Turbo Cider for a wedding

[NickW]

Hi all, I have made TC a few times. Simply using basics apple juice, safale 04 yeast, stopping the ferment at 1.018ish and storing in a corny keg at 2c for the life of the cider. This made tasty cider and was ready to drink as soon as it was carbonated.

A friend of mine had some of this at our BBQ and really enjoyed it and has asked if I can provide 100 small bottles for his wedding next year.

Obviously I cannot provide this same cider, the main reason being there would be exploding bottles!

He has asked for a fruity cider, so I was thinking of fermenting the basics apple juice right out, and then batch priming with some kind of cherry syrup?

Basically my question is, are there any tried and tested recipes out there? Would I need to use anything else in my brew?

Thanks for reading through all that!

 

[JonnyD]

Sounds like you need to do some experimenting :drink:
You won't get any bottle bombs of you just just carbonation drops (or certainly I've never experienced any) only a few quid for a couple of packets. Kill the yeast off with stabiliser first. Then I think there should be enough left to secondary ferment. And just use a tested recipe for primary and no need to back sweat or if there is use canderel

 

[NickW]

Sounds like you need to do some experimenting :drink:
You won't get any bottle bombs of you just just carbonation drops (or certainly I've never experienced any) only a few quid for a couple of packets. Kill the yeast off with stabiliser first. Then I think there should be enough left to secondary ferment. And just use a tested recipe for primary and no need to back sweat or if there is use canderel

I'm not sure there would be any yeast left after adding stabilizer... :wha: and if so, the yeast would start to multiply and surely cause a bottle bomb

 

[calumscott]

Yes, it would be different. For fizzy in bottles you'd have to ferment to dry and prime. That means you have to use artificial sweetener if you don't want it seriously dry.

For authenticity you can use real fruit. Basically ferment out a TC, age it, then juice whatever fruit you fancy (I did raspberry), add that and ferment out. Then back sweeten with Splenda and batch prime and bottle.

 

[NickW]

Yes, it would be different. For fizzy in bottles you'd have to ferment to dry and prime. That means you have to use artificial sweetener if you don't want it seriously dry.

For authenticity you can use real fruit. Basically ferment out a TC, age it, then juice whatever fruit you fancy (I did raspberry), add that and ferment out. Then back sweeten with Splenda and batch prime and bottle.

This sounds like what I had in mind. I have a year to experiment.. what kind of ageing are we talking? :wha:

 

[oldbloke]

The Lowicz syrups are popular in some quarters - "world foods" section of larger supermarkets.
Add towards the end to keep as much flavour as poss, but they're quite high in sugar so you want to ferment some of it out.
You'll probably find some good info if you put Lowicz in the forum search box

 

[frenchy]

Then back sweeten with Splenda and batch prime and bottle.

What quantity of Splenda is needed?

 

[graysalchemy]

Sounds like you need to do some experimenting :drink:
You won't get any bottle bombs of you just just carbonation drops (or certainly I've never experienced any) only a few quid for a couple of packets. Kill the yeast off with stabiliser first. Then I think there should be enough left to secondary ferment. And just use a tested recipe for primary and no need to back sweat or if there is use canderel

That wouldn't work If the yeast has been stabilised then there won't be any to ferment in the bottle. Any yeast that there may be in an unstabilised bottle will ferment all the sugar hence bottle bomb.

If you want fizzy sweet cider then you need to ferment to dryness back sweeten with a non fermentable sugar then prime and bottle as per normal. Adding a syrup for flavour will lead to more fermentation as they are packed full of sugar, the only problem you may have is that they will have preservatives so the syrup will have to be boiled first to drive off the preservatives.

:thumb: :thumb:

 

[calumscott]

Then back sweeten with Splenda and batch prime and bottle.

What quantity of Splenda is needed?

In layman's terms - a bucketful. To bring an ultra-dry west country cider back up to anything that will let the additional fruit flavour through needs a lot of splenda.

the only problem you may have is that they will have preservatives so the syrup will have to be boiled first to drive off the preservatives.

Yup, where juicing your own fresh fruit (use something ballsy, raspberry worked really well so anything distinctive - passion fruit, pineapple, blueberry...) means real fruit flavour, no preservatives and something you can claim to be just that little bit extra special. It's a wedding after all.

what kind of ageing are we talking?

Completely depends on style. If you are going west country scrumpy then several months to a year. For a cleaner style then definitely a couple of months in bulk and another couple in the bottle. Cider takes a long time even though we call it Turbo. Couple of weeks to ferment, couple of months to age, another couple of weeks to ferment out your fruit addition and another couple/few months in the bottle to finish.

 

[graysalchemy]

Basically get brewing now :whistle: :whistle:

 

[NickW]

Why is it my kegged turbo cider was damn tasty after just 2 weeks in the FV and one week pressurizing in the corny? :nah:

 

[graysalchemy]

Personally I wouldn't find TC tasty after 2 weeks and from reading peoples experiences on here over the last 3 years neither do most so in a word I don't know.

TC needs months not weeks it only gets better with time. However if you feel the wedding guest would enjoy it then go ahead. :thumb: :thumb:

 

[NickW]

:hmm:

Spanner in the works then. I may say I might not be able to do it. If it's going to take half a year juSt for the first batch experiment.

I don't want to give them sub-par cider

 

[oldbloke]

Depends exactly how good you need it to be.
I'm bottling some today, and while it will clearly be much better at christmas (which I've intended it for), it'll be /good enough/ in a month (minimal conditioning)
Per gallon:
625ml Suma concentrate, 500ml Morrison's cranberry juice drink, 1tsp tannin. Young's cider yeast (after lunch bottling same made with Gervin D, may remember to report back). At 0 conditioning I think I slightly prefer the gallon with sweetener (4tsp/gallon IIRC) but by christmas I'll almost certainly prefer the dry one.

 

[calumscott]

Why is it my kegged turbo cider was damn tasty after just 2 weeks in the FV and one week pressurizing in the corny? :nah:

Because you're stopping it while still quite sweet so lots of sugars and things haven't been chewed up by the yeast. When you ferment out to dry with no conditioning and some (me and GA for two) would say no MLF then you end up with thin, insipid cider.

The alternative is to see if you can borrow a blichmann beer gun and brew your standard cider, carb it in the corny and bottle under pressure. :thumb:

 

[Jeltz]

Would it be viable to kill the yeast @ 1.018 with Campden and Potassium Sorbate and then force carb in a corney and bottle from that?

 

[graysalchemy]

Yes if you have a blichmann gun to bottle with. :thumb: