So I've been building up my Beer tolerances, however I am still partial to Hard Ciders. However, there's not a great deal to be found locally so I'm doing my research into brewing my own Hard Ciders and was just wondering if anyone else here that brews does Cider?
i remember seeing kits on the MRbeer site if you want to go that route. but i would suggest finding out what others do because you will want to upgrade later anyway.
I'll send P@tmanBr3w a text and have him weigh in on the subject. He did a hard cider a while back. The toughest part was waiting though. I guess it gets a lot better as it gets older.
So I've been building up my Beer tolerances, however I am still partial to Hard Ciders. However, there's not a great deal to be found locally so I'm doing my research into brewing my own Hard Ciders and was just wondering if anyone else here that brews does Cider?
I def am interested Jeff, I figure I'll play with it this summer using organic cider from the store incase I make any mistakes and hopefully by fall I'll have the kinks worked out...
I'm also going to work up to Ales and maybe Mead cause I like those better than most lagers or ports... At least in my own tasting experiences...
I def am interested Jeff, I figure I'll play with it this summer using organic cider from the store incase I make any mistakes and hopefully by fall I'll have the kinks worked out...
I'm also going to work up to Ales and maybe Mead cause I like those better than most lagers or ports... At least in my own tasting experiences...
It's been a while since I've done research, but a dry cider is pretty easy to make. Since there are different types of cider, each is going to have a slightly different procedure. First make sure you get preservative free cider, otherwise it may kill the yeast. I would also recommend a three stage fermentation with, at the very least, the tertiary fermentor being made of glass so you can bulk age it for a while. I made the mistake of only doing a 2 stage fermentation with my cider and it left too much sediment in the finished cider. When I racked to secondary, I left most of the yeast behind but a lot of the particulate apple bits take a while to really settle out. Had I racked into another fermentor, it would have dropped out a bit more and I would would have had cleaner cider when I went to bottle. I also didn't add any sugar to the cider for extra alcohol and neglected to take a specific gravity reading. I used a mead yeast to ferment and it attenuated really well. It drank more like champagne than most of the commercial ciders you can buy. I think part of it had to do with the yeast. I am planning on making another this year with either ale or cider yeast. Again I don't have a whole lot of experience with ciders, but I can refer you here. Its a really friendly homebrewing forum owned by Midwest Supplies, a homebrew supplier out of Minnesota. All of the guys there are really friendly and helpful. They could definitely point you in the right direction.
I've been looking at that, I'm thinking of going with an Ale yeast and I'm used to taking specific gravity readings on salt water (for my salt fish tanks). Did you use any Pectic Enzym or do you think that would have helped with the apple particulates??
And today, I've remembered why I like kegging. Bottled 5 gallons of a sorghum beer (gluten free,) for one of the local bar tenders who's very gluten intolerant. The stuff smelled pretty good actually when I opened the fermenter, and it did ferment almost dry. 6.25 lbs. of white sorghum extract w/ Safale US05 dry yeast.
Cracked open one of those sorghum beers. It turned out far better than I was expecting or even hoping. Nicely carbonated, definitely on the dry side, but tasty. It goes down like a nice lawnmower beer with a sorghum molasses undertone. I'm quite happy with the way it turned out.
Cracked open one of those sorghum beers. It turned out far better than I was expecting or even hoping. Nicely carbonated, definitely on the dry side, but tasty. It goes down like a nice lawnmower beer with a sorghum molasses undertone. I'm quite happy with the way it turned out.
That sounds interesting, wish you were bringing some down to Brewfest!
My saison and IPA (Bells Two-hearted clone) are in secondary now. I made use of my currently lagerless lagering fridge to ferment them at 62 degrees which is in the middle to low range of their yeast's optimum fermentation temps.
I also brewed an IRA to about 4 gallons for a 5 gallon kit, so the OG was .051 rather than the .044 from following the instuctions. That's fermenting at 62 degrees also.
Picked up the fittings to finish the gas piping on my all-grain rig, still hoping to have that ready for Brewfest.
I only kept 2 bombers, and there's no way that I'll make BrewFest in a couple of weeks.
Austin, something you probably don't need to know is that you're going to be rather close to Northern Brewers' St. Paul counter outlet after you move...
