Cidermania

I'm going to ferment you all!

I mentioned in an earlier post that the first batch of homebrew I ever made was an apricot wheat beer. The second batch was a lager, specifically a clone of Shiner Bock. One of the hardest parts of brewing is the waiting. In order to pass the time while I was waiting for those beers to be ready, I decided to try my hand at making some cider. I had been perusing the HomeBrewTalk forums and encountered what might just be the most popular cider recipe in the homebrewing community: EdWort's Apfelwein. Apfelwein is a German style of cider and it is very dry. Bone dry. It usually has a final gravity below 1.000, meaning it is less dense than water. It is also very strong, usually around 8.5% ABV. There is a thread on HomeBrewTalk that is attempting to track how many gallons of the stuff has been made. Only including the people who self-report on that thread, it's already at 28,383 gallons. I'm sure the actual figure is much larger.

This stuff has started to grow in popularity at my house. More of my guests are getting a taste for it, and I realized I only had one batch left, which I made last June. I have a batch that I bottled in champagne bottles (it can be fun to carbonate it like champagne), but when my current keg kicks, I will only have 5 more gallons to put on tap. Given that it takes months for the stuff to mature, I decided something needed to be done.

EdWort's Apfelwein

Batch size: 5 gallons
Target OG: 1.068
Expected FG: 0.990

Fermentables:

• 5 gal. apple juice (no preservatives, added vitamin C is OK)
• 2# dextrose (corn sugar)

Misc:

• 1-1/4 tsp. yeast nutrient

Fermentation:

• Pitch 5 grams Red Star Montrachet wine yeast
• Maintain temperatures from 60°F to 65°F for 1 month or until cider clears completely
• Once all yeast drop out and it turns clear, bulk age at least 3 months (preferably longer) before packaging

Yeast nutrient.
Definitely worth it.

You can cheat a little bit and take a few months of aging off the original recommended aging schedule (8+ months) by adding a little yeast nutrient to the must. The dose is a bit higher than it would be for beer, because apple juice doesn't have all of the things that the yeast want, like nitrogen, amino acids, and fatty acids. Barley has some of these, but not always enough. I wind up using a quarter teaspoon of nutrient per gallon, which is more than the half teaspoon per five gallons recommended for beer. I try not to think about the fact that the yeast nutrient is mostly made of dead yeast. I guess it's hard to have scruples when you're a single-celled organism. The reason this helps shorten the time needed for aging is that without the nutrient, the yeast have to use slightly different metabolic pathways to consume the sugar. These pathways produce some byproducts, including sulfur compounds that will make the room you're fermenting in smell like rotten eggs. These compounds break down over time, but it takes a while, hence the extended aging period. You can save yourself some time and some unpleasant smells by using nutrient additions.

One of the great things about this recipe is how easy it is to modify it in little ways. Even on my second batch (which I put together the day after my first batch, as advised), I started to experiment. On that one I substituted a half gallon each of dark cherry and pomegranate juices for one of the gallons of apple juice. I still have some of that batch—the stuff just gets better and better with age. You can also make a lot of other substitutions: white or brown sugar for dextrose, different wine yeast, or even ale yeast if you want a little more residual sweetness. It's hard to go wrong.

During the holiday season of 2013 I encountered Trader Joe's Cinnamon Pear Cider. My first thought was "I bet I could ferment that." As usual, I wasn't the first to have the thought. I bought a gallon and brought it home, added some dextrose and yeast nutrient (scaled down to 1 gallon), and tossed in some Côte des Blancs wine yeast. The first taste a couple months later was just OK. Good, but nothing to write home (or on a blog) about. The pear taste wasn't really evident, and the cinnamon only came through in the aroma. Then the thing that every homebrewer hopes for happened: I totally forgot about it. For almost a year. I had some friends over and we were talking about cider and I stumbled across a few more bottles of it. Figuring I'd give it another try, I tossed a bottle in the fridge to chill. When we drank it, we were all blown away. The pear and cinnamon flavors were right up front, and it was so smooth. Needless to say, the remaining bottles went quickly, and I vowed to do a 5-gallon batch at some point. Despite the fact that Trader Joe's now carries the Cinnamon Pear Cider year-round, I never got around to picking up 5 gallons.

5-gallon Big Mouth Bubbler
being sanitized.

