Have gotten some color change within the last week, at about 2 weeks of fermentation. Is this mold do you guys think?

I've read many times that when you try to reuse philly sour yeast it doesn't sour the 2nd time and it's a completely different flavor profile with beer, good but different. Has anyone reused it with cider, and what flavor profile did you experience? I'm trying to decide of I should reuse mine or go with verdant yeast for my next batch.

So,I'm baffled,in a quandry,don't know what to do! I've brewed about 8 to 10 gallons of cider in glass jugs,always using the same recipe. 1/4 cup brown sugar,1/2 a can on concentrate,1 1/2 tsp yeast and fresh juice. All came out great at about 6% abv. I decided to jump to a 5 gallon carboy using the same recipe x 5 and also 2 gallons in jugs.The jugs I started 2 weeks before the 5 gallons. The only difference I switched to Mangrove Jacks m2. Well.....I experienced my 1st bottle bomb. Luckily I planned for such an event and it was all contained. Sucks! My 5 gallon will be 2 weeks old and usually ready for racking tomorrow but it's still bubbling away about 15 to 20 seconds apart. Is Mangrove yeast THAT much stronger? I don't think I want to rack it now. Should I just leave it go or put it in gallon jugs with bubblers? Thanks in advance!

I was signposted here by the good folks of Homebrewing. I am about to make cider for the first time as this is something I've been putting off for years and now I have a load of free time and access to a very large quantity of apples for free... I had a number of questions related to cider production for the first time. I should also add that I am in the UK as this may affect recommendations for available products to use.

1. How should I go about adequately cleaning and sanitizing my demijohns? Because I have a relatively small budget I have had to buy a number of glass 1 gallon demijohns second hand, so I assume I am going to need to clean them fairly thoroughly. People have mentioned Star San but this isn't available in the UK, I can buy a product called Chem San however which is relatively cheap but I wanted to check with people here if this is a suitable alternative.
2. I have purchased a variety of different yeast strains as I want to compare flavors, I have a sweet tooth so I've read I need to use yeasts that boost esters. I have purchased a few different wine yeasts, a saison yeast and a mead yeast, all by Mangrove Jacks. I've found that MJ also sell a variety of different yeast nutrients, for wine, cider and beer. Is it advisable that I use nutrients specific to each kind of yeast for optimal fermentation or can I just use one of them as a general purpouse nutrient?

Any help is appreciated.

I was signposted here by the good folks of Homebrewing. I am about to make cider for the first time as this is something I've been putting off for years and now I have a load of free time and access to a very large quantity of apples for free... I had a number of questions related to cider production for the first time. I should also add that I am in the UK as this may affect recommendations for available products to use.

1. How should I go about adequately cleaning and sanitizing my demijohns? Because I have a relatively small budget I have had to buy a number of glass 1 gallon demijohns second hand, so I assume I am going to need to clean them fairly thoroughly. People have mentioned Star San but this isn't available in the UK, I can buy a product called Chem San however which is relatively cheap but I wanted to check with people here if this is a suitable alternative.
2. I have purchased a variety of different yeast strains as I want to compare flavors, I have a sweet tooth so I've read I need to use yeasts that boost esters. I have purchased a few different wine yeasts, a saison yeast and a mead yeast, all by Mangrove Jacks. I've found that MJ also sell a variety of different yeast nutrients, for wine, cider and beer. Is it advisable that I use nutrients specific to each kind of yeast for optimal fermentation or can I just use one of them as a general purpouse nutrient?

Any help is appreciated.

Hello everyone,

Has anyone tried to make a yerba mate cider? The green tea leaf which is very popular in South America.

It also appears to have quite some tannin, which I am looking for as I mostly use juice from eating apples.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8984970/

I have the luxury of living in Upstate New York which is apple country. Picking season is over so what’s left gets juiced or composted. Farmer said help myself to as many as I wanted! Now I have acres of trees to pick from but only two carboys. Questions:

1. Can I freeze them (I have a chest freezer)?
2. What effect will freezing have?

Thanks for advice!

