Easy to Make Blueberry Cider using FRESH Blueberries

we make a lot of ciders we make a lot of wines and we make a lot of meats but today we're going to make a blueberry cider now we have done blueberry before but we're going to do a little bit different today we're going to use fresh blueberries instead of Frozen so we're going to have an extra step in there but we're also going to be mixing them with apple juice but first we want to work on those berries we have two pounds of fresh blueberries if you can get them in season and go to a you pick place I suggest doing that if they look like they're not fully ripe like well this one taste it to be sure it wasn't just so you know it was very very tart they're just stem or something on there there's a stick no sticks they don't ferment well and if you see any berries that just don't look good pull them out too um these look pretty good we looked through them already what we want to do is rinse these off and then go to the next step all right so we have rinsed berries now they need to go into blender this hopefully they'll all go in nope there's gonna be blueberry Cascade everywhere oh do they all fit no no yeah they do all right is that all of them that's it then they all fit all right I'm gonna go blend these up floor blender see in a minute it's a Vitamix it can handle it okay so we have our blueberry smoothie which is really just blueberries I mean it could be a smoothie if you really want it to be and I'm just going to pour that right into the fermenter now before anybody asks the reason why we decided to blend it is because people ask all the time can I blend the fruit you can we always say you don't need to but you can it doesn't hurt anything may I have the spoon or something ah certainly I was just handing a spatula that was sanitized in the red bucket of sanitization [Music] so what I'm doing is just getting all the all the stuff out of here you want to get as much of it as you can because I mean you paid for those blueberries you want them in your cider you know we're looking for a good amount of blueberry flavor um we are still going to mix this with apple but anyway the reason why I blended it is because people ask all the time well we're probably going to do after the next step is move these into a bag so it won't be as much of a mess in the bottom of the fermenter but the next step is kind of important because we used fresh berries the next step is to a couple of ingredients that a lot of time we like to say they're optional now the first one is optional this is pectic enzyme this is optional and I only have like a teaspoon left in here so I'm just gonna dump it in block your packet see it works it works for everything you know it's Universal yeah okay and what that's going to do is help to break down some more of the cell walls getting us a little bit more juice and a little bit more sugars but the one that is not optional at this point is a Camden tablet also known as potassium metabisulfite and basically what that's going to do is help to kill all the nasty beasties because you know little Johnny handled that package of blueberries in the grocery store and maybe he had the sniffles that day I don't really want to catch that from him and I don't want that in my cider but really it's wild yeasts and pathogens and anything that could be infected in this already you want to get rid of it if you froze these first not as critical still a good idea but I have my Camden tablet I want to break it Smash It Up They smash pretty easy and then just break it up a bit add a little bit of water be right back mix it up real good dump that in and then I want to give this a really good mix I want all that all those two ingredients to get in there mixed into the blueberries the one Camden towel is good for a gallon so I went on the safe side I could have used half but um one it's totally fine to do this needs to sit for 24 to 36 hours before we can continue to the next stage which is adding our yeast if you add yeast now they're going to die it's not going to ferment you're going to be sad so don't don't do that but we are I got a little blob right there see it and then there's a blob now one thing we've noticed is that it makes it lose its color just looks funky right away doesn't look so great but it's okay it's part of the process it's better to be safe than have pretty colors that's that's my motto I just made it up now what we want to do is put a lid on this and an airlock oh hey I did it doesn't have to be super tight I don't expect anything to come out of it let this sit for 24 36 hours we'll be back to show you what we do next okay so it's been two days now I just want to point out something to you that we noticed so in case you do this similar process and you notice it don't be freaked out when you put the combination of the Canon tablets and the pectic enzyme into your blueberry solution slushy gonna turn everything white yeah like white but we now have beautiful color back but the color comes back and it does as you can see it's already separating the solids from the juice sponge in there that is just fantastic so another thing we noticed with this particular one is that we would get cluster bubbles in our airlock and so you want to put it under airlock it was a little unnerving there's some off-gassing from the sulfites from the Canon tablets it's just part of the process it's just part of the process was it 100 necessary to use Canon tablets well unless you want Little Johnny sneezes in your room yes basically you want to treat your fruit in some fashion so that way any unwanted bacteria or infections or even wild yeasts won't be introduced into your brain If you froze it probably not as much of an issue uh like a deep freeze for a long time will kill a lot of those things too this way just guarantees it but even if you froze it it's probably still a good idea so we are pouring this through a bag did I make a mess I thought I did pretty