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Trying out brewing for the first time!
Hello everyone,
So I'm really new to brewing, and by really new I mean I went down to the local orchard, saw that a packet of red star yeast was $1.00 and decided to try it out.
I got two gallons of apple juice, started the yeast and added 1.5 cups of granulated sugar to each gallon.
Its been bubbling away for two days now, but I thought I would start a topic on here so that I could get a few suggestions. I realize that this may seem like a rinky-dink operation (admittedly, it is), but any tips you guys have would help!
I'm going for something like a sweet apple wine or hard cider.
Anything suggestions you have for aiding the fermentation process, ingredients to add, how long to let it ferment, etc would be greatly appreciated!
First of all, congradulations for joining the club, brewing is fun and produces a product everyone enjoys.
I think you're off to a good start with cider, it's the easiest to brew compared to wine and beer. On that note I'm curious what type of yeast the Red Star was. I use Red Star champaigne yeast for some of my ciders, they end up very dry. With the ammount of sugar you added you'll be fine, it will all ferment out and you might end up with an alcohol level closer to beer, like 5-6%. This is also because it is still reletively early in the pressing season and the cider has more sugar in it when pressed in late October. The more you explore this site you'll learn about gravity readings with a hydrometer (they cost about $5 and tell you the ammount of alcohol you should get with the ammout of sugar there is to ferment). But don't worry about that right now. If later you want a sweeter apple wine/cider, you'll need to get something that stops the fermentation process, like potasseum sorbate, and add that when it's done fermenting, because there is still yeast in there just waiting for something to eat. Then backsweeten with a little honey or sugar disolved in a few cups of juice.
For a wine level of alcohol, my general recipe is 1 pound of sugar per gallon of juice. Apple juice just doesn't have close to the ammount of sugar grape juice does.
Next - this you may already know but I'm basing this on the fact that this is a first time attempt - make sure air/CO2 can escape the container you're fermenting in but not get back in. If you are fermenting right in the jug the cider came in you can punch a hole in the cap and run a tube into a cup of water or cheap vodka (seal the cap so air can't get back in). If air gets back into your cider before fermentation has picked up it will turn your cider into cider vinegar and not hard cider. Yeast eats sugar and makes CO2 (what makes beer fizzy) and alcohol, bacteria eat sugar and make CO2 and vinager.
Lastly, the ammount of time to wait - you could probably drink it next week and be happy, but I'd let it ferment for at least three weeks. Then make sure you siphon the juice into a clean, sanatized contaner (DON'T POUR); this is because you will see a "cake" of yeast develop at the bottom of the jug and you don't want to drink that. Just take you're tube, fill it with water, with your fingers over each end set one end near the bottom of the cider without setting it in the yeast cake and take your finger off the other end and put it in a jug lower down and let gravity do the rest. You know, like when you siphon gas out of your neighbor's gas tank.
As you get more into brewing, you might ferment the cider longer. I will let mine ferment for 6 weeks, then siphon into another carboy, top off with fresh cider and let it sit for another 3 months. I usually don't bottle until February. And even then let it sit in the bottles for an additional few months. But for your first experiement I'd just go three weeks, siphon and drink.
Just make sure you sanitize everything, either with an iodine solution or a very light bleach mix; if you use bleach rinse very well. If you are using glass be careful not to pour boiling water in it because this will cause it to crack and break.
Good Luck. And cheers!
Yeah, what he said!
The only thing I have to add is, YouTube. It can be your best friend. Whether you want to stick with ciders, go towards meads and wines, go down the road of beer, or dive head first in to a whirl wind of everything (like a lot of us ambitiously do), you'll find a video showing you how to do exactly what your trying. Even just going to brew supply websites and sifting through the pages of equipment is helpful. Getting a routine down that is sanitary efficient is all you need to make great booze. So just have fun with it and don't get intimidated. Anything you brew yourself (with the exception of maybe a few experiments) will be better than something store bought if you appreciate the craft.
Cheers and welcome.
e_mott09 wrote:
Anything you brew yourself (with the exception of maybe a few experiments) will be better than something store bought if you appreciate the craft.
