How to Make Strawberry Cider - Finishing and Bottling

it's time to put some strawberry in that strawberry cider [Music] back on june 10th of 2020 today by the way is july 9th for those of you keeping track we actually made this strawberry cider which means it's about you know four weeks old now no problem so it should be ready for the next phase where it becomes strawberry cider right now it's just sire which isn't a bad thing and before anybody starts getting on me for the technicalities of the names yes technically this would be wine okay because we started with a 1.100 gravity which will put this in the like 12 to 15 range for alcohol yes i know it's really a wine we're calling it cider anyway so how do we make this into a strawberry cider fairly simple add strawberries done right well you'd think so but not really because even when we were trying to plan this out we were like okay we know we want to have a full gallon of end product but because this is already fermented and now we're adding whole fruit we really don't want to have a lot of air space head space because that could lead to problems which we've had in the past so brian peaches mostly brian used his gray matter and decided that we were going to use a wide mouth one gallon jar put our strawberries in first and then fill to appropriate with the cider because we know the cider on its own is a-okay to drink and that way anything that's extra goes in our bellies and we're happy so firstly everything that we're going to use today was sanitized in the red [ __ ] i think you get wilder with that every time now energy you gotta have energy and we're going to rack this from this container into the wine mount but not quite yet so let me just put this out of the way okay as you can tell we are in florida because we have publix strawberries this is two pounds of whole frozen strawberries am i gonna mash them up no am i gonna cut them up no am i gonna do anything to them other than dump them into a jar no one thing i'd like you to know though before i put them in there is the ingredients list for these strawberries ingredients strawberries that's it nothing else that's why i purchased these strawberries i'm just going to open them up and unceremoniously dump strawberry now these are partially thawed at this point they've been sitting in this bowl for a while they're not totally thawed just mostly thought actually not even most now if our strawberry plants produce enough strawberries for us to make this from our own homegrown ones we've of course done that but we would have still put them in the freezer because freezing as we have mentioned before breaks down the cell walls of the strawberries making them look less than appealing but helps for the juices to get out and intermingle and flavor your beverage when they're frozen you don't have to cut them up now i'm going to make an executive decision here we had initially thought that two pounds of strawberries was going to be what we needed i don't think so i think one pound is going to be enough so you know what that means we have more strawberries for something else are you dessert for derricka well i yes you are in case you're wondering why i made that decision well you know i think i did two pounds last time i did it it might have been one pound i'm not really sure we were trying to recreate that beverage and i just looked at this and i said if i put two pounds of strawberries in there that's like a third of the container this is not for fermentation this is just for flavoring smells like strawberries to me if i was to make a pulp out of this this would be plenty to flavor this much cider because after all we want it to still be cider not strawberry juice so next step is going to be rocking from the original fermenter right into here plus if i put two pounds in there there'd be no room for this for racking we're going to be using our latest cast member will the white bucket of levitation and i'm very sorry that was my total cheesy announcer voice i don't know where that came from as always when we rack we put something higher something lower and then remove the bung put that back into turbos and we get an auto siphon i like using an auto siphon to rack and here's why first it's cheap it's efficient and it gets the job done with no real mess and i don't have to put my mouth on the end of that getting germs in there i don't have to worry about filling with tubes with water and all this other stuff i don't need any electricity it just works now when i say cheap it's like 15 or 20 bucks it's really just not that much money a lot of people fight me on the auto syphon i don't know why it's kind of like hey here's a wheel it's the best machine ever well i can come up with a better one okay we've been using it for 10 000 years maybe not the auto siphon all right when racking you want to be careful because there is a ton of sediment in this one and i do not want that going in here although because this is still just a conditioning phase it's not that critical it's okay we're going to have to rack again i go about halfway down and get it going this cider has not actually cleared yet either which is kind of interesting it's been a month you'd think it'd start clearing right don't worry about it we're about to confuse it even more it's just going to have all kinds of stuff in there we got the pyrex measuring cup just in case there was any extra however looking at this i don't think there's really going to be the idea though is we want it