2. Fruit Juice: From Sugar to Hard Cider

If you are new to brewing or fermenting beverages this class will teach you everything you need to know about understanding sugar in juice and how that relates to the alcohol content. We will focus on apple juice for cider making but the information is important to any brewer.

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

Kirsten Shockey: Hi there. Welcome to our homestead in the mountains of southern Oregon. You can probably see behind me it’s a little smoky. That’s summer in the west these days. If you hear kids squealing, ducks quacking any of that, it’s all part of the real life here. So Christopher and I have picked some apples, and we…

[00:00:33] This is opening season for making some ciders. So we’re gonna start by making some juice and showing you all how to get specific gravity and kinda understand your juice. And then we’re gonna do the same with purchased juice because not everybody has a way to grind their own juice.[00:01:00]

[00:01:57] First time using this tabletop [00:02:00] press. We thank Roots & Harvest for letting us check it out. We got that pomace in there that you saw come out, and it’s in this cloth bag in here, and we’re gonna be squeezing it out.

[00:02:29] Juice flowing again

[00:02:47] The pomace is in here in a bag. This is a little tabletop press from Roots and Harvest. And we are just pressing it down [00:03:00] to press out that juice. So we’ll have some juice here in a bit, and we’ll come back to how to measure specific gravity

[00:03:34] All right, let’s learn how to take specific gravity. This is the juice that we just pressed, and this is a hydrometer. And we’re gonna place some of the juice into this little vial here

[00:03:59] The important [00:04:00] thing that you need to know for fermenting juices into wines in this case apple juice into cider really any fermentation process even making vinegar, is you wanna know how much sugar you’re coming you’re starting out with because the amount of alcohol or the amount of acid if you’re going all the way to vinegar is directly proportional to the amount of sugar.

[00:04:24] And to manage your ferment along the way, it’s really great to have a starting point. So there’s a couple of tools out there that are used by brewers to measure the sugar content. Probably the simplest, especially when it comes to apples, is the hydrometer. This is a little weighted vial. Looks pretty, pretty alchemy cool to me.

[00:04:51] And it’s got the Brix measurement on there, it’s got an ABV and… So we drop that in, and you’re [00:05:00] gonna want to let it settle, and you also wanna make sure that it’s not touching the sides of the jar, which is what this one’s wanting to do right now. Okay, there we go

[00:05:21] And then you’re going to look for where right under the meniscus where it lands. Right now it’s landing at 7% alcohol by volume, so that’s the potential that this can get to if the yeasts consume all the sugar. And it is at, the specific gravity measurement is right at 1-0 excuse me, 1.054. So that’s what you’re gonna wanna write down and keep track of.

[00:05:57] As your cider [00:06:00] ferments, you’re gonna take this again, and when it comes out to 1.000, you will know that all the residual sugar is gone, and that is the level that your alcohol will be. And because you have that little 7% that you looked at, you’ll know that your alcohol, your cider probably ended up right around that 7%, give or take.

[00:06:22] A really important thing to be aware of, though, is these are calibrated to 60 degrees Fahrenheit. So you wanna make sure that your juice that you’re measuring is right in that 60-degree range. If it’s way warmer or way cooler, y- your measurement isn’t gonna be quite exact. So the other measurement that we want, that some people use, is Brix.

[00:06:48] Now, I’m gonna show you how to use one of these, because it’s really handy with lots of different juices. Cider makers in general don’t use it as much as wine makers, and that’s because the juice [00:07:00] has a cloudiness in it, and what you’re doing is you’re looking for the sugars. But if it’s, if your juice, whatever it is, has too much particulate in it, it’s not gonna, it’s not gonna work.

[00:07:12] So what you can do is get a little bit of that out of the way by running a few drops of the juice through a filter, coffee filter, ’cause you only need a couple drops on this anyway.

[00:07:46] Okay, and squeeze that on there. And then once my drops are on there, I close the lid. And you will look through this, [00:08:00] and it’s really… Sorry you can’t look in there. But what I’m seeing is the Brix is showing by a blue line and landing right at the specific gravity, which I’m pleased to announce is coming out the same as this one at 1.056.