good it splashed did it splash I think it might have got on my glasses later all right let me get this out of here we put it in a bag to try to contain some of the goop um that's the technical term it's actually just the the skins and seeds and everything else of the blueberries which add a lot of nutrients tannins and other good things for the Brew so we wanted them in there but we wanted to not have them floating all over the place and as you can see it's actually coming out pretty clear juice this pretty fine bag I do have a glass weight that we're going to put in the bag to help hold it down sweets because we can sanitize them and so that one was as well as our fermentation bag yeah everything has been sanitized in the red button which I'm not sure if we said that yet or not so we're saying it now there you go and what I'm going to do is just wrap this around the bag so as to seal it up better just to hold that in place the idea is you want that to stay submerged so I'm going to flip it over so the knots on the bottom and now you got to wash it I gotta go wash my hands again okay so now we got our blueberries for our blueberry cider in the container but we need the cider part to a lot of people it cannot be cider without apple juice I would contend that well you know if we call it a blueberry cider it could be but we're not going to get into that argument today because we're gonna use apple juice we actually use apple juice in this one this is Publix GreenWise apple juice contains 100 juice which you would think they don't have to list ingredients after that because if it's 100 juice then that's all that there is but they do anyway it's water organic apple juice concentrate so this is an apple juice from concentrate which I don't really have a problem with I just broke the seal so I could shake it up there's no sediment in these this is perfectly clear juice if you had a apple cider that you wanted to use or a fresh juice that you wanted to use or a cloudy juice or a cloudy juice however you want to call it whatever your country calls it it's all good it's perfectly fine to use we're using this and I'm going to use a full one gallon and I don't mind splashing because oxygen is good at this stage except that I don't want to Splash Derek every drop is sacred except that one okay two of these now you might be wondering normally when you make a gallon and you have two half gallons you take some out well we're not doing that why because this is a 1.4 gallon fermenter we probably had a good half gallon there I'm okay with that what it's going to do is lower the gravity just a little bit but not a tremendous amount I wanted to get a reading of the blueberry juice alone however there was so little in there that was really really hard to do I don't expect there to be much two pounds of blueberries is probably only like a 10 to 12 points so I'm guessing our gravity on this is going to be somewhere around like a 1.060 to 1.065 somewhere in that range but having more simply means we have more once we've wrapped it off all right Dr instructor do you mind taking a look at your notes just to make sure that we have we don't have the apple juice can you add the apple juice for me please all right one gallon apple juice to this we're going to add some yeast nutrient and we're using fermato as we always do uh we just like fermato it's a little bit more of a closer to Nature kind of thing but you might be wondering why are using yeast nutrient at all in this well it helps it's an insurance policy so 2.5 grams a little bit of water just gonna pour that right in I'm going to use this just to mix this all around a little bit because if I don't somebody's going to yell at me that I didn't mix it before I took a gravity reading look at that color blueberries are never blue for men in the in the juice like this they always come out red then do you want to take your gravity reading before you do that yes I want to take my gravity reading before I do that again here we go oh look at see look at that color that's gorgeous again I'm saying 1.060 to 1.065 let's see how accurate I am well that's interesting it dropped lower normally that juice actually you know what we've never used that juice before I'm not just making excuses we have used different kinds of green wise juices or Publix juices but never that exact one I'm kind of surprised um well you know what it is there's probably a lot of water in the blueberries and as that leached out with the little tiny bit of sugars that they have it's not it's like sitting as the side and stuff come on now okay um stop spinning stop spinning stop spinning stop spinning you know what I'm going with this you know why this is at the perfect gravity 1.042 if you don't get that reference you need to watch more Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy or read more um by the way 1.042 just to give you an idea this goes dry which it probably will I'm not gonna knock it over it gives me about five and a half percent ABV for a cider I'm totally happy with that I don't need my ciders to be 22 I like them to be more crisp and refreshing so therefore ah I'm good with that next is the ace what kind of Easter I'm using reusing single so4 which is an aliased shockingly enough but this particular Ali East has a really great fallaculation power meaning that all those yeast are going to create a nice lovely yeast cake at the bottom and not all that wispy crap so that's good crispy crap that's the technical term also is used because it creates beautiful balanced fruity and floral notes so that is going to be perfect for The Cider see it's an ale yeast but I think it's actually better for ciders just because of some of that now this is a whole packet we don't need a whole packet for this I normally use a whole pack of yeast when we make a brew but I'm just going to use a half and I'm sprinkling it around the bag is sticking up so I am going to have to swirl this a little bit now and