Apple Juice/Cider

[EightyTwo]

Everything in my garden is about a month early this year. I usually pick my "early" apple tree at the beginning of September but they're all done now. The "late" tree is usually starting to drop in the middle of September and there are plenty of windfalls already!

I've used cleaned but smeggy bottles before without trouble - they don't look nice but if you've washed them out as best as you can, I don't think that the smeg will affect the cider. The professionals may disagree...!!

I'd let the cider brew for about 4-6 weeks until the bubbling has slowed to one or two bubbles a minute and then "rack it off" - siphon off all the clear stuff into a clean vessel, leaving the sediment behind, and fit a fermentation lock. You might want/need to do it sooner and/or filter through muslin if you want a clearer cider. I add sugar at this point but purists won't. You can now leave it to ferment to dryness and add artificial sweetner (to taste) or wait until it has the required dryness and then stop the fermentation with a camden tablet (sodium metabisulphite).

There's no rule against adding a sweetex to your pint of homebrew!!

 

[EightyTwo]

So, for those who are following this thread, I did add the red and black currants. They had been frozen so they were pretty soft. I simply squeezed them by hand in a muslin bag. The colour is superb!

On Sunday, I racked off all the cider - I siphoned it into a clean container, leaving all the "leys" (sludgey stuff) behind. I added about half a kilo of sugar dissolved in about a litre of water to each of the 15l buckets and half the quantity to each of the 5l demijohns. That's quite a lot in the currant cider - I want to see if it gets stronger or if the yeast dies before all the sugar is used up.

All but one bucket have started bubbling again by today, Tuesday. If the odd one doesn't start, I might kickstart it with some cider from another bucket.

I drank the contents of last year's mini-keg a couple of weeks ago - it worked fine. In fact, this one was a little sharper than one of the Coke bottles so I guess that the yeast had survived better. I don't know why but this is half the fun of this game - you're never quite sure what you're going to get!

The next job will be bottling. It's slow and labourious and I hate washing all the bottles first. If anyone knows a quick way of washing out about fifty 2l Coke/Lemonade bottles without having to kneel beside a bath full of washing up liquid, I'd be delighted to hear about it!!

 

[Flyboytim]

I once lived in a flat with a solitary Worcester apple tree in the garden. It had lots of windfalls, and they were very sweet, but rather small. I had several buckets full. I had not got a press, so I cut up the apples, added a little water, and used a blender, and filtered through nylon net into a beer-brewing bucket.

The juice was going very brown, so I added some crushed vitamin C tablets so that it would stay pale - it stayed white. Using some of the juice to keep things liquid, I managed to blend and squeeze all the juice till I had the bucket full enough to start to ferment. I think I used camden tablets like you were recommended for winemaking to soak the apples in before blending.

I used a wine yeast, and the first fermentation was fast. When things slowed down, I decanted to a polypin (ex Fuller's London Pride), fitted with an air lock for the secondary fermentation. It remained cloudy and white for the next two months...

...when I got fed up of waiting. I tried it with a few friends after a well-oiled Sunday lunch at my new flat, and it seemed quite palatable if not a little sharp and petillant. I don't think I had more than 3 half pint glasses...

...on Monday, back at work, I felt fine except for total amnesia for everything after lunch the day before. I had apparently nearly started a fight in the local pub (not my normal behaviour at all), among other things.
Apparently, getting home without stepping on the pavement or road was hilarious.

I drank the remaining brew cautiously over the next week or so without any ill effects...

...or, at least any I can remember! That was my last attempt at home brewing.

 

[EightyTwo]

One of my friends drank enough of my cider a few years back that he fell of his bicycle on the way home!

Last year's cider turned out to be incredibly sharp! That'll teach me to use unripe cooking apples. I might end up using it as descaler! I tried adding a bit of bicarb and some sugar but it didn't taste that good. More experiments required...