P.S. it amazes me what won’t sell in a grocery store. These are considered “seconds,” absolutely ridiculous.

I'm getting ready to start a 3 gallon batch and I want to try brewing store bought juice on a bunch of apple peels I've been saving. Are the peels going to provide enough tannins or should I still add some strong brewed tea?

I'm pretty new to brewing and never have made cider, admittedly. We just moved and have a huge crabapple tree in our front yard so I was like....why not?!?! Well, here's where I went wrong - I juiced, not pressed the crabapples which made for a thicker juice. I added pectic acid before fermenting but the bottom of my gallon jug is just full of thick sediment. Like, maybe 1/4....so, a lot. I'm wondering....could i siphon the liquid out of the top, add in just fresh apple juice from the store and then run through a second fermentation? What would it hurt? I'm planning on back-sweetening and pasteurizing after fermentation just to be on the safe side until I get this dialed in. Don't know if that's needed info....

this is just for the benefit of me & u/QuentinMagician/ - and anyone else who googles this in the future. Plus I know people in this sub like experimenting with flavours etc. so perhaps the rest of you might find it interesting

earlier this year, a storm knocked over a plum tree. We're only here a few years so not entirely sure what variety, but I think it was a Mirabelle - small yellow fruit, not much flavour, but still. It was a beautiful tree, great white blossoms in the early spring, I'll miss it. I managed to make a small amount of jam from it, but that's all

My dad chainsawed it up, and I split it with the ax, and the aroma from the split wet wood was incredible. It makes terrible firewood, too damp and stringy, but occasionally I still get a brief blast of that aroma - really fruity.

anyway, after a few batches of cider this year, I got to thinking about how to improve the flavour. I've done hops and that seems to work well. But something is missing. I have an oak tree, but not going to chop it down just yet. but then I got thinking - how about the plum wood? I won't miss it from the firewood anyway!

I've scoured this sub and beyond but there isn't a whole lot of research available on this topic. Most people seem to be using commercially produced oak spirals or cubes, as far as I can tell which isn't much help here with plum wood seasoned for no more than six months

so here's what I did - firstly, I just chopped up some plum wood into small pieces. now plum is pretty fibrous, so it ends up splintering into stringy bits which didn't seem ideal. getting uniform chips was tricky - I felt these splinters would end up producing too much sediment

first test - tea made from raw chips. so a cup full boiling water poured onto a small handful of chips and left to steep for a hour. look at the colour! incredible colour but unfortunately not much flavour. it just tastes like water (which made me burp a little too much)

first test

a bit more research led me to the second test - this time I stuck the chips in the oven before making the tea. Aga oven doesn't let me control the temp so it's about 200deg C. I checked them every 15 mins for aroma and not much happened until about 40 mins. then I got a nice biscuit scent so I took them out and made a tea. again steeped for an hour in freshly boiled water. unfortunately this time the colour declined in vibrancy, and the flavour did not really improve a whole lot

second test

so for the third test, I went back to the drawing board. this time I dropped the oven toasting, second-guessed myself and went for stringy shavings rather than chips. But crucially, I went for a boil, rather than a tea - at least 20 mins roilling boil, then cooled in a tea and strained after an hour.
the result? a much deeper colour and finally a little bit of tannins in the mouthfeel! I've added a few mls to a glass I've just poured from a recent bottle and it really blushes the colour up nicely and adds a new dimension to the taste so we might actually be getting somewhere. I have another batch about to pitch so fingers crossed by the time I get to secondary, I will have this plum tea ready to go - maybe a longer boil but I think that this might actually work in the end!

third test

anyone with any suggestions, I'm all ears - thanks folks!

Just started batch #8. I make this each year for the following year's thanksgiving holiday.

Starting gravity was 1.046 gravity now is 0.990. what should I do rack? Add sugar? There is a slight unpleasant smell but the taste is dry as you would expect but with some good flavor

Decided to splash out on a mixed case. Have only had the black dragon before so interested in hearing what people think/know about the others.

