I bought a gallon of apple juice off of the specials rack and it is not very tasty. I suspect that it is fermented. It doesn’t taste sweet at all. If I were to boil it and I found the boiling point to be below 212 would that indicate that it is fermented?
If the bottle hissed when you opened it, it’s fermented.
Boils below 180 degrees, fermented for sure.
Mmmm, hard cider.
Add some Ever clear.
Now you have Applejack.
(Buy aspirin while you’re out. That stuff is head bustin’)
Apple juice wants to be cider. A few years ago I made a small cider press - it was generally the case that if I spent a half day pressing apples, the juice from the first batch was already fizzing and starting off by the time I finished the last pressing - just a few hours is all it takes.
In commercial contexts, you have to do something immediately after pressing if you don’t want it to ferment - this could be pasteurising, shocking with sulphites or freezing it.
I’m not very sure that boiling point will be a reliable measure of the degree of fermentation, because apple juice isn’t just water - it’s got sugar in it. If you had measurements taken at the start, you could use boiling point or density to calculate the extent of fermentation, but with just a single data point, there’s no way to be sure. There are other ways to measure alcohol, but none I can think of that are tremendously practical with ordinary domestic kit.
I own a hydrometer, because I occasionally brew beer, which is the easiest way to approximate alcohol content, but in theory it would be possible to weigh the fermented apple juice and compare it to pure water, and pure apple juice. It would be fairly inaccurate, but you really need to know your cider’s alcohol content beyond one decimal place?
I suppose if it’s a commercial apple juice where they have normalised the composition, and you have another sample that you know is not fermented, a comparison is easy. If you just have the one sample, you have to make assumptions about the original sugar content (and other things in there), which might not even get you as close as one decimal place.
There’s probably a simple way to test for the presence of alcohol - such as putting a dot of waterproof ink on a piece of kitchen towel and adding a few drops of the liquid; alcohol in the mix may dissolve some of the ink and spread it out (a control with plain water and maybe water plus white sugar would be a useful comparison).
(For clarity, in American grocery parlance, apple cider is juice. The alcoholic variety is called hard cider in the States, unlike basically everywhere else in the world. This certainly gives rise to potential surprises on both sides of the misaligned nomenclature, but I presume expecting alcohol and not getting it is less troublesome than the reverse.)
(Edit: Given your name and established culinary bona fides, I presume you, individually, already know this. I’m just adding the note for the benefit of the thread.)
I think any alcohol would evaporate before boiling. You could try to capture the condensate and check for flammability. But it not being flammable does not necessarily mean it’s not alcohol, just that you may have captured too much moisture.
You could try the opposite, freezing it, and see if any liquid drains off, which in general would be more concentrated alcohol and be easier to recognize.
I remember that. I showed my neighbors, who have an apple orchard and sell their cider (not alcoholic) at their market and local grocery stores.
We never drink their cider out of the jug, always pour it into glasses. There are no preservatives and it will ferment quickly given the chance.
Technically, apple jack is either freeze-distilled (which can give you a wicked hangover because freeze distillation leaves some impurities behind) or traditionally distilled. Just adding everclear to it makes it more of a faux applejack cocktail or something.
A lot of grocery store apple juice is stabilized/preserved with sodium benzoate or potassium sorbate. These do not tend to ferment well, and, from my experience, tend to spoil rather than ferment cleanly. For me, when I use fresh apple juice with no other ingredients, as it ferments it still tastes good and smells of apples. When it’s completely fermented out, it’s still drinkable, but tastes best after 3-6 months or so, minimum.
Does your juice have preservatives? It does sound like it’s fermented with the data you’ve given us, but I wouldn’t quite trust just drinking it.
More because freeze distillation just concentrates everything, bad and good. There’s nothing left behind.
Distillation actually separates out the alcohol and some of the other stuff, and leaves stuff behind.
Yeah, from what I remember and quickly looked up, it’s the acetates that are the primary problem, and the methanol concentration can also be skewed compared with traditional distillation (though there seems to be some argument about that.) You’re just not leaving anything behind, like you said, but concentrating everything.
Yeah, I know about the differences in real hard cider and the added stuff type.
Common trick with bootleggers around here to fake the stuff
I was being facetious.
If the OP bought fermented apple “juice” at the discount bin. I’d tend to think it had previously been opened and had spoiled. Bad purchase. Toss and be careful what you grab discounted, next time.
Yeah, typically cider is fermented in a somewhat controlled fashioned, in the sense that it’s often inoculated with specific yeast and the temp is often controlled.
The idea is that you either ferment it with the yeast and at the temp you want, or you foster the right conditions for it to naturally ferment to produce the desired end product.
Spoiled cider doesn’t have either of those approaches in effect. There’s no knowing what grew in the juice or how it grew, so it’s likely to taste unpleasant.
There is no accumulation of dead yeast cells at the bottom of the bottle, so I am assuming it had already fermented before it was bottled.
When I first read the op I had tried to look up the usual boiling point of apple cider and found links to boiled apple cider that comes out syrupy. (Simmered cider several hours.)
More a CS question, but anyone ever make it and use it? Not a big sweets person myself but it does sound interesting!
Nice snip in your quote.Ick.
Yeah, don’t drink that stuff.
I would just do a bioassay
