Brewing? Maybe, ramblings? Yes.

I thought I was going to fly through the perry I had left fermenting and ignored due to the heavy pulp in it. I had gotten some muslin cloth earlier so I could strain the nettle juice and then the pear. The nettles took a minute or two, great! The pear took an hour and a half to do the thinner half of it :/ A few attempts at making a drip so I could leave it overnight kind of worked but will take a whole lot longer to do the job. A beer bottle full of pear plup with muslin over the top stuck in the top of the demijohn. Will work but will take ages due to pressure differences. A larger surface area for the muslin would be better. I tried a plastic bottle with the bottom cut off but when putting that in to the demijohn the muslin ripped and most of it came out making it useless. I tried again but with a looser fitting, it wasn’t stable and may have fallen off over night.

I’ll be back to pouring it on to some cloth over a funnel tonight… the things I’ll do for a bit of unusual alcohol.

After awhile of waiting, forgetting, waiting some more and then being distracted by shiney things I’m back looking for an auto syphon for demi-john’s.

http://www.thehomebrewcompany.ie/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=722

I originally got the larger version for carboy’s and then after a bit of practice to figure out how it worked and delighting in simpleness and effectivness I went to use it on a demi-john… *thunk* oh, the hole is too small… DAMN. A bit of a search around and few places where selling a smaller one at the time so I gave up for awhile. Now I see the homebrew company have a wider selection of cider kits in stock, €15 for 40 pints of cider isn’t too bad! Although it needs a bit of added sugar so will probably be closer to €20.

Strawberry flavoured cider as well! Although the strawberryness is achived by a sachet of flavouring added afterwards. Perhaps not favourable by some I think I’ll be adding this to my list of purchases next month.

Right, lets do some maths (yay!) for the purposes of this we’ll ignore equipment and yeast costs and just deal with ingredients.

Aim: Make a decent tasting cider that’s cheap.

Methods:  1)Purchase and use a cider kit. 2)Purchase juice from a supermarket.

Kit

A kit will cost €15, for this we’ll use the Black Rock Cider kit from the homebrewcompany

They recommend the addition of 1kg brewing sugar and 300g of lactose so extra cost if you go down that route which we will;

Brewing sugar: €2.28

Lactose 500g : €3.99

The lactose is a bit more than we need but if you make a few ciders it will work out well, 5 brews and you’ll have used all your lactose. We’ll ignore that for now but economies of scale come in to play if you want to plan out 5 batches of cider, you’ll save on delivery costs rather than getting it on a per batch basis. Also equipment costs will average out once a few batches are made.

Delivery: €7

Total: €28.27

Total per pint (40 pints): 0.70c

Total per 500ml (22.5 liters): 0.63c

Figures are rounded a bit, more than likely it will work out at 75c per pint and 67c per 500ml. That’s pretty decent for a drop of cider! Of course this is all if you have some magically sanitising, free fermentation vessel and ignore any kind of evaporation/inexact serving sizes. Equipment costs will come in to play but like I said I’m choosing to ignore them for now until I have a good idea of a usability range of the cheaper plastic fermentors, i.e. you’ll use them for set number of fermentation and then recycle them.

Supermarket Ciders

So, Tesco/Lidl are the ones that are close to me and sell pressed, pure, cloudy apple juice. Tesco sell it at 1.27 per liter and Lidl are a bit kinder on the pocket at 99c a liter. Prices change of course! Tesco did sell at 99c around christmas 2009 but the price went up in the new year.

Direct comparison volume wise, 22.5 liters

Tesco: €28.575

Lidl: €22.275

Wow, okay there’s a bit of a difference there! 6 euro between the two and if you add in the same ingredients for sugar/lactose your hitting €28.55 for the Lidl prices. I’m going with the optimistic option of not paying for delivery for the sugar and lactose but source them at the same place as the juice. Now the thing is does it even need the added sugar and lactose? Perhaps not, it might only need lactose for a bit of sweetening or if you like your cider dry you could use raisins to introduce tannins and make the cider dryer rather than sweeter.

