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.