then this is why I always have half packets of safe lso4 because we generally don't use a whole pack to make the gallon Brew um it just you don't need it for this particular one we've found that safe lso4 works great now save lso4 is a lower alcohol tolerance yeast it's only like 10 to 11 but don't tell the yeast that because I've seen them go to 12. so they can't read and apparently they don't understand English either because otherwise they would know and they would hear me and all that kind of thing but what I want to do now is just kind of give it a little tiny swirl to move things around and get it off the bag see it's all on the bag now it's on my finger you know and then but wait there's more what's more oh yeah I almost forgot um we decided Well I decided you know what goes good with blueberry French Oak I don't know why it just seemed like it sounded like a good idea to me so I decided to get out some of the French Oak that we got from Barrel chart Barrel char wood products and I have it sitting in some boiling water that's still really hot for about the last five or ten minutes just takes off some of the extra tannin and sanitizes it a little bit now this is a previously used one people ask me this all the time can you reuse them well we are we use them at least twice sometimes three times for a brew like this that's going to be on the not super strong side I don't see any reason to not use a used one dump that water though you don't want to put that water in there because it's just no not good I'm gonna put the lid on I'm gonna tighten that sucker down real good okay then now take a note that I put French Oak all right so I'm going to put this on here and what are we going to do with this now we're gonna let it sit but we're not going to let it sit in the fermentation station not yet we do have a good amount of Headroom to give us some little room for lava explosions but just to be safe we're gonna actually put this on a tray with edges that way in case fermentation gets incredibly active particularly since we're using a bag and it pushes that bag up against the base of the airlock we're gonna have a mess and so that lift tray is going to catch that mess rather than spreading it all over across the kitchen a little bit more information that bag is floating a little bit in there it's going to produce some gases in there as a ferments it's going to float even more I want to swirl this around a little bit so that it stays moist because if it dries out it could mold also we get this question a lot what should it look like once it starts fermenting we're going to see bubbles coming up the sides little teeny tiny bubbles and you may see a foam layer it may even start to turn kind of brownish and stick to the sides of the container totally okay if that happens if any comes up in the airlock Let It Go for a little while because you're just going to end up cleaning out all the time clean out the airlock replace it put more sanitized sanitation fluid or Cheap whiskey like a scoresby or something that you just don't like in there and replace that you do not want to use rubbing alcohol and water is not the best though a lot of people will say that they just use water so if it is overreactive and you see that you have to clean out your airlock like continuously go ahead and switch over to in a blow off tube which is just a piece of silicone tubing stuck into the bong going into a mason jar filled with water tape it off hold it in place if you want more information on that we have a video just on that and I'll put it in the description below if you have any questions as to what it should look like or what it should be doing during the first stages of fermentation ask in the description in the comment section below and we'll be happy to help you out but this is going to go sit for a week or two until it's done we'll be back to show you what it looks like then okay this has been going for about two weeks it's been sitting on wood and has a bag of blueberries in there so first thing we're going to get those blueberries out always my favorite job it's just gross I'm putting it into a colander over a bowl so that we can retrieve more of the liquid and I'm just going to pull the wood out it does have like some of the yeast scum things like that all stuck to it what would normally be cruising stuck to those sides is actually a little bit stuck to the wood in the bag and now I need to wash my hands the first thing I like to do once we open a brew up is do that Optical and oil factory check on this one there's a slightly off smell we can't quite place what it is it's not like vinegar exactly and it doesn't smell spoiled it's just not what it's what's expected if you watched our really old videos you may have noticed me mentioning the footy smell yeah so I'm going to take a reading on this and I'm going to take a quick little sip to see if something has gone awry it is possible that an infection came in on our blueberries even though we we did treat them with Canon tablets if that is the case well there's not a lot you can do but we did have Oak in this right away too which that could cause the unusual smell so maybe it's a little bit of all that going on that I'm smelling and just making it seem strange to me I also attribute it to some of the odors that we get from commercially made wine that we don't necessarily appreciate so that doesn't necessarily mean something bad has happened that just means something that we're not appreciating may have happened right so this is at 0.998 now normally we would say wait a week check again this is a cider and with a cider to me you're kind of on the clock once you start this because those yeasts are only going to be viable for so long this has been our experience if we let this sit for months and months and months and then try to carbonate it may not carbonate so instead we want to kind of move it over as quickly as we can so we're going to end up racking this today