Hoppy Brewing

I made the cyser a couple of days ago. Nothing too crazy, here’s what I ended up with:

Spice Apple Cyser

Ingredients:

2.5 Gallons Fresh Pressed Apple Cider
4 lbs Clover Honey (from Costco)
Water to fill my 3 gallon carboy
Lalvin K1-V1116 Yeast reconstituted in a cup of water (80°) with a tablespoon of sugar

I will add nutmeg, clove and cinnamon to the secondary.

Method:

This time I went the path of least resistance. I just dumped the cider in the carboy, followed by the honey, followed by some water to fill, followed by the yeast. No heating or anything. It was awesome, it took like 10 minutes, but it led to a lot of shaking. What I mean is that if you poor honey in at 60°, it won’t mix with anything without a lot of force. But a good 5 minutes of shaking and it seemed that the yeast did the rest of the work for me.

Numbers:

Brewed 10/13/09
OG: 1.095

It smells wonderful and I am anxiously awaiting my first chance to give it a try!

The ferment just finished up a couple of days ago. It’s sitting at about 0.990 for the FG. That’s what I call bone dry. So I will rack it off, sulfate it to attempt to settle out any remaining yeast, and then add more honey to back sweeten it. I’ve never tried to kill a fermentation before, so I will keep you updated on how it goes. There’s nothing like exploding bottles of what is supposed to be a “still” drink.