Waldo JaquithCan you make hard cider by pouring some yeast into a jug of store-bought cider and jamming a brewing airlock into the cap? IDK, let's find out!
Twelve hours after pitching the yeast, the cider has started to foam. I also poured some out, as several people pointed out I’ll need some headspace to prevent overflow.
OK, so two months later I bottled my cider in swing-top bottles, bottle-aged it for another couple of weeks, and I just had my first glass.
It’s…meh. There is nothing about it that is actively bad, but it's definitely not *good*.
Here's the challenge with homemade cider: it can either be sweet or carbonated, but not (easily) both. And this is *neither*, which is not a great combination.
When cider is done fermenting, the yeast has turned the sugars into alcohol. So it's no longer sweet. Also, the yeast has died off (because it ran out of sugar to eat or the alcohol got so high that the yeast can't live), so there are no longer any bubbles.
You can correct that by adding sugar just before you bottle it, if you kill off the yeast, which makes it sweet but not carbonated. Or you can add a bit of sugar before bottling, which will make it carbonated but not sweet.
I added a carefully measured bit of sugar to every bottle before bottling (too much and the bottle will explode), which somehow resulted in the cider being neither sweet nor carbonated. The bottle I opened was much improved through the addition of simple syrup, although of course it wasn't sparkling.
I've added a simple syrup to the other five bottles, and I hope to drink them at the perfect point when they're carbonated but still have sweetness.
IDK how much alcohol these have (I don't have a way to test), but the swimminess in my head tells me it's more than zero. I'll keep tweaking the remaining five ciders. I hope to learn enough to make cider from scratch next fall.
Backsweetening my cider did nothing to make it fizzy, so I added a pinch more yeast (which fizzed instantly) and waited a few days. I killed off the yeast with campden tablets, and just had some with lunch.
It’s pretty good! A little sweet, fizzy, entirely legit. I’ll enjoy drinking the rest, now that I’ve fixed them. And it all started by adding some yeast to a store-bought jug of cider.
Brice Ruth@waldoj very cool. I still have some I need to bottle downstairs …
Scott Matheson@waldoj don’t remember what yeast you used, but some are tuned to die before finishing the sugar (depending on the total starting sugar). Also tabs of sugar - little candies to drop in the bottles - are a thing to avoid having to measure.
@smatheson I used Red Star’s “premier classique” yeast, carefully selected on the basis of I already owned it.
@waldoj The brewing folks will have ideas I’m sure! I got some stuff - including a hygrometer- at a garage sale… or you know, trial and error may be more fun :-)
smolwaffle@waldoj
IIRC there's a few solutions, some of which you may have already come across.
1. Heat pasteurize the bottles at the right point during bottle conditioning to have carbonation and some sweetness. Find the right point by putting some in plastic so you can gauge the pressure.
2. Use a sweetener that the yeast can't digest for sweet.
3. Bottle off a keg with a counter pressure filler. This is the most expensive but the easiest and least dangerous (no exploding bottles).
@smolwaffle Since I'm using flip-top bottles, I can just drop in some campden tablets when they hit the right carbonation/sweetness balance during bottle conditioning. Or so goes my theory!
@waldoj
Sounds like a good experiment, and a pretty easy one to run. I hope it works!
Sounds like a good experiment, and a pretty easy one to run. I hope it works!
Don Whiteside@waldoj What about carbonating them after the fact? Seems like it would be easier to dial in a taste than a taste+bubble balance.
@donw I don't have the foggiest idea of how I'd do that.
Tim McCormack@waldoj @donw Probably with one of those home carbonators thingies with the CO2 cartridge. I think you're only supposed to use them to make seltzer (lest something sugary backsplash into the mechanism) but obviously it's more fun to carbonate random things.
You can also drop a pellet of dry ice into a glass of the cider and wait until it has sublimated. (*Fully* sublimated, nothing skating around on the surface.) Never in a closed container. And then you can play with the rest of the dry ice.
@timmc @waldoj the cheap soda stream type things are for water only but the classic soda water bottle we saw in old Stooges shorts aren’t limited that way. Some frufru restaurants have used them to make foams out of all sorts of things. There’s some targeted at home brewers as well. https://a.co/d/2y8ptxE
Present Good@waldoj My FIL & his 40's/50's college housemates used to get a barrel of cider every fall and put it in the attic until Christmas, by which time it had become hard cider. If unpasteurized cider is still available, I wonder if simply time would turn it hard.
bouriquet@PresentGood @waldoj Generally it should, with the help of the natural yeasts on the skin of the apple, if they haven’t been scrubbed off.
Frank Bennett 🇯🇵@waldoj Gonna guess you'll get bacteria in that, but who knows? Worth a try!
@fgbjr Maybe! I sterilized the airlock, and since the cider is pasteurized, I'm hoping that's OK. But if it gets funky, I'll know. :)
🐦⬛@waldoj I'm a little worried about how pasteurized it is, but maybe that's unfounded. Good luck little yeasts!
Pete@waldoj
I'm totally bookmarking this post and hoping it works out, I would try this!
I'm totally bookmarking this post and hoping it works out, I would try this!
Dark Phoenix 🇺🇦🇨🇦🇬🇱🇵🇦🇵🇸🏳️🌈
the Stripey Goodness@waldoj yes, yes you can. It works okay.
After a week, start doing this:
Leave it out on the back porch overnight to freeze.
In the morning, pour the liquid off into another container, and throw away the ice.
Repeat until it won't freeze in the freezer.
After a week, start doing this:
Leave it out on the back porch overnight to freeze.
In the morning, pour the liquid off into another container, and throw away the ice.
Repeat until it won't freeze in the freezer.
2xfo
Remind Me
Will@waldoj 100% this will work to make alcohol. No comment on if it will hit all the notes you want, but it will be booze.
@Will My basic thinking is that apple cider wants more than anything to be alcoholic. You have to work to stop it from doing that. So that bit should be easy.
Tom@waldoj @tbridge things I learned about cider in my few efforts making it from neighborhood trees: 1) this is why we have crabapples, if you add around 10-20% crabapple juice to other sweet apple juice, it adds enough acidity to kill bacteria while the natural yeast on apple skin gets going. This is the natural way to make cider w/o a lot of sterilization. 2) always use a blow-off valve. Yeast produce CO2, and in a sealed vessel, it creates enormous pressure
Lyle Solla-Yates@waldoj Fun, good luck! Please let me know if you need assistance with the testing process
@waldoj
I may have missed it, but how did the cider experiment turn out?
I may have missed it, but how did the cider experiment turn out?
@forpeterssake I’m letting it do a final round of in-bottle fermentation with a little bit of sugar, so I can’t say yet. It is definitely hard cider! But I’ll update when I first have a bottle, sometime this month.
@waldoj Awesome, I kinda want to try it out myself, I'll be interested to hear how it turned out!