Last September I made about 12 gallons of cider from a wild apple tree growing on my dad's farm. I'll be heading back there in April and on my list of things to do is to bottle the cider. Assuming the cider made it through the winter, I'm not expecting too much from it. Just a simple base cider.
What I'd like to do is try adding some local flavours to the cider. Maple syrup, spruce tips, dandelions, wild violets, linden blossoms, rhubarb, and so on. Normally I'd add these to either primary or secondary fermentation, but that wasn't an option this time around. So the question is how to go about adding adjuncts without infecting my finished cider.
For the maple and spruce tips I figure it's fairly straight forward. The plan there is to make a heavy syrup (or equivalent in the maple case) infused with the spruce tips and just use this as a replacement for priming sugar. I don't want to be too heavy-handed with the flavours, just something subtle to enhance the cider.
Things get more complicated with the blossoms and some of the fruits. I don't think I can follow the heavy syrup route for these as the flavours are much more delicate and I'm afraid they'll be destroyed in the boiling process. Might it be safe to just rack the cider onto the blossoms? My plan was to sulfite at racking anyway, which may or may not be sufficient to keep my cider from turning into vinegar.
Just not sure. Any insights would be appreciated. Thanks!
What I'd like to do is try adding some local flavours to the cider. Maple syrup, spruce tips, dandelions, wild violets, linden blossoms, rhubarb, and so on. Normally I'd add these to either primary or secondary fermentation, but that wasn't an option this time around. So the question is how to go about adding adjuncts without infecting my finished cider.
For the maple and spruce tips I figure it's fairly straight forward. The plan there is to make a heavy syrup (or equivalent in the maple case) infused with the spruce tips and just use this as a replacement for priming sugar. I don't want to be too heavy-handed with the flavours, just something subtle to enhance the cider.
Things get more complicated with the blossoms and some of the fruits. I don't think I can follow the heavy syrup route for these as the flavours are much more delicate and I'm afraid they'll be destroyed in the boiling process. Might it be safe to just rack the cider onto the blossoms? My plan was to sulfite at racking anyway, which may or may not be sufficient to keep my cider from turning into vinegar.
Just not sure. Any insights would be appreciated. Thanks!