put that in instead (there not being a shortage of cheap vodka here :) ).

Plans:
When it stops bubbling, wait a few days then add 120g sugar to carbonate and immediately bottle 10l of it into 20 0.5l swing-top beer bottles. Get volunteers to help drink the rest.

 

[chewie]

Hiya, don't worry about the headspace in a fermenter as the developing Co2 will force out any oxygen and will effectively create a blanket over the cider. You may want to leave it more than a few days before bottling once fermentation completes, this will allow it to clear. Cider does clear pretty quick unaided but it's more likely to take a week min.

 

[xozzx]

I wouldnt drink the remaining cider after fermentation, it will be far better bottled and carbonated and left for a few weeks. You can always use plastic water bottles (best to use ones which contained sparkling water). Ive always found when tasting the cider before bottling it is ok, after a few weeks bottled it starts tasting really good.

Also might be worth sweetening some. After all the sugars are fermented you might find it a bit dry, if you sweeten then just make sure to use non-fermentable sugars or you will get bottle bombs

 

[lektoraj]

Thanks for the advice. I will get more bottles for the rest of the cider than.

Fermentation has really slowed down today (day 5). About 1 bubble per minute - yesterday was 1 bubble per 4 secs. Have I messed something up or is that normal?

 

[Deltabrew]

Check your gravity with a hydrometer.
Open the lid a little and poke your nose in, take a good sniff. If it attacks your throat and makes you cough it's still making Co2 :lol:
Your recipe has too much water in it for me, it will be like harsh Strongbow, I make it with 100% juice and sweetener, but you might like it rough and hard!

 

[lektoraj]

I don't have a hydrometer. By the end of yesterday (day 6) it had stopped bubbling altogether.

Today, "to see what would happen" I opened the fermentation container and poured 2l of supermarket apple juice (100% juice, pasteurised no preservatives) into it (was this silly?) and it has started bubbling again pretty quickly (bubble per 3 seconds), which suggests the issue was just that all the sugar had been used up over the weekend.

Plans:

Order a hydrometer (I kind of knew I needed one but thanks to Deltabrew for the push to make me actually do it).

Order some stevia tablets.

Order about 40 bottles and swing tops.

Get some crates to store them in - bottled beer is still commonly sold here in crates with glass bottles (not swing top though) on a deposit system so I will get a couple of crates of something and take back the bottles for the deposit but not the crates.

When it stops bubbling again (which presumably will be fairly soon), leave it two weeks and bottle - rather than adding sugar for carbonation I may instead use another litre of juice (i.e. with 110g of sugar into the 20-ish l of cider in the tank - is that a good idea or will it disturb / cloud the cider and/or fail to mix properly? If not then perhaps it will be ok to put about 25 ml in the bottom of each bottle). I plan to do 10 bottles each with 0, 1, 2, 3 stevia tablets, leave to carbonate for a few weeks and then taste-test to see which is nicer.

 

[chewie]

Order a hydrometer (I kind of knew I needed one but thanks to Deltabrew for the push to make me actually do it).

If you have to get them posted then get two, they are easily broken.

 

[Nicks90]

If you are going to batch prime, you need to move the cider to a fresh bin first or you'll disturb all the sediment in the bottom.
If you don't have a spare fermentation bucket, much better would be to taste what you have after its completely finished bubbling and see how dry it is. If it's really dry, add a sweetener to each 500ml bottle with 15ml apple juice / 1teaspoon of sugar and fill them up!
The sugar/apple juice will ferment and carbonate the cider and the sweetener will make it a medium cider.
Optional is to leave out the sweetener if you like it dry.
Leave it somewhere warm for a week and the somewhere dark and cook for a minimum 2 weeks and it'll be ready to drink! The longer you leave it, the better it will be.

 

[Deltabrew]

Leave it somewhere warm for a week and the somewhere dark and cook for a minimum 2 weeks and it'll be ready to drink!

What gas mark would you recomend to cook it at?

 

[Nicks90]

Hahaha - beer on keyboard!

I leave mine at 20c for a week before cool storing

 

[lektoraj]

About to start bottling today and I tried a small glass poured from the tap at the bottom (of primary).

The consistency of it seems very thick (i.e. like ground apples). It doesn't really have a strong taste of any kind - though it seems alcoholic.