but let's just take a quick taste of it and see uh see if something is drastically wrong or just a slightly off flavor that might age out or go away it looks normal everything about it seems quite normal on the smell it definitely just smells like a young cider there is apple juice in this and there are blueberries in this oh it might be the I wonder if it's the apples the metal electric stuff no you're thinking of the ascorbic acid that isn't in this one right you want to taste it first do you want me to take it a little bit of young foot very very dry a little bit of blueberry a little bit of Apple yeah that's probably fine then I don't think there's anything wrong with it sometimes it'll give off a smell that you just go what is that I couldn't quite place it it was young but at the same time not exactly in line with what I expected and it must just be the combination of apple and blueberry fermentation gases with the oaking it's it's Apple but it's not bad I mean even as it is it's not bad it's a little a little light on the uh the body and things like that but we're not totally done with this yet so let's get out a fermenter and rack this over okay so first I'm going to pour the sample into the racking vessel that we're racking to wrecker right the destination destination whatever and the reason I'm doing this because if I just pour it in here there's a lot of sediment in there it's just gonna stir it all up and then there's no point in racking it I am keeping the cap on because I see some goop in the bottom and yes that is the technical term I'm gonna get it started good to go there we go we do have dedicated racking videos on our Channel Derica can link some of those below or one of them anyway um how many racking videos do you need to see and uh I'm just going to continue this and we will be with you once it's been wrecked okay so we racked it a little bit of it's in Derek's lap because it kind of overflowed we had just a little bit more and you know we were talking about things and there's a good life lesson for you pay attention to what you're doing at the time that you're doing it you know life isn't about what you're about to do it's about what you're doing right now that's right that way you get to drink it later rather than wear it today let this sit for a little while it's cleared in about a week and we'll uh bottle and do some other stuff to it okay so another week has passed and it is time to uh get this in the bottles but we also decided we want this to be a sparkling cider which means carbonation now there's many ways to carbonate you can do it in a keg if you really prefer there's you know you can try a SodaStream I've heard of people succeeding with it we are going to do what's called natural carbonation or bottle conditioning however you want to call it we'll get to more on that in a moment but first we want to Rack this because there is a little bit of sediment in the bottom here and we you know it's racking off of the racking so it was racked once to get all the stuff out but now there's just a little fine stuff in the bottom that we don't want in our bottle so we're going to Rack it again to a pitcher that way we know exactly how many bottles we need and we can do our penultimate tasting and as always when we rack we use an auto siphon and this is very very full so I'm not going to go too far in until it gets started and like that that's how you do it when you put too much in the bottle I did leave the cap on because there's some wispy leaves in the bottom here that I don't want in our final Brew like I said and Brack ink you know how to do this Source destination higher lower yeah I'll put a link in the description below for our full tutorial on racking after racking looks like we have 130 ounces but before we go any further we do need to do our penultimate tasting and this is where we find out what does it need what does it need to be better should we improve it and you know glass we'll be right back Derica made me move the bag that was over there we're going to be using it soon but it was bothering her I can appreciate that so we're going to take a little taste here just pour some in remember this is apple and blueberry together it's about four weeks old it's a really pretty color gorgeous color absolutely amazing color um Clarity it's like a 12. it does have an interesting smell and I think that's the oak because this was French so we might be getting a lot of extra tannic effect on this one take your Poker Face yeah I'm not sure what to make of it the oak has definitely toned down the brightness of the blueberry but I still detect blueberry mm-hmm it's got a nice roundness in the flavors it needs to be sweeter that's it does without a doubt it's really interesting it's like it's different it's different it's like oh this is a wine although oh this is blueberry oh this is a cider there's more flavor in this than you would expect for something as low as this is you know what let me let me give an ABV I don't think we did an ABV yet so we started at 1.042 and it ended at 0.998 um that's 0.044 times 131.25 because this is lower that's why I use that number it's 5.77 with roughly 0.3 added for the priming sugar that we didn't do yet it's going to be like a six percent so it's it's pretty reasonable it's not high or low it's like smack in the middle of normalcy but it needs sweetness that is the one thing it absolutely needs as it is right now it actually reminds me of many of the commercial sliders we've tried the dry ones the dry ones yeah uh but that's not our preference no so I like sweets we're not going to stop there so that means I have to get the bag out again and if you've ever seen any of our shows where we sweeten things we always sweeten blindly what and what I mean by that is we sweetened to taste okay so we're gonna add enough sweetener until it tastes the way we like it now you've probably heard me saying sweetener sweetener sweetener I didn't say sugar