Conclusion

Money wise buying a kit is the same as if you bought the juice from a supermarket, a few cent in the difference if you get the juice for 99c per liter. The only differences might be taste depending on what apples the kit used and the appearance of the cider. The Tesco and Lidl juices are both cloudy so you’ll get a murky scrumpy style cider from them if used and a clear one from the kit. Clear juice is available but can vary from concentrated juice to just filtered juice, the only one I’ve been able to find has been concentrated juice. Not that I’m against concentrated juice, the kits appear to be concentrated juice.

Kits also come with a sachet of yeast negating that cost if your willing to use it. Quite often kits come with substandard yeasts or ones that may not be the freshest due to long shelf times with kits. The kit yeast is fine to use although use of another yeast can improve the taste in the finished cider. Any yeast can be used as a subsitute but for the first few batches it’s best to stick with a cider type yeast, Ale, Weiss and other yeasts can add intresting flavours if you decide to use them I hope to brew a large batch of cider using wyeast American Ale 1056, a Trappist and a Weiss yeast.

I nearly bottled my ciders last night but I wasn’t able to do it! Not because of lazyness but maybe forgetfulness. I had forgotten I had drank them two months ago. All I have left now is the pear lurking in the back of the closet with all it’s extra pear bits. I have a feeling that I’ve left it too long with the pear pulp in it, tastes and smells of rotting pear come to mind. I hope I’m wrong of course and it turns out amazing

Concentration is a wonderful thing, I wish I had more of it or even a small amount of it. I can concentrate for awhile on something but then a few days or hours later I find it boring and move along, perhaps that is called dedication or something other than concentration, dedication even? Perhaps. I could be like most people that start a blog and forget about it or don’t want to post to it anymore, if most people are like that. Instead of today, I wait till tomorrow, instead of now, I am later.

Tonight that changes, I’ve left my cider and mead long enough. I’ll be plunging my Red Branch flip-top bottles in to the sink and scrubbing off the labels. 12 bottles, 6 liters, should be enough space to bottle two of the meads. Chilli and The Abomination

I’m hoping that this restart will get me motivated enough to build the brewing table I’ve wanted to do for a while. If I actually do it, I shall celebrate by brewing a weiss (a kit unfortunately but still a weiss! )

After a trip to London I’ve racked my set of ciders. The perry though…. it has fermented but the extra pulp has caused some issues. The first issue is there’s no yeast cake! The yeast is still suspended in the pear, attached to the pulp no doubt, eating away at it. I’m going to have to get a muslin cloth or cheesecloth and do some filtering! I’ll have to figure out something for other ideas I have, mango and peach, both will be equally as thick and a pain in the ass to seperate the yeast from the pulp.

The ciders have turned out well. The cherry cider does taste and smell like cherry but it’s quite sour as well, this might have something to do with the sweet cherry extract I used, it’s generally better to use sour cherries for brewing. This one is a bit darker then the rest. I thought it tasted quite close to red branch cherry cider! Without the extra carbonation or exploding.

The other two cloudies are basicly the same, a slight difference in sweetness but otherwise look and smell the same, the taste different is barely noticable, could be I only notice it because of the hydrometer measurement

The clear cider is the closest to an off the shelf cider I’ve tasted out of the lot. It’s sweet but not overly sweet, just about right so I don’t think I’ll be trying to carbonate this one or sweeten it for general consumption.

Overall young’s cider yeast turned out a decent batch of cider. If I had to pick which to do a large batch I’dgo for the clear apple juice for the sweetness. The cherry would be second if I can sweeten it for bottling.

A few recipies call for the use of tannins from tea bags or raisins, or from a cooking apple. I intend to try both out with some cloudy and clear juice in a few weeks time. Have to plan to get some mead out of the way first!

The cider is nearly ready to rack and in the mean time I’ve been looking at other alternative juices to ferment.

One of the new additions to the window of the local health food store is acai juice, small bottles of it at least with larger ones inside. I’ll be buying a small bottle for taste testing and seeing if it’s suitable for fermenting. I should be good for sweeting and flavouring once I figure out how much sugar is in it. It might make a decent priming agent instead of sugar.