Further converstations about homebrew cider:

"Oswestry again
I racked that Cider off the other day I lost about 1 litre pre drum in the process, I could not get it all out without sturing it all up so I chucked that bit could I have done anything to save it ?
I took the SG and it was 1006 is that ok, I took a little taste and was pleasantly surprised is was a little fresh/ tart but not bad.
I also had a brain wave ,not sure about result, at work we have a retractometer which we us to measure glycol strength so I thought I would play about with it
Its not calibrated for alcohol, but 40% scotch gave w , 13% wine x, 8.5%beer y and 4.7% beer z. my cider gave a reading between y and z nearer to the 8.5% beer I would guess between 6.5% and 7.5% not so sure about the accuracy all a bit of guess work but would this be a normal strength?
Thanks again in anticipation have a good X-mas one and all.
Leigh"

Hi Leigh,

Unfortunately you will always lose some cider when racking off. But you must get rid of the 'lees' (sediment) at the bottom. The sediment will spoil the taste of the cider otherwise. They will also make your cider more cloudy which some people do not like. There is nothing wrong with naturally cloudy cider but it should not be cloudy because the the lees. So it is always better to lose a bit cider in the process. I will lose up to a fifth of the pressed juice by the time I have racked it off once and then syphoned it again into barrels to sell. Many cider makers rack off twice during the fermentation process to let the cider clear as much as possible.



Your estimate of the strength sounds accurate. My cider seems to always be between 6% and 7.5%. Did you measure the original SG? If so there is a calculation to determine the strength using the first and last reading.

http://www.homebrewmart.com/alcohol.html

Technically your cider is ready to drink but it is 'young' i.e. it needs to mature. Store the cider, keeping it air tight for a month or two for to to mature. This rounds the cider off and helps bring out the full flavours.

Seasons greeting!

Ed


Herefordshire Cider at Checkley Brook

Fermenting cider questions

I met a fellow cider maker in Owestry who emailed me with a couple of questions about fermenting. So I thought it may be useful to turn it into a blog post in case others had similar questions. His email and my answer are below.

"Its Leigh from Oswestry
Hope you are well. Just a couple of silly questions
My 80litres of fermenting juice are in 4 , 25litre plastic containers, they were popping the airlocks about every 20secs in the start .now its down to about once every 2mins

When do I rack it off ?

How do I know when its stopped fermenting? I no the obvious answer is when the bubbles stop but can you over do fermenting it?

How do I know how strong it is?

And is better to leave the airlocks in or seal the container complete after racking . I would not want in to be still fermenting and blow the bung

Many thanks In anticipation
Leigh "



Hi Leigh,

It sounds like it is time to rack off that cider. The fermentation is coming to an end by the time of the popping. One way of checking it has stopped fermenting is to take a hydrometer reading a reading of around 1000 would indicate that all the sugar has turned into alcohol.



You cannot over ferment really. Although some people try to stop the fermentation to retain some of the natural sugars to produce a sweet cider (this is called 'keeving'). I would not attempt this yet. You can only tell how strong it is if you took a hydrometer reading when you pressed the juice. Then take a reading once fermentation has finished from this you can work out the alcoholic strength. Here is is simple formula to use:

Alcohol by Volume = (Initial Gravity - Final Gravity) / 0.75


The cider is now going through a secondary fermentation which will produce a small amount of CO2. It is best to seal the container. BUT CHECK REGULARY. Unscrew the lid to let off pressure. It is OK to do this as CO2 is heavier than air and will form a protective layer over the cider. Your cider should be ready in a month or so.



Herefordshire Cider at Checkley Brook

Visit to Brogdale home of the National Fruit Collection

Yesterday was a beautiful autumn day, and we were enjoying a heat wave most unusual for early October. It was a prefect day to go down to the beautiful county of Kent to Brogdale Farm the home of the National Fruit Collection near Faversham. Brogdale has been the home of the national fruit collection since the early fifties. Its purpose it to serve as a research facility for scientist and farmers alike, and to serve as place where all the thousands of varieties of fruit are preserved. I do mean all fruit: apples, cider apples, pears, perry pears, quinces, plums, cherries the list goes on and that is just the top fruit. There is also a huge collection of soft fruit.

We were given a guided tour around the facility. There are 150 acres of fruit trees to wonder round. If you were to try one different variety of apples along each day it would take you 6 years to try them all! As our group was mostly from Cambridge we hunted down some old Cambridgeshire varieties to sample such as Huntingdon Codlin and Histon Favourite developed of course by John Chivers. We did also get the chance to look round the extensive cider and perry tree collection there and it was good to spot some old favourites.



One apple I was very pleased to come across was Ashmeads Kernel show below. This is a lovely little apple good both as an eating apple and for use in cider. A real find - I might buy a couple for the orchard.



Of course no visit to such a place would be complete without sampling the wares made with all that lovely cider and perry fruit. They had a draft cider and a draft perry on offer both were splendid. I opted to bring back 4 pints of the perry as I have more cider that I could possibly (or wisely!) drink.



So the next Kent destination must be East Malling the place where many famous root stocks were developed.

Herefordshire Cider at Checkley Brook

Ross on Wye Cider festival 2011

This year was our first visit to the Ross Cider festival put on by these lovely people Ross Cider. It was a great event. Very well organised. We camped in an old orchard full of heritage varieties of cider apples and perry pears.



The event is limited to 400 people due to fire regulations. This keeps it feeling a small, friendly and cosy festival. On the friday night there was a ceilidh with lots of people dancing intoxicated on Ross Cider delicious cider and perry. On Saturday there was a demonstration of cider making.