It's that time of year again - I've just done another five 15l buckets with apples that I picked three weeks ago, before I went on holiday. I filled the "beer fridge" in the outbuilding with the better apples and they survived pretty well. However I lost about 50% of those left in the tubs and crates. Still, 75l from the "early tree" isn't bad.

I forgot to start a "primer" of yeast so we'll have to see how these go. I might blend this year's batch with last year's acidic brew - watch this space! I hope to be doing the other tree in a couple of weeks of so.

 

[Brigadier]

The next job will be bottling. It's slow and labourious and I hate washing all the bottles first. If anyone knows a quick way of washing out about fifty 2l Coke/Lemonade bottles without having to kneel beside a bath full of washing up liquid, I'd be delighted to hear about it!!

At 17p for 2 litres of Tesco bottled water, it'll only cost £8 to buy 50 bottles, and to tip the water away / use it to make your next batch.

Or,

After you finish each bottle, rinse it out, put a bit of campden solution into it, and store it for next use.

I use wine bottles. After each one is drunk, I rinse it with running water, then store it (upside down, and uncorked) in the garage. All I did was drill a load of 2" diameter holes into some shelves, and put the bottle necks into those. Works fine, and saves the backache of bleaching out....

 

[ericmark]

Well it is getting to the cider time of year again and I was considering having another go. Cider is very slow to make and having loads of demijohns in the freezer kept at 18.5°C with both refrigeration and heating does not seem a good use of resources when kit beer is so easy to make and I can say it will take 20 days not as with cider 6 months.

I told my wife this and she returned home with a £15 kit to make 20 pints of cider in 48 hours. It comes with it's own container, simply add water and drink 48 hours latter. Is it really worth juicing all those apples, storing demijohns and bottles and making what in my case was a very dry cider when it comes ready to drink in 48 hours?

OK twice the cost of kit beer, but 10 times faster to make, no need to bottle comes in ready to serve container with tap already in it. However I prefer taste of beer so freezer will still be used. And at the moment it is making some Orange Brandy Liquor claims to be 40% proof so expect that is US proof so around 20% ABV. At £10 for the kit plus sugar for 6 bottles of 20% ABV liquor that seems well worth the effort.

 

[EightyTwo]

I don't think that I've paid £15 for the whole setup (I did buy a couple of bags of sugar)! I made 100 litres - half a day to scrat and press the apples, an hour or so to rack off in November, a morning to bottle it in the new year and I've got enough for a 4 pints a week 'til next year. And it's so much better than chucking all the apples on the compost heap.

I've started using mini kegs that had contained real ales. The ones with the rubber bungs on the top are much easier to clean and re-use than the plastic bungs. However, I found a source of replacement bungs (brewuk) which means that I can replace broken or leaking ones (and I don't have to throw away my Hobgoblin kegs!). This is definitely easier than washing PET bottles and not as environmentally thuggish as buying water and throwing it away!

BTW, the 2015 vintage is really good and, after a reasonably heavy session this weekend, doesn't seem to give you a hangover!

 

[ericmark]

I have not got a press, I used a juicer which although it does extract the juicer it is a long winded process to even do enough to fill a demijohn, I have to stop to clean and empty pulp found a stick of rhubarb works well to clean the pulping spikes. As you say seemed better than allowing them to simply rot down.

Some of the pulp does get through when using a juicer and you need to allow it to settle. However the point where it has settled is very close to point where it starts to ferment and if a little warm the it starts to ferment first.

The fermentation is in stages, at first rapid where it goes for juice, but after that it goes for the pulp, at first it forms a crust on the top, then it falls and produces a sediment on the bottom. The sediment can be hard, but often it is a floating mass at the bottom and to remove you need a slow syphon into clean demijohn. It is hard to decide when to start removing crust and sediment as the longer you wait the less there is, but even after 6 months there is still some.

Point is it is rather labour intensive and the results changed demijohn to demijohn often the cider is very dry. So £15 and no hassle seems good. And I do wonder is it really worth all the effort when 20 pints can be made so easy? As to 48 hours it seems incredible compared with nearly as many weeks to make real cider.