I am a beginner to advanced. I normally make Cider from fresh apple juice. But I tried for the first time a pasteurized 100% juice without additives, a little better.

I normally use wine yeast, but this time I used better quality dried baker's yeast and experimented a bit with a smaller amount of fresh yeast.

There were 40g of white sugar per 1l. Fermentation ends in two days, 10g of sugar is added, end again on day 3. I found it strange. I tasted one bottle and drank it all.

8-10% alcohol according to taste. Cloudy. Dry. A bit of a stale apple taste.

I just went 2000 years back in time. It worked 🤣🤣

Picked up a new carboy from the local homebrew store. Star San & PBW is expensive. Should I still use some ?

Hi and thanks for your help! I put some juice into primary fermentation in 1gal glass carboys and had to leave town for a bit (not ideal). When I got back I noticed some of the 3 piece airlocks had some juice and sediment in them. I did a good job cleaning/sanitizing everything and used vodka in the airlocks. Has anyone had this happen before and if so, what were the results? They are still ticking along and the only visual difference between the 2 that bubbled over from the 4 that didn't are the airlocks. Thanks again for your time and help!

Good morning all. I apologize if this has been asked in some other form before but I'm new and not even sure what questions I'm supposed to ask.

Long story short I am making my first batch of hard cider. The juice is unfiltered and organic, but it was pasteurized. The end goal is to have it carbonated, utilizing carb drops, if that matters. My question is, does the cider need to be pasteurized again once it's done fermenting, and if so, how do I go about doing that? It's a 3 gallon batch and it'll just be me and one of my friends drinking it, so it'll need to last at least a few months.

Thank you in advance for your help.

It’s been fermenting for about a week and a half. Not really sure if this is bad or if anything should be done?

Hello everybody,

I’m new to cider crafting and I’d like to know if it is usual to add water to decrease the OG of fresh pressed apple juice. I’m getting OGs between 1.050 and 1.060, which lead to ciders with +7% ABV. I like my ciders dry, so stop the fermentation prematurely is not an option.

Thank you for your time.

On my final cider of the year I think. I've never tried oaking before, but given that I have some plum logs here, from a tree felled by a storm earlier in the year, I thought I'd give it a try.

I believe it should be close to a cherry flavour - anyone tried anything like this before?

Hey y'all, I'm a fairly new brewer (June this year) and I've become obsessed with cider. I want to compare several popular yeasts in making a basic/plain cider, but I need your help in figuring out the ideal process for each yeast so that I can get a fair comparison of their best foot forward.

Currently, I use Kveik yeasts (recently a slight preference for Lutra over Voss) because they are fast (4 weeks is more than enough pitch to glass) and because they consistently leave in a noticable amount of sugar and apple flavor, making them very drinkable as-is when primed with sugar (1.002-3 and no need to add apple flavor back in with concentrate). They work just chucking yeast into juice at room temperature, but:

• massively benefit from nutrient; I've settled at 2.5g/gal fermaid-O (minimum, and I've been adding it all up front)
• moderately benefit from heating the juice to 90 or so at pitch and wrapping to maintain warmth during fermentation (still experimenting with whether heat during fermentation is good/bad/neutral)
• somewhat benefit from staggering the nutrient instead of adding it all up front (still experimenting with this)

I bottle at two weeks (could go sooner but rarely bother) and start drinking 2 weeks after that. I know this process is VERY different than what most cider yeasts will want. What yeast do you prefer, and what is your preferred process for brewing with it? Of the names I've seen, mangrove jack m02 and Nottingham seem to be the most popular overall, so advice for those in particular would be appreciated. Runner ups seen to be imperial bubbles, belle Saison, and k-97, but if anyone has a different yeast they like I'd love to hear about it! I'm hoping to run a bunch of simultaneous 1.5 gallon batches in 2 gallon buckets, but if I have to use carboys and stagger the batches I can do that.

Edit: because it's what I can consistently get affordably in quantity, I use commercial juice. Specifically Kirkland apple juice, not from concentrate, with no additions.