Cider Pressing and Fermenting

3 Sep

85 lbs of backyard apples + 19th century cast iron grinder and cider press + an afternoon of elbow grease (x2) + yeast + a few months = single-varietal Adina hard cider:

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Screenshot 2014-09-06 at 14.26.41

The raw juice had a pH of 3.3 (a reasonable level for hard cider) and a specific gravity of 1.050 (expected, should result in a 6.5% ABV cider after fermentation all the way to dry).

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Fermenting with the special White Labs WLP775 cider yeast (rather than the dry champagne yeast and ale yeasts I’d used back in the previous kitchen-scale hard cidering with store-bought cider) in a glass carboy and then resting to condition/clarify/settle:

Screenshot 2014-09-06 at 14.25.26

And, about a month later, we racked it into bottles with a little sugar to carbonate it. As usual for a cider, it had fermented all the sugars (down to a specific gravity of 0.996, below even water). In a few months (just in time for Thanksgiving?) we’ll see how it is… but even the first taste of the unaged still cider was interesting– tart in a very crabapple way, but not at all harsh.

Update: Later– bottled and labeled:

ciderlabeled

2 Responses to “Cider Pressing and Fermenting”

Trackbacks/Pingbacks

  1. Single Malt, Single Hop, Single Gallon (Homebrewing) | The Robot Must Eat - October 4, 2014

    […] from left to right: two hard ciders I was fermenting at the same time, this all-Maris-Otter batch, and on the right, Batch #11: a reddish Munich-Malt-and-Fuggles (also […]

  2. Homebrews #31/32: (Caramel) Hard Cider | The Robot Must Eat - November 13, 2015

    […] last year’s cidering from whole apples, this year I picked up six gallons of fresh-pressed cider (unpasteurized, of course) at a store in […]

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