there's a good reason for that we are not sweetening with sugar today today we are actually going to be using allulose as you could see because I put the bag down backwards I was meant to put that towards me I was wondering like why is this side empty but it's okay allulose is a non-fermentable sugar which means we can add as much as we want and it's not going to ferment this any further and that's important when you're carbonating because carbonation is a tiny fermentation so to be as safe as possible we had just enough actual fermentables the priming sugar to ferment it to carbonate but not so much that it can explode and make you know bottle bombs it's all about control you want to be as much in control of this organic natural process as possible and so that's why we're gonna limit the variables so they give you a little spoon and what's amazing is somehow there is alulose inside the package but the spoon can I'm not going to use the spoon for this it would take forever so I'm not going to give you a measurement as to how much allulose we're adding instead we're going to taste this as we go and we're going to give you a final reading on the sweetness level because non-fermentable sugars do show up as gravity beans but I'm going to guess allulose tends to be about 60 to 70 percent of Swedish sugar so I guess with like a quarter pound to start by the way if you're curious yes you can use erythritol if you prefer we actually found allulose to be a little bit more like sugar yeah we did a test that I I will that test in the description below in case you're curious to see what our results were so I'm going to need my magic spoon of stirring all right and you just want to mix that in allulose in particular dissolves very easily yeah it's a really fine powder more than a granule so it it uh and there's a little bit of gas in here too so I'm degassing a little bit at the same time not super critical but it does get some of the bad gases out so you can put in some new gases that somehow don't taste as bad as the bad gases don't ask me how that works but I know that during actual fermentation there's harsher compounds made and they sit in it longer so it doesn't taste as good at least that's my story and I'm sticking to it all right so now that it's mixed we take another quick sample and what we're doing with this process of adding a little bit then making sure it's well mixed and then sampling it is we're dialing it in we're making sure that we get to the point of where we're happy where we're satisfied because the next step is basically carbonating and bottling it so there's no more room to improve it and needs more and it's just wash rinse repeat more like poor Shake repeat and I in irons when we are creating something that we want to be very forward in this case we want it to taste like blueberries we find that if it's not sweet it really doesn't read as a berry now sweet has many different connotations to some people what we consider sweet is overly sweet to others what we consider sweet isn't sweet enough so that's why we like the idea of Sweden to taste and if you sweetened to your own taste that's totally cool we're going to give you a final gravity reading so you can Sweden to our taste if you so choose but it also gives you a reference point for what our sweetness is to what yours is plus the advantage to this method is you get to taste it about eight times if you do it right still needs more definitely has a berry and an apple flavor the Apple's coming through pretty strong shocking the berries though are definitely a note in there more sweetness how much do you put in at a time well that's largely up to you um this time I played it a little safer in the beginning and now I'm going a little fast and loose with it because I know it needs a lot more than what I put in so there you have it the only addition that I'm gonna do to that is it's it's totally fine to keep adding but it's certainly more tricky to take away like how do you do that you don't I don't think you can you can dilute it that's about the only thing you can really do you don't want to do that we're getting there definitely getting there yeah I think it's just Just a Touch nothing glad you agree needed that last little bit a little bit in the same now in the past we have shown sweetening with fermentable sugars and priming and letting it go for so long to build up pressure for carbonation and then pasteurizing we found that that's very unpredictable and inconsistent some people never get carbonation when they bottle pasteurize or bottle carbonate so they have trouble with that method and we started to feel like that's not necessarily the safest way to go because it's very easy to get a bottle bomb and even if you don't it's very easy for those bottles to explode when you actually try to pasteurize them so it's not really a method we recommend it's some of the older videos that we have that have that method in them we're going to recreate those with the newer method using some non-fermentable sugars it's not my favorite thing to do I don't really like to use non-fermentable sugars but in this case it is the safest method I could find until we get Adept at keg carbonating which is a whole different thing and we would like to bring that to the channel we're just kind of afraid because it does incur some extra cost for people so we don't know so if that's necessarily something we want to do or not let me know in the comments below if you'd like to see us do that I do have a one gallon keg thing that I played with once and it didn't really work right for me but hey if people want it we'll figure it out make it work it's definitely coming across more blueberry now um the blueberry Apple thing mixed together it's almost coming across a little bit as a sour I get just a twinge of a sour in there it's interesting it's possible we got some wild yeast in there or something yeah all right at least a little bit more a little bit more a