Ross cider has invested in a new type of press which uses water pressure to do the pressing. The pressure only goes up to two and a half bar which is quite amazing as my hydraulic press goes up to 380 bar! The juice is extracted slowly so should be of good quality.



Ross cider invites other cider producers to come and sell their wares at the festival which is nice of them! The Marchers Cyder Circle's Palmer's Upland Cyder was there. Other present were Tom Oliver, Greggs Pitt, Gwatkins, Swallowfields, Seidr Dai and Carey Organic. Needless to say we tried them all over the day and bought a few to take home with us too.

Throughout Saturday there were various folk musicians playing for our entertainment



There was also fantastic food available all weekend so we didn't really have to take any food with us. We'll certainly be going next year.

Herefordshire Cider at Checkley Brook

Beer on the Wye 2011 and Perry tasting

This post is a bit after the event but I've been busy. Well Beer on the Wye, the Hereford CAMRA event was very enjoyable again this year. There were 99 ciders available all from the county of Herefordshire, which just goes to show what a mecca for Cyder Herefordshire is. In the picture above is Roger's Jolly our offering this year. The same cyder appears in Beer the CAMRA publication in an article by Tom Stainer - Mick Lewis, CAMRA's long serving cider campaigner gives cyder tasting lessons and tries our cyder at the Cambridge Beer festival earlier this summer.

Anyway back to Beer on the Wye - Pat Pope from Herefordshire CAMRA asked me to do the perry tasting again this year. A job I am delighted ti perform as you can probably guess. The quality of the perries on offer were not as great as the year before. Many of them still tasted young and this may be due to the cold winter. In fact the other judges and I were convinced one was still fermenting!

One new cider of note I tried was Gryfter cider (below).



Among the other judges was Dave from Gryfter cider and his friend Charlie. That's Dave on the left.




Thanks again to Charlie for giving me a bed after far to much 'apple juice' and saving me from a precarious 6 mile cycle ride home! Hope to see them at the Ross Cider festival in September.


Herefordshire Cyder at Checkley Brook

Hostgator promotion codes

We were on Countrywise Kitchen last winter. They came and did a bit of filming of us making cider. Anyway I have finally got round to editing the DVD they sent me to produce a three minute clip of us on telly. This involved new territory for me. Downloading various DVD to WMV converters and merging the two resulting files into one. Of course Windows media maker did not work probably and cut off the last few seconds ruining the whole thing. Anyway a good learning experience. Might have another go at some sort of video in the future.

Go on have look http://bit.ly/lbet3t

Herefordshire Cyder at Checkley Brook

Selling a barrel of cyder to the British Army today. It's going out to Waterbeach barracks for an officer's ball.

This reminded me of an amusing (to me anyway) passage from my father's book The history and Virtues of cyder about cyder as a national English drink.

"Social reform was seen as one of the major avenues to prepare for the coming of the new millennium. It was suggested that landowners should be legally obliged to plant a certain proportion of their land with fruit trees. R. Austen, who wrote a Treatise on Fruit Trees in 1653 (it included "The Spiritual use of an Orchard"), approached Cromwell with an appeal for state aid in a national scheme for the planting of fruit trees. The appeal was unsuccessful, but it embodied many of the points that were to be used many times again: the planting of fruit trees in hedges and orchards would supply timber, both for joiners and heavy use; the bark would supply the tanner's needs, which were currently raising the price of leather to a very high level; wood useless for construction would provide fuel; the general adoption of cider instead of ale would save malt, the wood used in preparing the malt (as fuel) , and the grain itself, freeing land for other purposes; moreover, cider was a such a health-giving drink that Englishmen, newly prosperous from following the above advice, "would be strong and healthy People, and Long-Lived, able to goe forth to Warre and bee a terror to all our enemies".

So cyder seems to have had great social implications in the past. To some extent many of the points made then are true today. As far as making English strong and a terror to our enemies, well I'll just have to ask the army after they have drunk some!

Herefordshire Cider at Checkley Brook

The great task of racking off 5000 liters of cyder has begun. Surprisingly enough some of the cyder from last autumn has finished fermenting and needed racking off. It was cyder I had made last September so it had had the chance to get most of the fermentation done before the very cold spell we had again this winter. Some of this is ready to sell and will be winging its way to a beer festival in Liverpool as I type.

Much of the later cyder is still cloudy and bubbling away. Hydrometer readings showed there was still sugar being fermented. I expect them to have finished by Easter.

The cold weather had another effect of bursting some pipe connectors in the kitchen and bathroom of the cottage. So it looks like I'll have to turn my had to a bit of plumbing next time I am over in Hereford ;-(

Herefordshire Cyder at Checkley Brook

Acetification of Cyder

I got a worried phone call from a worried amateur cyder maker the other day. They had found my phone number via my website (this is encouraging news for the visibility of the site). They were worried about whether to leave a gap of air at the top of the cyder's maturation tank. They should of course NOT leave an air gap. Whilst this is not a problem whilst the cyder is vigorously fermenting, all air should be excluded when the cyder has stopped fermenting and it being left to mature.

It is preferable to fill up the gap with water rather than leave it to aerate and acidify the cyder so turning it to vinegar. Of course adding water will weaken the cyder. Some people may actually do this to reduce the strength of a cyder. They only needed to add 2 litres to a 30 litre tank so the impact on the strength and taste of the cyder would be minimal.

Making cyder at Checkley Brook