Cyser or "How d'ya like them apples?"

In December 2011 I was given a tub of windfall apples in exchange for a tin of beeswax polish and decided to try making Cyser, apple mead. I looked at Cyser recipes on the internet and the one in Andy Hamilton's Booze For Free before piecing my own together. It seems there's as many different ways to make cyser as there are worms in apples.

Windfall apples from Newbald

Initial Ingredient List
4.5KG Apples
150g Sugar
10 Sultanas
2 Cloves
1360g Honey
Another 680g Honey to add later
1.5 Litres Water
1 Teaspoon Pectolase
1 Teaspoon Yeast Nutrient
1 Sachet of Wine Yeast

First thing I did was put the apples through a juicer. It took a while to chop up and juice the apples and twice I had to stop and clean the machine out as the pulp clogged it up and and it started to whine.

Juicing apples exactly how subsistence farmers in days of yore did.

Eventually when they'ed all been converted to liquid I added 2 cloves and 10 sultanas and boiled the lot for 10 minutes -mainly to kill anything living in the apples, some of them had been quite lively having spent a while on the ground. It tasted a little tart so I added 150g of sugar to the mix.

I decided against boiling the honey (some people do, some people don't, some people says it damages the honey, some people say it doesn't) and heated up half a litre of Tesco's spring water whilst the four 340g jars of Tesco's cheapest Clear Honey loitered in a bath of hot water. Once the honey was good and runny I poured it into the water using topping up the jars with more water to rinse out the last dregs and adding that to the pan too. Gave it a stir till the honey looked to have dissolved.

Next up I poured the honey and water mixture into the demijohn and added an orange I'd chopped up and mashed. I didn't want to wait all day for the apple and sugar solution to cool so I ladled that in and after adding the pectolase and yeast nutrient I sat the whole thing in a sink half full of cold water to cool. An hour later it'd cooled and there was about an inch of air space at the top. This bit of air is called headspace by brewers, and my lack of it turned out to be a problem later. I gave it a quick stir with a sterilised chopstick, added the yeast, waited 15 minutes then gave it another stir like the sachet said to before putting the airlock on.

Freshly racked and looking a little opaque

24 hours later fermentation was happily underway but unlike the meads and cranberry melomel with this fermentation a load of froth was produced and the pulp had risen to the top of the demijohn pushing liquid and froth out through the airlock so after a quick clean up and rinsing out of the airlock I decanted some of the liquid into a a milk bottle with a foodbag rubberbanded to the top and sat it and the demijohn in a plastic tub in case it happened again. Looking at a couple of brewing website the froth is apparently called kraeusen, I was happy to call it froth but there ya go. Anyway it should only present a problem for the first few days but, as I read, if the pulped fruit blocks the airlock the pressure from the buildup of CO2 can crack the demijohn.

Cranberry Melomel on left and Cyser on the right.

Four days later the majority of the pulp had sunk into the  liquid so I was able to pour the contents of the milk bottle back into the demijohn. I had a little taste of the dregs in the milk bottle and  and can honestly say it was pretty sweet, however that gave no real indicator of the final flavour as the stuff was still full of sugar the yeast had to consume.

Whilst the fermentation is going on bubbles can be seen in the water in the airlock. A fortnight after starting the fermentation the bubble had slowed quite a lot so I decided to rerack it, removing the liquid from the bits of apple and the lees (dead yeast). You're meant to do this with a siphon but having had a try and finding the siphon kept dropping lower into the demijohn than I wanted (need to get or make some kinda clip to hold it in place) I wound up pouring it through a couple of coffee filters sat in a sieve in a funnel in the demijohn. Not the best way to do it as ideally there should be minimal aeration..but it worked.

After an hour of painstakingly slow filtering it began to flow through the filter faster and I realised one of the coffee filters had a hole in it. D'oh! I figured the heavier stuff will still have been near the bottom of the bottle and not gone through the hole in the filter. So I whipped out the filters and in replaced them with a sheet of kitchen roll, one of those thick one's that claims to act more like muslin than paper -a claim it seemed to live up to. The liquid came through this much faster than the coffee filters and I was able to finish that in a matter of minutes. I was left with a kitchen roll full of yucky looking thick yellow apple pulp and a demijohn of uniformly pale orange liquid.

