Jenny had been buying Hard Cider at the store lately, and wanted me to try some -- different than wanting us to try some. We went to Downriver landmark Block's Farmstand to buy 1.5 bushels of Michigan apples.
I found a kit at the local beer store, which essentially was a packet of preweighed chemicals. I liked this kit because it had a hard cider recipe, which is:
5 gallons apple juice
3.75 t acid blend
2.5 t pectic enzyme
1.25 t wine tannin
1 pack yeast
2.5 t potassium sorbate
This seems like a lot of chemicals for five gallons, but it is from a wine chemical vendor. Worse, the kit is missing the potassium sorbate.
The problem was getting the juice. I thought I could mash the apples well enough with the food processor, but that was way too slow. I eventually gave up on most of the apples, and ended up buying juice. (After a while, most of the apples ended up in my garden's compost pit.)
The resulting juice was flavorless, but I fermented it anyway.
By Thanksgiving, I knew I did not have a tastey Hard Cider, which is after all a weak apple wine --rather I had weak flavorless liquid not good for anything.
I thought for a while I could save it by blending it with other wine,; most notably my 2009 Blueberry wine which had a strong tannin flavor, but not enough fruitiness. No way though. The Apple wine wrecks whatever it touches.
I did find something to blend it with. Fortifying it with brandy helps a lot. Fortifying with grain alcohol does not give the right flavor. Either one makes helps the wine to clear. I had given up getting to become clear, but adding the extra alcohol made it all settle to the bottom of the bottle. One can see sediment at the bottom of the bottle in the photo.
Flavoring it with honey also helps. I bottled off some Pseudo-Mead with brandy and honey that is decent.
The lesson I have learned is that only flavorful juice makes flavorful wine. The second lesson is that the main flavor in apple juice is sugar.
No comments:
Post a Comment