Je fais mon cidre avec du s04 mais je veux faire quelque chose de diffèrent cette fois. Quelle levure vous suggérez?
A picture only a brewer could love. 2020 apple cider, fermented with a cider yeast until it was basically complete and then racked onto 1.3kg of sour cherries. It’s been sitting on the cherries for about a month and I’ll rack to a keg in the next week or so to carbonate and age for the next couple of months. Before I start serving it, I’ll add a litre or so of fresh apple juice to back sweeten enough to cut the tartness of the dry finish (It’s usually less than 1.000).
To respond to the original post, I really like cider specific yeasts, they preserve the apple flavour super nicely. Champagne yeast is the absolute worst. The finished product tastes like nothing, and requires years to age into something interesting. I’ve had good experiences with english and saison yeasts. I usually add a bit of nutrients at the beginning to give them the extra supplies they need to finish the job in a healthy way. They can take a lot longer to finish and settle out. The lallemand abbaye yeast I used this year is still super cloudy and slowly bubbling away.
Anyone else have any cider experiments going?
A couple years ago I made a sour cherry mead and it’s delicious but it’s not aging well so I have to drink them all before it’s too late! No cider going this year unfortunately
I’ve been finding I like the kveik yeasts in cider. Ebbegarden is my house go-to and seems to work quite nicely. I like Voss too.
I’ve also got a batch going now with the Verdant IPA yeast. It is still slowly working its way through and bubbling after about 3.5 weeks. I tend to go toward S-04 or Nottingham as easy pitch-from-the-pouch go-to’s that leave a good amount of apple flavor, but I thought I’d change it up this time, so we’ll see how the Verdant does.
As for experiments, for the last batch I made, I added some decaffeinated black tea to bring in a tannin aspect (5 bags steeped in about 1L of water for 15 minutes, then added to near-finished cider). I wouldn’t say I get a ton of recognizable tea flavor, but it does add some complexity and balance to the cider that I like.