I left this alone for a couple of months before re-racking again then gave it another two months and sampled the cyser again. Things had really changed in there. This time it was really dry. The yeast had had a great time turning sugars to alcohol leaving it a little dry for my palate so I figured I'd need to backsweeten it later. There seems to be two different ways to back-sweeten. One involves waiting till the fermentation has stopped then adding syrup or honey as required, the other is to just add the syrup or honey and hope the yeast will die off due to the rising alcohol content before consuming all you've added. I went for the second way, as it sounds easier' after all I could back-sweeten it again later if need be. I added the last two jars of honey filling the space left from previously being reracked and put the bung and airlock back on.. Looking at the air lock I could see fermentation was still going on as bubbles slowly made their way through. Eventually the bubbling stopped and I sampled it again, too dry! This makes me wonder if Tesco's cheapest honey is maybe cut with some kind of sugar syrup which the yeast was better ale to break down than the sugars found in real honey. Anyway I was going to have to backsweeten it again, on the plus side the alcohol content was up.

Harris Quickfine filter. It's not quick.
But it does filter rather well.

At this point I'd acquired a Harris Quickfine Filter from an auction. It's a filter system that's unfortunately no longer made but going by the wine making forums is one of the best filters around but also the slowest. You make up a small bucket of whatever you're brewing add 3 chemicals then pour this into a cloth filter which you top up as it runs through till you've filtered everything. It's painstakingly slow. We're talking leave it overnight kind of slow. Came out good and clear though. :) Potent stuff too going by the sample I tried, I really to need to get one of those gadgets for measuring alcohol content.

If your wee looks like this, drink more water

As I mentioned I'd decided to backsweeten it again, but I didn't really have space in the demijohn for it so I split the cyser between two containers and added some 1:2 sugar:water syrup -yep same stuff I feed the bees in spring. Popped airlocks on both vessels in case fermentation restarted then left it a while. The glass demijohn contains a sweeter cyser than the plastic one -more sugar syrup in that one.

Cyser backsweetened an split across containers

A month or so later I filtered it a last painstakingly slow time and decided to bottle it. Having acquired an automatic bottle filler I decided to use that. After a few trial runs with sterilising solution and then water to get it clean and figure out how it worked I soon had the cyser bottled and ready for corking.

Racking to bottles. Woohoo!

I started the project in December 2011 and bottled it in July 2012. In November 2012 I opened the first bottle. I may have been a little heavy handed with the final backsweetening giving me more of a desert drink but certainly enjoyable.

Also in December 2011 I started making a Cranberry Melomel. This ran more or less parallel with the Cyser fermentation, you can see the dark red demijohn full of Melomel in the fourth photo down in this post. Like the Cyser I reracked this a few times slowly running it through the Harris Quickfine. Here's a picture of it somewhere along the line, looks a little nicer than the the demijohn of gore it started out as.

Cranberry Melomel

The end product is a very pale pinkish liquid and tastes fantastic. Whilst I'll be tweaking my Cyser and Mead recipes in future this one is spot on. The flavour is meant to change over time and I still have most of the mead, cyser and melomel ageing in bottles at the moment. The mead and cyser look identical but following the fizzy mead cork popping fiasco I'd moved the mead back into demijohns and eventually reracked the remainder into green bottles, otherwise I'd now have no idea which was which.

Cranberry Melomel and Cyser.

Winter Feeding

Well with night time temperatures approaching freezing it's too cold to feed the bees syrup so it's time to drop some  insulation and a block of fondant icing onto each hive, leave the bees to it and hope for the best. I popped the insulation on a few days ago and instead of making this years fondant decided to buy some ready made. Fondant is that heavy white icing you get on cakes. In theory you can buy it from local bakeries so I went out to get some. After visiting a few shops it became apparent that most high street bakeries don't actually do any baking onsite -bit of a con but that's the high street. I wound up buying some Dr Oetker branded fondant from a local Sainsbury's. Hope it's not got too much additives in it but the ingredients list looked a little longer than the three items I used to make the stuff last time.

