Our first apfelwein, batch 092, turned out so well that we want to start brewing another batch immediately. There will of course be some tweaks: we're trying a different yeast this time, and I'm going to keep dosing it with ginger juice, because we want it to be gingery as fuck. The honeycrisp apple juice worked really well the last time we used it, so I want to try to bring that forward even more by starting the cider with a generic apple juice blend, then build the volume and feed the fermentation by periodically adding honeycrisp juice with a heavy dose of sugar: probably brown sugar or honey most of the time.

I'm going to call this batch Honeycrisp Gingerbread Cyser. If you'd smelled it at bottling, you'd understand why.

Ingredients in this batch

  • 2 gallons Kroger unfiltered 100% apple juice from concentrate.
  • 2 lb. dark brown sugar.
  • 1 lb. Kirkland clover honey.
  • 3 tsp. Wyeast beer nutrient (note: no SNA planned for this batch).
  • 1 oz. (by weight) ginger juice from fresh-juiced ginger root.
  • Approx. 3 fl. oz. fermenting perry from batch 102, containing Fermentis Safcider yeast.
  • 1 gal. Tree Top Fresh Pressed 100% Pure Juice Honeycrisp Apple Juice, added 11 July 2018.
  • ½ gal. Kroger 100% Juice Unfiltered Honeycrisp juice, added 11 July 2018.
  • 3½ lb. Kirkland clover honey, added after being agitated into the apple juice added at the same time, on 11 July 2018.
  • 1 tsp. Wyeast beer nutrient, added after being agitated into apple juice, on 11 July 2018.
  • 4.37 oz. (by weight) frozen ginger juice, added on 11 July 2018.
  • 5.15 oz. (by weight) frozen ginger juice, added on 30 July 2018.
  • 11.57 oz. Trader Joe's Mostly Mesquite Honey, added on 30 July 2018.
  • 36.7 oz. alfalfa honey from Beekeeper's Honey Boutique, added on 30 July 2018.
  • 3 qt. Tree Top Fresh Pressed 100% Pure Juice Honeycrisp Apple Juice, added 30 July 2018.
  • 4.02 lb. Kirkland clover honey, added 30 August 2018.
  • 4 qt. Kroger unfiltered apple juice, added 30 August 2018.
  • 300 mL fresh ginger juice, from approximately 18 dry oz. of ginger, added 16 Sept 2018.
  • Spice addition of 4 November (all added in hop bag):
    • 1 stick (11 g.) Imperial (brand) cinnamon (canella).
    • 5 whole Penzeys dried allspice berries.
    • 3 whole dried Penzeys cloves.

Sanitized. Mixed the various sugars into the apple juice one half-gallon of juice at a time by pouring some juice into the three-gallon carboy, putting some sugar into the half-gallon juice container, and shaking vigorously to mix. Repeated as long as there was sugar and juice. Stirred vigorously through the carboy mouth—we're using our new wide-mouthed PET carboy for this batch, at least to start (and we're ending up in our largest bucket, which holds 30 liters)—and injected a turkey baster's worth of fermenting perry. (The fermenting batch 102 tastes amazing: tart and dry and complex, but with plenty of residual fruit taste and aroma.)

label
Label for the holiday cyser.

Once this gets going, we're going to move it into a five-gallon carboy or bucket and build the fermentation volume (and alcohol content) by adding in more honeycrisp fortified with additional sugars, one half-gallon to gallon at a time. A quick Google search suggests this yeast has a rather high alcohol tolerance, but if it poops out early, I might just throw in some champagne yeast.

Brew date: 3 July 2018.
Original gravity: 1.094. (But some off-the-cuff post-bottling calculations suggest that the large amount of additional sugars mean that we should use an as-if O.G. of 1.155 for ABV calculations!)
Bottling date: 10 February 2019
Final gravity: 1.004.
Estimated ABV: Approx. 22½%!

Yield:

  • 45 x 22 oz. beer bottles

Total yield: Approx 7⅔ gallons.

Notes and observations

  • 2018-07-05T22:13:00: No evidence of fermentation yet.
  • 2018-07-06T19:58:00: No evidence of carbon dioxide production yet. Starting to develop some yeast rafts on the surface of the juice, though.
  • 2018-07-11T19:30: Agitated honey and yeast nutrient into a gallon and a half of honeycrisp apple juice, then poured that mixture into a newly sanitized bucket. Poured the fermenting cider into the same bucket, added some frozen ginger juice, sealed the bucket and popped in an airlock.
  • 2018-07-30: Added more ginger juice, honeycrisp juice, and (mesquite and alfalfa) honey to the carboy.
  • 2018-08-30: Moved to an even larger bucket—thirty liters!—and added another gallon of honeycrisp juice with four pounds of (clover) honey.
  • 2018-09-16T17:00: Added more ginger juice. Tasted first. Holy jeez, this is good. Lots of honey underneath the sweet apple flavor.
  • 2018-11-04T16:20: Added spices in a hop bag.
  • 2019-02-10T17:00: Bottled, yielding around seven and a half gallons of delicious cyser that smells like appley gingerbread and is 22½% ABV!