Amen to that!
^^^^^^^^^ What they said!
If this turns out to be something you are interested in pursuing, Craigslist can also be your friend. If you keep watching, you can find most any of the equipment you need there, at a significant cost savings. Just don't let anybody try and tell you that you need to spend a lot on equipment in order to get in to this hobby. You can spend thousands, but it is not necessary. I have seen three gallon high density polyethylene (HDPE, always look for that, it is pretty much impervious to air infiltration.) bottles of water selling for six bucks at one of the local home improvement stores. Spend a couple bucks on a drilled stopper and airlock and you are all set to make a three gallon batch of cider. New five gallon paint buckets and lids are cheap at most home improvement stores, drill a hole in the lid and buy a grommet and airlock and you have a five gallon fermenter.
If you decide to get into beer, most extract kits can be done on the stove, or the side burner on a gas grill. If you already have a big enough fermenter and a decent sized stockpot the only other equipment necessary is an accurate thermometer and a hydrometer, which are both cheap enough. All grain is a little more expensive, but I picked up a turkey fryer setup with a propane tank on Craigslist for twenty bucks. I found an eight gallon stainless steel stockpot on Amazon for $79. If you have a cooler you can repurpose and a few plumbing parts and you are good to go.
And you can use this same equipment to make wine. I just buy the wine kits, let it ferment, clear and bottle it. It has always turned out great. Good wine for a couple bucks a bottle is hard to beat. I don't drink much wine, I make it for my wife. As long as I keep her supplied with wine, she lets me brew as much as I want. Sort of a symbiotic relationship. 
Anyway, I hope your cider turns out for you, and you keep fermenting. Boards like this are a wonderful resource. I only started this year, and without a resource like this it would have taken me a lot longer and a lot more mistakes without the combined years of experience and expertise residing on this board.
Thanks guys! You've all been really helpful.
Yup it was the red star champagne yeast that I picked out. I'm also fermenting the apple juice right in the plastic jug it came in, I read online before I started that that could help curb contamination. On that note, are there any other ways of avoiding bacterial growth? I much prefer the taste of hard cider to vinegar.
I originally just had the caps unscrewed a little bit to let the CO2 out, so I'll be putting tubes into the caps tonight.
Also, if I wanted to increase the alcohol level to more like a wine, is adding more sugar still an option?
I fully support putting a half pou d of brown sugar into each of your bottles. If you go by the book you'd want to sanitize anything you add from now on. So that would mean mixing it into some cider and heating it to 150 for a little while. But since you are only allotted the room of your already full bottles and since you already pitched your yeast it isn't really feasible to add/heat any new cider. Alcohol does however kill a certain amount of gross stuff so it's kind of a chance that you can take if you are so inclined. If it were me I'd throw some sugar in it while you're still fermenting. I'd say the chance of introducing bacteria is relatively low if you're pouring sugar directly from a fresh sealed bag into your bubbling bottles. I did use the word "chance" tho...
If I rambled I apologize. I may have enjoyed the fruits of my labor a little too much tonight.
You're fine leaving the caps slightly unscrewed, that will get the desired effect. Though this is a shorter term solution. For longer aged ciders you'll want to look into a fermenting jug, like those water cooler jugs (they make good carboys) and a stopper with a bubbler airlock.
I'd wait to add more sugar. The way I'd do it (if it were me) is to wait maybe three weeks for the bubbling to slow down a lot, then make up a light bleach solution (although, if you have a brewry store near by or a camping store I'd get iodine, it's safer and you don't have to worry about rinsing; idopher solution is 1 tsp to 1 1/2 gallons of water) and thouroughly sanitize a few empty gallon jugs, a few feet of plastic tubing, a small sauce pan and a spoon. Then I'd heat up like 1-2 cups of fresh cider in the saucepan and use the spoon to disolve another 1/2 lb. of brown sugar as e-motto suggested in the warm cider (don't boil the cider, just get it warm enough to disolve the sugar; if you boil you'll set pectins in the cider and it will stay foggy) Then siphon the fermented cider off of the yeast cake into the clean jug. Because you siphoned off of the yeast cake you will now have space to add the sugar mix. Top it off with the sugar mix and any remaining cider needed to give you about an inch of headspace at the top of the jug. This process is called "racking". When I rack into my secondary I usually just top off the fermenter with fresh cider and fermentation picks back up, but I start with more sugar than you did.
