Recent content by JulianDave

This could definitely be the issue. Big difference between the two.

It just occurred to me that experimenting with skins may be better done with your own fruit as store bought apples have some type of wax on them. That might prevent the contact you would be hoping for?

5.25 + 1 ice cider = 6.25 gal

I love this out of the box thinking. I have no idea, but I think it's worth experimenting with.

I agree with everything you said. The reason for the post was to challenge the idea that the only way to get a dry cider to taste somewhat like apples is to add AJC. My limited experience seems to suggest that generic sugar is going to be the same, as the fruit flavor is gone because it's dry...

Pressure fermentation is done a lot in beer brewing, so a thought would be to ask over there what it does exactly and figure out if it's relevant to cider. Or do the exact same batch with pressure fermentation as the only difference to see what you think. As far as O2, what Cider Wraith said...

Update. I took 1.5 gallons of store bought juice at 1.050 and freeze/thawed it according to my directions above and ended up with ~0.8 gallons of 1.078 cider. I think I could probably continue, but like you mentioned, you start to loose efficiency.

I just did 3 freeze/thaw cycles on 1.050 store bought juice and it's at 1.078, so similar to OPs results. Volume was reduced by about 40%.

I have had problems with an aged cider, a cold crashed cider and a KMBS treated cider from bottle conditioning. Adding yeast did the trick, it's easy to do, and cheap insurance if you think there might be an issue.

Have you ever tried erythritol as a nonfermentable sweetener? It was recommended by a few other brewers and since I tried it it's all I use now. Tastes like sugar in reasonably low concentrations we use to make cider off dry. I see it commonly at the store in the US, not sure if you have it there.

It seems that you're making a non-alcoholic 'beer', more like a ginger ale. The other way to go is to actually do a fermentation to produce ~6% ABV, then bottle with a little sugar to produce carbonation. I have been experimenting with the later and had good results with adding pineapple juice...

I don't think most bone dry fruit wines taste very good. I'd consider sweeting it up a little. Not like a dessert wine, but just enough to get it off of being so dry. If that works then you could either use a nonfermentable sugar, or stabilize and add sugar/honey/whatever.

Thanks for the feedback. I'm going to do a test batch, keeping everything the same except method of backsweetening to see if I can tell the difference.

OP, I recommend you do it this way. This method is the 'easy button' for making a sweet sparkling cider. For nonfermentable sweeteners I like erythritol.

How much sugar did you add? There are online calculators that will tell you exactly how much sugar to add to a certain quantity of cider to get a certain carbonation level. Assuming you did add enough sugar, if nothing happened either: It's too cold You didn't wait long enough Keg has a leak...