From Newsgroup: rec.crafts.brewing

Tldr: My cider used to be much less sour but now it's coming out warhead-level. What's wrong? Can K-metabisulfite help?

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I've been playing around with cider for about two years now but I've
been intentionally not working from any recipes; rather trying to
discover things on my own. I have an engineering background so I'm
actually more interested in the research-and-experimentation aspect than
the making-a-beverage aspect. I made one batch in August of 2022 that
was just amazing, and I've been chasing that dragon ever since* with
little success.

Here's my process: I use a gallon of Walmart-brand apple juice, with
1/4tsp pectinase, 1/2c white sugar, and 1/4tsp or so of Safcider yeast. Sometimes, instead of the yeast I'll inoculate with about 1/4c of the
previous batch. I start a batch every two weeks, using 1-gallon plastic
iced tea jugs, capped loosely. I check the SG weekly and stop when the
SG doesn't change by more than a couple thousandths. As I'm checking
the SG I also taste the batch and if there's no sweetness left in it I
add 1/4c white sugar. I want it to run to max abv but still be a little sweet. This normally takes about 6-8 weeks.

Between batches I rinse everything with very hot water and then store
the containers open end down to dry.

In the early days things came out OK (esp. that one batch!!!) but for
the last six months or so they're all going quite sour.

My suspicion is that I've gotten Lactobacillus into my "equipment" so I stopped by the brew shop and asked for a good sanitizer to use with
cider; they sold me a packet of potassium metabisulfite. My intention
was to mix up a gallon of this and use it to sanitize everything between batches, but when I looked it up it turns out folks are using it as an additive also.

I'm due to start my next batch in a few days (3/15) and I'm unsure what changes to make. Advice?

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*I know what was different about that batch but it's problematic to
duplicate
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From Newsgroup: rec.crafts.brewing

K-Metabisulfite is great for clearing chloring and chloramines from your initial water, but it's not much of a sanitizer in my opinion.
I do beer more often than ciders or meads, but I use the same cleaning process for all of them.
I use Powdered Brewery Wash (PBW) immediately after bottling/canning my ciders, meads and beer to clean everything and remove all organic material. Then, on brew day, I use a iodine based sanitizer such as BTF Iodophor (no rinse needed if used at proper dilution) to make sure there are no wild yeasts or bacteria in my equipment.
Good luck.
R


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From Newsgroup: rec.crafts.brewing

On 3/22/2024 10:51 AM, nobody wrote:

BTF Iodophor

I'm going to pick up a bottle of this and try it out.

I started a batch on 3/15; I looked around to see how folks were using
the metabisulfite and decided to try 1/8tsp per gallon as an additive.
I'll find out in a couple of months if this made any difference.
--
I'm part of the vast libertarian conspiracy to take over the world and
leave everyone alone.
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From Newsgroup: rec.crafts.brewing

Crash Gordon <uucp@crashelex.com> wrote:

Tldr: My cider used to be much less sour but now it's coming out warhead-level. What's wrong? Can K-metabisulfite help?

You should definitely sterilize everything before use. I always use
an oxygen-based bleach before I start a batch of something. E.g.
sodium percarbonate. Sold as stain remover for laundry use, it comes
in tubs of granules, you use 1 scoop per gallon / 5 litres. (But you
need one of those cheap no-name brands which are made from the
active ingredient with no added perfume etc.) You can also use
chlorine bleach but there's the risk of getting a chlorine smell in
your kit.

I'm surprised you've managed to use ordinary apple juice for cider
at all. As with apple pie, I find you need sour apples, either cider
apples or cooking apples, to get any appreciable flavour.

As the other poster said, metabisulfite is sometimes used at about
1/5 the normal dose to remove chlorine from tap-water prior to
brewing, the idea is that it gets used up by the chlorine and has
basically gone before you add the yeast. At normal strength its
purpose is to actually kill the yeast to halt residual fermentation
in wine, and to help protect the wine from bacterial contamination,
so putting it in water before you start carries a certain amount of
risk that it will stop the fermentation from ever starting. Again,
as the other poster said, it's not a very powerful sanitizer,
bleach is much better and much cheaper!
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From Newsgroup: rec.crafts.brewing

On 3/22/2024 11:43 AM, Crash Gordon wrote:

On 3/22/2024 10:51 AM, nobody wrote:
I started a batch on 3/15; I looked around to see how folks were using
the metabisulfite and decided to try 1/8tsp per gallon as an additive.
I'll find out in a couple of months if this made any difference.

It made a huge difference! All the sour is gone. I added 1/8 tsp/gal potassium metabisulfite to in-progress batches as well (I start a new
batch on the 1st and 15th each month) and it seems to have done the
trick for all of them. I'm not detecting any sulfurous notes in the
final product.

Some folks said that the sourness fades after a few months of storage,
so I have some samples that I've set aside to be opened in 2025 but
that's just an exercise at this point.
--
I'm part of the vast libertarian conspiracy to take over the world and
leave everyone alone.

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