I don’t like the overly sweet ciders that taste like Jolly Ranchers, but the drier ciders are great on a hot day; they don’t fill you up the way a beer can.
If you could find some French Normandy ciders, they are sold in champagne-type bottles, I would give them a shot. Those and the ciders out of Quebec are my favorite regions. Also, English ciders like Aspall and Samuel Smith are worth checking out, and it you like the funk, Basque ciders can get quite tart and barnyardy, like a lambic or other sour beer.
1911 is a good one, too.
I made some for the first time this fall. I’ve brewed a lot of beer over the years, but this was the first try at cider. 5 G of unpasturised from a local mill and into a carboy for a couple weeks with some yeast.
Turned out great.
[quote=“Baker, post:9, topic:741448”]
If I lived in Australia I’d like to try the Dicken’s brand of hard cider.
[/QUOTE]I was talking with a woman I know about cider. Although she is in her 50s, she claims that she has never had a Dicken’s Cider!!
I asked repeatedly for clarification, but she insisted she has never had a Dicken’s Cider.
She eventually got it and was horribly embarrassed.
As tasty as they are, I have a suspicion that somehow the commercial apple ciders like Angry Orchard are not quite what they appear; if you actually ferment apple juice, it ends up bone-dry unless you do something to arrest the fermentation. Even then, it’s less sweet than the original juice, and the aroma is different as well. Still mighty tasty, but not nearly as sweet and crisp as Angry Orchard.
I wonder if there’s some sort of fermenting, filtering, and then adding aroma, acid and sugar back to the product kind of action going on similar to orange juice flavor packs.
Fresh apple juice is what, 13 °Bx? Even if you arrest fermentation at 5% ABV, I don’t think that leaves you enough sugar considering how sweet some of them are. Maybe some apples are sweeter, or there’s some amylase action going on, or they simply concentrate it.
I’ve found homebrew recipes for graf online which are basically a spiced ale with apple juice as the base instead of water. I made a batch about a year ago and it came out strong as hell (well over 10% ABV, as I recall).
I’m fairly sure that, like most beers, hard cider isn’t bottle-conditioned - they pasteurize it to kill the yeast, add extra sugar, and force-carbonate it before bottling. I can’t recall ever seeing a cider that was labeled as bottle-conditioned, but some of the expensive ones that come in 750ml bottles probably are.
I liked the imported Strongbow that was available up until a few years ago, but apparently they’ve decided that Americans like sweeter ciders and they pulled it and replaced it with “Gold Apple” and “Honey Apple” flavors, neither or which are as good as the original.
“Backsweetening” is the term for this, and it’s certainly common in homebrew circles, at least. You can read about Angry Orchard here.
You can certainly just ferment it to the sweetness you like, pasteurize, and force carbonate. An arrested fermentation (say, at 1.05 gravity) is still pretty apple-y and sweet.
What? A.O.'s Crisp Apple is quite dry, which is why I like it so much. Dry but with no harshness at all. It’s the cider I’ve waited for all my life. At 5% ABV I suppose they must have done something to halt the ferment, or else started with inherently dry apples? For ingredients they list hard cider, natural flavors, CO[sub]2[/sub], malic acid, and sulfites. You’re right about the aroma, acid, and CO[sub]2[/sub], but I can’t detect any sign of added sugar.
Fun fact: Nobody in early America ate apples as a snack, because the tasty varietals hadn’t been developed yet. Johnny Appleseed was actually propagating the hard… <hic>… cider industry.
:dubious: Pictures of the label are telling me 23 g of sugars per bottle. That’s 65 g/l! That is not dry. Is there some confusion about what the word means?
AO’s Crisp Apple is what I’ve been drinking. The only other one I’ve tried is Strongbow Honey. It was really sweet but I guess the name was a dead giveaway! I have a serious sweet tooth so it’s not really a problem for me. I usually drink one or two and then switch over to beer.
Does hard cider give you the shits like apple juice?
One big glass of apple juice and I’m on the pot for awhile. I’ve wanted to try hard cider but am a bit wary.
Not that I’ve noticed. But I probably wouldn’t notice because my shitty diet makes my digestive habits kind of a crapshoot anyways.
I’ve not noticed either, but apple juice doesn’t give me the shits either (didn’t know that was a thing. Prune juice, yeah. Apple juice? Never for me.)
I’ll get a friend to split a bottle with me. See how my innards react.
Apples and me have a difficult relationship. I love them but they don’t always love me.
I’m so annoyed with Heineken about that! Strongbow used to be my favorite cider, I’d recommend it to anyone, but now? Disgusting. I’m still looking for a good, not-sweet cider. I like Ace’s Pear Cider, so that’s something.
I prefer the cider I brew myself, starting from store-bought nonalcoholic cider. If I brew it long enough, it’s not sweet. (It’s also a lot cheaper.)
Those of you looking for something less sweet than the typical American varieties might try Magner’s Irish Cider.
What yeast do you like? I’ve just barely started playing around with home fermentation. Haven’t tried apple yet.
A few years ago I did an experiment with about a dozen or so different yeasts plus apples from my friend’s apple tree (we had something like 30-40 gallons of cider going) and, for me, my favorites was Wyeast’s Weihenstephaner yeast. I didn’t like any of the wine or champagne yeasts–too dry, left almost no fruit flavor whatsoever. Safale S-04 dry English ale yeast was also nice, my next favorite. The absolute best by far, though, was the one I did without pitching any yeast, just the natural fermentation, but that’s a bit of a throw of the dice, as you don’t know exactly what’s on your apples/in your apple juice. Also the cider benefit greatly from aging. It’s drinkable after a few weeks, but if you can wait six months to a year, it really makes a difference.
Same here, I’ve actually only tried one, the “dry wine yeast” from http://e-z-caps.com.
It worked pretty well with orange juice too, but I had to add some sugar to that.