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Cider Digest #1438
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Subject: Cider Digest #1438, 17 February 2008
From: cider-request@talisman.com
Cider Digest #1438 17 February 2008
Forum for Discussion of Cider Issues
Dick Dunn, Digest Janitor
Contents:
Backsweetening with concentrates. (Charles Mcgonegal)
Preserving Cider With Sulfur Strips ("scott schemel")
Apple rootstocks (Dick Dunn)
Re: Small Scale Yeast Filtering (Dick Dunn)
Very slow keeved cider (Claude Jolicoeur)
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Subject: Backsweetening with concentrates.
From: Charles Mcgonegal <cpm@appletrue.com>
Date: Mon, 11 Feb 2008 07:51:50 -0600
To answer John H. - concentrates are pretty expensive, and the price
for apple concentrate shot up with apple prices this year. They have
some conveniences, but price isn't among them. Berry juice
concentrates run over $100/gallon. Well over.
About filtering, keep mind that pad filters, even the .45 micron
grade, won't deliver a sterile product. Pad technology doesn't contol
pore size that well. You need a membrane filter to get an absolute
pore size - pad filters make good prefilters, and may reduce cell
counts enough to get by. And as others have noted, you can still get
bitten post-filtration in the bottler or bottle.
Sorbate (just under 200ppm) and a little CO2 pressure can go a long
way. I've had pad filtered cider in legs keep a year with no problems.
Still cider is trickier, and either bumping it up to apple wine, or
learning the whole bottle pastuerization technique seem like good
ideas to me.
Charles McGonegal
AEppelTreow Winery
Elegant Hard Cider and Orchard Wines
>>Sent from my iPhone<<
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Subject: Preserving Cider With Sulfur Strips
From: "scott schemel" <smschemel@gmail.com>
Date: Thu, 14 Feb 2008 10:37:33 -0700
Dear Ciderdigesters,
The other day I was reading Jacque Pepin's autobiography The Apprentice.
There are a few paragraphs in the book where Jacque talks about some
of his daily duties as a young boy. One was helping his father bottle
wine for his mothers restaurant. Every day they would go down into
the cellar and from the barrels fill only enough bottles for what the
restaurant would use that day. After bottling they would burn a
sulfur stick attached to a piece of metal that was connected to a bung
and plug the whole in the barrel with the "bung burning sulfur stick".
This would remove the air from the head space and keep the wine from
going bad. My question is wouldn't the fumes from the burning sulfur
stick get absorbed into the wine. Jacque didn't say how fast they
went through a barrel of wine, but if it took very long at all
wouldn't the last few gallons of wine have quite a bit of sulfur in
it?
If this works, I was thinking that I could keep a few 2 liter PET
bottles in the fridge and fill them when needed using the same
technique.
Thanks,
Scott
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Subject: Apple rootstocks
From: Dick Dunn <rcd@talisman.com>
Date: Sat, 16 Feb 2008 15:06:06 -0700
Jack O Feil <feilorchards@juno.com> wrote, a few digests back, in response
to my fussing over difficulty of finding Geneva rootstocks:
> I grow apples commercially and there is a nice selection from the Malling
> and Bud series. I know nothing about the Geneva s, so I will continue to
> use the rootstocks with which I am familiar. I find very little if any
> information on the Geneva series, so if it ain't broke don't fix it.
(You should be able to find info on Geneva rootstocks from some suppliers or
certainly with a bit of Googling. See Cummins' web site cumminsnursery.com,
or treco.nu, for a couple.)
Yes, don't fix it if it ain't broke, but if you're growing where fireblight
is a problem, it's way-broke. The Malling (+Merton + LA) rootstocks
weren't bred for fireblight resistance, so any resistance they have is
I suppose coincidental to a generally healthy rootstock type. The Geneva
rootstocks had fireblight resistance as one major goal.
- --
Dick Dunn rcd@talisman.com Hygiene, Colorado USA
------------------------------
Subject: Re: Small Scale Yeast Filtering
From: Dick Dunn <rcd@talisman.com>
Date: Sat, 16 Feb 2008 15:23:24 -0700
In the last digest, Rich Anderson <rhanderson@centurytel.net> wrote:
> Filtering cider to stabilize it can be a daunting task, particularly if no
> SO2 is used. We tried for a several years to pad filter at a nominal .45
> micron and 50ppm of SO2. It worked fine during the cool months of the year,
> but when it warmed up the activity was noticeable on the bottom of the
> bottle, the cider was fine but the last pour could be a bit cloudy and this
> was a dry cider.
Rich, are you saying that you only added 50 ppm throughout? (I.e., you
tried to use final filtering in order to keep the SO2 way-low?)
You advocated pasteurizing, even for dry cider, but is there a reason to
pasteurize if the cider was sulfited to more traditional levels.
Finally, you said:
> Even if you keg it, pasteurization should be a doable thing.
On a small scale, how? What I'm thinking is that your argument is for
pasteurizing in the final container (so that no contamination can be
introduced during a final transfer step). I don't see how you'd manage
that--the processing time for a container of 20-60 liter capacity would
be so long, it doesn't sound reasonable even if you could figure out how
to heat the keg.
I can sort of visualize a flash-pasteurizing setup by passing the cider
through heated tubing and then into the keg, but that's a bit of a project.
- --
Dick Dunn rcd@talisman.com Hygiene, Colorado USA
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Subject: Very slow keeved cider
From: Claude Jolicoeur <cjoli@gmc.ulaval.ca>
Date: Sun, 17 Feb 2008 13:40:15 -0500
I have a batch of cider for which I need a consultation...
It was started last fall, by mid october, keeved with PME enzyme. It made a
very nice chapeau brun and was racked after 8 days. Original gravity was
1.064. No yeast was added.
I guess the keeve was too successful and the juice was low in nutrients to
start, as the fermentation is extremely slow. Today, the gravity is 1.051,
a drop of 0.013 after 125 days! Temperature in the fermentation room is
stable around 48F / 9C since December. If I let it go, probably the
fermentation will pick up a little next summer as temperature will rise,
but I doubt the gravity will fall much under 1.040, which would leave me
with an extremely sweet cider with about 3% alcool.
In the past years, my successful keeved ciders had fermented to a gravity
of about 1.035 by this date and have stabilised around 1.020 by end of
summer for bottling. I have another keeved batch this year which was
measured today at 1.035 and is going as expected.
So, I am currently evaluating a few different options for my slow batch:
1- Wait and see.
2- Bring it in another room with higher temperature.
3- Blend it with my other keeved batch. The inconvenient of this choice is
that the slow batch has a good part of bittersweet apples which the other
one doesn't have - I would then dilute the character of this particular cider.
4- Add a tiny bit of yeast nutrient. The problem here would be to figure
the quantity. The recommended dosage of the nutrient I have is 5 teaspoons
(tsp) per 5 gal batch. This is way too much as I know a single tsp is
sufficient to bring a stucked fermentation to dryness. So, if I choose this
option, I would probably use about 1/4 tsp per 5 gal.
If anyone has comments or suggestions, I would be happy to read you.
Thanks,
Claude Jolicoeur
Quebec.
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End of Cider Digest #1438
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