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Honey just crystalized on bottom after I backsweetened
So this is a continuation of "cider still foggy"...or rather it's the same batch.
I just racked it for a second time to both help it clear and to back-sweeten a bit. My gravity reading was at .996 (used Lalvin D-47) and as you can immagine it's quite bitter and acidic, so I wanted to sweeten it up a bit and get the gravity back up a bit at the suggestion of my local brew store.
When I racked it I added a couple pounds of honey and some cane sugar(didn't actually sweeten the flavor all that much, but it definately helped)
Now it's a couple of hours later and it looks as though the honey just crystalized and sank to the bottom of the carboy. I've got what looks like a small cake at the bottom and then a couple of inches of floaties. Also airlock activity has not increased though I'm not as worried about that yet. So I have a couple of questions as this is my first time brewing anything let alone cider, and as most first timers I'm a little nervous about screwing up and ending up with 6+ gallons of vinager.
1. Did I mess up? Should I have diluted or heated the honey to help it disolve in the cider, or should I have not used honey at all? I didn't want to stir too aggresivly and oxidize the batch.
2. Will the yeast consume the honey and disolve it or will I have honey sludge at the bottom of my carboy indefinately that will be useless for sweetening or fermenting?
3. If the cider is still foggy to begin with, and I can assume that it's yeast floating arround waiting for something to eat, will the yeast just consume the sugar/honey I used to backsweeten and I'll still end up with extreemly dry cider(and the ABV will just keep rising), or will this actually leave me with a sweeter cider?
I'd appreciate any of you more experienced cider brewers advice on this one.
1. You probably don't want to hear this, but yes. on the mess up. But this is how we learn.
1a. I always dilute the honey in a bit of water, & heat it up, dissolves better
2. Absolutely, the sugars you put in, in with live yeast will continue to ferment.
In order to backsweeten a mead or cider, you have to kill the yeast with something like potassium sorbate, and then do the additional honey, or sugar.
I would suggest at this point, mix what you have ASAP throughly with 1 Tablespoon of Potassium Sorbate, rack the whole thing into another fermenter, & let it clear.
Thanks Brewski for your honesty.
That's what I was affraid of. Unfortunately, all the brew stores around here are closed on Monday's, so I won't be able to get Potasium Sorbate until Tues at the earliest. The floaties have all settled and I just have a cake of honey at the bottom of the carboy. Airlock activity has still not increased.
Will the sorbate affect the taste? I'm basically assuming at this point that I'm stuck with a still cider, and I won't waste my champaigne bottles on this batch. I do have two other carboys going and their bubbling strong, maybe I can get some carbonated bottles out of those.
Also, with the fact that I don't mind a dry cider, would it be terrible to just let the cider age on top of the honey as is? I probably wont, but hypothetically...
Thanks again.
The sorbate will not affect the taste.
The only way I have been successful getting a bottled, sparking, sweetened cider or mead is to pasteurize.
1. Sweeten to taste
2. Bottle in strong bottles
3. Allow to carbonate, test a bottle after 3-4 days & every other after that.
4. When sufficiently carbonated, place the bottles in a large pot, cover with warm water, and slowly bring the temperature to around 170F. Turn off & let cool.
There is a good possibility that you will break a bottle or two during this process. That's why I like to use the big pot of water. All the broken glass & liquid stays in the pot, better than in the stove.
I have some two year old Ancient Orange Spiced Mead, done that way.
You could, in fact, do that with the stuff you have now, just mix it up first, let the yeast settle out, and bottle.
Good Luck
Quite a color spectrum isn't it? The one on the right is the one in question.
Ok, so I stirred it up and tasted it, it's a little too sweet for my taste; so I'm going to let the yeast work for a little while longer and then I'll add the stabalizer & bottle. Thanks Brewski for the feed back. And I'll probably use that pasturization technique for my sparkling.
--fermentation picked up within two min. used to be about every 45 sec, down to 24.
I use Lavin D47 for all my meads. It has a lower tolerance to alcohol than the champagne yeasts, leaves a little more sugars un-fermented. If you don't want bottle bombs, you really need to use the potassium sorbate before you bottle or, let it continue to ferment until you get to a specific gravity around 1.00 or less.
That would mean you are done, then if you are ok with a dry, sparkling cider, add some corn or table sugar before bottling for carbonation.
If you want sweet bottled, you have to kill the yeast at some point, whether with heat or potassium sorbate.
So all went well with this cider, in fact all three of them. I bottled half with out adding any sweetner (grav was about 1.012). It took a month and a half before the fizz and head were to my liking, I'm letting the champaigne bottles go a week longer. It's a nice, semi-sweet sparkling cider. Hope the pasturization worked. Got the water up to 190*F, turned off heat and put bottles in for 10 min with a lid over it. No more than 5 bottles in the pot (bigger lobster pot style). Not one bottle blew. Aging in the basement. I didn't go for crazy fizzy cider, just a light sparkle to it and a head that lasts just a min when you pour it, ginda like ginger ale that you opened yeasterday and kept in the fridge. It's great!..and Strong! The backsweeten with honey brought a lot more of the apple flavour back in comparison to the six gallon batch I left dry.
I'm going to let the cranberry batch age a while and post the recepie when I try one depending on the outcome, though I'm pretty sure it will be good.
Cheers!
