Marie Ann Dominic Mallari

10 Tips You’ll Need to Know About Making Cider with Jon Schlee Source : https://www.instagram.com/sessionzbrewing This month is the prime time of the year for apples in America, the best time to make cider. For this reason we uploaded an episode about making a great cider, luckily I had an opportunity to interview Jon Schlee. If you are an aspiring brewer and a cider lover, I recommend you follow his Instagram @sessionzbrewing/ to know more about his creations and be inspired. He is an avid maker of great cider and he shared his 10 great tips and ways on how he makes great different types of cider. And here follows are his 10 tips: 1. Best equipment for beginners First and foremost, you just need some basic equipment. Use a single fermenter, a six-gallon or five-gallon batches, will made it easier. Provide a carboy for secondary. Next, for secondary fermentation, once you’re done with your primary fermentation will racket to carboy. 2. Needs/Ingredients in making a cider Provide basic ingredients that you can get from your home store. Basic uses are wine yeast or champagne yeast. It gives a really nice clean profile. And then yeast will work like a USAA five ale yeast, as well as some yeast nutrient. Use peptic enzyme, the peptic enzyme is actually what breaks down the pectin’s in the cider. Oil helps clarify the cider. That makes it a clear product with cider. It’s really easy to accomplish using those few simple ingredients, same as making juices. 3. The most approachable way for a beginner to make a cider For the beginners, to make an easy way cider is you must provide a preservative-free like the fresh-pressed tree. Next, have top juices and has something that is not from concentrate, even not from concentrate juice from Costco works. Pour five gallons into that fermenter and add your peptic enzyme yeast nutrient. And then, pitch the yeast and within three weeks or so the cider has done fermenting. It’s time to put into secondary for another couple of weeks and ready to be bottled up.  4. Recommended variety of apple Starting gravity is 1.04, six to 1.05 to, from different orchards, two different pressings. Not all kinds of apples have the same taste, some apples consist more sugar than others, while crab apples have a ton of sugar in them. It’s easier with a kind of a simpler site or a store-bought juice that is common use and make it into a really tasty product. Grab a couple of pounds of crab apples, and throw them in the juicer. Ferment it separately. Make it into gallons. Blend that back into finished fermented cider. It adds a lot of really nice tannins and body. 5. Preferred complexity of cider Don’t make it super sweet. The sweetness adds a whole other set of challenges too, the yeast will overcome too much sweetness. You need to pasteurize things to be able to retain sweetness. Just a little bit more of a perceived sweetness will do. Measure champagne yeast the same as ISI that is one eight, this will produce dryness. It actually leaves sweetness in the final product, interestingly enough, so much. USO five is best in making cider sweet. There are also alternative ways like adding sugar.   6. Kind of spices to use and what kind of flavors do get from those Ferment your cider and add some passion fruit puree and vanilla beans. It will make two and a half full vanilla Madagascar, vanilla beans, about four-inch-long beans into a hop sock basically. Let it sit in there for about a week. It actually imparted a significant amount of vanilla flavor.  Use bourbon barrel aged maple syrup and put it in fermented cider. Let that ferment down again for about another month. Add some cinnamon sticks, one will do. Add a couple of cloves and some vanilla beans, it will really turn out amazing.  The most important thing to remember is when using spices, you really need to sample every few days because in a couple of days, it really imparts a very distinct flavor. Pull everything within five days because it will really impart a pretty intense flavor.  7. When to add the fruit Freeze the whole fruit before using it. Mash it a little bit, freeze it again, do that a couple of times it helps really down those cellular walls of the fruit to really maximize the flavor yield that you’re going to get.  Always add fruits in the secondary. If you put your fruit before the given time, the fermentation activity is going to blow off a lot of those really delicate flavors and aromas that you’re going to get from the fruits. Always rack the cider after it’s done fermenting to a secondary carboy and add fruits.  8.  Bottle preferred for Cider It’s good to have a little bit more carbonation with them, using the cot. You will get that real fine bubble with a bottle conditioning versus forced carbonation with CO2.  Bottle the ciders and carbonate them to about 3.2 to 3.7 volumes. Use some pretty thick bottles. Buy some thicker, no Belgian style, beer bottles, 12-ounce beer bottles, online from some of the big distributors.   Using champagne bottles are recommended. An alternative use when you are a champagne lover.  9. Benefits in Cider Cider is adaptable. You can blend it with wine, blend it with beer. You can take all the other alcoholic beverages and the kind of all will go well with cider in some way.   10. Recommended beginner cider recipe  Always use a standard based side five gallons of Apple juice. Get a Kroger Apple Juice at Costco. It’s not from concentrate, there are no preservatives in it. It’s a wonderful juice to use.   Don’t use any type of potassium sorbate that you’ll usually find in some storage uses. Look for a pasteurized product. If it is pasteurized, it is just either by heat or by UV, it’s fine. Ferment it, but if there’s potassium sorbate or potassium, petabyte by sulfate, that will definitely stall a fermentation. Make sure that there’s no preservatives in your juice. Most juices out there don’t have preservatives in them anyways. I hope this tips gave you an idea and inspiration in creating your very own cider. If you wish to know more about brewing cider, you're just a click way of it. To listen to our full podcast episode, please visit Episode 51 – Making Cider with Jon Schlee