Back Sweetening

Let’s say that you weren’t monitoring the wine or cider batch and the yeast ate all the sugar until the yeast died and the batch tastes dry, but you wanted it sweet. The solution to the problem is called back sweetening.

First off, the yeast should be verified as dead, which can be done by adding potassium sorbate or pasteurizing. From there, sugar or juice can be added to make it sweet. This technique is used with making ciders flavored with other fruits.

In his book Craft Cider Making, Andrew Lea talks about making sweet ciders, “If you want to sweeten dry ciders with added sugar (or with frozen or concentrated apple juice) but you do not want to pasteurise or filter them, it is important that they should be racked and stored for several months after fermentation is complete, to allow the yeast to die out completely before the sugar is added. Otherwise the risk of re-fermentation is considerable. The chances of re-fermentation can be reduced by the addition of yeast inhibitors such as potassium sorbate and benzoate at levels up to 200 ppm. (Both these materials occur naturally in rowan berries and cranberries respectively). Potassium sorbate may be bought from home winemaking suppliers. It is most effective if combined with say 50 ppm of SO2 added at the same time. If the cider is to be sold, however, a total of 200 ppm for the sum of sulphite and sorbate must not be exceeded.”

I should note that you do not need to add potassium sorbate to a dry wine or cider if you decide to back sweeten with an artificial sweeteners such as sucralose (Splenda). Most artificial sweeteners  are not edible by yeast, so there is no risk that fermentation will start up again. However, using artificial sweeteners is sometimes frowned upon as not being natural, affecting the texture of the cider or wine, causing the wine or cider to have an aftertaste and off flavors, and some even claim it gives them headaches to consume such a product, so consider these issues before deciding to use artificial sweeteners.

Kill the Yeast

In my last post, I said in order to obtain a sweet cider, the yeast needs to be killed to prevent it from eating any more sugar. There are several ways to do this, including the use of potassium sorbate or pasteurizing.

I have stressed that when picking out sources to make wine and cider from that it needs to be preservative free because the preservatives will prevent the yeast from fermenting. Now, when the yeast is towards the end of fermentation, preservatives in the form of potassium sorbate help kill the yeast to stop fermentation.

If you don’t want to add chemicals, the other option to kill the yeast is by pasteurizing. Andrew Lea describes the process as follows: “The sweetened bottled cider can then be batch pasteurised on a domestic scale in tanks of hot water e.g. at 68^o C for 20 minutes, although it is much more efficient to use a proper flow-through heat exchanger operating at 90^o C with a residence time of 30 seconds so that the pasteurised cider is filled directly into warmed bottles. Equipment of this sort does not come cheap and can usually only be justified in the context of a commercial operation.”

In Cider: Hard and Sweet, Ben Watson recommends having a mixture that reads 1.010 on a hydrometer, bottling it, and then possibly waiting a few days before pasteurizing. With “a large kettle on the stovetop, or in a metal tub or livestock trough that’s set over a propane burner outdoors, place the capped bottles in the water bath; the water should come up to the fill line on the necks. Fill one bottle with water that’s at about the same temperature or cooler than the cider, and leave it uncapped, with a thermometer inserted into it. Heat the water in the tub or kettle until the thermometer in the test bottle reads 150⁰F (65⁰C) for 10 to 20 minutes… The bottles may start leaking gas around their caps and hissing; this is fine and isn’t cause for concern. Remove the bottles carefully and cool them slowly to minimize any risk of breakage.”

Making a sweet or dry wine or cider

I have eluded to the fact that it is much easier to make a dry wine or cider than it is to make a sweet one. I think it is time to go a little deeper into the topic.

The yeast in cider and wine eat sugar, turning it into alcohol. Thing is, they will do that until one of two things happens. The first one is that the yeast run out of sugar. At this point, it is a dry beverage with no sweetness, which some may dislike. This process is the easiest to accomplish because it allows the yeast to do what it wants to do. To obtain a sweet wine or cider, one must interfere with the batch, either killing the yeast prematurely before all the sugar is gone, or making sure the yeast is truly dead before adding more sugar back. I will explore those options in the posts to come.

