Brewing? Maybe, ramblings? Yes.

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.

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!

A new year and a new brew! It’s been longer than two days which I said last time….

I’ll be running four cider experiments, first being cloudy juice vs clear (from concentrate), second being cloudy and clear ciders flavoured with black cherry concentrate, third being a cider yeast vs an Ale yeast (Wyeast 1056) just with cloudy cider and the fourth will be a perry in the cider vs ale yeast. Hopefully all will turn out nice and tasty

Youngs Cider yeast:

1. Cloudy cider
2. Clear cider
3. Cloudy black cherry cider (flavoured with cherry concentrate)
4. Clear black cherry cider (flavoured with cherry concentrate)
5. Perry (pear juice)

American Ale 1056

1. Cloudy cider
2. Perry (pear juice)
3. Forst flowers mead
4. Red or white grape juice

As you can see I have a few different types to get through. I’m making small batches, 1 gallon demijohn each, so I can see what works out best. I’m fairly confident about the cloudy ciders, the mead and the grape batches. The others are juices are from concentrate, while they’ll have plenty of sugar I’m intrested to see if they keep their flavours or if the added absorbic acid contributes to any off flavours. Another off the shelf juice is available to me but is twice the price! Although it contains alot more pulp from pear, I think with that I’d get a large yeast cake at the bottom of the demijohn or at the very least a very cloudy perry.

I’ve chosen the american ale 1056 as the Basic Brewing guys used it for mead with great results, they got a sweetish mead out of it. I want to give it a go with ciders to see what results I get from it.