A tale of two ciders

Some friends of mine have some apples on their tree so I suggested having a go at making some cider for them. As a backup I have also put on a turbo cider to make sure there is something to drink!

18th August 2012

Picked a bucket of apples from said apple tree. The apples were fairly bitter in taste and sharp rather than sweet. Not sure what that means for the resultant cider but we will see.

Processing them was fairly time consuming. Using the food processor to bash them up and then using a muslin to wring out the fluid that couldn't be strained out.

In the end, the measuring somewhat inaccurately we produced about 2L of Apple juice.

Next time I do this I would definitely want to build some sort of home made fruit press as we didn't get all that much juice out and it was a lot of effort for the juice we did get.

I put in a whole campden tablet to the juice to ensure it was thoroughly sterilised before I add the yeast.

20th August 2012

Now adding the yeast, and starting a second Turbo Cider just in case the first one doesn't work out.

Yeast was added 2/3rds to the turbo cider, 1/3 to the real juice cider.

Ingredients

• 4 litres of Apple juice (from concentrate)
• Youngs Cider Yeast

Original Gravity: 1.042

Yep, it is a pretty basic cider recipe. I could have added extra sugar but I didn't feel want to make something too strong for a refreshing summery drink.

21st August 2012

The Turbo Cider as expected has started nicely and has developed a good foam. The real juice cider doesn't appear to be doing very much at the moment.

22nd August 2012

The real juice cider had definitely not started fermenting. There was no visible activity (bubbles, foam, airlock activity) so I decided to repitch some yeast. This time I made a starter of bakers yeast with sugary water.

Later that evening there was more activity from the airlock and slight bubbley patches forming on the surface.

23rd August 2012

The real juice cider is now most definitely fermenting with lots of activity. Excellent, now we wait.

20th August 2012

Fermentation appears to have stopped for both ciders. I will give them both two weeks to mature and then bottle.

05th September 2012

Found some time to get this bottled. Tasted the turbo cider which was close to drinkable, a good cider flavour with a bit of zingyness which I figure will settle down once the cider has more time to mature.

No final gravity so ABV estimated at 6%

The real apple juice however fared less well. On tasting it, bitter, sharp and left a very sour taste in the mouth. Undrinkably sour... I suspect that is an infected batch or that the apples were not suitable for making cider with. Down the sink with ye foul smelling brew!

So, with that established I got the turbo cider primed with 40g of sugar and bottled ready for labelling.

19th September 2012

For the label design I decided on something humorously classic for what is a very simple cider.

I've decided to include a QR Code which links to this page as a nice link between what you are drinking and how it was made.

20th September 2012

Bottled and ready to drink.

Brewing Lessons Learnt

Sanitation

• Baby bottle chemical steriliser can be used in place of bleach.

Ingredients

• Sugar in a beer recipe can be replaced with more malt extract for a fuller taste.

Bakers Yeast whilst cheap is not ideal. This is because the flavour profile is an unknown quantity. Baking yeasts are selected for speed of fermentation and CO2 output not for flavour. I would recommend doing a test run first with some before doing a larger brew. I found Alisons Easy Bake Bread Yeast added a bitter flavour to the brews I used it with.

Bottling

• Measure the volume of your demijohn and how many bottles it is equivalent to. This will save running out of clean bottles mid way through bottling.
• Modern capping and corking tools are very efficient, and quiet (if you have a baby sleeping up stairs).
• When dealing with lees at the bottom of the demijohn, slow and steady is best. You don't want those lees in your bottles or next fermentation vessel.

Bottling can be fiddly with one hand controlling the racking wand, and the other hand operating the siphon tube. A good tip is to fold the siphon tube in half creating a crimp. This allows one handed control of both flow and direction and is an easy way to bottle with little mess.

Prior to bottling, once racked off the lees, it is I feel a good idea to leave the brew for another week or so, just incase more sediment falls out.

Noted that The Long Bar (seemingly renamed to The Cider House) has its bottles collected at 0800 on Wednesday. The bins were unsecured and I would imagine they are available for the deft of fingers for a few hours before collection.

Labelling

• 6.5cm by 10cm for 284ml Stella Bottles
• 10cm by 10cm for Wine Bottles

Yarrow Ale

Now turning my attention to beers and the kinds of beers that can be made, I have become interested in historical beers. So starting with what is at least in part a gruit ale, I will try my fermentation vessels at a Yarrow Ale.

Available Recipes

There are four that I noted when searching:

• O Gope Yarrow Ale
• Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers
• Yarrow
• Yarrow Ale, A True Ale

I did some analysis on the amount of yarrow they all use in an attempt to get a feel for how much I should aim for. My research showed something that surprised me:

I found that Andy Hamilton's recipe used about three times the amount of Yarrow when compared to the other recipes. I asked him about this and it turns out he used leaf, stalk and flower which accounts for the large Yarrow amount. I have decided to divide that amount by about 3 using just leafs and flowers.

Sunday 16th September 2012

Decided to give this one a go this evening, as I had been collecting Yarrow from the route home from work.