to be as close to the surface as possible we want as little oxygen contact as we can get we're getting very very close i'm not expecting this to ferment anymore all right i'm going to stop it right there because once it comes out of that tube we're very very close to the top okay the racking process is done the level of the liquid is like right here there's just about no extra air space and yeah i know i'm talking over the liquid it's okay i'm gonna put a lid on it and we're gonna stick an air lock in there with sanitizer liquid in it and some people would say you don't need to do this in secondary i disagree if there's any off-gassing or anything happening i really you know these thin wool glass containers they're not really made to hold carbonation so i much prefer to see an air lock in there it also tells me it's a better safe than sorry yeah and that's what a lot of brewing really is is better safe than sorry i mean can you do it other ways sure because you know what i can just take that whole vessel and pour it right into a bottle i could do it from five feet up two and just make sure that it goes right in but it's probably not the safest way to do it for a variety of reasons you know one being falling off the ladder to be five feet up never mind the fact that i'd be oxidizing it and all other things but just because you can doesn't mean you should in a lot of cases and i just i don't know all the effort that went into this a month's time so far why risk it use an auto siphon do it properly and you'll have a much safer brew that nothing's going to go wrong so what's gonna happen with this now it's gonna go sit for a few weeks probably two to three weeks we will check on it from time to time to make sure that there's no fuzzy business happening with the strawberries a word of i want to say caution but it's really not caution i just want to forewarn you that when you're fermenting or brewing with strawberries they like to release their color turning almost completely white which if you're not prepared for may freak you out just a bit yeah i believe some of that is because well you know it's entirely possible that somebody might have gassed these a little bit for extra color or something like that it's possible but they do they turn completely pure white and that's totally normal and it's okay if you look this is already starting to change color it's turning a little bit more pink this will probably be very pink by the time it's done then we will see you in a little bit to go over that oops we did it again well sort of we intentionally didn't take a reading on this because it's been sitting for a month it's probably done no need to worry about it because it's just not that critical at this juncture in time however i thought you know people might want to know might want to follow along so let's take a reading and see what our gravity is we did add the strawberries in so that's going to throw it off some but it's all right doesn't really matter it's more for curiosity's sake than anything and they haven't had that much time in there it's only been you know a couple minutes and my initial suspicion is correct right now it's reading 1.010 now if i can assume that a little bit of sugars got into this from the strawberries let's say it might have been at like 1.000 which puts this as a solid 13.1 percent or even 13.5 percent using just the rough math that i like to use now which by the way that simple gravity measurement versus abv is in parentheses original gravity minus final gravity times 135. why 135 well because 131.25 just seemed more inaccurate the higher we went in gravity and it just got weird so i said 135 make it simple i can do that in my head no big deal that's my story and i'm sticking to it so today what we want to do is get these strawberries out of here they were put in on july 9th today's july 28th it's a little bit longer than i really wanted but uh it's okay nothing should have happened i believe fermentation still occurred i did crack that lid as i was bringing it in here so that's why you see the pressure difference but um i didn't actually like remove anything or anything like that yet but what we want to do is get this lid off and we're going to take a reading before we remove the strawberries because actually we're going to do a strawberryectomy first yeah i want to show you what these strawberries actually look like no that is not just bad color on your television that is really the color they are it's kind of like a whitish grayish purple but if you look they have actually imparted a lot of their color into that cider which is pretty awesome if you ask me so we showed that to you on purpose because they don't look very good but that's normal but that's normal that way in case you did this and you're following along at home and your strawberries look like that you don't throw it out because there's nothing wrong with them they just don't look appetizing at all so i sanitized the tongs because i knew this was going to be my method of strawberry removal um i have much harsher methods yeah fast though he likes to think that wouldn't he but i don't normally do most of the cleanup so we have this rule in our household and this is what's gotten us through a lot um whoever cares most and when you think about it that applies to almost any situation if you ever say where do you want to go or what do you want to do what do you want to eat how do you want to do this how do you want to take care of this situation if