Subject: Cider Digest #1439, 25 February 2008 Date: Mon, 25 Feb 2008 15:39:57 -0700 (MST) From: cider-request@talisman.com Cider Digest #1439 25 February 2008 Forum for Discussion of Cider Issues Dick Dunn, Digest Janitor Contents: Backsweetening ("Howard, John") RE: Cider Digest #1438, 17 February 2008 ("Rich Anderson") growing regions? ("Ben Bachelor") Send ONLY articles for the digest to cider@talisman.com. Use cider-request@talisman.com for subscribe/unsubscribe/admin requests. When subscribing, please include your name and a good address in the message body unless you're sure your mailer generates them. Archives of the Digest are available at www.talisman.com/cider ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Subject: Backsweetening From: "Howard, John" Date: Mon, 18 Feb 2008 10:03:03 -0500 Charles, How do the risks of infection and the added expense of using concentrate to backsweeten outweigh the option of simply adding clean cheap refined sugar? I know you well enough to know this is not a purely philosophical decision. ;O) John ------------------------------ Subject: RE: Cider Digest #1438, 17 February 2008 From: "Rich Anderson" Date: Mon, 18 Feb 2008 11:54:37 -0800 Dick, we were using about 100-150 ppm in the pressed juice, adding 50 ppm when the cider was racked and another 50 ppm when the cider was filtered and bottled. Lab analysis would reflect a fairly high total SO2, but most of it was bound and did little to protect the cider from in-bottle fermentation. When we bottled at 75 ppm the in-bottle fermentation problem stopped but the total SO2 was higher yet. Expert sensory analysis could detect the SO2. My take on this is that pad filtration was not doing the job and I did not like the SO2 levels. We looked at membrane filters to do the job on the advice of the Millipore Rep. Membrane filters are expensive and require a strict maintenance cycle to insure sterility plus we are not on a public water system and felt that water purity could be a problem. When I designed our pasteurization system, I experimented a bit with how volumes of hot water heat, my observation, using the boiler on the pressure washer was that the temperatures in the water bath and in the bottles used to monitor that the temperature rise and distribution was fairly uniform at any give point in the process. The unit I build for about $500 excluding the boiler works fairly well, I pasteurize about 100-110 bottles per batch in 35-40 min. OK, my keg pasteurization idea is a bit off-the-wall. I was thinking a cut down steel barrel and a gas flame under it. However, for home production, heat the cider slowly to 60C and pour it in to a clean and sanitized keg would probably work. ------------------------------ Subject: growing regions? From: "Ben Bachelor" Date: Thu, 21 Feb 2008 11:58:24 -0800 I was considering planting a few cider apple trees in my back yard, but I'm not sure what all the good cider apple trees are, nor am I familiar with what grows in my region - I live in San Diego. I'm sure there are plenty of people on this list who can tell me exactly what I want to know, but I'm also generally curious as to what grows and how well across the country/continent/planet. Is there an easy place on the web, or a good book I can look this sort of thing up in? - -Ben Bachelor