little bit more you heard the lady if she wants a tweeter I'm never going to argue because usually I'm the one that wants it sweeter and she doesn't so I guess that last little bit that I did before just wasn't enough so I took the spoon out thinking that was going to be the end I'm channeling Willy Wonka it needs to be sweeter yeah okay plus another advantage to this method of sweetening with non-fermentables is you don't have to pasteurize so you just bottle condition them and they can sit we put them in a container for a while we'll get more into that in a minute and they can just sit there for months if you want to until they're ready to be drank no big deal the only thing I do recommend is Chill them before you open them because that keeps the CO2 more into the liquid and gives you a nice bubbly carbonated fresh refreshing drink without it being all over your lap I think I like it what do you think cold with some carbonation to that I think that's going to be really really nice it's going to be very crisp and refreshing it's sweet but not overly so yeah I'm guessing hold on I gotta give my guess needs its own taste I'm guessing we went to 1.018 that's what I think let's find out time for reading the moment of truth I said 1.018 uh I'm a little bit off I don't know I'm Losing My Edge it's 1.022 I'm off by Four Points still it's in the realm of sweet or ciders and such without going overly so um and I'm going to go on record as saying that the Four Points differences because it's allulose and not real sugar that's my story and I'm sticking to it so now that that part is done this Brew is completed okay this is the way we want it to taste so now we need to bottle carbon for that we need to add a little bit more sugar and in that I'm going to use white sugar that I've dissolved in water now how much sugar there are charts and tables online and if you know exactly how much of the pressure or carbonation there's a name for it I forget the term you want then you can use one of those charts and figure it out there's a wide range of safe range and we use one that's smash back in the middle just happens to be 28 grams which is exactly one ounce now that's by weight not by volume and it is very important you weigh this with a scale that can weigh out to like tenths of a gram I mean you want this to be really really accurate because if you go several grams too high you could over pressurize okay so that's that's important I just put it in I don't know maybe an ounce and a half of water and mix it up that way it mixes through this much much easier let me get out my magical spoon here and just give that a stir through and the reason why this is our preferred method of adding the carbonation sugar to our Brew versus adding a small amount to a smaller vessel is that the variances are going to be drastically different so here we know we have the exact amount that we need in the full amount of the liquid and so then we can bottle from here and know that each bottle is going to have the same amount of potential carbonation whereas if we put that little tiny bit Yeah like they used to say put a teaspoon of sugar in each bottle that's what she's referring to it's a smaller volume to start off with because you already have a bottle Plus plus the little inconsistencies are going to be a larger ratio in that high so because you know measure out a teaspoon 15 times and then weigh them I bet you they come out vastly different now this isn't something we always do but I'm going to in this case because this is set for a couple more weeks than maybe I would have liked I'm going to use what's what I'm calling Insurance yeast it doesn't really matter what yeast you use it could be bread yeast it could be wine yeast ale yeast whatever this happens to be so4 as an open Package I'm going to just sprinkle a little bit on top and what I mean by Insurance yeast is because this has been sitting we've had issues before where things didn't carbonate when they sat too long now is there enough yeast in there to make it work without me adding any probably probably that's the thing probably I don't have time for probably I want to know so I put in just a little bit of yeast and I'm gonna mix that through so we call it Insurance yeast it's just enough to get that little bit of fermentation going to carbonate our bottles I just want to mix that through so that it is a little bit in every bottle and it's already gone just like that so now I'm going to clear away the items that went to the bottling process okay we have 4 000 milliliters or 132 ounces I use my calculator and got 8.25 16 ounce bottles from that we happen to be using our swing Top beer bottles some of them are colored which is going to be a pain when I'm trying to bottle them and some of them are clear which is going to be my preferred ones however what we're going to do is bodilies just like you've seen us do a million times I'm going to use a bottling wand I'm going to put it on the end of the hose of our Auto siphon stick it on about a half inch hand it to my lovely partner here get all my bottles ready dump out any extra foam star sand and stuff that's in them by the way these are all you know sanitized if you didn't figure that out they were they were sanitized and then I'm going to use the crotchler method because it works let me get set up here I have a bottle for you all right well I need two yep I saw you grab one so and then are you ready I'm ready did you take the cap off I did not gotta take the cap off no wastage my fingers are are very very much sanitized so don't because yeah she was just in turbos it was elbow deep and turbo and then we bottle see when we're done all right so we have our eight lovely filled bottles and all that's left is to put our fancy schmancy masking tape and Sharpie labels on them telling us what's in them and then what do we do with them we're going to store them in what we call our bomb shelter and basically it's just a heavy duty tub