Katy Cider

[old dog new tricks]

Question for all the cider drinkers and brewers as part of a gift set I had a bottle of Thatchers Katy Cider.
A single variety apple cider coming in at 7.4%. I was impressed very nice it was not what I was expecting at all.

Question is to home brewers can I recreate this with homemade cider at all or not financially viable?

 

[MashBag]

You could try a basic cider recipe, back sweeten and throw in something to give a strawberry note!

 

[Clint]

Isn't Katy a single apple variety,the apple being....Katy??

 

[fury_tea]

Yeah, it's a variety of apple.

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/234693139842

Not affiliated and you could look elsewhere but looks like 20L of Katy apple juice is about £40. You could put it in a fermenter, throw some wine yeast in and as @MashBag says, backsweeten it, if you put it in a keg you could probably get pretty close I bet.

For that you are looking at about, say £2.10 a bottle after backsweetening - depending on what you use to backsweeten.

Depends on what you want to achieve, but I think that's a bit high price-wise for me. I'd be tempted to do half the Katy apple juice and half regular cheapo supermarket apple juice. That would bring the price down considerably, but it obviously wouldn't be single apple and wouldn't taste quite the same, but I bet it would be quite nice.

I've done supermarket juice cider with 70% cheapo juice and 30% more expensive cloudy apple juice or freshly picked and juiced apples and it comes out really nice.

 

[MashBag]

Question is to home brewers can I recreate this with homemade cider at all or not financially viable?

Not at those prices.

Hence my suggestion of some "any old apple" cider and a SBH of strawberries.

 

[fury_tea]

Not at those prices.

Hence my suggestion of some "any old apple" cider and a SBH of strawberries.

You're still going to make it cheaper, but it depends how cheap you want to make it. Mate of mine used to make old school 'rocketfuel' cider. It was about 9% and he used sugar and kid's apple cordial. Cost was about 7p a pint 15 years ago and it also doubled as toilet cleaner.

As I say, it depends what you want to achieve doesn't it. Using half Katy apple juice and half cheap juice would probably be about half the cost of buying a bottle of the Thatcher's one. That's not too bad, I don't think.

 

[MashBag]

I do think you could make a reasonable clone. I certainly could. After a few goes, and some very clean drains

 

[fluketamer]

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/threads/grahams-english-cider.107152/

try this its surprisingly good.
this makes a super drinkable cider that is easy to flavor with juices.

if you want strawberry backsweeten with ribena

 

[old dog new tricks]

Shows how crap my taste buds are I did not think strawberry more an initial sweetness then sour and then an apple after taste.

I have made a few ciders they come out very dry and agree back sweetenig might work and even adding some sugar to raise the SG to get a stronger cider