How not to make cider - or - my garage reeks of apples!
Howdy all, been a while but quite busy lately and not a lot of time for making things.
I thought I'd bring you up to speed with my first attempt at apple cider. I've got a lot of friends with crab apple trees and who know I'm handy with alcohol. I got 2 large Rubbermaid totes worth of apples dropped off at my place. Since they did the hard work of picking, they (correctly) figured they could get part of the final product.
First thing to do was prep them by coring and quartering them, getting rid of seeds, stems, and leaves.
While I was chopping them up I noticed that some of them had damaged parts or potentially signs of pests eating at them. I got rid of those parts, and decided that it might be best to pasteurize the prepped apples.
I fired up the burner and brought the apples to almost boil for 10 minutes or so, in batches since the pot is a 20L stock pot.
This also had the effect of softening up the apples and giving them a cooked taste. As I'll find out in the next couple steps, that's bad.
It's at this point that I realize my luck is starting to turn and I really don't know what I'm doing when it comes to cider. Firstly I see that the food mill I bought sucks and really doesn't do a good job of mashing the apples, even with them softened up. Since it would take days to mill all the apples with that thing I quickly set it aside and try to come up with plan B.
Being halfway decently clever (it's where smart and lazy meet), I go into my kitchen and get the Kitchen Aid stand mixer with the vegetable chopping attachment. Not quite good enough, so I swap it out with the meat grinder attachment.
Clever, right? WRONG! I've been told by a friend who knows what they're doing that this pulps it, making the juice difficult to extract (as we will find out in a moment), and resulting in something that's more like cooked apple sauce than yummy juice. Also, being occasionally sprayed by boiling hot apple pulp while mushing it through isn't especially fun.
The next lesson learned the hard way, while sanitizing my equipment, I opened the nylon mesh strainer bag and realize I got the small size, not the large on suitable for 5 gallon primaries. This is going to be challenging...
Some of the things I try to compensate for this, including using a linen pillow case, failed miserably, and left me with hands scalded by boiling apple pulp as the bag didn't pass enough juice through due to the high pulp content (see: why not to use a meat grinder). So using a metal strainer and a ladle, I proceed to push liters of apple pulp through one scoop at a time.
*** Hours later ***
After working way too hard to get a respectable amount of still very pulpy juice I use that small, wrong sized mesh bag and my trusty strainer to filter it one more time into the primary.
And once again into another primary.
Each time getting an increasing amount of pulp and a decreasing amount of juice. A frustrating amount of my hard earned juice went into the green bin that day. So much so that I only ended up with about 10L, half of what was expected from that volume of apples. I used some of the apple-tasting liquid from the pasteurization, but that stuff was low sugar content despite the taste.
I also added 4L of store-bought apple juice to round out the flavour of the crab apples, as well as 500mL of honey. This brought the starting gravity up to 1.04, and a final ABV of approximately 5%.
I added two packages of EC-1118 Champagne yeast and some pectic enzyme, stirred it up, and sealed it.
Fast forward a couple weeks and the fermentation has stopped. Wait one more week to be sure there's no more bubbles from the primary and that fermentation is complete. I racked the cider off the sediment, leaving me about 16L of cider. Since I like my cider fizzy, I decided to bottle condition, so I mixed 1 cup of water with a 1/2 cup of white sugar, and brought it to a boil to to invert and dissolve it. Added this to the cider, stirred it up, and immediately bottled my cider into Korken re-sealable bottles from Ikea. Got them on sale, seems like they'd do the job. Stashed all the bottles in a sealed Rubbermaid container (since I'm expecting exploding bottles at the rate I've been going with this project), and wait a month or so.
My goal was to have the cider ready for Canadian Thanksgiving, which just passed. I chilled a couple bottles and popped the top.
The final product has a dry, crisp apple taste, lightly effervescent, and pleasant to drink. My ever-patient wife, who cannot tell a lie when it comes to my alcohol adventures, says its quite nice. After giving away a couple bottles to the contributing neighbours, I still have about a dozen bottles to show for my afternoon of unnecessarily difficult work.
Some improvements for next time:
1. Mechanically break apart the apples without pulping or grinding them. I've been told pea-sized bits is about the right size, and the trick is to do this by a shredding action rather than grinding.
2. I'm going to build a cider press rather than doing things by hand. I'm looking into some basic designs using plastic primary buckets and a bottle jack.