with a lid where we can put them in there just in case something bad occurs and by bad I mean Kaboom it explodes yeah and that would be due to over pressurization now actually in this case it wouldn't be due to over pressurization it would be due to faulty bottles yes because there's not going to be enough pressure build up in these because we measured the sugars for that to occur but if the bottle had a flaw that we didn't see if there was a chip or a crack that we didn't notice that's how it could happen so even when you think you're safe be extra safe use the plastic tote like we do keeps things from embedding in your skin and then roughly a week maybe two we will check on these to make sure that they did carbonate because carbonation again as Brian said earlier is a mini fermentation so it could take just a couple of days to a couple of weeks usually ours happen in seven to ten days but your mileage may vary we know some people it takes a month and other people get it done in like three days depends on your situation that you keep them in and the Brew itself sometimes some Brews just do it a little bit faster we have in the past tried the plastic bottle trick and we found that not to be reliable and by that I mean taking a soda bottle a small soda bottle that was plastic and that used to hold soda and you empty the soda and you clean the bottle and you sanitize the bottle and you put some of your Brew in it and that way when you squeeze it and it's nice and firm in theory that means they're carbonated we did that and it wasn't so we don't use them I think it's very unreliable the only way that it can sort of kind of work is if you have like an original bottle that hasn't been opened of that same liquid and the same exact bottle but we're not human densitometers so it's really hard because it'll feel firm but then when you pop it open it might not have much carbonation so how do you know you guessed you pop won't open that's the only way that we found I mean if anybody has a more Surefire way of knowing that it's carbonated let me know but usually just play it safe give it a couple more weeks than you think however once you've done this process and your particular environment you'll have a better idea of basically how long it should take and that will help save some of your Brews but once you pop one open you're just gonna have to drink it all yeah oh no anyway so these are going to go in the bomb shelter and we'll see in a couple weeks for the tasting all right so this has been carbonating for a couple weeks and it put in the refrigerator for what like a day or two yeah it's the moment of truth let's find out did a carbonate a little bit a little tiny pop um which you know that's that signifies carbonation and this is 1.022 yeah there's bubbles 1.022 final gravity so it's on the sweeter side and it's six percent so it's a reasonable ABV here beautiful color look at that color it's a lovely like yeah there's there's carbonation in there it's definitely uh purpley red oh it's gorgeous that is beautiful looks like blueberry to me can you see that let me see if I can do the white thing see ooh fancy now it's coming out a lot redder on that but it's kind of like a purpley so color like we said I'm absolutely gorgeous Clarity beautiful Clarity fantastic a little monkey yeah there's something something funky in that nose a little funky we usually get that from apple cider that doesn't that doesn't or that has like ascorbic or citric acid Queen yeah it is but that's not in the taste whatever Funk is on that smell didn't come through in the taste taste prize has got a lovely sweetness a little bit of sharpness from the acidity level uh good blueberry flavor it's got a really nice fruity flavor there's enough sweetness here to carry it through now when we talk about the funk I I want to to go further into this and I want to travel backwards at a time I'm going to get into my Tardis it's bigger on the inside and I'm gonna go baby the back back back to a time where Brian and I went to Total Wine and More and did a tour of France was it yeah yeah and wine and it was us and a lot of old people much more mature people is the term I was going to use who literally went there for free food and alcohol oh it's not free I believe went there mostly for the snacks because they did do food pairings with it normally you just get a little plate we actually overheard some people in our area that are like oh yeah this is my dinner and I'm just like seriously people people anyway so Brian and I didn't eat very much because we didn't want to deprive these people of their dinner and because we were the last to get up and there wasn't really much left for us yeah uh so we had our scorecards and we were just getting sillier and silly Arizona new word of the day right now these are words that come out of Derek's mouth and we started reading the wines based on their footnotes and we we were joking and how footy they were so if you've seen our old videos we talk about how footy is your fermentation and there was not away from that because it's a negative connotation that we really didn't like right and some people called us out on it said that wasn't cool and they were right and they're right but this is totally funny but the problem I have with that is that your sense of smell is very closely tied in with your sense of taste and those perceptions come together to create a flavor profile so because I'm still smelling it because I'm tasting it I feel like I'm getting some of the footnotes in the beverage itself but I think it's really just the aroma my theory on that though I think this got a britainomyces infection um it wasn't very strong and it somehow died out I don't know wow is this this is the one we used whole blueberries yep and we did the whole we used Canon tablets and everything is it possible something snuck through yeah yeah I am going to do True Confession time here and Brian's probably going to kick me under