Cider Flavouring

[Human123]

Goodday I am busy fermenting an apple cider and want to know how to add more apple flavour to my cider? Do you buy flavour somewhere and just add it to the cider after fermentation or what do you do? Hope someone can help me , kind regards Human.

 

[Rish]

Hi, Human, welcome to HBT. I've added frozen apple juice concentrate to up the apple flavor and abv in my ciders with limited success. You might try some of the flavorings from Olive Nation. I haven't but have read good things about them on HBT. Good luck!

https://www.olivenation.com/apple-flavor-extract-pg-free-natural.html

 

[Chalkyt]

Welcome to the world of cider.

I guess that when many of us made our first cider we expect to get an apple flavored alcoholic beverage, but instead got something that is dry, tart, and “arrgh”, what is that? ...tasting not at all like some of the commercial ciders which are modified to “improve” the flavor.

To paraphrase the cider guru, Andrew Lea… “wine doesn’t taste like grapes, nor beer like barley, so it is illogical to expect cider to taste of apples”. However, all is not lost since the cider flavor is easy to modify, but first it is useful to understand what cider is.

Cider is fermented apple juice where yeast converts all the sugar into alcohol and CO2, leaving water, alcohol and flavor compounds.

The flavor of the original juice basically comprised three elements, sugar, acids and tannins (the sugar provides sweetness, the acids tartness, and the tannins bitterness and astringency. So, to modify the cider flavor, it is typical to add and balance some or all of these elements.

As a guide…

Adding sugar will simply produce more alcohol and CO2 (which escapes into the atmosphere) unless residual yeast is inactivated by heat or chemical pasteurization to stop any new fermentation. Typically, 5g/L of sugar gives a touch of sweetness with up to 25g/L resulting in a sweet cider. An alternative is to add a non-fermentable sweetener, however some find the taste unsatisfactory or suffer gastric effects.

Also, carbonation enhances “mouthfeel”, typically 2.0 – 3.0 volumes of CO2 about the same as beer or soft-drink.

Malic acid is the dominant acid in apple juice. The ideal acid level for cider is 5g/L to 7g/L. This gives the cider its “bite” but juice often has low levels (3g/L) so high acid apple juice or even malic acid needs to be added to get a balanced cider.

As with acid, many apples are low in tannin so high tannin juice or exogenous tannin (powder, oak chips, black tea, etc) can be added to improve the flavor.

The other element to add is time. Since cider is a form of fruit wine, as it matures there is often a difference between one week, one month, six months, twelve months’ worth of maturing.

I suggest you use the search function at the top of the forum to find lots of information about these approaches.

It is likely that others will reply with their favorite methods of improving cider, like adding apple juice concentrate, other fruits, etc, etc.

I hope this helps.

Cheers!

 

[bernardsmith]

I guess my question is what exactly are you calling the "apple cider" you are fermenting. If the juice was pressed to make a sweet drink (apple juice) then 99 times out of 100 the people pressing the fruit are pressing table apples. Cider apples tend to be too tart, too tannic and too crumby to be eaten as a "dessert" fruit. If you got your apple juice from an orchard pressing apples for cider makers, then the blend of apples ought to be more appropriate for hard cider. If so, a couple of questions:
1. What is the pH of the juice?
2 What is the TA?
3. What was the SG?
4. What was the blend and did they advise you the % of each varietal?
5. Have you back sweetened? Brut dry cider tends to taste more fruit forward if you stabilize and back-sweeten or if you carbonate.

Others may disagree, but I tend to always pitch 71B yeast when I make a cider. This yeast has an affinity for apples and will metaboolize about 40% of the malic and convert it to lactic acid. Lactic is a less jagged flavored acid than malic.
If you know the malic content of your cider, you may want to add malo-lactic bacteria to convert all the malic to lactic. Not advisable if you have added sorbate.

 

[Midway Island]

I fired up an unpasteurized cider from a mill that uses U/V light to kill off bad bacteria. The brix content was 15 so I added 3 cups of desolved granular sugar, After pitching nutrient and 71B it started great. I racked at .910 SG and added sorbate. racked after 3 months will add 4 gr. of oak and honey. Plan on hitting it with bentonite 3 weeks before i bottle.

 

[Timbrews]

All good comments above, I add a half teaspoon of malic acid per gallon of fermented cider, find it it gives more of an apple flavor then extracts. Also adding a few ounces juice concentrate to a stabilized cider works well in my opinion.