It may be hard to believe for some, but did you know that you can make a decent hard cider from juice that you purchase from the grocery store? There’s a trick to selecting the right juice, you need to be careful of some preservatives that are put in them, which is why it’s usually best to choose something labeled as ‘fresh squeezed’ or ‘cider’ – frankly in Western NY we’re spoiled by our apple cider in the fall. It seems like you can’t go anywhere without someone having it!
Now, it’s April, the cider I made back in the fall didn’t come out the greatest this year – I think it may have gotten a little too oxygenated when kegging, so I was limited to the end of my Ginger Pear Cider that I’d made last year, and that keg is just about kicked. So, I decided that I wanted to try and make something not ridiculously expensive as fresh pressed apple cider is very expensive this time of the year, and I don’t have a juice press to make my own. I opted to try something that I hadn’t – a Cranberry Apple Cider. Like I said, you can use juice off the shelf, but you just need to be careful of which juice you’re grabbing. Read the labels – one additive is okay, Ascorbic Acid. Why is this one okay? It’s essentially concentrated Vitamin C. This occurs naturally in the juices that you’re using already, but it’s added at a level that’s an anti-oxidant to the bottled juice to help it from spoiling. Believe it or not, ascorbic acid is often used in the brewing process. It’s used to stop oxidation in bottling by adding some to their finished product prior to bottling or canning.
If Ascorbic Acid is present in your product before even starting the fermentation process, this can be diluted to the point of being a non-factor, or even removed simply by thoroughly heating, which is what we’re going to do to infuse some additional flavors anyways, so we won’t even miss a step here by using just plain old juice off the shelf.
The juice we’re using has 28g of sugar per 8oz, at 96oz per bottle we’re looking at 336g per bottle – using 7 bottles of juice this is 2.352kg of sugar, or 5.19lbs. We’re going for a semi-sweet cider, and from my past experience I’ve had a higher yeast efficiency in my ciders over my beers, so I’m going to add an additional 4lbs of sugar to try and get the desired carbonation and sweetness. This should take about 10 days to ferment out – I’m projecting about a 7-9% ABV on this. To try and get the desired level of sweetness, though I’m projecting 10 days for full fermentation, there is a chance that it’s done a little earlier; I’m going to take a gravity reading at 5 days, and each subsequent day following that to really just test for sweetness levels. Since there’ll be minimal head space, we shouldn’t have to worry too much about oxygenation as when it’s opened, the yeast left behind producing CO2 will push out that little bit of O2 that we introduce taking the gravity reading. The real key will just be to make sure that our wine thief is properly sanitized between each readying.
When it hits where I’m aiming for sweetness wise (yes, I know, I could define how many brix I’m looking for, but we’re not getting that specific here), I’m going to cold crash, and keg it. We’ll let it sit under pressure for about 10 days before drinking.
I’ll post updates as we go along!
Roving On 