one of the two people meaning us is not really fussed either way if the other one actually does have an opinion and cares about the situation that's the choice that we go with now if we both care that's when things get a little bit interesting and we end up convincing each other but nine times out of ten what we end up doing is i fight my side she fights her side i say fight i explain my sign she explains her side and we realize that we're actually saying the exact same thing coming from slightly different viewpoints and we get very excited about it and our voices grow in volume and then tigger has to get in between us and yell at me yep yell at her notice that you'll let her tigger's daddy's little girl she defends me by the way if you don't know who tigger is she is our calico cat one of our seven cats but she would be very vociferous when we are you which we don't really argue no you just get loud yeah all right she's going to keep pulling strawberries out strawberryectomy is complete alrighty so what i want to do now is take a reading get a little sample see how it is now we're taking a reading because i want to see if it re-fermented after the last time because we did add fruit which is sugars which is fermentable so there is a possibility of re-fermentation it's not quite as clear as i would like it to be but it is still fairly young so you know i'm going to give that some time and see how it does when we last checked it it was 1.010 and right now i'm going to say it's 1.012 which means it's about two points higher than it was at that point which means most likely it didn't re-firm it but it is possible that it did a little bit because the strawberries would add some sugars to it so it could have re-fermented yeah so because this still needs some time it's totally okay but we now have a gauge of where it is now to know when it's done and i'm going to pour off a little sample for us to taste whoo that was risky you can kind of tell from the size of the samples how i feel about the brew you tell we might like this one when they're little teeny tiny samples like half a sip means we probably aren't going to like it but yeah like i said it's a little cloudy still which that's normal i mean it's not that old yet this was started on june 10th so i mean the whole thing is only seven weeks old very strong strawberry smell like fresh strawberry wow that's that's actually really impressive oh yeah way strong like we did this is based off of a strawberry cider that we made once before this has much more strawberry scent it actually smells like my sister's strawberry shortcake doll when i was a kid which is to say almost a fake strawberry smell but those are real strawberries it has an unusual flavor profile because you get a little bit of the weird young apple which never is a good thing but then the strawberries in there you're like oh yeah strawberry and then the weird apple comes back and you're like is this good is this bad is it just young yes it's a very light uh cider it's not as rich and heady as the other one that we were trying to clone i think this is nicer actually it's a little more refreshing sparkling this would be awesome i don't know if we can make this sparkling at this point yeah uh let me let me see if we can make this sparkling let me see what the uh what the abv is here oh yeah we used save hill s04 it's already 12 that's past what safe lso4 should be able to do so i'm going to say we probably cannot make this sparkling at this point no sparkles for me but i have club soda over there so when i pour this i can do a mixed drink with club soda get my sparkles and my strawberry cider all in one this is really quite nice though i think with a little bit of age let it clear out this is going to be absolutely wonderful so let's get a lid back on this and interlock all right so i got my notes going right back on this is going to go under the desk for another couple weeks we'll take another reading at that point and we'll see you then so it's been two weeks and we're ready to take another hydrometer reading and then we're going to sample it to see if it's ready for bottles now at this point this is a long-running cider it's been about three months almost to the day but there's a lot of reasons behind that there was so much stuff in here that needed to settle out that's why we gave this a lot of extra time most ciders don't take anywhere near this amount of time had we used pure juice it would have been a lot quicker too so we're just going to take a reading which means taking the cap off today we're using i just named it that i just got it like it literally got off the truck like an hour ago he's so proud i just think this is awesome the other one that we used i had to do like four squirts to get this full this one it's like one i see the comics section exploding i am careful with what stays in the comment section see look at that it fills it in like one shot i mean that's just awesome but it didn't because i need more it'll take me a little while to get used to it [Music] okay i did spill a couple of drops but it's okay every drop is sacred yeah i can see the comment section on that now all right so this was 1.012 when we last checked it today it is um 0.994 so here's what i think we should do we should rack this to a three liter bottle okay and let it sit for a little bit longer because the fact that it dropped again makes me a little bit nervous about it still fermenting so it's not ready to bottle but i am going to take