Cranberry Cider Recipe - a smash hit!
Ok, so in a month or so it's pressing season, and I thought I'd post this early enough for people to think about trying it. I opened one last night and it's mellowed out a lot in the last month and a half, where earlier on it tasted like a cranberry cocktail, now it's back to tasting like a truly great semi-sweet wine, and the apple flavor has come back quite a bit and the tartness of the cranberry's has mellowed out. This will be a perfect Christmas Cider! I will try to be as detailed as possible, and I took good notes so here goes...if you like making hard cider you have to try this one!
5G glass carboy
4lbs white table sugar
1lb brown sugar
1Cup white table sugar
12 oz. package of cranberries
5 Gallons of preservative free cider (I get the pasturized, saves time)
One packet Red Star Champaigne yeast
Later:
8 oz Raspberries
Pectic Enzyme (because boiling cranberries/raspberries sets some pectins)
Potasseum Sorbate
disolve 4lbs of white sugar and 1lb of brown in 1G warm fresh, preservative free cider (I get mine pasturized straight from the orchard). Do not boil the cider, just get it warm enough to disolve the sugar.
Save a cup cooled to disolve the yeast in, pour the rest with in the carboy with the rest of the cider (I keep one gallon out to pour in after I've added the yeast to make sure it's mixed in there well)
In a small sauce pan bring 1 Cup water and 1 Cup Sugar to boil and add cranberries for 5 min (they should just start to pop). If you boil for 10 min you have homemade craberry sauce, but I didn't want to gelatenize it, just make a syrup out of it. Pour the syrup and cranberries into carboy; add yeast mix and remaining cider. Should have an OG or arround 1.096-1.098ish. The OG varries depending on when you get the cider, late Sept apples won't have as much sugar to them as late October apples.
Ferment at arround 62*
Rack into 2ndary after 7 weeks, when I did gravity was down to 1.016; discard cranberries, boil 8 oz raspberries in 1/2 cup water with 1/2 cup sugar for 5 min, let cool and add to juice. At that point I topped off the carboy with 32 oz of preservative free apple juice from Shaw's (too late for fresh pressed cider)
Leave in 2ndary for 9 weeks and add 1 Cup Sugar with 1/2 lb honey disolved in a minimal ammount of preservative free apple juice. I just did this because it was a little too dry for my taste, if you like your cider/wine dry you can ommit the backsweetening. Add recomended ammount of Potasseum Sorbate and Pectic enzyme to clear it. Let it sit for two more days to make sure the Sorbate has a chance to stop active fermentation and also let the pectic enzyme clear it out. Then Bottle (I bottle in 750ml wine bottles)
Let it bottle condition for at least 6 months to mellow out or it tastes like a cranberry coctail. All in all it's about a year process to get a great wine, but man it's good stuff and the ladies love it too! I oppened a bottle with some friends last night and it was great, got good reviews! People who like sweet wine call it dry, people who like dry wine called it sweet, so I just label this a semi-sweet cider. With all the backsweetening it's hard to determine an exact ABV but I can guestemate it at 12.5-13.5%. Dangerous stuff!
I started it in mid October and bottled by the beginning of February, and as I said just opened it last night and it was just starting to come into it's own. I'm still working on becoming a beer brewer but after tasting last night I can say with confidence that this recipe needs little tampering with.
Cheers 
It's the one in the middle...duh...the pink one. Ends up with a nice strwberry blonde color.
This sounds tasty. I was wondering if you don't backsweeten, could you skip the sorbate and have a wine with a little carbonation? Or would you end up pushing the corks out of the bottles? I don't have any experience with ciders, so I wouldn't be sure what to expect.
ruralbrew wrote:
This sounds tasty. I was wondering if you don't backsweeten, could you skip the sorbate and have a wine with a little carbonation? Or would you end up pushing the corks out of the bottles?
If you don't backsweeten, and were planning on using regular wine bottles, you would want to be absolutely sure that it was fermented out, and would end up with a still wine, and yes, you could skip the sorbate with that too; though this would end up dry, and with the craberries would be pretty tart, some like that, so of course this recipe is up for experimenting to taste like any. If you wanted it carbonated, you would want to use beer, grolsh, or champaigne bottles, because yes, you would blow the cork out of a regular wine bottle, and the screw top wine bottles are not made to take the pressure of carbonation. The other two carboys in the picture I made sparkling cider quite successfully, but with this one, I personally think it works better as a still cider. Really nice chilled on an August day, will be great at Christmas time! Although, a sparkling version would make great Christmas gifts...
