Happy Wife = Happy Life: Giving Cider Another Try

   I finally decided to get serious, and more clinical about brewing.  Along with learning the technical side, numbers and such, that means taking notes.  Looking for an easy way to access and save those notes, as well as share them, I thought about starting a blog.  I've never blogged before, but at the suggestion by a friend, I went to it.  Here, I'll post all my observations, notes, and really anything having to do with home brewing beer, cider, and mead.

   My last foray into cider making wasn't terrible, but certainly ended up with far too much dumping.  The reason being, that fermentation was not ended, and because of the very aggressive wine yeast I used, it over fermented resulting in a very dry, sour beverage that was far too hot (too much alcohol).  I had used the same yeast and roughly same techniques, though a longer fermentation time, to make a mead at the same time, with similar results. In addition to having learned much more about brewing techniques, and the brewing process in general, I did, however, learn a few things specifically related to these newest batches:

• Red Star Cote des Blancs champagne yeast makes a very dry, very bland cider.
• Back sweetening with sugar alcohols (Splenda, Stevia, etc) can compensate for this.
• My fridge was not, at the time, cold enough to properly cold-crash unracked cider.
• Rack.  Then rack some more.
• Dishwashers are useful brewing tools.

  Doing much research to find a way to make a sweet, yet sparkling cider for SWMBO, I came across a great post here in one of my favorite home brewing forums.  The original writer of this info is/was (it's an old post, Google digs deep) the president of a Michigan home brew club, and winner of multiple consecutive Cider Maker of the Year awards.  It gives lots of great info, explains things many other forum members talk about but of which never state the whys and results, and is actually from what I've seen, innovative.

  You see, conventionally, you can either have sparkling dry apple cider, or still sweet cider which is essentially low-gravity Apfelwein.  If one were to try to bottle carbonate (as is done with beer) a sweet cider, the fermentation would not bottom out and the resulting pressure would cause exploding bottles.  So, to create a sweet cider, the cider is cold-crashed once the cider reaches the desired gravity.  This means storing the bottled cider at ~36F for 24-48 hours after racking to a secondary or tertiary fermenter, then bottling.  This effectively stops fermentation, killing the yeast.  This also stops any chance of carbonation.

   For a sparkling dry cider, the cider is allowed to dry out to a FG (final gravity) of around 1.005-.995.  Then  bottled, then pasteurized or cold-crashed.

   So, how to create a sparkling sweet cider, without the bottle bombs?

   The commonly accepted solutions to this are to make a very dry cider, then adding Splenda, Xylitol, or Stevia (sugar alcohols which cannot be fermented by yeast) which will sweeten the cider without causing a continuation, or re-start of fermentation.  The other is to force carbonate by injecting CO2 via a kegging system.

   Though most people are happy with the results of back-sweetening, not being a fan of those sweeteners, I was wanting to avoid it.  Though this helped convince SWMBO that a kegging system is a necessary household fixture, it just isn't yet in the cards.  So what to do?

  As mentioned in the article above, one could brew a semi-sweet cider to more on the dry end, say 1.007 (think Strongbow), then add 'too much' preservative free apple juice during bottling time.  Checking the carbonation levels every two weeks or so.  Once desired levels of carbonation are reached, soaking the bottles in 160F water for 10-15 minutes will pasteurize, killing the yeast, while maintaining the sweetness and carbonation.  Easy way to do this: run the bottles through the dishwasher (do not use high heat dry).

   Forum members posted good results with this technique.  So, one problem solved (the problem of a lack of  kegerator is still there).  At this point I wonder, why dry out and back sweeten at all?  I believe, that after multiple rackings (transferring cider to a fresh fermenter, which will remove the cider from the cake of yeast at the bottom), which should slow fermentation down due to fewer yeast cells, why not just bottle and pasteurize once the cider is at the desired gravity/level of sweetness?

  I believe one poster left a comment that they had done just the very thing with success.  So, this will be my goal.  Tonight was the first racking, and with amazing efforts of SWMBO, things went well.  However, very active yeasts due to very warm temperatures (and possibly the added yeast nutrient, I'm not sure how much that affected the violence and speed of fermentation), things moved much more quickly than I had intended.

   Everyone loves a cliffhanger, so I will end this post with that.  I will post the continuation tomorrow, with my notes and observations of the last four days of fermentation!