Winter fodder for micro livestock

After pressing the fondant into some food boxes I drizzled a few drops of Vitafeed Gold on each block just for good measure, slipped on a veil and some gloves and went out to feed the bees. Upon opening up the feed hole in the Nucleus crown board I was overwhelmed by a lack of bees 8-O It was about 9 degrees Celsius at the time so I'd expected active bees to come streaming out as soon as I opened up. Looking into the hole I could see a few bees making their way up the comb face to see what was happening but not the numbers I'd been hoping for so I'm wondering if maybe they won't be surviving the winter.. I popped on the fondant block replaced the insulation and roof then after feeding the other hives I went back to the nuc and had a look under the fondant. I was pleased to see more bees had gone to it and were making a start on the fondant, but I suspect this little colony may be a bit touch and go.

When I opened Hive1 I got the reaction I was expecting. Lots of worker bees who were already under the feed hole came ambling out to see why some fool had opened it. I placed the fondant block on hoping not to squash any bees and replaced the insulation and the roof then moved onto Hive2. It took a few seconds before workers started investigating the opened feed hole but they got there. I'm thinking Hive1 seems to be the strongest at the moment which corresponds with the Bee Inspector's visual survey of the hives back in September.

Hive	Combs of Brood	Combs of Bees	Diseased Brood
Nucleus	2.5	5	0
Hive1	7	18	0
Hive2	6.5	13	0

Colony inspection from September 2012

A comb is one side of a frame so the 5 frame nucleus has a total of 10 combs and the main hives have 11 frames which is 22 combs apiece. As you can see the nuc was about half full of bees and a quarter full of brood. It's not entirely impossible that it's still about half full but the cluster is positioned towards one end of the nuc rather than directly below the feed hole. Afterall the nucleus is ventilated only by it's entrance rather then through the open mesh floor which I keep closed, so there be some reason to do with airflow affecting their position within the hive. At the time of inspection Hive1 was slightly more populous than Hive2 and going by response to my opening the feed hole that still seems to be the case. As I mentioned in a previous post Hive2 had had some Sacbrood but since physically removing the affected larvae it hadn't recurred by te time of the inspection.

I popped back outside with the stethoscope to give the colonies a listen. I'd expected the nuc to be noticeably quiter than the main hives but that wasn't the case as far as I could make out, fingers crossed for them. Next weekend I'll be looking under the roofs and insulation so see how quickly they're taking the fondant and depending on how fast it's going down I may feed them again this.

In a normal cold period the bees do very little but generate heat slowly consuming their stores. However we've had occassional warmer days so they've been going out to forage which uses more energy than just keeping the cluster warm would use. Unfortunately on those odd days there probably hasn't much if any nectar out there for the foragers to bring back so all that happens is the stores get depleted for no return.


As I've mentioned before wasp activity has been very limited and late in season this year. I have seen a couple round the hives and spotted a couple near the nuc entrance which moved me to put  a trap out but it didn't catch anything. On Monday I spotted a very large shiny wasp investigating my house wall.

Saxon Queen

Around here you tend to see German Wasps and Common Wasps but they both have a set of 4 yellow markings at the base of the thorax whilst this one had 2. After looking at far too many pictures of wasps and identification charts I've come to the conclusion she was a Saxon Wasp or Dolichovespula saxonica if you're so inclined. These are usually found further South, according to my know-it-all mate Google and whilst Saxon Wasps are a particularly large species the long abdomen on this one suggests to my entemologically untrained eye that she was a queen. Saxon wasp colonies die off every year with only the queen surviving so I'm guessing she's abandoned her sisters so to find a place to make a cocoon and hide out. I left her to it and I'm really hoping she's not going to surprise me with a nest under the bed in Spring.

Edit 9/11/12 Checked to see how the fondant's going down yesterday and it's barely been touched. You might think that sounds bad but it actually means the bees in the cluster have adequate food stores so they've not had to go looking for more food. I'll be leaving the fondant in place for them though just in case.

Possibly one to avoid

Whilst there's not much happening on the beekeeping front I thought I'd take time out to post an article about an item I've seen in various places on the net aimed at potential beginner beekeepers.

As seen on eBay..

..and as seen on Amazon
Both sites also sell regular hives too

I've seen it on eBay, I've seen it on Amazon, I've seen it on a few other sites too, but I've not seen it on any actual beekeeping websites which may ring an alarm bell or two. It's usually called Wooden Bee Hive Garden/Small Starter Wood Beehive For Beginners Honey Bees. Well it certainly is a small hive, it's what beekeepers would call a Nucleus rather than a hive, specifically a five frame Nucleus. That's just less than half the number of frames in a standard National brood box. A 5 frame Nuc can be a useful thing, you use them to start new colonies, transport bees, even overwinter small colonies but it's usually a transitional housing. At some point assuming your bees thrive they'll need more space which will mean moving into a bigger hive or somehow expanding the nucleus. Unfortunately you can't expand this box, aesthetically pleasing as it is, and lengthwise it also seems to be slightly smaller than a National Hive which may make transferring bees from one of these boxes into a larger hive later difficult problematic.

