Cooking apples to make cider?

First off, let me say that the title of this blog post does not mean that I used “cooking apples” to make the cider but rather that I cooked some apples to extract the sugar for cider. This was a question I'd had in my head for a while, “Can you make cider by cooking the apples?” This seems like a good idea right? The cooking process will mush the apples without a press and extract the sugars! I did a bit of research and everyone wrote what a bad idea it was some said it wasn't even possible. The most common complaint appeared to be that the cider would taste too much like apple pie. Well I like apple pie and the idea of apple pie flavoured cider sounds pretty good to me. I've added nutmeg, cinnamon and honey to a scrumpy before now deliberately trying to get that flavour. An experiment was certainly needed!

Boiling

I used mostly eating apples and just a few cooking apples. I picked that apples from my trees perhaps a little earlier than I would normally so they were still a little acidic, I washed them, cored them and chopped them. Then added them to a large pan and brought them very slowly to the boil. If you're trying to extract sugars from anything I find bringing it slowly to a boil is much more effective. So now had some boiled up apples I mashed it a little to get all the juice out and then strained off the pulp. I made some very nice apple sauce with the “waste” apple pulp by the way! I just boiled it up again and added some nutmeg, cinnamon, honey and a little ginger!

So I now had a large pan of sweet hot apple juice extract (and a little suspended pulp), I added a bag of raw brown sugar at this point to help with gravity and flavour. By the time it had cooled and I had added a bit more water I had an original gravity of 1.036 at 27c (which is about 1.038 when corrected for temperature) so that's enough to ferment into a reasonable cider.

Yeast

I wanted to make sure I got a decent ferment so I made a yeast starter with a 9 grams of dried cider yeast and pitched it into the juice. If you're making cider using cider yeast will improve it lots, don't use a beer yeast! The ferment was vigorous at first then slow but steady, I left it in primary for 7 days, by the end of this I had a massive amount of settled yeast sediment and pulp. I racked the whole thing off into a clean barrel and left it to have a secondary fermentation for 14 days, during this time it carbonated a little but still produced a fair amount of sediment so I racked it into another clean barrel and left it to mature!

Racking

Many people will warn against racking like this and I agree that you should keep racking to a minimum, especially with beers. If you rack anything you should take a few precautions:

1. Make sure everything involved is sterile, not clean but sterile.
2. Try not to let too much oxygen get into the drink, cover open vessels.
3. Let the siphon tube be submerged in the destination container, this will also reduce oxygen intake.

The Results

So what I ended up with is a barrel of pretty tasty cider, it's slightly fizzy and about 4% alcohol, not super strong scrumpy but quite drinkable. As for the apple pie flavour, well it's not really noticeable but it tastes of apples for sure!