a little sample anyway i'm also thinking we might want to back sweetness because it's really dry i'm not sure if we're going to like it so let's just let's just taste it and see what we think let's do this it has that dry young smell now i just brushed my teeth brian is now questioning some life choices whoa i do not recommend brushing your teeth and then tasting this so my evaluation of this is completely useless so for me when i smell it i smell strawberries and that makes me happy because i really like strawberries now contrary to that brian isn't as excited about strawberries i like them fine they're not my favorite thing in the world so that may have slanted his viewpoint on this particular but everything the toothpaste that in the toothpaste it's dry it's dry it has that sharpie stringency that you attribute to dryness um so yeah without going into further rotation notes because that's not that's not what this video is about i'm going to say yeah let's backsweep okay so let me just calculate what it is now um abv wise because we used so4 which could continue to ferment uh oh wow one point one zero zero starting how did we get one point oh the juice was one point zero five two okay one 1.100 minus 0.994 so so4 yeast went to 14 it's only supposed to go to 10 so and that it's at least that because the strawberries would have added some too so i'm guessing we can probably back sweeten with impunity here i don't think that's gonna be a problem if we're going to back sweeten that's going to add to our volume do we want to rack and then back sweeten before yeah we're going to rack it back so we can get rid of some of that lease do you want to go back to a while i think we could probably go back to a wide mouth depending on what we end up with when we rack i'm just going to dump this sample right back into this new clean fermenter and why am i able to do that because these have been sanitized in someone made a comment on our channel recently about i wonder what brand of sanitizer they used back in the 1100s they didn't we all know that they didn't and repeatedly saying that oh they didn't do this 5000 years ago really doesn't make it right to ignore sanitization today because i would hazard to guess that back then they made a lot of pretty nasty tasting brew but they didn't throw it away or dump it down the drain like we might today because it was expensive and it was all they had they made wines meads and stuff like that as preservation of food as much as something to drink to get drunk so they wouldn't have wasted it therefore they would have realized probably over time that being cleaner was better while they didn't understand sanitization as we do today they probably would have used the cleanest methods they knew of okay probably with a little bit of superstition and things like that in there too but they would have done the best they could it is also my understanding that the vikings actually were are more clean people most europeans they believed in bathing on us on my regular basis yeah but the vikings weren't the only ones making needs and why sure i know but i'm just saying that they have a better understanding or appreciation of hygiene yeah i can appreciate that one may think so what i think is that today we get more successful brews more consistently successful brews and maybe even better tasting brews because ours don't have that little bit of sourness to them or a little bit of an infection and i still believe that that's why uh a plain old mead was probably never made because they might have gone a little sour most times or had a little bit of an off flavor or whatever so they hid that with spices and with fruits and things like that it made it taste better so that's why they did it to say though that oh we shouldn't sanitize today because they didn't 10 000 years ago that's kind of disingenuous i just don't understand that but that kind of comment happens every once in a while on our channel and i just kind of roll my eyes and laugh and give that basic soliloquy back to them now i know some of you are probably watching this going wow that's really cloudy yes it is yeah and we're okay with that strawberries have a lot of pectin and the cloudiness actually doesn't affect flavor i don't on something like this i don't even care a lot of people get really crazy about the clarity thing and it just doesn't make sense to me we did a video on it i just i've never found clarity to be an issue this is about as cloudy as i find something to not be offensive to me though like if it had bits floating in it that's different this isn't chunky it's just cloudy there's a difference now this is our second racking of this i'm being careful but not super careful because a little bit of stuff getting in there isn't that big of a deal i want to get as much product as i can because we are going to add some sugar to this in just a minute and there we go lost next to nothing as you can see this is still right up to the shoulders we're good i am going to add some sugar into that and then um that'll be there okay so we're going to add some sugar to this now and you know going back and forth in my head i was thinking okay if we do half a pound of sugar that brings that 0.994 up to like a 1.017 if it doesn't ferment further that gives us a reasonably sweet flavor it actually you know as i'm smelling it more it has a good flavor component to it already the base is good so i don't want to go overly sweet but i do think this might ferment it just