Batch 186, Malted Cider

I haven't made a cider before, and the universe seems to be pushing me in that direction. My beer club met at Merriwether Cider Company a couple of weeks ago, and we got a great tour and discussion about how to make ciders. Then I was reading a recent issue of Zymurgy and they had an article about making malted ciders. The problem with straight-up cider is that there isn't any nutrients for the yeast. Malted cider, however, uses some beer wort added to the apple juice as yeast nutrient, so when I was making Batch 185, I ran off an extra gallon to make 5 gallons of malted cider. It turns out the wort I ran off was a little low on gravity, so I added some DME to get it to 1.042.

5 gallon batch

4 gallons of cider from concentrate. My wife bought 11 of these cans at about $1 each from Winco:

Beats the crap out of me why I take a photo landscape and Google turns it to portrait and doesn't give me any option to rotate it.

So 11 of these plus 3 gallons of water plus 1 gallon of wort makes 5 gallons.

All I did was mix the concentrate with water in a fermenter bucket, then added the gallon of wort, oxygenated, then pitched a jar of Wyeast London Ale III from batch 184. I'm real interested to see how this comes out. This was super simple to make and was easy to add into a regular brew day. I'm a little worried about sanitation, I was careful, but the water came right out of the tap (through a carbon filter), not boiled, the wort came right out of the mash tun, so it was about 170F at one point, but not boiled and much it was much cooler when I added it to the cider.

May 3, the airlock is bubbling away, that's a good sign.

May 11, fermentation is done, FG is 1.012, so I put it in a keg and put it on tap. I added 2 tsp of Cream of Tartar to the fermenter before kegging, it probably would have been better to add that to the keg.

May 14, first taste now that's carbonated, it's good, but a little plain, not a lot of apple flavor.

June 3, I've been mixing this 50/50 with the Prickly Pear beer, and that is an excellent combination. I took a growler to a tennis match for afterwards, and it was gone in about 10 minutes.