It is that time of year to crush up some apples and make cider.  unfortunately it was not a very good year to get lots of apples for me to make multiple batches of different ciders.  The bad thing about mix and matching apples is that there is almost no way for me to duplicate a great hard cider from one year to the next.  About the only thing I can do is be consistent with the variety of yeast that I use.  Last year I used Champagne and Nottingham for all my batches of hard cider, which were all very good, but since I used a heavy waxen mix for every type of hard cider I made they were all very tart.  This years apples are a bunch of different variety that were about the only ones we could find. They

Hard cider ingredients:

• apple mix: Northern spy, sweet seedling of some kind, waxen (no more than half a gallon of the five), Spitzenburg
• yeast: White labs English cider yeast WLP775 (i wanted the strain from rogue brewery called pacman but they were sold out)
• 5 campdon pellets to kill all the wild yeast
• 1 tsp yeast nutrient per gallon of cider

Measurements:

• Original Gravity (OG): 1.050
• Final Gravity (FG): pending 🙂
• estimated alcohol amount at FG of 1.0=6.56%

This came out with a higher sugar content than any of the ones i did last year.  Last years cider was also just the early fall varieties and these are all winter apples except for the small amount of waxen’s we added as a filler.  The sugar content is close to a one gallon batch of red June apples that I used by them selves.  That was a good cider I back sweetened it and heat pasteurized it after it self carbonated.  It was gone in less than two weeks.

• Cider started: 10/15/2013
• Yeast started dropping out of suspension: 10/25/2013