 

[EightyTwo]

I agree! Using a juicer and demijohns would be hard work!! I do about half a ton bag of apples, often with some friends, and use 15l food grade buckets (that used to contain mayonnaise!). Most of our equipment is homemade from scrounged stuff, modified and/or re-purposed. The only new things were screws and bolts, a bottle jack for the press, muslin squares and bags, fermentation locks and other sundry brewing supplies.

I've never had a crust on the top but it can get a bit excited in the first week! I tried getting the sediment out of a demijohn once - it was hard work. Much easier in a bucket! I always use a siphon with about 1" minimum depth (plastic, not a glass J tube) but I gently tip the bucket at the end. I rack off once and then bottle it so everything goes through the siphon only twice. When I bottle it, it is pretty much dead (and very dry) so I try to stir up a little sediment. I prep the 2 litre bottles with about 30ml of sugar solution (about 500g of sugar dissolved in a litre of hot water) before adding the cider and then leave them in the shed. The end result is something a little fizzy and slightly sweet.

If you lived a little closer, you could pop round for a taster..!

 

[ericmark]

Had I still been working I would have considered some form of press. But I now lack the access to welding sets and the like to build a press, as you say a simple hydraulic jack is easy way to do the pressing, I have built a press but this was for concrete not apples, we actually sucked out the water it was not simple squeezed out.

The pulp clearly still have fermentables in it. As to if we want to ferment the pulp is another question, but with my method some pulp always got through, so as a result it was fermented.

What I could do now is cool the juice while it settles, that way fermenting only starts after I have syphoned off the amber liquid and I can remove the small amount of pulp which gets though. However when I last did it I did not have a spare fridge of freezer to keep the liquid cool and stop fermenting, and just as the liquid started to clear it also started to ferment and made it cloudy again.

Today I brew with careful temperature control, when I did the cider it was on the windowsill in the kitchen. I have found temperature control has resulted in a completely different brew. I knew temperature mattered and I had found winter brews of beer were better than summer brews, but I had never realised how much temperature matters until I started using an old fridge/freezer to brew in.

When I first got the fridge/freezer I ordered up a controller and made a mistake. The MH1210A would control heating or cooling but not both together, so at first only used heating, and in the garage in winter months this was not a problem. However I had not realised how much heat the fermenting released and also used a heater which was fair too big, I used a 18W heater and now realise an 8W heater is ample. As winter ended I had enough stock so stopped brewing, but in September 2015 I restarted and we had a hot spell, and once it had over shot I was unable to cool it off again.

So I bought a second controller this time the STC-1000 which has two relays so can heat and cool without the need for me to do anything. I really expected it to over shoot, with the sensor on the fermentor the air in the freezer dropped to less than 6ºC on first switch on, with some 2ºC for the fermentor to drop, but the fermentor temperature did not even dip 0.1ºC below the 18.5ºC set temperature, maybe because it's a frost free freezer which has the active bit behind a panel and a fan to circulate the cold air? Now with just an 8W bulb for heating it kept to set temperature very well. Once the main fermentation is over I transfer to the fridge compartment, one as once main bit is over the heat released by fermentation is a lot less, and two once the main bit is over it does not matter if the temperature rises, in fact it likely helps. The fridge is high enough to syphon from and the freezer is then free for the next brew, the old MH1210A controller keeps fridge warm enough, it has been found the fridge/freezer motor cools the freezer first so it does not really cool the fridge as turned off well before that point.

The improvement in beer quality has been impressive, I had never really expected such a marked difference. So I now look at my other brews from kit wines to high ABV liquors and wonder what effect temperature control would have on them?

As a result the 48 hour cider kit has not been started yet, as I don't have the freezer free it has a orange brandy in it at the moment, as the Scottish heavy in the fridge is bottled the orange brandy will move up to the fridge and the cider will be started in the freezer.