How do you know if the wine or cider is sweet or dry? The answer is as simple as taking a specific gravity reading taken with a hydrometer. That reading can be classified into the corresponding sweetness:

• 1.025     Very Sweet
• 1.020     Sweet
• 1.015     Medium Sweet
• 1.010     Medium Dry
• 1.005     Dry

It is not really recommended bottling much higher than 1.025, as most people would not find it very drinkable. Also, if the yeast starts fermenting again, the carbon dioxide released could create too much pressure on the bottle, causing it to pop the cork, or worse yet, explode. Ben Watson in his Cider: Hard and Sweet cautions against bottling cider higher than 1.005 if it has not been stabilized, that is, if chemicals or pasteurization has not happened to ensure the yeast will not start fermenting again.

Fermented Fruit Drink Definitions

As I keep reading, there are all these different ways to ferment fruit into different types of drinks. Here are some that I have found:

• Apple Juice – To North Americans, it can mean a fresh but filtered apple juice
• Applejack – an alcoholic beverage made from the freezing and thawing of apple cider to concentrate the alcohol.
• Braggot – a mead made with malted grain, usually malted barley.
• Brandy – a distilled spirit made from grape wine
• Calvados – a brandy made in France from apple cider
• Cider – to North Americans, unfiltered fresh apple juice. To the rest of the world, a fermented apple drink.
• Cyser – a melomel made with apples
• Demi-sec – a rather sweet sparkling wine, or it could be used to describe a sweet cider.
• Eau de vie – a brandy made from other fruit wines, not grape wines
• Fruit Cider – a fermented apple cider that then has fruit juice added, such as pear cider or blackberry cider.
• Fortified – a cider, wine, mead, or beer that brandy, vodka, or some other distilled alcohol has been added, which raises the alcohol content. Port is a classic example of this.
• Graf – a cider made with malt and hops; a cider/beer cross that is mostly cider
• Mead – a fermented honey drink that is sometimes referred to as honey wine.
• Melomel – mead made with fruit
• Metheglin – mead made with spices
• Mulled – a drink that spices are added to it and warmed.
• Perry – a cider like drink made from pears instead of cider. If fermented apple juice has pear juice added, it is usually called pear cider.
• Pommeau – a Calvados or clear apple brandy/eau de vie  blended with fresh sweet cider to produce a lightly sweet, reddish amber liqueur around 16-18% alcohol by volume.
• Pyment – melomel made with grape juice
• Slider – an English apple cider made with the discarded sloe berries (similar to a plum) that were soaked in gin to make sloe gin.

My husband’s Hefeweizen

My husband decided to brew on Thanksgiving weekend a hefeweizen, which is a style of wheat beer. Due to having to cook all the grains, hops, and malts in water to make a “tea”, as I like to call it, beer is seldom made in batches smaller than 5 gallons. The reasoning is why go though all that work for one gallon when it takes just about the same amount of time to do 5 gallons.

My husband got the idea to split the hefeweizen out into five single gallon containers and flavor each with some fruit extract he bought from the supply store before bottling. These extracts are a bit runny and come in a 4 oz bottle that is meant to be put into 5 gallons of water, so he added one ounce per gallon. So now he has plain, cherry, mango, and raspberry hefeweizens.

For the fifth batch, because he likes pomegranates so much, we bought some pomegranate juice to put in it. However, he set that one aside for a week to ferment in case the yeast wanted to eat on the pomegranate sugars. In theory, the yeast could eat the syrups placed in the other bottles, but being a novice at brewing beer, he didn’t know how to solve the problem, and just did it hoping it would explode.

Well, these beers didn’t turn out quite as well as he had hoped, and has since been told that using Oregon Fruit Puree is superior to using the fruit extracts he bought from the home brewing supply store. I still think it was quite cleaver of him to split a batch like that, and I may try something like that with mead and fruit flavors in the future.