the table but the whole sit the fruit in a vat with that tablet crushed up in it just seemed wrong wrongly wrong to me and it wasn't just because there was a tablet in it it's just like we're not starting fermentation I understood why we weren't starting fermentation because the tablet was would kill the yeast because that's his job is to kill any outside bacteria or fungus or anything but it just seemed wrong just leave it there for was it two days they say 36 hours so we did 48. we we followed the rules we we did the measurements we used their recommendations and it just still seemed wrong to me and well it's not a technique that we use often we did it in two videos mostly just to show this is what you would do if you only had access to fresh fruit now my personal preference would have been take that fresh fruit and freeze it for a month and then thaw it and use it because you're going to get a lot more out of it that way um I'm I can't say that I'm a huge fan of the Canon tablet method but it works it did the job I do believe we got some sort of infection in this now this is the thing with infections not every infection is going to be bad or taste bad or be most of them aren't even dangerous right this had no indication visually that there was an infection yeah the only thing is on the smell and I seem to remember when we were tasting it for the pre whatever penultimate tasting that I said I think this got a little bit sour there's nothing wrong with that because anytime you have like a sour beer or sour sauce that's potential mycies that's that's what did it um it it's not vinegarization because that's a whole different thing yep does not smell like vinegar at all it has a it doesn't smell like blueberry in any way okay it has a a harsher not altogether pleasant smell and that's why she's saying foot but this isn't even foot this is like this is sour it's a sour smell and that makes me think we got a breath infection in here but it wasn't very strong because it does not seem to have affected the flavor at all and it never shows normally when you get a bread you get yeah you know something like oh and then you research it and like oh yeah it's bread uh we never had any signs of that whatsoever so that's my guess okay uh without scientific study in a lab or something we probably could never really know but I don't think it affected the flavor which it's just that's a little perplexing that the smell is I mean they are night and day different if I didn't smell this and tasty I'd be like oh wow this is great but then you smell it and you go there's no way that's the same thing see what I'm saying like they're they don't go together like if I hold my breath and taste it this tastes nice try to Exhale the entire time that I was a sipping that I just held my breath and tasted it and it's fantastic I felt like there was a residual and flavor maybe that was just some of the aroma cleaners I didn't know it was there I don't think you'd notice it but this the aroma though very unusual um I'm I'm gonna give this one two scores when we score it and I'm gonna give one of them right now and that is on the aroma from an aroma perspective this is like a one and a half no sir I don't like it yeah it's like a one and a half it's not making me wretch that's why I'm not making it a one it doesn't smell good but like I say if I hold my breath while holding my breath now see now that I'm breathing again and I exhale now I kind of get it on the flavor on the exhale but on the Sip it's sweet it's it's got the blueberry flavors it's got a little bit of carbonation it's got a little bit of acid it's well balanced everything about it is great I'm not even getting the watery sensation with this one that I get no no this is a little thicker more hibiscus just that smell oh wow if it wasn't for the smell this is like an eight to a nine to me absolutely absolutely but if I have to factor in the smell it's like I mean we might not even truly score this one we're just going to talk about it instead because I think it's better if I factor everything in this is like a four to a five for me it's a three because I'm super sensitive to smell and but if I separate them the smell makes it a one and a half the smells of one and a half the flavor is like a nine they're two separate beverages so that's why when you average them together I get like a four and a half to a five yeah this is really perplexing it really is I I don't so the only takeaway I can have with this is go with my gut instinct because my gut instinct actually rarely leads me astray so I'm one of those lucky few um and if I collect fruit from our garden which I do frequently if I collect fruit from a you pick if I have a collect fruit from the grocery store and it's fresh I'm going to wash them thoroughly I'm going to put them in a nice clean sterile bag and I'm gonna toss those bad boys in the freezer yeah and I think that's something we need to revisit we need to do this one again using frozen fruit instead of the fresh fruit and camel towels because I think that's what's going on so if we have more of these let's leave at least one okay and we will redo this and come back with one I mean we don't have to even show the whole video we could do like a shorter version and then just do the taste test between the two at the end yeah I'm cool with that because I think that's what happened there's this got some sort of an infection that didn't fully take somehow that that which doesn't make any sense but it's not affecting the flavor like the flavor nice it's really good but the smell it's just not good so yeah or freezer fruit yeah freezer fruit thanks for watching we'll see we'll see me studying Bruce [Music] [Music]

Channel: City Steading Brews

Views: 115,602

Keywords: blueberry cider, how to make blueberry cider, apple cider, hard cider, blueberry cider recipe, hard cider homebrew

Id: UoOYwaMZ-2U

Length: 52min 36sec (3156 seconds)

Published: Sun May 21 2023