Capturing that fruit flavor

I'm new to all of this, but I did a LOT of research before I went to the homebrew store over the weekend and picked up my first 3gal Better Bottle. I get the whole yeast/alcohol life cycle, when it's alive, when it's dead, how to kill it, how not to kill it. But I'm missing some practical experience and I recently read something that through me for a loop.

I made the assumption that the yeast was going to gobble up all of the sugars and I was going to be left with essentially an apple juice where the sugar had been replaced by alcohol and some yeast carcasses. Then I read that "the apple flavors are largely consumed by the fermentation process as well". Is this true? Or is this one of those things where you just can't taste it because the sugar isn't there to bring out the flavor? Like when you don't put enough sugar in your Kool-Aid?

Yes to both. A large part of the apple flavor is the sugars, which obviously are consumed by the yeast. Which is why apple juice and apple concentrate are popular back-sweetening ingredient, since they bring back the 'apple'.

Fermented cider will not taste like apple juice, especially when dry, just like wine doesn't taste like grape juice, and beer doesn't taste like boiled grains and hops.

There is also a wide range of other chemical reactions occurring, which I'm not going to even get into right now, which also impact the flavor. A comprehensive winemaking book is a great resource for learning about them though all the info will not transfer into cidermaking.

LeBreton is 100% correct. It is possible to get a finished cider with some apple aroma, which tends to fool your palate into giving you the taste of apple, but it's not easy.

Cider is its own kind of fermented beverage and should not be expected to taste like alcoholic apple juice.

I find that fermenting at lower temps allows you to slow the process down and allows you to retain a lot more of the apple aromas and flavors. If you ferment at 70+ºF and use a very aggressive yeast strain, in my experience, you tend to lose a lot through the CO2 escaping the airlock. Slow and low seems to work best for me. With my environment, I can't keep my fermenters below 62ºF so I typically don't make ciders in the summer months.

In the winter, I use ale yeast and ferment in the upper 50s so I can drag the process out over a month or so instead of it ripping through the sugars in a week. My beers are happy at 68º, my ciders...not so much. I try not to let my gravity drop below 1.005 and I think they end up tasting like apple juice with all of the sugars removed.

to me apple juice fermented dry taste like white wine but way less harsh. very smooth.

Pickled_Pepper said:

Slow and low seems to work best for me.

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Ditto, a few degrees above stalling out seems ideal.