3. Not use the pasteurizing water. While it has a lot of apple flavour, the sugar content is low and does nothing in the end to improve the product.
So that, in a few words, is how not to make cider. I think I'll stick with distilling through the winter while I can figure out how to do this better next time.
I thought I'd bring you up to speed with my first attempt at apple cider. I've got a lot of friends with crab apple trees and who know I'm handy with alcohol. I got 2 large Rubbermaid totes worth of apples dropped off at my place. Since they did the hard work of picking, they (correctly) figured they could get part of the final product.
First thing to do was prep them by coring and quartering them, getting rid of seeds, stems, and leaves.
While I was chopping them up I noticed that some of them had damaged parts or potentially signs of pests eating at them. I got rid of those parts, and decided that it might be best to pasteurize the prepped apples.
I fired up the burner and brought the apples to almost boil for 10 minutes or so, in batches since the pot is a 20L stock pot.
It's at this point that I realize my luck is starting to turn and I really don't know what I'm doing when it comes to cider. Firstly I see that the food mill I bought sucks and really doesn't do a good job of mashing the apples, even with them softened up. Since it would take days to mill all the apples with that thing I quickly set it aside and try to come up with plan B.
Being halfway decently clever (it's where smart and lazy meet), I go into my kitchen and get the Kitchen Aid stand mixer with the vegetable chopping attachment. Not quite good enough, so I swap it out with the meat grinder attachment.
The next lesson learned the hard way, while sanitizing my equipment, I opened the nylon mesh strainer bag and realize I got the small size, not the large on suitable for 5 gallon primaries. This is going to be challenging...
Some of the things I try to compensate for this, including using a linen pillow case, failed miserably, and left me with hands scalded by boiling apple pulp as the bag didn't pass enough juice through due to the high pulp content (see: why not to use a meat grinder). So using a metal strainer and a ladle, I proceed to push liters of apple pulp through one scoop at a time.
*** Hours later ***
After working way too hard to get a respectable amount of still very pulpy juice I use that small, wrong sized mesh bag and my trusty strainer to filter it one more time into the primary.
And once again into another primary.
Each time getting an increasing amount of pulp and a decreasing amount of juice. A frustrating amount of my hard earned juice went into the green bin that day. So much so that I only ended up with about 10L, half of what was expected from that volume of apples. I used some of the apple-tasting liquid from the pasteurization, but that stuff was low sugar content despite the taste.
I also added 4L of store-bought apple juice to round out the flavour of the crab apples, as well as 500mL of honey. This brought the starting gravity up to 1.04, and a final ABV of approximately 5%.
I added two packages of EC-1118 Champagne yeast and some pectic enzyme, stirred it up, and sealed it.
Fast forward a couple weeks and the fermentation has stopped. Wait one more week to be sure there's no more bubbles from the primary and that fermentation is complete. I racked the cider off the sediment, leaving me about 16L of cider. Since I like my cider fizzy, I decided to bottle condition, so I mixed 1 cup of water with a 1/2 cup of white sugar, and brought it to a boil to to invert and dissolve it. Added this to the cider, stirred it up, and immediately bottled my cider into Korken re-sealable bottles from Ikea. Got them on sale, seems like they'd do the job. Stashed all the bottles in a sealed Rubbermaid container (since I'm expecting exploding bottles at the rate I've been going with this project), and wait a month or so.
My goal was to have the cider ready for Canadian Thanksgiving, which just passed. I chilled a couple bottles and popped the top.
The final product has a dry, crisp apple taste, lightly effervescent, and pleasant to drink. My ever-patient wife, who cannot tell a lie when it comes to my alcohol adventures, says its quite nice. After giving away a couple bottles to the contributing neighbours, I still have about a dozen bottles to show for my afternoon of unnecessarily difficult work.
Some improvements for next time:
1. Mechanically break apart the apples without pulping or grinding them. I've been told pea-sized bits is about the right size, and the trick is to do this by a shredding action rather than grinding.
2. I'm going to build a cider press rather than doing things by hand. I'm looking into some basic designs using plastic primary buckets and a bottle jack.
3. Not use the pasteurizing water. While it has a lot of apple flavour, the sugar content is low and does nothing in the end to improve the product.
So that, in a few words, is how not to make cider. I think I'll stick with distilling through the winter while I can figure out how to do this better next time.
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