Brewing? Maybe, ramblings? Yes.

Time to start harvesting some nettles! It’s about the right time of year if you’ve got a decent nettle patch nearby. I managed to harvest one plastic carrier bag of nettles from around Charleville Castle I wish I could have gotten more but it turned out well as I wouldn’t have been able to cook more, all my pots are small

I’ve managed to make a litre of it for brewing, a bit small but the liquid looks fairly dark, a bit of dilution wouldn’t do it any harm so I hope to get two litres from it. I’ll be filtering it tonight and then diluting it before adding everything to it for brewing. Now to find some muslin!

My cider kit arrived from The Homebrew Company today, nice and fast, I had ordered it yesterday morning.

Somehow the thoughs of “how big will this be” had fled from my thoughts and belived that I’d be getting 4-5 gallons of apple juice to brew with. Getting this home would have been a problem had I thought of this but of course that’s not what I got. I’m sure most people would get it right and figure out you’d get a large can of concentrated juice, like you’d get with beer kits.

So now it’s all down the water I’m using with this. I have a few liters of bottled mineral water at home I might use or go down the route of using apple juice like quite a few people have. It would add some extra sugar and make the end result stronger. I’ll have to decide when I get this stuff home!

Well my batch of ciders have all gone down the hatch except for one, the pear.

I’m disappointed that I didn’t take many notes during the process, something I hope to resolve with the next batch. I do have some memories though

• The lidl and tesco apple juices are pretty much identical
• The clear juice came out a bit sweeter then others but had a slight vinigar taste from it. More than likely a mild infection but it was still drank before it got worse.
• I’ve been ignoring the pear and it’s pulp, just out of lazyness.
• The cherry cider was nice but quite tart! A bit of sweeting wouldn’t go amiss with it, also more cherry flavour.

Next time I’ll be doing

• Accurated and recorded gravity measurements
• Adding raisins/apples to increase body as most people do, increased tannins really that comes with a shot of extra sugar
• Single large batches, the small batches where good but take up so much room
• Bottling, rather than drinking straight from the demi-john I might give this bottling thing a try!

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 saying of plans and battles is true for me in most things. My plan of a bunch of cider using two different yeasts has changed a bit If I had examined the smack pack more I would have realised I needed a starter to get the yeast going before pitching…. :/ Mistake two was not having all my mead bottled as three of them where still too cloudy to bottle. I’ve racked them and will have to wait a few days  now which will more than likely be sometime next week.

I used the following instead:

1. Tesco cloudy
2. Lidl cloudy
3. Tesco cloudy with black cherry extract (80ml)
4. Tesco clear
5. Sunway pear

Everything is done in four litres since a demijohn can fit about four and a half litres. The Lidl and Tesco’s cloudy look more or less the same, there’s not much difference except price. Tesco’s cloudy cider used to be 99 cent, after the budget and VAT cut it’s €1.25! Lidl is still 99c though The pear juice was a bit more expensive, again from Tesco, coming in at around €2 a litre. They have peach and mango juice which I might look at in a few months.

The clear apple juice was the only juice that was from concentrate, the cloudy juices are all pure pressed apple juice and the pear is 50% pear with lots of pulp, even watered down the way it is, it’s fairly thick!  The pressed apple juice is quite nice, a bit more flavour off it then the clear stuff. Although bit of wood, a drum and a car jack are all you need to make an apple press if you have the apples to do it! Every thing has been in a demijohn brewing for the last two and a half days, due to thirst issues I’ve only been able to use 3 litres of pear, I’ll sort this tomorrow

Youngs cider yeast was used for this batch, aside from the apple juice this is all I’ve bothered to use as ingredients, the next large cider batch I make will have more in the as I’ll test ingredients that are used to generally provide tannin or add a bite to the cider that juice and yeast cannot do alone! The cherry might make a difference in that way but then that’s what this is all about, after brewing some drinking cider of course. The cherry did seem to make a difference though, the cloudy/cherry mix was the most foamy of the lot, two inches of foam built up over night and thankfully that was all. When I added the additional liter apple juice I’ve left out the last 20ml of cheery extract because of the foam, didn’t want more! I wasn’t sure if it was the cherry that caused it cut since it was the only extra ingredient but I’d rather not risk the floor/walls.

The pear juice is quite thick despite being 50% pear, they’ve used pear pulp instead of filtered juice so it should give the yeast plenty to eat and plenty to leave behind. I really was expecting either a big foam up from the pear, the most was a bit of swelling as pockets of air formed, trapped by the pulp that was floating around the top. I think this one will benefit from some extra stirring.

After pitching it didn’t take too long for airlock activity to start up, about 2 hours for the pear and 3 to 8 hours for the rest. I fully expected the pear to foam up and put of the airlock due to the extra pulp but hardly anything at all.

The Perry or pear cider will get split up in to two sets, one as plain Perry and the second will get a dose of cherry extract to make a cherry flavoured Perry. I’m not sure what I’ll do with the rest of the cider besides drinking it.

I’m sure I’ll find something intresting to do!

I had a look at the cider again today and couldn’t help but check the fruit mead. Wow, I can see through it! Some of the fruit has floated to the top and some of it stayed on the bottle but most of whatever was floating around in the mead has settled on the bottom in an inch thick layer. The others have shown no attempt at clearing.