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A good starting gravity
I pressed about 1000# of apples. We had a 4:1 sweet to tart apple ratio and blended it. The gravity right now is 1.042, and tossed in some campden tablets.
Usually we add honey to boost the gravity, but I wanted to get some other opinions.
What is a good starting gravity, because 1.042 seems low and will affect the durability during long term ageing?
Also what should I use to boost gravity?
Lastly, we usually use champagne yeast, what yeast would be better suited for cider?
thanks
julian
I've gotten over the urge to try to boost the gravity in my ciders. No matter what I use, it just thins out the cider and weakesn any apple flavor. They seem to store fine (I have some going on 5 years old), so if that's your main concern I wouldn't worry. I've also gravitated to WY3766 cider yeast or WY3184 sweet mead yeast for them for the same reason. Those 2 yeasts seem to leave a lot more apple character and body than any wine, champagne, or ale yeast I've tried.
thanks
jonathan
There's really no need to add sugar just for the sake of the gravity, unless your goal is to get a strong 'get drunk quick' brew. Pretty much every bit of that .042 is going to ferment out - in fact unaided ciders can ferment into the high .9s, so you can get 5-7% abv without help.
Now if you're trying to add flavor or sweetness, sugar alone won't help since it'll all ferment out too....
So where does this urge come from to increase the starting SG? Is it a beer brewer thing? I can't imagine that our forefathers were adding a lot of extra sugar to their ciders. I don't want or expect to get my socks knocked off by my cider, but I want my family to really get a apple character unadulterated when they sip. I've heard that some people will actually boil down their cider from 7 gal. to 5 gal. to concentrate the sugars. I'm brewing this week so I'm trying to get my thoughts together on what I'm going to do and what I'm going to add, etc. Great thread!
Well, it's done. I boiled a little of the cider to bring it down to about 5 1/2 gallons instead of 6 and added some honey and brown sugar as well (2 lb. each). My starting specific gravity was 1.072. I didn't really want it that high, but didn't have a point of reference so I followed a recipe from my local brewing store.
Holy ----
four more lbs of almost pure sugar- that's like almost 2 kg of almost pure fermentable.
That's like- 6-7% of alcohol in a US 5 gal (20litre) batch.
That's like - 10-12% final.
holy----
are you sure you want(ed) this?
Is my math wrong?
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