Presumably it's not going to be that thick all the way though - perhaps I should fill each bottle (I have forty 0.5l bottles with swing tops) in two stages, some from the bottom and some from the top.

I have a bit of time though as I still have to put the tops onto the bottles before I start and also prime with some apple juice but if anyone wants to tell me I'm doing something wrong then now is a good time.

Re: sweetener, the idea is basically to bottle without sweetener and then to experiment putting it in different amounts as we open each bottle to see what it's like so I know how much to put in next time.

 

[freester]

The consistency of it seems very thick (i.e. like ground apples).

Sounds to me like the lees are coming out of the tap - not the cider.

I personally wouldn't be bottling straight away. Try syphoning the cider into another container if possible. Let it settle and clear a bit before bottling. Then you will also be more certain the fermentation has finished and you aren't bottling bombs :thumb:

 

[lektoraj]

I'm pretty sure it had stopped fermenting by the time I bottled it. The apple juice I added earlier in the thread had made it restart then stop again.

So in the end I threw away the first litre or so that came out which yes was mostly lees.

Any ideas why I had so much lees? Is it from using home juiced apples rather than supermarket juice? Should I have filtered it all before fermenting?

At the moment I have (in the order it came out the tap at the bottom):

8 bottles which have quite a bit lot of sediment - i.e. the lees. The plan when drinking is to pour this into glasses through a fine sieve.

24 bottles which came out next from the middle of the container and seem pretty much sediment free, though they are a beautiful "real cider" colour:



These are probably to be drunk as is or possibly also sieved if necesssary.

After these, the "cake" from the top of the container started blocking the tap - five more bottles were produced by filtering it through a fine sieve, these look similar to the ones from the middle of the tank (possibly slightly lighter in colour). These should be fine to drink straight as is.

All bottles were primed with 25 ml of 11g sugar/100ml apple juice for carbonation.

The plan is to start drinking them in two weeks. I will report back on which (if any) of these are drinkable.

 

[MattH1973]

I made similar rookie mistakes last year and got a lot of sediment in some bottles - they were still fine once cleared, just made pouring a bit of a pain and it was annoying to waste the cloudy bit at the bottom of the bottles.

I think the answer is to siphon into a clean vessel (ideally a demijohn) before bottling and leave to clear in that vessel. Then siphon again to a bottling bucket with a tap at the bottom. I hope to do a better job of that this year.

 

[Deltabrew]

You could win an award with that, I think it's the worst attempt at making Cider i've ever seen.

 

[lektoraj]

Been drinking these for the last couple of weeks.

They didn't carbonate in the bottles - perhaps the supermarket 100% apple juice I used to carbonate has something in it?

Opaque yellow colour. Sediment at the bottom of some of the bottles is well behaved and stays at the bottom of the bottle when you pour the cider into a glass.

The initial taste is quite sour (perhaps from some of the sweet-sour apples used) but as you drink it the body sends signals to the brain that it's pure vitamins and alcohol and to send more down and you start to like it and it doesn't taste sour any more (sounds strange but that's how it is).

I didn't measure initial or final gravity but from drinking a few at once I'd guess at roughly 5% alcohol (i.e. clearly not half that and clearly not double that).

Not much variation based on the order the bottles were they were pulled from - same from all parts of the fermenter.

The key thing is - I prefer this to both "Strongbow" and "Lisiak zo Sadu" (Heineken Slovakia) - ciders that are available in the supermarket so that's mission accomplished I think.

 

[lektoraj]

Finished these just before Christmas. The last few were much less sour, and better tasting generally, so I obviously should have left them to mature for longer.

 

[chewie]

Finished these just before Christmas. The last few were much less sour, and better tasting generally, so I obviously should have left them to mature for longer.

If you have somewhere warm enough for a steady ferment, now's a good time to get the next TC on so it's in good order for xmas

 

[terrym]

If you have somewhere warm enough for a steady ferment, now's a good time to get the next TC on so it's in good order for xmas

In my very limited experience of making a TC I'd say that is the best advice going. :thumb:
It takes months for 'real' cider to mature properly and yet people knock out a cider and sometimes seem to expect it to be fully mature and ready to drink very soon after.

 

[Nicks90]

My vimto TC was incredible after 6 months. Shame there was only 2 bottles left by that time!