It's actually a bit sneaky trying to bill it as a beginners hive and any beginners trying to use one will soon find problems. There's no feeder for you to feed up your bees if there's a dearth of nectar (as happened this year) or help them into or out of winter, there's no eke either which with a crown board (advert doesn't mention a crown board either) would let you use a rapid or contact feeder instead. There's also no mention on any of the adverts of the floor so chances are it's a solid wooden floor. Whilst a Nuc has different ventilation requirements to a full sized hive an open mesh floor with sliding bottom board is useful if you hope to have some idea of varroa levels within the hive. Without monitoring them the unchecked mites will probably kill off your colony -I suspect finding a box of dead bees at the bottom of your garden may not be the most encouraging experience for the beginner beekeeper.

Whilst the 'hive' isn't as beginner friendly as it claims to be the blurb accompanying it hive seems to be missleading and nonsensical. Rather than suggesting beginners go out and purchase some bees (which will probably come housed in a nuc of their own anyway) the sellers claim the hive is designed to attract "non-swarming bees."

It goes on to say how bees are attracted to holes in wood, which is true enough. Beekeepers often leave out baited boxes or baited nucs to attract swarms, some may even have luck with unbaited ones. I've had a baited nuc on my shed roof for about 4 months which didn't catch a single swarm. Including my own there's at least 11 honey bee colonies within a quarter mile of my property and colleagues have told me about 2 clustering swarms spotted in the area -add that to the colony I lost and that's at least three swarms who've ignored my baited box. I know the bait attracts bees because I've foragers investigating the box. Evidently having the right size box for bees sat there, even with an attractive bait, won't necessarily get you any passing bees.

But anyway, let's give a little more thought to those non-swarming bees. Bee colonies swarm to reproduce, if they reached the evolutionary cul-de-sac of no longer swarming they would die out. But let's ignore very basic biology and pretend these magical fantastic non swarming bees do exist and didn't die out about 120 million years ago.

Why are a bunch of non-swarming bees looking for a place to live? Well, what do you normally call a bunch of bees out looking for a place to live? It's not a gaggle, a gang, a herd or a murder.. it's a.. wait for it.. it's.. it's called a swarm -that's the word. Swarm. So basically the claim is that these boxes will attract a swarm of non-swarming bees. Sounding a little unlikely isn't it, and that's whilst you're pretending they exist.

Some adverts have a print out of what appears to be the hive's instructions.

Instructions, errata and honey crop claims

The first thing I noticed is they say a queen bee life span is up to 3 years. That's just wrong. It's generally acknowledged that without mishaps a queen can live up to 5 years hence the colour scheme for marking queen bees having 5 colours used in a 5 year cycle. Beekeepers are a thrifty bunch (to put it mildly) and if they only needed three colours of insect paint then they wouldn't bother with another two.

The intructions claim you can get 20-30lbs of honey from one of these hives which can be harvested in August. That's based on a National Deep frame potentially being able to hold up to 5-6lb of honey and multiplied by 5. However that's assuming every frame contains nothing but honey. No brood, no eggs and no pollen. If in August your colony has no eggs, brood or pollen they're probably in trouble. Some beekeeper's do get National deep boxes completely filled with honey, however they're using another deep box to house the brood.

There's also the question of where do you put the bees when you've removed every single frame from the nuc -I mean hive, to presumably crush and strain the comb? I suppose it could be done by removing and cutting out a frame at a time then replacing the sticky wet empty frames as you go but that's going to get you some seriously angry bees.

The boxes aren't entirely useless to existing beekeepers. They certainly look nicer than a lot of nucs on the market and properly sited (high up) and baited they may actually attract swarms of real-proper-swarming bees. They'd probably have use as a temporary home for a split or raising a new queen too -well actually perhaps not the latter as that usually requires feeding now I think about it. But for beginners? Well buyer beware.

Oh and if despite all the above you still decide to get one don't leave it sat on the grass like in the picture above, it might look rustic but damp kills bees.