If you ferment it out and want to sparkle it, prime it with table sugar because champaigne yeast will ferment table sugar with no problem, I use 1/2 teaspoon in a 12 oz beer bottle and a heaping teaspoon in a champaigne bottle. Have not had any blowouts with that ammount, and gotten a really good cider champaigne.
I guess the next wedding I am at I will have to collect empty champaigne bottles. All I would be interested in is just a light carbonation to give it a little sparkle. SWMBO thinks it sounds good too. Looks like I'll have to start searching for a fresh cider supply. And get some more carboys for some of these longer ferments.
You can usually find 12 oz bags of cranberries by mid October in the grocery stores, which is the middle of pressing season. Of course you can do an apple juice version of this too which many do for their hard ciders...but I guess coming from Norther New England I'm a bit of a purist when it comes to cider. Where I grew up in VT there was a distinct difference between cider and apple juice. Like I said, you add pectic enzyme at the verry end to clear it anyway, so it's not like you'd end up with a bad product if you used preservative free apple juice; but it adds to the wow factor to say "I did this with fresh pressed cider". The orchards neer me use mostly macintosh and cortlands in their ciders.
But if you get into cider, and many even press themselves (but then pasturize to get rid of wild yeasts), you can start experimenting with varieties of apples, the same way wine makers do with grapes. There are so many varieties. I've even heard of people making hard cider that was good using types of crab apples.
I'm with you on the cider/apple juice thing. Nothing compares to fresh cider. I'm not sure if I can even buy fresh cider anymore. I think it all has to be pasteurized these days. Damn guv'ments. I used to buy fresh cider and let it sit in the fridge for a while and it would ferment, or maybe it was a lactoferment, but it would get really tangy and tasty. Fresh cranberries are no problem. More cranberries grown in Wisconsin than anywhere else. I could go right to the bog and get them fresh, but unlike most fruits or berries, they are just as good from the store in a plastic bag.
I am assuming the raspberries you use must be frozen? Kind of late for fresh that time of year.
I'm going to make this this fall. Have it ready for Thanksgiving/Christmas next year. And as long as I'm starting a long-term project, I might as well start a mead too. There is a guy that bought a farm just up the valley from where I used to farm. He used to be an entomology professor at Arizona State, and when he retired and moved back to Wisconsin he opened an aviary. Always used to bring a gift of honey to our Christmas parties. Maybe I can work out a honey for mead exchange, a win/win situation. So anyone have any good recipes for a first time mead attempt?
The raspberries were fresh but store bought so I think they were grown in Chili. Frozen would probably work just fine, they add a minimal ammount of flavor to the pallet.
Also, pasturized is such a bad thing, because then you don't have to worry about wild yeasts altering the brew (sometimes for good, but sometimes desasterous). It's when the store bought cider has potaseum sorbate added to it already, which makes the yeast unable to reproduce. I've heard you can brew with cider that's had sorbate added but you need to get a good starter going so there is enough yeast that the ammount of sorbate won't affect it, but really you should try to find the preservative free, pasturized ok cider, which is usually in stores only when pressing season is on.
Hope it works well for you! I'll be making another batch this year as well.
Just got this years batch going on Saturday, the only change I tried this year is I'm doing a 6 gallon batch and I'm trying using yeast nutrient, don't know if this will turn out bad or good as a result because the slower fermenting may have contributed to the flavor. But within 12 hours it was bubbling every 4 secconds, way faster than it picked up last year, when it wasn't really going until a day or two later. Now it's crankin'! And I'm using a later in the season pressing so I think the juice had a higher gravity to begin with. I'll keep posting on the progress.
