Super Lazy Ice Cider: An Experiment

In November of last year, I was reading the November/December 2014 issue of Zymurgy and I ran across an article named "Frozen: Making Ice Cider" by Nathan Williams (I also read an article in BYO). I've had ice wine before, I guess it had never occurred to me that one could also make ice cider. Ice wine is made by leaving grapes on the vine until they freeze, which does two things. First, it allows the fruit to develop more sugars (essentially becoming overripe). Second, it freezes the juice of the fruit, so that when pressed, much of the water is left behind as ice, yielding a very concentrated must. There's nothing particularly special about grapes in this case, and the same can be done with apples. As of December  2008, to be designated as cidre de glace (it originated in Quebec), a beverage must obey the following rules:

1. Additional sugar cannot be dissolved into the must before fermentation (apparently known as Chaptalization)
2. Alcohol may not be added after fermentation
3. During the production of the ice cider, the use of artificial cooling (no lower than -4°C) may only be used for the purposes of precipitating malic acid
4. No artificial flavor or color
5. Ice cider producers must grow the apples themselves (with the exception of holders of a manufacturer’s license, who may produce ice cider using a maximum of 50% of apples they did not grow)
6. Can only be force carbonated to between 1.5 and 2.5 or between 3.5 and 5.5 volumes

I don't have an apple orchard, and I don't like arbitrary rules (seriously, 3 volumes of CO₂ is somehow not OK?). Also, I'm lazy.

Nothing specifies that the apples have to freeze on the tree—you're allowed to press the juice and then naturally freeze-concentrate it to the desired gravity (around 30 °Brix or SG 1.130). Even that sounds like a pain, though. I wanted to be able to try this out quick and easy. That's right, I just bought frozen apple juice concentrate.

My understanding is that regular apple juice is about SG 1.050. So I needed to calculate how to dilute the concentrate to reach SG 1.130. Most apple juice concentrate has you add 3 cans of water, so we just have to solve a simple equation to get the gravity of the concentrate:

(1.000 * 3 + x) / 4 = 1.050

Thus, the concentrate is SG 1.200. How much water do we need to add to get to 1.130?

(1.000 * y + 1.200)/(1 + y) = 1.130

Solving this gives us 7/13 ≈ 0.54 parts water per part concentrate. That's really not a lot of water. Doing some simple algebra saved me a lot of work on "brew" day and allowed me to dial in the right gravity on the first try. Easy!

At least, it would have been if I had been smart enough to do that. Instead, I just kept alternately adding more concentrate and water, eventually realizing I needed to dilute with straight apple juice to even have a shot of getting enough must. Oops.

Once I had three 1-gallon carboys of must, I dropped in some yeast nutrient and then pitched three different yeasts, each of which I'd seen recommended for making ice cider:

1. Lalvin EC-1118
2. Lalvin 71B-1122
3. Red Star Côte des Blancs

48 points in 9 days. I guess that's not that slow.

The first two took off like a rocket. They were at terminal gravity before I left for December. The Côte des Blancs was taking its sweet (pun intended) time, though. So I wound up leaving it for all of December. That may wind up with a better result though, as I've read that slower fermentation produces better flavors in ice cider. To make sure fermentation was done, I racked each off the lees twice and added some potassium sorbate and potassium metabisulfite. Then I bottled it in these awesome Bellissima bottles.

The shrink-wrap PVC capsules are handy for writing on, too.

All in all, it was pretty darn easy. Now all that's left is to let them sit a little while before doing the taste test. I gave some of the EC-1118 batch away as holiday gifts, so maybe I can get some feedback there too.