Thanks for the update. I bottled 8 cases of cider back on 2/5/2011. It looks like I may also be looking at a month and a half of conditioning before pasteurization. The one I tested last night had only a trace of carbonation.
SewerU- Good idea to use champagne bottles. Strongest ones out there.
By reading your post I'm not sure whether you had the bottles in the water while you raised the temp to 190.
If you did, no problem, the temp is a little high, might have changed the flavor a bit, but the yeast is dead for sure.
If you didn't, that is, if you put the room temp bottles in 190F water for 10 min, I would be concerned that the contents may not have reached the magic 170F mark, and therefore continue to ferment.
R5520- Continue to test on a regular basis. The fermentation can accelerate quickly sometimes, and the result is bottle bombs & no booze.
sewer, you might also try using a yeast other than a wine/champagne for your cider.
your gravity dropping below 1.000 and necessitating the use of K-sorbate to stop fermentation is due to the higher alcohol tolerance of wine yeasts when compared to the majority of beer yeasts. i didn't see it mentioned, but what was your O.G.? if you had a moderate starting O.G. (say in the 1.050s), the wine yeast will eat that up and keep right on going, not pooping out naturally until the alcohol content in solution reaches 12% or so.
if you want a 6 - 8% sparkling cider, i have had great success with starting at about 1.075 and using the commercially available cider yeasts or an ale yeast. i have experimented by brewing the same recipe and using different yeast and got the best results by using the White Labs English Cider yeast, though an english ale yeas does pretty well too.
these yeasts can ferment up to approx. 10% but will slow down when your residual sugars are around 1.020 - 1.018, leaving you ample residual sugars for a full bodied, slightly sweet, and bottle conditioned cider.
i like my ciders to be higher up in ABV, so i usually aim for an O.G. of 1.100 - 1.095 and use the cider yeast, it has finished about 1.012 most times. i use brown sugar to sweeten the must and mull with spices. the resulting cider has a great, well-balanced flavor profile and tastes like apple cider. i ended up performing the yeast experiments because my first few attempts at cider were with wine yeast and all were too dry and had no real apple flavor. the results of the experiment have much improved my cider and i am quite pleased with the results.
you might want to try 3-gallon or 1-gallon test batches to see what apple blend, recipe, and yeast produces the flavor profile you prefer.
Brewski wrote:
R5520- Continue to test on a regular basis. The fermentation can accelerate quickly sometimes, and the result is bottle bombs & no booze.
I will indeed check them often - no booze would be no fun.
Next time you might want to backsweeten with Splenda. It's nonfermentable and you don't need much.
You could rack off into another carboy and remove the remaining honey. then get some potassium sorbate and add it when it tastes like you want. But if fermentation has started potassium sorbate will not stop it, it will kill yeast when fermentation has stopped. campden tablets will stop fermentation. one tablet per gallon. I use the sorbate, then backsweeten, then to be sure I add crushed campden tablets. then I bottle.
DC
Thanks all, to answer Brewski's question I did not heat the bottles with the water, simply put the room temp bottles in the 190* water and put the lid back on. I left the pot on the burner with it off ( I have one of those glass top electric stoves that holds a temp much better than the older ones, so the glass bottom held it at close to 190* for a while), it was actually about 192 when I put the bottles in four at a time, then one time five. With the lid on and sitting on the hot glass I'm hopefull the the yeast is pretty well dead. I had one yeasterday and it was WONDERFUL! so I'm not worried about any flavour changes.
To answer the others my OG was around 1092, I was going for, I suppose technically, apple wine rather than what most in brewing would consider "cider". I used in a 6 gal batch 5 pounds of white sugar and 1 1/2 pounds of brown. after a month racked into a 61/2 G carboy and topped off with fresh pressed, pasturized cider direct from the orchard, no other sweetner. After another two months checked and Grav down to 0996!..bone dry. Backsweetened with 2lbs of honey which brought me to the beginning of this post. I stirred it up and the Grav went back up to about 1020ish, a little too sweet for me so I let it go back on for another three weeks maybe, got it down to 1012 and bottled half of it in Champaign/sparkling cider bottles and beer bottles as well...
Which brings me to deafcone, with the other 31/2 Gallons I added Potasseum Sorbate and stirred it up, let it sit for two days in the carboy, stirred once after a day, and on the seccond day I bottled in about 8 wine bottles I had and the rest as still cider in 12 oz beer bottles which make better gifts, to my single friends who don't want to commit to a whole bottle of wine in one night (like I sometimes do) they can have two beer bottles. Of the wine bottles I haven't had a single cork pop out or even show signs of moving and I bottle over a month ago now.
Really this sparkling is one of my favorites of what I have from this year so far, may do this batch almost the same next year. No problems on regularly checking it. If the yeast is still going it doesn't have much time leaft before it will be in a stomach.
My first posting to hit over 1000 views! Too bat it was a screw up post and not a recipe! 
This brew turned out pretty good, I've only got a few bottles left. It worked good as a sparkling and those who like sweet wine liked this as a still cider...I got good reviews and this one turned out very hard! I'm not doing this one again this year though because I favored the dryer cider (which makes a great cider champagne), and one of my carboys is being taken up with an experimental cinnamon clove cyser. Maybe I'll come back to this one next year, I've got a few stashed away where I won't see them and I'll see what they taste like after a couple years of age. I like instant gratification but I also like a multiple year experiment that turns out good!
Cheers all and thanks for all the input on this one...Brewski in particular, thanks man!
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