a little bit more because it did drop down to 0.94 even though so4 shouldn't but you know what this is just another example of yeast don't read yeah we didn't teach them to read this time so they don't know the rules anyway half a pound of sugar we're using pure cane sugar you can use white sugar corn sugar whatever you want so now because we added more sugar i need to stir this now if you notice i did not degas this yet it was mostly degassed already but i noticed as i was pouring the sugar in there was some bubbles coming up so there's a little bit of gas in here still which is good that helps with us being able to do this but if you notice the way i'm stirring i'm not sloshing it around i'm not making a lot of extra waves or introducing more air to this now our abv is at such a height that we really aren't worried about vinegar occurring but oxygenating a brew is bad regardless because it can create odd flavors now we say that it's bad some people actually have said that they've done that and it gives like a sherry flavor to things if you like that you can try it and it's a good experiment we might do it someday not this time though because you know strawberry cider cherried i don't know just doesn't work for me whenever you introduce sugar crystals to a brew what you want to do after you mix it for a while is stop and see what happens does it does anything settle to the bottom like that yeah there's there's some settle on the bottom it's okay you just stir a little bit more what i am going to want to do though is take another reading on this so that we have a record and we can test this in another week or two and see if it stays because if it doesn't if it doesn't change at this point now it's ready to bottle because now it's a skilled product that's ready to go but we just want to make sure it isn't going to continue fermenting this is a really good test slash example of hey you know what things don't always go exactly as planned we didn't know that yeast was going to do that how could we possibly know but we know what to do had we bottled this right now it could have kept fermenting a little bit there wasn't much sugar left really to ferment so it could have been okay but we probably wanted it sweeter so that's why we added some sugar but if i just bottle it right now what if it ferments again that's the thing you need to learn with brewing is know what's safe and what's not could we do it it'll be just fine very likely but i don't want to take that chance i'd rather not have that chance of a bottle exploding another week or two in here doesn't hurt me and if it does if that bothers you you need to make more bruise what i mean by make more bruises have several going at once so that you don't feel the need to have to babysit or do this one early or anything like that you can let them have their time let them do what they're supposed to do time heals all brews and as i said it should be 10 17 it's actually 10 18 1.018 so close enough um we added the eleventh and i'm just gonna pour this right back in everything's been sanitized everything's clean i'm not really worried about the little bit of oxygenation that could possibly happen from that not with something that's like 15 alcohol so we're just gonna put the lid back on let this sit for another week or two and we'll see you then all right so we have done a bunch of stuff to this we put strawberries in it we took strawberries out of it we racked it we added more sugar just recently just a couple weeks ago so uh let's see where it's at before anyone asks no it did not clear well you know what i'm okay with that i don't know why i'm okay with that because i know don't change a thing i also know that this smells incredible right now now if you're wondering why i'm taking this last reading it's because we recently added half a pound of sugar to this couple weeks ago and i want to make sure that it didn't ferment any further that way we know it's safe to bottle and look at that 1.018 it has not moved at all which means perfect this is ready to go so i'm just going to pour this into our picture of racking i don't know we don't have names for everything it's a picture we put stuff in it and if you're wondering why i'm using a picture it's because this is cloudy i can't see to the bottom and i want to know am i getting lease am i not getting lease so i want to make sure that i just get all the good stuff leave the lease behind and that way when we bottle it's totally safe to do so when wrecking we use wibble the white bucket of levitation hello sorry i don't do jazz hands and all you want to do when you're racking or anytime you're going to use a siphon is you put one vessel higher one vessel lower you get your tube set up now you can just use a regular tube if you don't have an auto siphon auto syphon is the easiest way to get it going i'm just going to put this in about halfway down i like to start halfway down that way i can kind of get a feel for what's in there give it a few pumps and it should be going there's about like the slightest hint of dust there's not even dust at the bottom it's like a suggestion of dust at the bottom it's just very very little lease in there and that's it so i'm just going to take this and put it right into the pitcher and get this bottle out of the way put the pitcher up on top now i do need to apply the bottling wand bottling wand we talk about these all the time it's just an extra piece of tubing that has a little spring loaded tip on the end to