Fruit Ciders

Ciders made from pears is called perry, but a lot of stuff out there on the market today are labeled “Pear Cider.” What does that mean?

Due to a loophole in the US, some ciders fall under the FDA requirements to put the ingredients on their labels. Reading the label of Original Sin’s Pear Cider, it reads “hard cider, pear juice, yeast, malic acid and sulfiates.” To me, this means that they fermented apple juice, stopped the fermentation, and then added pear juice to it to give it flavor and sweeten it a bit.

Why would they do that? Pears that make the best perry are not really grown in quantities, so this process would make it easier to produce at a lower cost.

However, this may not be the only reason. On my trip to Wandering Aengus Ciderworks, they showed us some cherry juice that they had. They said that they had attempted to ferment it as a cider, but that it tasted horrible, so they planned on adding the juice to already fermented apple juice in hopes that it would make a cherry cider they found worthy of selling.

In fact, on January 22, 2010, they recently posted this on their facebook page:

“Found a great blend for Pear Cider (Fermented cider from apples with added pear juice). To my knowledge this will be the only Pear Cider in the country made from just apples (about 15 varieties) and pears (2 varieties), no flavors added…

Perry did not make the grade though, not enough acidity and flavor. Next year we will try to find true Perry pears, they have the acidity and sugars required to make a high quality Perry.”

There are many other flavored ciders out there, including peach, raspberry, blackberry, blueberry, and many more.

Sources of Fruit for Wine

Of course, the ultimate fruit for wine would be fresh fruit that is crushed and/or pressed for the juice, and then fermented. No water added. But what to do in the middle of winter?

Well, there are a couple of inferior but cheaper and accessible sources. The first one is to use frozen fruit. This could be thawed out and pressed for juice, or it could be allowed to soak in water.

Another option is to use canned fruits. I recently bought some canned Bartlett pears, and I plan on using the syrup and pears both when I make them. However, canned fruit often contains some form of sugar, so read the labels to make sure you are comfortable with the variety in the product. While I do not particularly care for corn syrup, my husband is now buying a powdered form of corn sugar to use with his beer because it does better than cane sugar.

Probably the most easy source for making fruit wine is buying fruit juice. While more expensive, using juices that are 100% juice usually tastes a little better than concentrated juice. Also, 100% is usually pasteurized, so aside from sterilizing equipment, the juice itself does not need to have potassium metasulfite added.  However, when on a budget, concentrated juice works well. My first batch of apple wine used concentrated apple juice.

Remember, if you are buying any processed fruit or fruit juice, check the labels to ensure that no preservatives have been added.

There are also a few choices from your local brew supply store, including canned fruit, pureed fruit, or even kits that have all the ingredients needed in a box. These can be spendy, but at the same time it will be higher quality and preservative free. This stuff is made for making wine.

Wall Mounted Bottle Opener

We were staying at a little hotel when I discovered it had a wall mounted bottle opener in the bathroom. I loved the idea. I asked the hotel where they had gotten them, but apparently the hotel had changed owners since they were installed and did not know.

When I got home, I was looking at a home brew supply store catalog and noticed they had one of these. Since then, I’ve found out that about all home brew supply stores sell them for $5 each, along with a little bucket to catch the bottle caps in for an additional fee.

I talked my husband into buying two of them, and then proceeded to install one of them in the kitchen next to the refrigerator. You hardly notice it is there, and it is so handy. We were visiting his parents, and his mother was trying to find a bottle opener in her kitchen drawers, and I was thinking, “I don’t have to do that in my home anymore because it is right there on the wall!” My husband can’t believe how lucky he is to have married a woman who has no problem mounting a bottle opener in the kitchen.

We put the second one out in the garage near the door into the house, as we have a small apartment refrigerator out there full of beer and cider. That location would provide us with an opportunity to open our drinks before going inside, or even if we didn’t. However, this location really needs a bucket to catch the caps. Inside, the bucket would have been a little too big, would have stuck out, been noticeable, and possibly even prevent the refrigerator door from opening wide enough. In the house, our trash can is two steps away, so it is very easy to deal with the cap. But out in the garage, the opener is kind of in a bad spot for opening and catching the caps, so the caps get lost in and under the stuff piled by the door, and if you did catch it, the garbage can is a ways away. The wall mounted bucket would look great there and be highly functional for our needs.

