Apple cider

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alphacento

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Frankfurt am Main
Hi all,

this weekend I have made 100% home made cider for the first time. It took 10 hours all in all but hopefully it will be worth it.

I purchased 40 kg of Apfelwein apples (don't know the real name) last weekend and let them sweat for about 1 week. Last night I decided to bring myself forward a little so I cleaned (took me about 1,5 hours). This morning, startin at 8,30, I cut, mash and pressed them. By the time they were all pressed it was about 15.00. After that I filtered the juice to remove some little chunky bits.

After seven hours of work I was left with about 15 litres of juice. I took so long because I used a normal kitchen helper to mash them and a 1,3 litres fruit press to press them. Theoretically I was suppose to let the pomace be pressed for about 25 minutes to get as much juice our of it but it would have taken far to long otherwise. Next time I will get the shop to press them (they offer the service) in order to save time.

So after that I added 5 litres of 100% apple juice just to get over the 20 litres mark. Once reached the amout that I wanted I added 4 campden tablets, 4 taaspoon of pectolase and 1 teaspoon of tannin and mixed until dissolved.

Once everything was dissolved I checked the SG which was 1.050 and then I added enough Sugar to increase it to 1.060. Then I checked the PH level which was around 2,7 so I decided to increase it to 3,0.

Tomorrow evening I will add cider yeast and then, hopefully, in 3-4 months I will have a very good cider!

Does anybody has some suggestions on how make it better? Should increase some more the SG or the PH before dissolving the yeast?

Take care!
 
I have a question about fermentation. In this recipe I added 1 Campden tablet per gallon and then let it rest for 24 hours before adding yeast. The fermentation process did not start. Today, about 16 hours ater adding yeast, there was not activity.

After that I syphon it to another fermenter and added new yeast and fermentation started immediately.

I don't understand why. The first fermenter bin was completely sealed so the gasses could have only go through the airlock. The yeast was a few month old but the package was not open until yesterday so it should not have had an influence.

My only theory is that by not having crushed the campden tablets they might have taken longer to dissolve. Maybe the yeast that I added were killed off by effects of the campden tablets.

What if it was just taking longer to start and I added twice the amount of yeast? Would that havee any effect on the brew?

Any ideas?

Take care
 
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