Beer Forum

A few months back I found some organic 100% Honeycrisp apple juice at the local grocery. I LOVE honeycrisp apples, so I bought enough juice to make 3 gallons of hard cider.

Fermented with White Labs English Cider yeast at room temp.

It's been in the carboy about 2 months. After tasting it, it's really thin and has almost none of the honeycrisp flavor. I was thinking of taking 1/4 gallon of the same juice and boiling it down to concentrate the sugar. Then sorbate the yeast and sweeten. Anyone have any experience with a method like this?

I don't want to use generic apple juice concentrate, because I really wanted to get the honeycrisp flavor...

2 things...
How much of the honeycrisp flavor is tied to aroma that will get driven off in the boil?
Boiling will set your pectins, resulting in a haze in the finished product.

I just backsweeten with the straight juice to taste. I'm not really a cider drinker, but that's how I make them and they win the occasional medal and keep the wife happy.

Keep in mind that a half gallon of juice into a 5 gallon batch is 10%. I suspect that should be plenty to get the sweetness you desire.

My concern is that adding straight juice will water it down too much. No? The juice itself only clocks in at about 1.045.

Water it down in what sense? You'll cut the ABV by 10%, so it's 4.5% instead of 5%. It's not like there's a lot of body there to dilute.

Try it in a glass. 10 oz of fermented cider and 1 oz of fresh juice. Stir well, see if it tastes "watered down" to you. You'll want to do some of these small experiments to dial in the sweetness anyways.

Brewing TV did a show on ciders that was very informative. They recommended freezing the fresh juice then turning it upside down and letting the concentrated sugar solution drip out. I never tried it, I used a can of apple juice concentrate instead. Along with some wine conditioner.

Scottthepiper wrote:Brewing TV did a show on ciders that was very informative. They recommended freezing the fresh juice then turning it upside down and letting the concentrated sugar solution drip out. I never tried it, I used a can of apple juice concentrate instead. Along with some wine conditioner.

I just made a cherry cider this using this method and it worked great...the cider is delicious and I didn't need to add any sweetener, just the frozen concentrated juice was perfect

Canned concentrate is my preferred method of sweetening too.