I manged to collect mostly leaves, some flower heads and a small handful of mugwort as well. I was keen to keep the mugwort content low as it can be quite a bitter herb and didn't want to throw off the recipe too much.

Recipe

• 500g Medium dry malt extract
• 50g Yarrow/Mugwort herbs
• 1/2 sachet of Young Ale Yeast
• 4.5l spring water

For the herbs I decided to boil half at the start of the boil and half just before the end. The first half will provide the bittering and the second half will provide the aroma. This means boil times 30 mins and 5 mins respectively. For the later herbs I selected mostly the flowers as should contain most of the aroma and less bittering.

In my case I did the boil with two pots because I didn't have a single pot large enough.

• Add malt to both pots
• Bring to the boil, monitoring it closely for boil over and adjusting carefully
• Add half the herbs between both pots
• Stir and boil
• At 5 minutes remaining and the second half
• Once the boil was complete, cool the pots in a cold sink of water
• Pour over a sieve and remove the herbs
• Pour into the demijohn
• Top up with any further water to bring the batch to 4.5l
• Shake to airate
• Pitch yeast

Original Gravity: 1.036

Taste of the wort was sweet and malty, with a bitter after taste and Yarrow aroma. So far so good.

17th September 2012

Fermentation started over night and the air lock was popping this morning. By this evening it had developed an orderly fizz.

20th September 2012

Fermentation has now finished, there is a few bubbles rising from the bottom, but generally the airlock is showing little activity. I'll give it another week and a half to condition before racking.

28th September's 2012

Had a chance to rack the ale this evening.

Final Gravity: 1.010

The ale is not all that strong which feels appropriate. However the taste is very mild. The main flavour is the fermented malt. The Yarrow is far too weak and not distinctive enough. There is a bitter hint but again is too weak.

I suspect what has happened here is that I have not put enough Yarrow in. Andy Hamiltons recipe we can be certain uses freshly harvested Yarrow. If we assume that the other recipes in my research all use dried Yarrow then that would be a problem.

Fresh herbs are less potent than dried herbs so I suspect I should have matched Andy's ratio and upped my herbs by a factor of three.

So I'll give the ale another week to get and see if anything else happens with the flavour otherwise I'll start again with larger quantities of herbs.

Removing tough bottle label glue

I was searching again for a method to remove the sticky glue left behind on a clear glass bottle, which is increasingly common on non-brown glass bottles these days.

WD40

• Drink beer (always a good start)
• Soak in hot water for a few minutes
• Peel off label
• Spray glue with WD40
• Wait a a few minutes
• Rub/polish off the glue with a piece of kitchen paper

The oil changes the nature of the glue and makes it possible to scrape off. Using kitchen paper means you can throw away the paper after as the glue turns into a gummy blob.

Once done, you can clean the bottle with soapy water as usual.

Excellent!

Strawberry Mead

Both previous meads have done very well and have been all but quaffed. The blackberry mead in particular was excellent with its lighter fruity flavour.

So in that vein, I am attempting a strawberry mead.

20th September 2012

Started the mead this evening. Quite a simple process of adding the warmed honey, rasins and water to a demijohn. Stir and shake to oxygenate and then pitch yeast.

• 3lb (3 x 340g) clover honey from Aldi
• 4.5l water
• 25 rasins
• Gervin wine yeast

Original Gravity: 1.062

Wild Hops Ale

I have been wanting to brew a hopped ale for a while and there was a spare space in the brewing cupboard to get it started.

29th September 2012

The recipe is quite a standard extract based ale recipe. The process being as simple as bringing the malt to boil, adding the hops at various times and then letting it cool to the point where it can be added to the fermentation vessel and yeast pitched.

• 500g Dark Mark Extract (Muntons Spraymalt)
• 10g Fuggles Hops for 30mins
• 42g Wild Hops for 5mins
• Safale S-04

In this case I am boiling with two pots to make up the volumne. Quite a lot of boil off which will have an effect on the hop utilisiation.

I let the pots steep for 20 minutes after boiling to ensure the wild hops had a chance to impart their flavour before cooling and straining the wort.

I pitched the entire packet, which is over pitching it, but I wanted to make sure that fermentation started correctly and got off to a vigourous start.

Original Gravity: 1.036

Tasted malty and very bitter. Undrinkably so, which will calm down a lot as it ages.

30th September 2012

Fermenting, yes you could call it that. More like erupting I would say. The brew is fermenting vigorously and foam is climbing up the airlock.

Not a problem though, just wrapped a few tea towels round the neck and let it get on with it. So much gas is coming out it is unlikely that anything else can get in the airlock past the foam.

It had calmed down by the evening and was the ideal chance to clean the airlock and refit it.

05th October 2012

Racked the beer to secondary and took a sample.

Final Gravity: 1.008

It had a very interesting taste. It tasted like a fruity session beer. A good solid ale with fruit like smells to it. I thought I could smell rasins but was not certain.

Quite pleased with how it turned out. Not overly bitter and very pleasent to drink.

It needs probably a week or two to settle down and let the flavours combine, but otherwise it worked out very nicely.

11th October 2012

Bottled and labelled. Produced about 8 bottles from 500ml to 330ml.