let liquid flow or not flow depending on how far into the bottle you have it so bottling versus racking pretty much the same thing just in bottling you're putting it into 10-year little containers and you use a bottling wand usually you don't have to but it does make it a lot neater because that way it'll stop the liquid pour and you can go to the next bottle without spilling any all over the place or without having to mess with clamps and crimping hoses and all that kind of crazy stuff something i did want to point out though this is a very simple calculation for abv we might have mentioned it in the previous part of the video but it started at 1.100 original gravity and it ended at 0.994 that gives us a number i forget what it is it's like 1.006 but anyway the calculation is here and the end abv is 14.3 percent so this is pretty good especially considering this is safeal so4 it's supposed to be like 10 so it went 4 above and beyond yeast tend to do that when they have a lot of nutrition or in a really good environment um i'm just going to start the bottling and maybe i'll continue talking that i want to point something out to you guys too you see this little cap on the end here someone just recently said if you're in a an environment that doesn't have any lease you can take it off that way your siphon goes all the way to the bottom why didn't i think of that before now just remember when you're using a bottling wand you have to push down inside the bottle or else it will not start i got it and really really simple you probably can't see too much of that liquid let me say no you can't see it i'll just put my finger at the side here to show you and it rises up it rises up i stop when it gets to about here because the bottling wand itself is displacing the liquid to make it appear higher and we want it to get pretty far up in the water here we go here we go here we go and right there and take it out he stopped here but once he took the bottling wand out the level went back down to here and that's the perfect amount of head space we should have very limited oxidization in this and that's key now it's 14.3 percent the idea that this could become vinegar is pretty much not even a thought it can't we could get off funny flavors if you oxidize too much and some people have said that strawberry in particular when it sits too long does change and we did experience that the last strawberry cider after two years it wasn't as good as what it was when we first made it so uh that's something to be aware of and when you're doing this always pay attention to what you're doing because i almost overfilled that bottle we are using 16-ounce beer bottles today um why because it's what we had and this is a cider it's not going to be carbonated that's something that comes up a lot a lot of people seem to be thinking that we're making carbonated ciders all the time because we didn't show you a degassing well this sat long enough that it degassed naturally there was no gas in this normally if it was bubbly i would degas it but we tend to let our bruise go long enough lately that it's not really necessary if you wanted this to be carbonated well you can't on this one because we went so far past the east tolerance there's just no way those yeast would be like no can't do it we're just not gonna do it and you know it's just not gonna happen well you could but it would be more complicated yeah it's beyond the scope of what we're doing for this particular video i calculated out about eight bottles for this because we did get a full gallon of product pretty much so i'm expecting that we'll have pretty much eight full bottles we will see when we're done bottling okay again the bottles made a liar out of me we only got seven but there was enough left for uh you know a little sniffer here so uh we're gonna give you a taste well we're gonna take the taste we're gonna give you our opinion of it i smell like strawberry shortcake the doll when my when we were little my sister's balls that's kind of not quite as cheesy smelling like as fake strawberry but it does certainly have that kind of a smell she just took a quick taste oh there's nothing wrong with that nothing wrong with that at all it's got just enough sweetness to cut through the tart strawberry flavor but it's all strawberry tiny hint of the apple but not a lot i'm i don't want to to go into too much detail about this tasting because we will go into full detail in our tasting video but the surprise note that i'm getting from this is cotton candy you know yeah a little bit so what we're gonna do strawberry and cider like this although this is 14 this isn't really a cider anymore this is a strawberry apple wine we can put one of these away for a year just to see what happens i don't guarantee that it's going to be better but i'm curious to see what happens so one will get put away for a year one will be tasted in you know a week or two you'll see that soon and then the others we're gonna drink them but uh if you like this video we have about 300 videos on making wine cider mead and beer on our channel thank you for liking and subscribing and as always guys thanks for watching have a great day bye [Music] you

Channel: City Steading Brews

Views: 93,663

Keywords: citysteading, strawberry cider, finishing strawberry cider, strawberry ciderbottling, how to make strawberry cider, hard cider recipe, hard cider

Id: M3OhDe1KXmQ

Length: 36min 3sec (2163 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 27 2020