Reusing Bottles?

As a home brewer, I have choices when it comes to bottling. I can buy empty bottles from my local homebrew store, fill them, drink them, and have empty bottles to reuse. Actually, my husband recently bought a box of Costco beer because it was just a few dollars more than buying empty bottles, plus he got some beer out of the deal. Now all my family members are saving up bottles for us to use, and it is great.

I had this business idea that if I got my cidery/winery up and running, I would offer my customers a coupon if they brought my bottles back. The coupon would be good towards their next purchase in my store, and I don’t have to pay as much to get bottles.

Problem is, it may not be technically legal. There are worries that the bottles would be chipped and I wouldn’t know it, and therefore put glass into the beverage and hurt the drinker. In this day of paranoia, there is also the worry that some customer would poison the bottle with a chemical that my washing techniques would not be able to get rid of. These are all things that would make it so that I couldn’t offer coupons to reuse bottles.

Or is it? There is a new company in California called Wine Bottle Recycling who are collecting bottles, cleaning them up, and reselling them. Doing their research, they found that seven out of every ten bottles ended up in landfills, and the energy it took to melt the glass and reform it was the same as making a new bottle, just not using any sand, so there was really very little benefit to recycling bottles. However, with their system of making bottles reusable, energy is saved. This program could open the doors for me to act on my coupon idea.

For more information on Wine Bottle Recycling, go to: http://www.bohemian.com/bohemian/01.06.10/eats-1001.html

A Cidery’s Desire to Distill for Pommeau

Wandering Aengus Ciderworks produces a dessert drink Pommeau. Ben Watson’s Cider Hard and Sweet describes Pommeau as a Calvados or clear apple brandy blended with fresh sweet cider to produce a lightly sweet, reddish amber liqueur around 16-18% alcohol by volume. Wandering Aengus Ciderworks describes their Pommeau as:

“Pommeau is a unique apple dessert wine. Select heirloom cider apple varieties were fermented and then distilled. The resulting apple brandy, after aged 5 years in oak, was expertly blended with fresh juice from cider apples that offer diverse character – those with a wealth of tannins and those with plentiful sugars. Pommeau is a delicately sweet, surprisingly smooth, aromatic wine with an incredible brandy essence. Serve chilled or warm and enjoy as an aperitif, a dessert or with a meal. Production of only 100 cases every other year.”

In a way, this is very much like a Port Wine or Sherry, which is wine fortified with, or has added, grape brandy, but in this case, they are using apple juice and apple brandy.

When I was at Wandering Aengus Ciderworks after Thanksgiving, they were almost sold out. I asked them about Clear Creek Distillery, to which they responded that, yes, they did get the brandy from Clear Creek Distillery. However, it was a small custom batch that they requested, so it was quite expensive, which could help explain the $45 a bottle price tag. Wandering Aengus Ciderworks instead expressed interest in obtaining their own distilling and license.  They went on to explain that most large wineries blend all their wine from all the barrels together before bottling, but some barrels may have contained a slightly inferior wine. Rather than toss the wine, the makers blend it in with the other wine to keep the volume up believing that such a small amount would not affect the overall quality. What Wandering Aengus Ciderworks hopes to do is take their slightly inferior batches and distill them to make the Pommeau. This allows them to better control cider quality, find a use for slightly inferior cider, keep all of the production at their facility, and lower costs on the Pommeau. I say it sounds like a good idea.

One more thing I should note is that Watson does say it is easy to produce your own Pommeau by taking some fresh sweet cider, and add either cider brandy or clear apple eau-de-vie. He does caution about adding too much brandy, as the higher alcohol content will mask the fruit flavors, while not enough brandy might allow raw sweet cider to start fermenting unless it is treated.