Sanitation is important, but at that stage of brewing you don't have to worry about it quite as much as when you are just starting the brew. By that stage the alcohol and co2 that's in the cider will hold back contamination for the most part...don't sneeze in it or cough in it, but if you do what I mentioned above and make sure you transfer into a sanatized container you should be all set. Fermentation will pick back up within a day or two because as I said, there will still be lots of yeast in there just waiting to eat something. Then let it go three more weeks and bottle, or siphon back into your orriginal jut (sanatized, of course) and drink the whole gallon over the course of the week...hmmm, that wouldn't be a bad idea.
Oh, and don't shake it up or splash it too much at this stage, now that you're on the way to having an alcoholic beverage you want to avoid oxidising because that will help the bacteria contaminate. When you siphon make sure there is enough hose to go to the bottom of both jugs with one on a shelf above the empty one.
One last question, how do I stop fermentation? Is there anything I can add that will kill the yeast?
Also, my cider tastes a little bit like beer. Any ideas as to why this happened and if there's anything I can add to make it taste more like wine?
Well, to stop fermentation, if you have a local home brew shop nearby, or have the paitience to order online, you can use Potasseum Sorbate. Add the reccomended ammount (I think it's about 1 tsp per gallon) and gently stir that in, then give it a couple of days to take effect. It doesn't kill the yeast, but it makes the yeast no longer able to reproduce, which means when it dies off it's gone. I've used this successfully, bottled in wine bottles and have not had a cork pop out on me yet. It also acts as a preservative and will give it a longer shelf life (though with a higher alcohol content it should have a long shelf life anyway). Also, if you don't like the flavor right now just keep letting it ferment until you're absolutely sure it's stopped, if you do that there are no more sugars in the wine and you don't need the sorbate.
In answer to your seccond question...time time time...stronger cider will verry often need to age before the flavors mellow and mesh together, just like wine...that's, after all what it is...apple wine...You'll notice that almost all wine you find on the shelf is at a minnimum aged a year. You don't have to wait that long, par set, but the longer it sits in the bottles the better it gets. And in spite of the flavor not being exactly what you're looking for you can absolutely drink it right now, and you'll probably get a damn good buzz from it besides. I have a cider going right now, that if you took a glass of it it would barely be drinkable, but give it six months in a bottle to age and it becomes much more pleasant.
If you are an impatient brewer (and who isn't) you should try a beer, where you can turn arround a drinkable batch in a month. Hope this helps.
I wonder if your flavor profile is related to your yeast choice. If you used standard Red Star yeast meant for baking then those flavors will not mellow in time. Unless you used a cider or wine yeast then maybe you can expect to age it out a bit.
What yeast did you use specifically, red star makes lots of yeast?
Earlier in the thread he mentioned it was the Red Star Champagne yeast, I use this all the time and it will definately improve with age. Mine usually need a good 6-8 months in the bottle to mellow out, some taste like a cocktail until then.
Like I said cdonno, even if the flavor is not to your liking, it doesn't mean it's not drinkable...but I'd bottle it and let it sit for a few months, open one once in a while to check. It sounds like you're looking for wine like cider, and that means time, sorry to say.
Thanks again guys! This is all really helpful.
Looks like I'll just bottle it up, be patient, and let it sit then.
Seems like a good bet, it goes through changes for better AND worse over time. Last year there were about two months where the acidity went up and it tasted wicked bitter, then started to mellow and tasted like it did when I first bottled it...THEN mellowed more and the apple flavors started coming through again, and so on and so on. Any wine, be it apple, honey, or grape, goes through changes, you have to treat it like a living thing. If found, the stronger it is, the more time it needs to mature.
Good luck. Enjoy, and maybe next year you'll want to do a full five gallon batch!
That makes about 24 wine bottles!
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