After two weeks it's still bubbling every two seconds!!! MMMM...alcohol...It's not as pink this year and I think it's because it's dilluded in 6 gallons this year instead of 5 and also I boiled the cranberrys just a few min longer. Last year I put the cranberrys in boiling water and let go for 5 min, this year I put the cranberry's in, let the water return to a boil and then timed 5 min, so it ended up being arround 7 min and turned more into a mush with fewer whole crans in it that just poped open. Other than that the smell coming out of the bubbler is just as I remember it and is good! I brewed this later at night and never got the OG but it must have been high with the cider being fairly sweet and 7lbs of sugar + the cranberry syrup. I never worry as much about gravity with cider because it is what it is, I'll either keep backsweetening until the yeast kicks (which is what I might do with the craberry) or I'll let it get to clear enough and bottle with priming sugar. It's always strong and good!
I'm getting my final batch (6 1/2 gallons) of dry cider going tomorrow (the other stuff I sent to Andrew in the beer swap) and I'm going to make that all sparkling this year for some good stock of cider champaigne!
Keep on brewing all!
I picked up the cider and cranberries today. Was going to put this together this afternoon, and discovered I didn't have enough brown sugar. So I am going to pick some up in the morning after work and get it started tomorrow. I was planning on using DAP for the yeast nutrient. And maybe throw an extra pack of yeast in when I am making the cranberry sauce to add some dead yeast hulls in the mix. What did you use for the yeast nutrient?
I used fermax for the yeast nutrient, recommends 1 tsp per gallon; I don't think I used quite that, about 4 tsps. Any is more than the apple cider has. It's basically B vitamins that the cider doesn't have, speeds up the initial fermentation process. It was definately rockin within 12 hours of pitching. I take a cup or two of the sugar mix I desolve and stir in the nutrient and yeast to disolve for about ten min. Leave a half a gallon behind so that you can use that to rinse the measuring cup of the yeast that sticks to the side and to the funnel and pour that into the carboy so nothing's left behind. I don't know if that actually helps, but it can't hurt.
I finally got a batch of this put together today. I made a four gallon batch using my cheap PET water carboy. I didn't get quite all four gallons of cider in. The cranberries and sugar took up some of the space. But I added the sugar for a four gallon batch so it will be interesting to see if the yeast poops out before the sugar runs out.
It is easy to put a batch together, this might have to become an annual ritual.
As our resident cider expert, care to share some of your other recipes?
If you used the Red Star Champaigne yeast (or really any wine yeast) odds are that it won't kick before it's eaten all the fermentable sugars. The guy that owns my LHBS makes a lot of cider too and he just keeps backsweetening and backsweetening over the next few months until his poops out. I've thought about doing this, this year, to see what happens as opposed to using the sorbate. But champaigne cider can sometimes go as high as 15% ABV and that would be rocket fuel! As close as you can get to a distilled product with natural fermentation.
Check it in a month, you'll probably find it's pretty dry. In the orriginal post I said rack to the 2ndary after 7 weeks, but with the yeast nutrient that can probably get cut down to 4 or 5. Also you can freeze a gallon or two for when you need to rack it again in late December/January. I'm doing that this year instead of going to apple juice.
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My other recipe's are pretty straight forward. My basic starting ratio is a pound of sugar (brown or white)/Honey per gallon of juice, and from there I experiment. I switch between Red Star Champaigne and Lalvin D-47 dry wine yeast, though my backsweetening changes from batch to batch too, and I haven't noticed that much difference between the two yeasts. They say the Lalvin leaves some residual sweetness but I had a batch last year with that yeast go from 1.098 down to .996 - bone dry! After that starting point I'll play with cinamon, clove (go easy on the clove, a dab-ll do ya), and last year the cranberries. This year I'm trying a batch with a couple teaspoons of whole cloves and two cinamon sticks sweetened with just honey. I take good notes for the sake of reproduction in case I find something that works really well, like the case of the cranberry cider, but mostly I play arround from year to year.
Cider champaigne is really straight, 1lb sugar-1gal cider...rack onto 2 large cinamon sticks - let sit till mid February - bottle with 1/2 tsp white sugar in a 12 oz bottle or a heaping tsp in a 750 ml champaigne bottle. Let bottle condidtion for a couple months and its ready.
Glad to hear you're trying the crancider! Hope it works well for you, let me know!
Slenche!
I used the Red Star Champagne yeast. It is very happy, healthy and busy this morning. The airlock is going pretty much nonstop. I'll see where it is in a month. Good idea, freezing the extra cider to top off with.
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