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Cider Digest #1299
Subject: Cider Digest #1299, 11 February 2006
From: cider-request@talisman.com
Cider Digest #1299 11 February 2006
Forum for Discussion of Cider Issues
Dick Dunn, Digest Janitor
Contents:
Re: Apples in bottles (Mike Faul)
MLF and springtime awakening (Dick Dunn)
Kit cider, normal sugar, and yeasty flavours. (Daniel Pittman)
RE: Annie Proulx (Dick Dunn)
apples in bottles ("drcath@tiac.net")
Reply to Dick Dunn ("Hal Smith")
Juice Nitrogen (Andrew Lea)
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Subject: Re: Apples in bottles
From: Mike Faul <carraig@earthlink.net>
Date: Tue, 7 Feb 2006 12:10:48 -0800 (GMT-08:00)
Use small apples ;-)
I guess it really depends on what you are looking for. Aroma, flavour or
something else. I know a Japanese farmer who grows apples and puts every
apple (thousands) in little containers. Essentially keeping them sterile
while they grow. These apples are then sold for $50 each in Tokyo.
You might try using jars or other wide mouth container.
Mike
>Subject: Apples in bottles
>From: "John Jeffs" <pdms@senet.com.au>
>Date: Mon, 6 Feb 2006 21:51:19 +1030
>
>Hi All,
>
>Just curious if anyone would know which apple varieties are best suited to
>be grown in bottles to be filled with apple brandy? Also, is there another
>way to put an apple in a bottle instead of actually growing the apple in the
>bottle?
------------------------------
Subject: MLF and springtime awakening
From: Dick Dunn <rcd@talisman.com>
Date: Tue, 7 Feb 2006 22:00:03 -0700
In the last digest, Mike Beck <mjbeck@ujcidermill.com> noted:
> I would like to point out that yeast fermentation and ML are two separate
> and different chemical changes. Each with their own problems and rewards.
> They should never be lumped, IMHO...
Too true.
My comments were based on historical anecdote--that people had noted cider
starting to "work" (ferment; produce bubbles) as it warmed up in the
springtime, and assumed it was an awakening of the yeast, whereas it could
just as well have been MLF starting. Andrew has written about this in the
past.
In other words, I think we understand it now, and we can (and should) keep
the two straight, as Mike suggests. But historically it was confused.
Mike's right...very different critters even. Yeast are yeast; MLF is
bacteria.
And surely it matters, especially considering that you may or may not want
MLF in your cider. Again as noted by Andrew and others, MLF is more likely
in the ciders that don't need it! The MLF bacteria prefer lower acid
(higher pH), and they reduce acid. So you can get MLF in a low-acid cider
that doesn't need it, thereby pushing its pH up to a dangerous spoilage
level, whereas the sharp cider that could really benefit from reduced
acidity is not a hospitable environment for MLF bacteria.
(But note also that the available commercial MLF cultures may not be so
reluctant to start in a low-pH environment.)
- --
Dick Dunn rcd@talisman.com Hygiene, Colorado USA
------------------------------
Subject: Kit cider, normal sugar, and yeasty flavours.
From: Daniel Pittman <daniel@rimspace.net>
Date: Wed, 08 Feb 2006 15:48:02 +1100
A couple of questions here, from a novice brewer:
I am a fair fan of cider, and getting started brewing using commercial
cider kits (basically, Apple concentrate).
I hope to get better at cider making before I try to work with more
expensive juice purchased from the relatively few cider fruit growers in
the area. (I have no scope to grow my own, sadly.)
My first batch turned out fairly bad, to my taste. It was extremely dry
and has a yeasty aftertaste.
The dryness didn't surprise me, as it took almost a month to fully
ferment, and it stayed in the same fermentation vessel the whole time.
I wondered if the yeasty taste could be caused by the very long
fermentation and, if so, if I would be better moving the cider into
another vessel after a week or two to remove some of the sediment?
The second question I have is about the sugar for brewing. The first
time around I used Dextrose, but in talking to a friend I had
recommended the use of normal white cane sugar.
The recommendation, basically, was that the flavours that the white
sugar encouraged might be bad for beer, but they enhanced the cider.
My reading suggests that the side effects of the normal sugar tend to
give a "green apple" flavour to the brew which I can well imagine
working well for apple cider. :)
Does anyone have comments on this?
Thanks,
Daniel
------------------------------
Subject: RE: Annie Proulx
From: Dick Dunn <rcd@talisman.com>
Date: Tue, 7 Feb 2006 22:14:07 -0700
Pat Maloney <pmaloney@callatg.com> wrote:
> Lee Passey <lee@novomail.net> wrote:
>
> >A brief discussion on how to make apple brandy can be found in Annie Proulx
> >& Lew Nicols' book "Cider: >Making, using & enjoying sweet & hard cider",
> (Storey Publishing, 2003, www.storey.com).
>
> This is one of the first books I read on cider making and I'm glad to see
> it's still (or back?) in print.
Actually it's been in print all along, and is now in its third edition.
It's not the best American cider book. (I claim that title goes to Ben
Watson's _Cider:_Hard_and_Sweet_.) But it's good and it's available.
> As good as it is, I think more people are now aware of Annie's amazing
> writing ability after seeing the recent blockbuster based on her short story
> - - "Brokeback Mountain."...
I see it the other way around: Annie Proulx has been a very successful
fiction writer for quite a few years; I'm surprised that she's still got
her name on a cider book, and apparently (given that it keeps getting
revised and re-published) still involved with it.
