On Sunday (8 days ago),
Kat and I had a wonderful picnic at
Dixon's Apples. We got 8
gallons of cider (in addition to a bag of
apples), and
just in time, because about half an hour later, they were all sold out of cider. (And now, according to their website, they're sold out of apples.) You gotta hit those farms
fast!2 gallons have already been drunk, Kat's fermenting one in her fridge using whatever wild yeasts happen to be present in the unpasteurized cider (nothing to do, except let it sit there a couple months), and this blog is about what's happening to the other 5 gallons. I'm making
hard cider, honeyed about half way to being a
cyser. (Next time, I'll use 2 or 3 times as much honey, making a
real cyser.)
I dissolved the unpasteurized cider with 3 pounds of orange blossom
Bee Chama Honey and 2 pounds of "Mrs Crockett's Hill Country" honey, adding it to my carboy. I also added 5 crushed
campden tablets to kill anything alive in there, since I didn't want to boil the
must and drive off any flavor. The SO2 from the campden needs about a day to disperse. I also added 1/4 tsp of pectic enzyme, but I don't know if that was really necessary (since I didn't boil), but I hear it helps with clarity too (not that I've ever really cared much about that).
While I let the campden tabs work their lethal magic, I started some
White Labs 720 (Sweet Mead) yeast in about a pint of pasteurized apple juice.
The next morning, I saw that my must was strikingly
layered. The cider that I had dissolved the honey in, and the remaining cider that I had poured into it, didn't mix well. Each layer had a sediment of apple bits. It was kind of funny to see a "floating" sediment layer, and when I agitaged the carboy, the dense bottom layer would slosh in slow motion.
That night, I stirred with a sanitized racking cane (it's awkward to try to stir inside a carboy, and that was about the only thing I can that was long and narrow enough), and then pitched the starter, along with a little
DAP and
Fermaid-K. The next morning, it was visible (though slowly) fermenting, and by lunchtime, I had a solid fermentatation going. Over the next few days, the fermentation has looked good (I needed a blowoff tube for the first day or so, and since then, the airlock has been steadily 'blooping' about once per second), though hydrometer readings indicate that it is going pretty slowly.
I have the carboy
wearing a black T-shirt, both to block light, and also so that I could wet it for evaporative cooling should the temp get too high. Wetting hasn't been necessary, though. The luck of the weather combined with strategic opening and closing of doors connecting the room to the warmer part of the house, has allowed me to keep it perfectly in the 70F-75F range, supposedly ideal for this yeast strain.
I'll continue to add small amounts of DAP and Fermaid-K until the primary is about half done. I may also add some raspberries when I rack to secondary. We'll see.
This is a longer-than-usual (compared to beer) project. Not only will it require more aging than beer, but the primary fermentation is taking longer. I had expected the primary to take about a week, but judging from my hydrometer readings, I'm skeptical that it'll be that fast. I wanted to transfer the cider to secondary this coming weekend, so that I could re-use that carboy as the primary for my first beer (!) of the season. But if it's not ready in time, I guess I'll end up leaving it in primary longer, and my beer will end up going into my other carboy, leaving me with nowhere to transfer the cider to, after it flocculates. I guess I'll have to buy another carboy some time next week, unless I want to delay the beer. And I don't. ;-)
I think hard cider might make a good intro for newbies, since it's really just about fermentation, without the additional work and mess of brewing. You don't
need farm-fresh cider for this; a lot of people use pasteurized apple juice from a grocery store and get great results. Just make sure the juice doesn't have any added preservatives, since that stuff is just as poisonous to yeast, as it is to the "invaders" it's intended to preserve against. The only real catch with cider and mead, is that you have to add nutrients (Fermaid-K and DAP), which aren't needed in beer wort (beer is much more nutricious).
Ideas for next year: hit Dixon's a week earlier -- this time it was
really close. And get a lot more cider, to ferment multiple batches with variations in honey content and yeast strain (e.g. a perhaps batch of cyser with this sweet mead yeast, a batch of pure unhoneyed cider with ale yeast, a batch of apfelwein using cider with champaign yeast and added dextrose). And try to get apple blossom honey, probably most available in spring.
Next time, I'll also probably mix cider and honey and campdens into my bottling bucket (where I can more easily stir it), make a larger starter, and after the must is sterilized by the campdens, I'll add the starter and Fermaid-K to the fermentation carboy and splashily pitch (to better aerate) the must onto the yeast. I guess I'm kind of disappointed with the slowness of my primary, this time around.
[BTW, it is
so lame that MySpace filters the pound sign out of URLs. Some of the above links (White Labs and Wikipedia) don't go quite to the part of the pages I had intended to reference, so you might have to scroll around to figure out WTF I was pointing at.]
Update 10/29: racked to secondary this morning. I am pleased to have my first-ever
less-than-1.0 density reading: 0.997. If my original reading of 1.075 is correct, this honey-boosted cider is a little bit over 10% ABV.