Crabapple cider - natural ferment

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OxfordNick

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Loads of crab apples this year so time for a natural fermentation experiment.

Two buckets full of crab apples - wash, slice & then mince in the food processor
Press in my small vigour fruit press with a certain amount of swearing
yield - 8 litres of tart but quite drinkable juice & a rather nice pink colour.
OG - 1.045

Away for a week so Ive left it to ferment in a fermentation bucket with an airlock - no commercial yeast added - any bets on how its going to turn out ?
 
If the juice was drinkable then can't be that crabby an apple. A lot of wild apples are commerial apple trees grown from discarded apple cores. Anyway made some crab apple wine last year still haven't bottled as it seems there's still some malo/lactic going on in the dj, but had used yeast. It will take some time for wild yeasts to work, certainly you'd be very lucky to get it to ferment within a week. Best of luck.
 
Two and a bit weeks on - its pretty much fermented out:
zDMj9HFl.jpg

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Bottling in the next couple of days with a little priming sugar - its getting very dry so Ill probably add a little artifical sweetener too, although Ill leave a couple of bottles unsweetened to see what it would have been like if I left it.

6 months in the shed before drinking.. can I wait that long !
 

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