Let's talk a little bit about my process. First, my choice of fermentor: plastic 5-gallon Big Mouth Bubbler (BMB). I used to use Better Bottles exclusively for Apfelwein, but the BMB has a few properties that make it much better suited to the task. The 5-gallon BMB is actually more than 5 gallons, whereas the 5-gallon Better Bottle doesn't quite hold 5 gallons, leaving a little juice left over. The BMB also has, well, a bigger mouth. This makes it much easier to add the dextrose after all the apple juice has been added, instead of dissolving some into each bottle (as I still had to do in the 1-gallon batches). For the 1-gallon batches, I just used 1-gallon glass carboys.

Junior brewmaster in training.

For the larger batches, I pour all the apple juice in after sanitizing the fermentors with Star San. This is an area where junior brewmasters in training can assist. Even if they spill the first bottle of juice on the floor. For the smaller batches, I pour one half-gallon bottle into the sanitized fermentor. You may want to rinse the sanitizer out of the smaller fermentors to minimize foaming. For the larger carboys, it's not an issue. I then add the dextrose to the emptied bottle, and pour half of the remaining bottle on top of it. Add the yeast nutrient, re-cap, and shake the hell out of it to dissolve the dextrose. Then pour the juice/dextrose/nutrient mixture into the carboy, followed by the remaining juice from the second bottle. This may still take a while due to foam. In the large carboys, I add any additional sugars and the yeast nutrient at the end. I dissolve it right in the carboy using a stainless steel stirring tool attached to a drill. This is where the extra headspace of the BMB comes in handy. This also helps aerate the must, though that's not as important as it is with beer wort, because we didn't just spend an hour or more boiling all the oxygen out of it.

Yeast sprinkled on top.

To pitch the yeast, I just sprinkle it on top, dry. Within a few minutes, most of the yeast will start to absorb the liquid and begin to fall down to the bottom. Once fermentation really gets going, the whole container will become a cloudy tan color. No need to add any pectic enzyme or anything like that (unless you added additional fruit); the cider will clear on its own once fermentation finishes. Montrachet wine yeast won't create a kräusen (KROY-zen), the big foamy, hoppy mess on top of a fermenting beer. This means you don't actually need any real headspace. The yeast will just fizz like a glass of soda. Once the yeast is pitched, I add a stopper and airlock, and fill the airlock with cheap vodka. The vodka is just in case I get any sort of suckback into the fermentor. In this case, all that happens is I up my alcohol content a tiny bit.

2 pounds of dextrose.

So what did I make? Five batches, two of which were 5 gallons, and the rest 1 gallon. The first 5-gallon batch was just straight up according to the recipe. For the second 5-gallon batch, I decided to try boosting the sugar content using apple juice concentrate instead of dextrose. I wondered whether this would increase the apple flavor. According to some basic calculations, I'd need about 4.3 12-ounce cans of concentrate to add as much sugar as is in 2 pounds of dextrose. I decided to just use 4. This turned out to be a good choice, because in addition to increasing the sugar concentration, adding apple juice concentrate increases the volume of must. So much so that it barely fits, even in the BMB. I actually had to be careful not to push the airlock too far down into the stopper, lest it go below the liquid level. The original gravity turned out at 1.062, just a tad lower than it would be with dextrose. One last concern with using apple juice concentrate is that it increases the malic acid concentration in the must. This can apparently give the cider quite a bite, but I'm hoping that long-term cold storage will let it precipitate out and round the corners off that bite.

The apple juice concentrate significantly increased the volume of the must. It barely fit in the fermentor.

The one-gallon batches were scaled versions of the standard recipe, with juice substitutions. One was the Cinnamon Pear Cider from Trader Joe's. The other two were cranberry-grape and cranberry-raspberry juice blends, respectively. Even though the headlining fruits tend to dominate the taste, many of these juice blends are, in fact, mostly apple or pear juice. I don't know how the potentially significantly lower pH (I didn't measure) of cranberry juice will affect the fermentation. Straight-up cranberry juice can be in the low 2s, which is very low for yeast, possibly below its tolerance level. I guess that's part of why this is an experiment. I don't know what's going to happen!

Three one-gallon batches, before adding yeast.

As of the following morning, the airlocks definitely had some positive pressure in them, but there was no visible activity in the must. It's very cold in the brewery, so I put the 1-gallon carboys into separate plastic buckets to insulate them from the metal lid of the chest freezers they were on, and to hopefully allow them to warm up a bit from the exothermic yeast metabolism.