[00:08:25] And then I also have the Brix number in there, which is right at a little over 12. If I had my glasses on, we’d know a little better where that was. And so if you’re using a Brix and you only have the hydrometer excuse me, the specific gravity reading and the sugar reading, y- there are many online calculators that you put those in and you’re gonna get that same ABV in this case, probably around 7%.

[00:08:58] So let’s [00:09:00] do this same experiment quickly with some purchased juice because as a cider maker, it’s really great if you have a setup like this and you have an abundance of apples. But what if you don’t? You can use grocery store juice. The thing I wanna warn you about is you just don’t want preservatives in your juice because that will inhibit your fermentation.

[00:09:28] Vitamin C, ascorbic acid, that’s okay, but any other preservatives are not okay. This is a natural cider cloudy juice, but even the real crystal clear amber treetop style juices will work quite well for making a cider. You might not have some of the nuance of flavor and, but you can play with that by using wild yeasts from blossoms like these flowers right here.

[00:09:53] So let’s check in on our specific gravity here for this one[00:10:00]

[00:10:11] All right. It’s coming in at a little below 7% on the ABV and right at 1.0… Excuse me, 1.050 at the specific gravity. So what that tells us is this is a little less sweet, a little less sugar. We are going to Get a little higher alcohol with this particular juice here. So our two different juices are gonna give us just a little bit of a different amount of final alcohol.

[00:10:51] Now, what do you do if that is showing, your specific gravity is showing that you won’t get at least 5%? [00:11:00] Or let’s say your juice is so sweet it’s too high and you don’t want an alcohol that’s maybe se- 8 or 9%, you want something more like 6 or 5% more of a session drinker. To do that, you are going to dilute a little bit.

[00:11:20] Or the other thing you would do is just pay attention to this. Partway through the fermentation, remember you can keep taking this reading and get a sense of where things are, because you’ve written down that beginning number and you know what you started with and therefore where you can end.

[00:11:37] And if you want less alcohol, you could stop that fermentation a little bit early. You’re gonna get residual sweetness that way and a much lighter alcohol. The bigger problem really is if you’re wanting to do an aging. So if you’re below .045, that means that you won’t have a cider you’ll be able to age.

[00:11:59] [00:12:00] So that’s another important reason to check the ABV, if you’re going to wanna age your cider. So what do you do? That’s an easy one. You add some kind of sugar source. If you’ve got other apples that are sweeter, maybe some dessert apples or some juice that’s sweeter, you could add that, see what happens.

[00:12:22] But the easiest way is probably to add sugar or if you wanna make a ciser, you could at this point add some honey. And I’m gonna grab our book, got The Big Book of Cider Making, because these are numbers that I don’t just remember off the top of my head. So the general guidelines for every .005 increase of specific gravity which is about a .64 increase percent of ABV, is nine teaspoons of sugar for every gallon of juice.

[00:12:58] And so for [00:13:00] example, if your specific gravity reading was 1.040 and you wanted to raise it to that 1.050, what you’re gonna do is you’re gonna add- four and one half teaspoons of sugar for every quart of juice. And so that will help you raise that up. So if you’re adding– if you have a whole gallon, of course that’s gonna be, what, around 18 teaspoons of sugar for that gallon of juice, and that will raise that up for you

[00:13:37] So understanding sugar is so important for understanding how to ferment your beverages. Remember that yeasts like sugar, that’s what they eat. Specific gravity isn’t the only thing that’s gonna determine your final alcohol. The other thing that you have to keep in mind, of course, are your yeasts and what they’re [00:14:00] capable of producing.

[00:14:02] So some yeast varieties can go really high, whereas most yeast varieties don’t. They maybe die out at 10% or 12% or even lower. Sometimes, hummingbird fights. Sometimes wild yeasts are known to not go as high in their ability to take your ferment all the way through. But that’s something you’re gonna learn as you play around with this, as you experiment with either purchased yeasts or wild yeasts.

[00:14:36] We’ve had plenty of wild yeasts that have taken us all the way through our ferment and given us delicious flavors. So again, sugar, your yeast capability, that is gonna determine your alcohol percentage by volume. And I hope you have a wonderful time with these Mother Earth News courses, and [00:15:00] you’re ready to ferment all kinds of beverages.

[00:15:02] And I’m gonna put in a plug for cider. It’s a delicious, wonderful probiotic beverage