Fresh Juice Cider Help

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Fresh Juice Cider Help

Postby Link » Wednesday May 19, 2010 4:45 pm

Hey all,

So, after trying a kit cider variation, and a store bought juice cider, I have taken the plunge and made a cider with fresh juice. I bought 20 litres of fresh pressed apple juice from Kellybrook Wineries cider festival to have a crack.

Now, my first two ciders were crazy dry. Dryer than a really dry thing. I really can't emphasise enough how dry they were. I burped and dust came out.
So this time I wanted to pull it back and make a sweeter cider (though I may have overdone it). The recipe is as follows:

20l Fresh Apple Juice
6 Campden Tabs (crushed and added to juice for 36 hours).
1kg Lactose
250g Dextrose
250g LDME
SN9 Yeast.
1l water (just to give the sugars a quick boil).

OG was 1076. Six days in had dropped to 1020 and eight days after that it is sitting pretty steady at 1018-1020ish with the airlock still bubbling, albeit very, very slowly.

It is still fairly sweet, but not overly so. Overall it tastes good, with great mouthfeel, but I was still expecting a little dryer after the last two (even with the 1kg Lactose).

So, a couple of questions...

Would you bottle it now? Call it done and see how it goes? 1020 still seems too high to me to bottle, but it's been steady for a week and I have no idea how that much Lactose would affect the FG.

What priming rate would you use?

Any general thoughts about the recipe?

Thanks in advance...

Link.
Beers are friends, not food.
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Re: Fresh Juice Cider Help

Postby Chris » Wednesday May 19, 2010 6:08 pm

If you bottle that now, I'd suggest investing in a bomb shelter.

Consider an extra kg of lactose.

Aside from that, if you want to keep a cider sweet, filter all the yeast, back-sweeten, or retard
fermentation with an appropriate chemical/temp regime. That's how the big-boys do it anyway.

Filtering and lactose would be your best options here.
A beer in the hand is worth two in George Bush...

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