The only problem is I am producing far more than I can drink, my wife is going on about using up craft supplies, it's OK for her, using up the masses of paper, glitter etc she uses for her craft hobbies does not cause one to get permanently drunk! I look at the 100 odd pints of booze in the garden shed and think I must stop brewing, specially when some of it is 20% ABV.

 

[EightyTwo]

The only problem is I am producing far more than I can drink, my wife is going on about using up craft supplies, it's OK for her, using up the masses of paper, glitter etc she uses for her craft hobbies does not cause one to get permanently drunk! I look at the 100 odd pints of booze in the garden shed and think I must stop brewing, specially when some of it is 20% ABV.

Have a party and/or invite your brewing mates round!!

 

[ericmark]

Well the kit

has been made, first 48 hours in a controlled environment at 19.5°C waited three days before trying, it was a nice sparking drink, rather cloudy with a s.g. of 1.020 which is rather high pointing to fermentation is not really complete, put some in bottle to take to daughter, and squeezed the bottle first only half full and when got there is was turgid with pressure. Just re-tested the s.g. and down to 1.002 however hydrometer sticking to test jar side so could be out a little, however a massive drop to the first test, and cider drier as one would expect. In both cases still a nice drink, but very different in taste, I would say at least 5 days are required not 48 hours. The cider has remained cloudy but it claims it is a cloudy cider anyway.

 

[EightyTwo]

Finally got round to "bottling" last years brew. Now I have nineteen 5l mini-kegs full of cider sitting in the shed!

One interesting thing - I was working my way through a 2l bottle at a bike rally and had done about 3/4 of it when I needed to "let some out". As I stood up to head for the loos, I found that my legs didn't work very well... Still, I managed and returned to finish the bottle and start another. Finally, at stupid o'clock, I headed for my tent. When I woke up, I expected to have a massive hangover but I didn't! I thought that it might creep up on me during the day (I did deserve one!) but no. No hangover! I have repeated this "experiment" a couple more times with the same result - no hangover. Has anyone else found this?

 

[ericmark]

I found real cider too dry, I would think it needs some thing to stop the fermenting at the wanted dryness, this is likely OK with pressed apples, but I put the apples through a juicer, this means you get more pulp in with juice than with pressed, this pulp takes a long time to ferment, around a year, if you try to remove the cider before complete then very had separating cider from pulp, so you have two options, one at around 2 days in before fermentation has really kicked in, specially if kept cool, the pulp and liquid separate, syphon at this point so only clear liquid is fermented and you can stop at required point, however you have a problem with infection in these early days.

I drank the cider mixed with pop, this means it's no so dry and is a nice drink, but not as alcoholic, so because mixing I did not have a bad head or any other side effects, in general with home brewing I have come to realise the alcoholic content is not as important as with ready made beer or cider, in the UK we have a taxation system which means commercial brewers need to aim for just under the point where the next tax point comes in, so instead of beers through the range 1.5 to 12% alcohol we have drinks going up in steps just under next limit.

With home brew you don't pay tax, so you don't aim for a set alcohol level you aim for a taste, the alcohol level needs to be high enough so the brew will keep, but after that point it does not matter, so you can drink say 6 pints at 2% or 3 pints at 4% or 1 litre at 8%. I would prefer to sit down drinking all night long than having a drink and the whole night is lost in a mist of drunkenness. So I now go for low alcohol brewing, and actually the pint tastes better too.

You can brew pure sugar, no need for anything to add taste, you can get around the 20% ABV using just sugar, then you have a horrid bitter after taste, so you add charcoal to absorb the taste so you end up with 20% ABV with no taste, then you add the taste you want, orange I like, you can also add it to other brews. So if you look at a standard one can kit beer you add sugar, if instead of adding sugar before you ferment you add cleaned up alcohol made from sugar after you have fermented you get a 50/50 beer sugar brew but without the bitter after taste from the sugar. So far so good, but the problem is the beer tastes like a low alcohol beer even when it is really a high alcohol beer, so what is the point?