Well its the end of my first week back from England and I finally got to go to an orchard and try to purchase some fresh pressed apple juice and to do what I’ve discovered is called “Back sweetening” my cider. Its basically for cider that has gone on fermenting and leeched out the sweet apple flavor. I’ve sorta been doing this already by adding honey to the bottles before I sealed them up.
In preparation I checked online and found that the three closest orchards are Lehmans, Kercher’s and Garwoods. Lehman’s is closest being just up the road in Niles but when I emailed them about juice for cider they said they had a bad crop this year and wouldn’t ahve any to sale. That’s a sad story that’s true of most of the crops around here.  Between the late frost and the two months of drought there wasn’t much to harvest. 🙁
So then I checked Kercher’s and their website was full of activity but I couldn’t tell if any of it was recent. It looked suspciously like a cut and past job from a previous year so I clicked on the ‘contact us’ button and got a pop up blocked my path and said “You cannot ask us a question before you’ve registered.” Well I felt that was a bit rude so I decided thru process of elimination to go to Garwood’s in LaPorte. Both places are about an hour away but Garwoods was also nearer to Indiana Bill whom I owed a couple bottles of piccalilli so I arranged for him to meet us there.
The place was swamped, people parking half way to the Upick and onward… I guess so many orchards having to give this year a miss was hard on the area. They had apples, they didn’t all look as good as previous years, but mostly I was disappointed by the lack of anyone with any knowledge to talk to. I wanted to ask what variety apple was in the cider this year but I couldn’t find anyone over the age of 16 and they didn’t know.  The press wasn’t going so watching it was out too. They were just too busy to chat!

SO I bought 6 apples of a variety called “Ambrosia” at $2.49 a pound!  Had a brief meet and greet with Indy and then came back home. In retrospect the jonagold might have been a better choice but I had enough for my experiment.  I washed and stemmed the apples, cubed them roughly and the popped them into the blender. Added a tiny bit of filtered water.  Then I poured the apple sauce like mixture into a bowl thru some cheesecloth and watched the now brown apple juice start to seive out slowly. Looked like I was off to a good start. The Mrs said it would take a while so I drove over to Martins and got some apple cider and some apple juice to top off the containers.

You’ll remember from an earlier entry that there was three gallons of cider in the fridge in a couple of two gallon containers. Plus another one I’d started about a month ago. The plan was to take the fresh juice and the apple cider (which is unpasteurized local apple juice recently pressed) and top off each fermenter and balance out the alcohol taste with some of the original apple taste.

I got inspired by this video from Brewing TV:

I also tested the SG though I’m not sure why as I don’t understand it yet. I will go back to Brewing TV and watch their video on how to read a hydrometer. It read less than 1.

I say I PLANNED to add the ambrosia apple juice to the cider cause when I came back I’d found that the contraption I’d put together to filter into had a leak and now there was fresh apple juice running all over the counter. Fortunately the towels from the blending process where still on the conter and they stopped it from running under the toaster oven and into the coffee supply.

I was left with about two cups of juice. Good thing I had a gallon of cider to work with now, though it tasts a lot sweeter than I thought it should. Nothing on the label indicated it was anything but apple juice and water so I’m crossing my fingers. I added about 1/3…roughly speaking… apple cider to the one fermenter that was only half full, then a bit of apple juice to top it off. I’m leaving about 1/2 inch at the top for pressure release. To the full 2 gallon container I did the same by siphoning off 1/2 gallon into an freshly emptied apple juice bottle and then topped it back off with apple cider and a tiny bit of apple juice. Probably only got 1/2 cup of ambrosia apple juice, the rest was “Ziegler’s apple cider.”

I returned both to the mini fridge out in the garage where they’ve been living since primary fermentation ended. I’ll give it another week minimum and then try a test bottle. I found an answer to that pesky bottling issue too, which I will go over when I do the bottling.

I also found a recipe for cider that you drink in about a week’s time. I’ll try that once I’ve bottled this batch.  The Mrs wants space in the fridge back and I need to officially finish the Autumn batch before I can think about jump starting a new one.

I want to note that the cider that is just a fortnight old had a soft fizzy nature and I could taste some bite and  had I not known it was still early days for it I would have deemed it drinkable. Not much body, that comes with time. But I was so disappointed in that Woodchuck Fall cider that I was tempted to drink that this right now. Tempted! I think I can wait one more week…

I also set a couple of bottles on a garage shelf just to see how they’ll fair now that nights are around 66 and days are 70 something. I’m thinking that’s cooler than the basement gets and I won’t have room in the fridge for the roughly 5 gallons of cider once its in pint bottles. Roughly 40 bottles. Some will go in larger bottles, and some will stay in the  secondary fermenter as ‘still.

whew!

Don’t let anyone tell you making cider is easy, I’m always soaked in sweat by the time I’ve finished.