How much sugar is too much sugar?

[Sinisterdex]

So I've learned off some of our regulars on the forum that if you pile a cider high with sugar you get "tramp juice".

So my question is ;

Giving that apple juice from concentrate without no added sugar with brew out to a modest 5 - 6%
How much sugar is a sufficient to boost you cider up to old scrumpy/old Rosie type level (7%)?

 

[Ken L]

I have added upto about 700g into a 23l batch and it's brewed out dry and then lightly carbonated with no difficulties.
Of course, I was only adding the sugar so that I had a medium to mix the malic acid and tannin and stop it clumping and not upping the alcohol at all.....

To be honest, I've just done two batches for the summer and deliberately made them weaker buy adding about 3l of water with just enough sugar to match the alcohol that I'd get from pure juice. The strong stuff was nice but three pints on a weeknight was seeing me wake up with a thick head.

One thing worth noting is that all juices are not equal. Tesco's cheapest AJ is considerably more concentrated than the Sainsbury's version - and consequently gives a higher alcohol yield.

Never actually bothered with working out the alcohol content but I'm sure somebody can give you a starting gravity for a 7% brew.

 

[Sinisterdex]

Fantastic tips.
Thank you for the input Ken L

 

[Applesnmore]

As a guide it is generally said that for wine 20g of sugar per litre equals 1% alcohol.
I have it in my head, probably from Andrew​ Lea's site, that 1.055 gives 7% alcohol and 1.050 around 6%
Of course it isn't straight forward, what fermentable sugars are available, is it all converted to alcohol....


Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk

 

[Ken L]

I was wondering were the tips had gone until I realised they wee on your other thread.
My cider batches are typically about 26l and take two weeks to bottling.
I will take a 2l PET bottle on a Saturday and add wine yeast, a little nutrient and a litre of juice and about half a litre of water. Give it a good shake, squeeze the sides to get rid of excess air and leave it in the kitchen.
On Sunday, when I'm 100% sure that I have active yeast (you don't want to open £15 worth of AJ only to discover you have no yeast), I'll re-sterilise and rinse the vessel, add the yeast mix and dump in AJ to about 19l - along with a teaspoon of tannin, a teaspoon of nutrient and two heaped desert spoons of acid stired into some sugar so that the tannin doesn't clump.
By about Thursday or Friday (after the first mad fermentation has finished and the foam has dropped), I top it up to 26 or 27l and let it go.
Do nothing that weekend. Check it the following Saturday and you should see that the brew is no longer fizzing and instead of a ring of foam around a clear fizzing centre, you now have a polker dot maze of little foam flecks across the surface and the yeast will be noticeably starting to drop out of suspension.
It's now ready to clean and ready your syphon, bottles etc and have a bottling session, but if you're busy, it can be left in the FV for a month or so with no ill effects.
When you're done, you can either clean up or dump fresh apple juice directly on top of the old yeast - but don't do more than two or three repeat batches before starting again with fresh yeast.

I do carbonate but only enough to give the cider a fresh taste - half a teaspoon to a pint bottle.

When you're confident, you can stat to play with the alcohol content, the type of acids you use (malic is best but citric is cheap), oaking and (so long as you haven't used citric acid) with malolactic secondary fermentation.