It's interesting: Even with Proulx's substantial reputation as a writer,
the jacket note from the current edition says only: "ANNIE PROULX is a
writer who lives in Wyoming and Newfoundland." But I suppose that's like
saying "John Barlow is a sometime lyricist who lives in Wyoming." We
Americans should appreciate understatement on those few occasions we get
it.
The reason I'm not crazy about Proulx and Nichols is that it's got some
really archaic boners, like sucking on a siphon hose to start racking.
Isn't that pretty much inoculating your cider with a culture of your mouth
bacteria?!? And even the homebrewing community mostly got rid of that one
twenty years ago or more. (Their racking technique also has you put a
stick with a brad and a rubber band into the cider, which seems slightly
chancy, but pales in comparison to the mouth-suction part.) It wouldn't
take much other than a careful reading by a cider-knowledgable reviewer
to get rid of these few "old-style" techniques and ideas.
I don't know that either Proulx or Nichols are aware of the Cider Digest.
I wish they were.
- --
Dick Dunn rcd@talisman.com Hygiene, Colorado USA
------------------------------
Subject: apples in bottles
From: "drcath@tiac.net" <drcath@tiac.net>
Date: Wed, 8 Feb 2006 10:35:38 -0500
RE: John Jeffs =2E=2E=2EAlso, is there another
way to put an apple in a bottle instead of actually growing the apple in
the bottle=3F
Hmmm=2E=2E You could build the bottle around the apple by joining two halves of
a bottle from separate glass moulds=2E You'd have to dissipate the heat
somehow during firing to avoid cooking the apple=2E Another crafty way would
be to cut the bottom off of the bottle, insert an appropriately sized
apple, invert so the apple falls to the neck, then weld the bottom back on
the bottle=2E Find a glass blower in your local art community and see if it
would work=2E
Dave
------------------------------
Subject: Reply to Dick Dunn
From: "Hal Smith" <rakovsky@excite.com>
Date: Thu, 9 Feb 2006 20:02:52 -0500 (EST)
Andrew Lea, thanks for the info on bacteria.
>> We've done a good job establishing that there
>> are no decent US commercial ciders...
> WHOA there, podner! I think the best we've established is that there are
some pretty weak mass-market (nationally distributed) ciders. Even those
are popular in a wine-cooler sort of way, just not particularly interesting
as ciders.
> There are many very good US commercial ciders, but they only have local
or regional distribution.
>-Dick Dunn
Oh yeah, that's what I meant. Last week I visited the Stoney Acres Winery
in Nescopek, PA, about 40 miles from my house. I bought a botttle of their
cider, And it is pretty good. It has 6% alchohol and is carbonated. It
comes in something between a beer bottle and a wine bottle! I had their
dry cider. Until now, I had only bgotten "apple wines" in my area.
- -Hal
------------------------------
Subject: Juice Nitrogen
From: Andrew Lea <andrew_lea@compuserve.com>
Date: Sat, 11 Feb 2006 09:52:29 +0000
Dick wrote:
> Terry mentioned tests on leaf nitrogen, which is the normal approach.
> But is anybody doing, or set up to do, tests on fruit nitrogen
> levels?
These test are quite widely done by people in wineries. For instance,
Vinquiry in the US offer Ammonia and Assimilable Amino Nitrogen and AWRI
in Australia offer much the same Yeast Assimilable Nitrogen (incl.
ammonia) as part of their 'juice panel' of assays. When I was at Long
Ashton we measured total nitrogen in cider juices by the Kjeldahl
procedure. The numbers you get by either method should not be too far
apart because in apples, most (90%?) of the nitrogen is in the form of
asparagine or aspartic acid which will respond to the AAN / YAN assays.
Unlike grapes, there are no significant levels of unassimilable proline
etc in apples which will give falsely high values by Kjeldahl. So I
would recommend anyone who wants to pursue this to get in touch with
their local wine analysis laboratory. The only thing these assays miss
is the level of thiamin (Vitamin B1) which is also a factor in speed of
fermentation.
Now for some numbers. When I was at LARS in the 70's we had a cut-off
for total juice nitrogen of around 100 mg/L. This was based on
'traditional' practice and effectively said that 100 mg/L or below was
typical of cider fruit from standard orchards and was a level that
should not be exceeded. The fruit experiment in pots I referred to a
couple of Digests ago gave juice N values of 68 mg/L and 33 mg/L in fed
and unfed Dabinett respectively. But since we were working at the time
on fruit coming from the then new and relatively heavily fertilised bush
orchards, we were often seeing numbers of 300 mg/L. These were regarded
as fast fermenters and moreover as producing ciders which were likely to
give microbial instability problems (eg renewed fermentation) in
storage. For comparison, it is interesting to note that Paul Henschke's
paper on the AWRI website says that a YAN value of 150 mg/l or below
will likely lead to problems of poor fermentation in grape wines. It
all depends what you're looking for - a modern winemaker might be
worried at that sort of level while a cidermaker trying to get a
fermentation that ends with residual sweetness would be trying to keep
below it.
I confess I have absolutely no idea of the current YAN levels in cider
apples. I have not had these assays done for the best part of 30 years
- - it would be very interesting to get some data from modern orchards of
different management types, cultivars, and tree age (we do also know
that young trees give fruit with higher YAN than more mature trees), and
I don't know of anyone doing them in the UK (not least because the large
commercial cidermakers will be adding DAP and thiamin routinely so the
base level of YAN really doesn't matter to them).
Andrew Lea, nr Oxford, UK
- --
Wittenham Hill Cider Page
http://www.cider.org.uk
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End of Cider Digest #1299
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