Back in February I decided to give a quick an easy apple cider a try. I had been lurking around the Cider forum and had come up with a recipe based on others that I had read.
4.2L Allen's apple juice
1 can no name frozen Apple Juice Concentrate with ascorbic acid (Vitamin C)
and another can of concentrate for priming
1 packet Danstar Nottingham yeast
There's nothing to this recipe, just mix the concentrate with the juice, shake and pitch the yeast. At least that is what I thought... I realized that as I was making it that you need to melt down the concentrate before mixing and allow it to come to room temperature before pitching the yeast. Otherwise it could be too cold for the yeast and there could be a rather significant lag time before they get started.
I pitched the yeast on a Sunday and by the Tuesday the yeast still fermentation hadn't started. The closest that the jug was sitting in was 20C, and was well within the temperature tolerance (14 – 21C) of the yeast. I ended up moving it into the furnace room, which was around 25C, to see if I couldn't kick start the yeast into action. And it pretty much took off, I had considered moving it back into the closet to prevent the yeast from throwing off flavors at such a high temp. But after the trouble it had before I decided that it was better to leave it in the furnace room rather then risk stalling the fermentation again.
13 days later I primed the cider by racking it onto another can of melted concentrate and then bottled it. At the time the cider was still fairly cloudy, with lots of yeast still in suspension. But since this was supposed to be a quick cider I bottled it anyways and made sure to keep a close eye on it. I left the lids loose for 24hrs to push out any oxygen and then sealed them. After about 3 days the bottles felt like they had carbed enough and since it happened to fast I tossed them into the fridge in order to avoid bottle bombs. As it was they could have been carbed more and would have benefited from being left out longer.
On to the tasting notes, it ended up being fairly sour with a weak carb that all but disappeared by the half way mark. And I found that as it warmed up in the glass it started to get a bit of a cloying mouth feel. This could be attributed to the lack of carbonation, I've read that the CO2 adds an acidic taste that can offset sweetness. So that as it disappeared there wasn't anything to counter all the extra sugars that I added at bottling. Overtime though it started to get less sour, one suggestion when I asked on the forums was that the cider underwent a malolactic fermentation while within the bottles. And the OG was 1.050 and the FG was 1.000 making for an ABV of 6.55%.
The next time I tired this I left it in primary a lot longer in hopes that it would produce a cleaner tasting product. It is currently bottle conditioning and I'll have post on it within the next few weeks.
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