I saw this recipe for English dry apple cider on HomeBrewTalk and thought it looked interesting (and I like cider). It’s a long term brew with people saying the cider only comes good sometime after the four month mark. The recipe itself uses store bought clear apple juice, yeast nutrient, and ale yeast. It also makes use of an acid (lime juice) and steeped black tea for the tannins. The cider seemed like a good (and easy) recipe for a smaller test batch and the only real cost to me would be the apple juice. I am switching out the lime juice with lemon juice (as we have tree in fruit), there’s English black tea bags in the pantry and I have a packet of (unknown) ale yeast from a brew can. There’s no “yeast nutrients” on hand but some Googling suggests that plain old bread yeast boiled in water for 10 minutes works well as a substitute. Finally, it’s coming up to winter here and I can leave the fermentation vessel and secondary outside and not worry too much about temperature control. So, it’s all systems go!

Recipe
6L of store bought clear apple juice
The juice of half a small lemon
2 cups of water
7g packet of baking yeast
1 English black tea bag
Packet of ale brewing yeast

Boil a cup of water with the juice of a lemon for 10 minutes. Turn off heat, steep tea bag in hot mixture for 7 minutes. In another saucepan boil a cup of water with the packet of bakers yeast for 10 minutes. Let both mixtures cool to room temperature and tip both in fermentation vessel. Pour in apple juice making sure to get plenty of air into the mixture. Pitch the yeast, seal FV and let it ferment. Rather than use an airlock on my FV this time I’ve used a large rubber band and several layers of cling (GLAD or Saran) wrap to seal the top of the vessel. Apparently this works well and I can see what’s going on for once as my vessels are all opaque plastic. I didn’t take an SG reading as there’s not enough depth. I doubt I’ll bother except perhaps when I move it to a secondary. Expected FG is 1.000 or a bit less (it is DRY cider after all).

I plan on leaving it in the primary for a month, then into a secondary for another month or two before bulk priming and bottling.

30 May 2015 – I washed and sterilised the juice bottles today and racked off the cider from the fermenter into the bottles for aging for a couple of months. You can see the cider below. The bottle on the left was racked first and is quite clear, the bottle on the right was last and is quite cloudy. I tasted a little of the cider. On the nose it was quite a strong apple scent but had little apple flavour. It was extremely dry and the mouth feel and after taste was very reminiscent of dry white wine. There was a strong flavour of alcohol. I took an SG measurement at 1.004.

Cider racked into original 2L juice bottles

Update 18 July 2015

It’s been nearly two months since I started aging the cider. I put a bottle in the fridge today to cool and have had a glass back sweetened a little with regular apple juice. It is smooth and has a strong apple flavour. The dryness has dropped off a little and the dry harshness I noted a couple of months ago has gone. It’s also dropped out extremely clear. I guess because it’s flat it’s apple scrumpy. I’ll carbonate the other four liters and see how they turn out.

Second brew day was completed at 2:00PM.

1 x 1.7kg Coopers Stout Hopped Extract Can
1 x 1.7kg Coopers Dark Ale Hopped Extract Can
2 x Kit Yeast
0.5kg Dark Dry Malt
0.5kg Dextrose
0.25kg Maltodextrin

Fermentation Vessel in refrigerator – temperature probe taped to side of vessel in insulated holder

Boiled adjuncts in 4L of water for 10 minutes. Sat both cans in hot tap water for 10 minutes to loosen contents before tipping into FV. Rinsed cans in 2L of boiling water and added boiled adjunct mixture. Filled to 23L with cold tap water and aerated well periodically with large spoon. Temperature was too high, packed with ice bricks to get temp down to 30.4C. OG measured as 1.068 (target 1.065) and pitched both packets of kit yeast. Put lid and valve on FV and moved to refrigerator with heat belt wrapped to crash temp to 18.5C. Once at 18.5C set temp to 18.5C using KegKing temperature controller. Plan to leave for 14 days before taking SG reading. Target FG (according to the Kit & Extract Beer Designer spreadsheet) is 1.017 with a 6.7%ABV.

Keg King temperature controller – controls fridge and heat belt

2:00PM temp was 30.4C.
2:30PM temp was 28.4C.
8:30PM temp was down to 18.5C (target brew temperature)
9:00AM 26/4/15 – Significant airlock activity (bubbles every 1-2 seconds), krausen has started to form
6:00PM 28/4/15 – Airlock activity slowed to bubbles every 5-10 seconds
9:00AM 29/4/15 – No airlock activity
2:00PM 2/5/15 – First SG reading taken. 1.022. Drank sample (of course) and it was black and bitter with a hint of wateriness. But not unpleasant. Certainly none of the cidery undertones of my first brew effort.
5:30PM 6/5/15 – SG reading 1.022, fermentation has either stalled or completed. Turned set temperature up to 21C to try to get things started again and plan to take a reading on Saturday 9/5/15. If SG is stable again will rack to secondary, bulk prime, and bottle. Drank sample again, and wow, huge improvement on just four days ago. Smooth rounded mouth feel, no alcohol harshness and the wateryness is gone. Here’s the sample taken today:

10/5/15 – Took SG reading of 1.021. Concluded fermentation has stopped. Leaving set to 18.5C until Wednesday 13/5/15 and then will cold crash till Saturday 16/5 and will then bottle.
8:00AM 13/5/15 – Temperature controller taken out of circuit and fridge set to lowest temp.
16/5/15 – Turned off refrigerator and let FV come up to ambient.
17/5/15 – Racked off to secondary. Bulk primed with 115g of brown sugar dissolved in 200mL of boiling water then bottled into 750mL PET bottles. Yield was 22L (29.5 750mL bottles).
23/5/15 – Had first bottle. Very flat, no head to speak of, very dark, caramel and burnt flavours. A little watery and a very slight hint of a cidery twang. You can see a poured glass below.

1 Week after Bottling

30/5/15 – Cracked second bottle tonight. Little carbonation (as expected) but head was excellent and lasted to end of glass. No noticeable cidery tang and it may have been my imagination but it was a little smoother than last week. Lovely and dark and bitter and intensely satisfying. Alcoholic too, 1 750mL bottle is more than enough for me. Image of poured glass below.

Stout two weeks after bottling – nice head!