Hard apple cider gone wrong?

[Swordnut]

I've decided to try my hand at a very simple apple cider. Bought a 1 liter bottle of pasteurized but unfiltered apple juice. Added 7gr of bread yeast and 50gr. of dextrose along with 1 tbsp of sugar diluted in boiling water. Then placed a balloon on it.

After 1 week fermentation seemingly halted so I refrigerated it for a week. I was unhappy with how fast the fermentation had died, it took a couple of days for it to become noticeable as well (balloon remained flaccid) so it could only have been really fermenting for a day or 4.

I added 3 tbsp of brown sugar to it and placed it back in the fridge for another week. Yesterday I took it out and left it to stand, within 12 hours fermentation has restarted. I am now certain that the apple juice had very little nutrients in it and/or fermentable sugars.

The taste is...weird. Somewhere between Alcohol contents are noticeable to be low. It tastes somewhere between warm unfiltered apple juice and eggs. In fact the only thing which comes to mind that comes close it sulphur smell.

Or there's too much sugar in there from the start drawing all the moisture from the yeast and producing a sulphur smell...?​

 

[theEnvoy]

I've decided to try my hand at a very simple apple cider. Bought a 1 liter bottle of pasteurized but unfiltered apple juice. Added 7gr of bread yeast and 50gr. of dextrose along with 1 tbsp of sugar diluted in boiling water. Then placed a balloon on it.

After 1 week fermentation seemingly halted so I refrigerated it for a week. I was unhappy with how fast the fermentation had died, it took a couple of days for it to become noticeable as well (balloon remained flaccid) so it could only have been really fermenting for a day or 4.

I added 3 tbsp of brown sugar to it and placed it back in the fridge for another week. Yesterday I took it out and left it to stand, within 12 hours fermentation has restarted. I am now certain that the apple juice had very little nutrients in it and/or fermentable sugars.

The taste is...weird. Somewhere between Alcohol contents are noticeable to be low. It tastes somewhere between warm unfiltered apple juice and eggs. In fact the only thing which comes to mind that comes close it sulphur smell.​

I do a boatload of Cider, love the stuff. I'm not sure why you put in the refrigerator. My best success has been to use about 2.5 cups of sugar per gallon of Apple juice, supplanted with a little lime juice, nutrient, and a cup of black tea brewed. If my calcs are correct, you had about 33 ounces of juice, with about 1/3 cup of dextrose. So it looks like you are using a little over a cup of sugar(initially) per gallon. I think your gravity original was a little low. Also, don't know what your temp for fermentation was, and was it steady. My Starting gravity is around 1.098, and I kill it at a gravity of around 1.015 with camphden and sorbate, and it produces a nice sweet, fruity, cider.

 

[akueck]

Apple juice usually ferments quickly. 4 days might have been enough. Have you measured the current SG?

 

[Swordnut]

Apple juice usually ferments quickly. 4 days might have been enough. Have you measured the current SG?

Sadly no, where I live home brewing supply shops are virtually non-existent. Online ordering would work were it not that I still have to pay the bank a few €€€ before they reopen my account for payments again ;D shizzle happens.

So for the time being I'll just have to go medieval, juice + yeast + hoping it goes well (well, a little bit more thorough than this).​

 

[akueck]

Well once things are figured out, check out Brouwland.

Newly fermented anything tastes rather odd, most times. Dry cider, especially, is pretty awful for at least several months. I'd wait awhile before passing judgment, and apples usually do kick off some sulfur.

 

[The_Psychotic_One]

I too make a lot of hard apple cider/wine

I been making a lot of hard apple cider for about 2 years now. Mine is actually more of a sparkling apple wine. I doubt you've used too much sugar. The 6 gallon batch I started on April 1st had 10 pounds of sugar added to it. The starting gravity was 1.092. In the past, I've had batches as high as 1.12.

If I remember right 1 pound is something like 2 1/4 cups for sugar. Keep in mind, this is for table sugar, not dextrose. I don't know about the egg smell. I've never run across that.

I personally would age it for 6 months or so. Then take a wiff. Obviously, if it still smells like eggs, I'd probably not use it. If it's not bad, but not great either. Dilute it into another batch. I did that with my mistake, I made about a year ago. My batch fermented too far. At 15% alcohol, it did not want to restart, so I could carbonate in the bottles. It worked well added to my next batch, however.

As far as fermenting fast, oh yeah. Definitely. My 6 gallon batch has been mostly done for days. I even used bread yeast on this batch. Normally I'll break out the distiller's yeast (can you tell I like a strong drink?). Distiller's yeast can do the job in 2 days or less, even with a ton of sugar.

Whatever you decide, best of luck, and be sure to let us know what happened, ok?

 

[Swordnut]

Well for one, fermentation has restarted as if the yeasts tanked that 2 week freezing like superman tanked a supernova. So I decided to put it in a cosy place for it to further ferment.

Took a zip of it, taste is yeasty and the alcohol contents is much stronger than what I could discern from the smell. It's very dry already, I wonder how long the yeast will take to ferment the additional sugar I put in there.

That said, there's also some egg shell (powdered) in it from an earlier experiment for fining agents. I'm not sure how boiled and kiln dried shells can produce an egg shell but I have learnt that they are lousy fining agents. Instead they can lower the acidity and restart fermentation. I theorize now that the egg shells might help yeast attain a higher alcohol contents than they normally can. How high I do not know of course.

Once I get my hydrometer I'll conduct side-by-side experiments what powdered egg shell actually does.

At the moment however, I"ll wait for fermentation to halt, rack it, put it back in its bottle, store it & forget about it for a nice long time.​

 

[Soyala_Amaya]

I've tried a batch or two of cider now with an idea in my head that "I can do this instead of beer and have a quick drink!" (I have very few beers I drink happily, but many ciders.)
That is a wrong idea. As akueck said, it takes a while for the appley flavours to age into something that doesn't taste like sour yuck. Though the cider I made with blueberries and a beer yeast is now proclaimed delicious (I'm still not 100% a fan) by everyone who's drank it, I pitched it in July of 2012 sooooo....8-9 months before it lost the sulphury barfy taste?

 

[Cal]

I have as batch of hard cider aging now. When it first came out it was DISGUSTING and I thought I had failed. I forgot about it for a while and recently rediscovered it. It is drinkable now with the apple taste starting to come through. I plan to let it bulk age till September then bottle.

As previously mentioned let it age for some months then judge it. You may be surprised as to how it develops.

 

[theEnvoy]

I've made 13 batches of Cider, started out going dry --- (.992 - .998), continued to gradually add more sugar to each batch, until I settled on a sweet, still finish (1.013 - 1.015). Tastes like rich, sweet apple wine. Can't stand the dry fizzy approach, too bitter to me, I would always added apple juice to sweeten before drinking. Always had the sulhpur effect mid way in each ferment, but, it always went away with good batch aging. May resort to several rackings over time. Also, I add the campden and sorbate in the final racking, may not need to, but it finishes out very clear and gives me peace of mind when long term bottling (I had one batch of bottle bombs, which you will never want to experience). Once 12 ounce bottle a day is my quota, the stuff is potent.

 

[Chevette Girl]

I've fermented straight cider, I've done cider with honey, I've done chopped crabapples with honey, chopped crabapples with sugar and most of them went through a barfy stinky phase and most of them kicked off some sulphur at some point but all of them have turned out to be pretty nice after a year of aging. I'm ok with the dry fizzy approach with a straight cider (~6%) I think because there's not a lot of alcohol to enhance the dryness or any bitter/sour flavours in there, but I like the stronger stuff sweetened up a little.