blending juices for cider

I made my first cider almost a year ago, and enjoyed the experience. It was incredibly easy to do, and I was happy with how the final product turned out: a refreshing drink on its own, and an interesting alternative to beer.

I've been meaning to brew another cider, and I finally got around to it a few months back. This time I wanted to experiment with blending juices, to see how that would affect the final drink. Despite enjoying the first cider, it felt a bit simple, less-interesting than it could have been. I wanted to see if mixing in another juice would result in a more complex drink.



I decided to try adding in a little grape juice--hoping the sweetness of the juice would convert into a tartness that would enhance the crispness of the apples--and I settled on a mix of one quart of grape juice to two gallons of apple juice. I used the same yeast I'd used before--Red Star Pasteur Champagne, which is a very dry champagne yeast that removes virtually any sweetness from the drink, allowing the tart and sour flavors to shine forth.

The most interesting thing for me about adding the grape was how potent it is as an ingredient, how strongly it effects the aroma, flavor, and color of the final product. Despite there being 8 times more apple juice in the mix, the presence of the grape juice was undeniable.



Another interesting thing about the final drink was the way the aroma of the grapes carried through pretty much unchanged, despite the complete transformation of the grape flavor. It was fascinating, even slightly jarring, to bring the glass to your nose and smell sweet grapes, and then take a sip and experience absolutely no sweetness.

And one last little note: back in January of last year I tried brewing a poi beer, hoping to somehow capture the lovely color of the poi in final drink. In the end I failed to do it there, but to my surprise this apple-grape cider turned out to have pretty close to the exact color I'd been hoping for with that poi brew.



So try it. Start drinking purple!

breaking brews into batches

I made my first cider a while back, which left me with the four 1-gallon glass jugs that the apple juice had come in. I figured the jugs would be perfect "mini-carboys," and on Sunday I got a chance to try using one in that capacity.



I was finally getting around to bottling the Belgian-yeast beer I brewed almost two months ago. I'd left that beer sitting in secondary fermentation for six weeks because I wanted to see if an extended secondary would help mellow the yeast further before bottling--I've been having trouble with bottles over-carbonating and turning into gushers. I've collected a lot of lilikoi juice in that time, and I thought it would be cool to rack some of the Belgian beer onto a few ounces of lilikoi, to see how the flavors would blend.



So, after sanitizing one of the 1-gallon jugs, and pouring three ounces of pasteurized lilikoi juice into the bottle, I added about four-fifths of a gallon of beer to the jug (I wanted to leave it with some headroom, just in case it kicks into another vigorous fermentation). Then I put a sanitized cap on the bottle and shook it up. A sanitized airlock on top, and it was all set.



It's already bubbling, and I'm eager to see how it turns out.

Brewing with Lilikoi

Lilikoi is a variety of passion fruit commonly grown in Hawaii. I've read that it takes its name from Lilikoi Valley in Maui, where it was originally planted. While the more common passion fruit varieties on the mainland look purple and wrinkly on the outside when ripe, Lilikoi turns yellow and doesn't wrinkle (before ripening, lilikoi fruit is green). Its fruit is perfectly round and ranges in size from squash ball to baseball dimensions. The plant itself is an aggressive vine that will totally take over if you don't keep it under firm control; you've got to cut it back harshly every few months--sort of like blackberry in Northern California, though lilikoi has no thorns.



The rind of the lilikoi is inedible, a stiff and durable material that resembles packing foam. You eat the fruit by cutting it in half with a knife and scraping out the inner pulp with a spoon. The pulp is very tart and extremely potent--about the equivalent of lemon juice in its potency, or maybe even beyond that. The seeds can be eaten along with the pulp, but because of how potent the taste of the fruit is, it's rarely eaten in its unadulterated form. Usually lilikoi is used for its juice, which is blended with other juices (a popular drink in Hawaii is POG, made from passion fruit, orange, and guava juice) or used to make jelly.



I wanted to use lilikoi in a beer, and decided to try it in an Amber. I'm hoping that the malty, sweet orientation of the Amber style will balance well with the tartness of the fruit, and I'm hoping that the color shade of the beer will be enhanced by the vivid orange of lilikoi juice. I brewed my last batch of beer, mentioned in my post about brewing in a bag, with lilikoi in mind. I pitched it with a British ale yeast, and let it ferment at 72 degrees Fahrenheit, to encourage the development of fruity esters. And the mash temperature was higher, which will likely result in more body and less fermentable sugars, which fit with an English ale.



One of the lilikoi characteristics I wanted to capture was its delicate aroma--a truly unique scent that's unlike anything else. Because of that, I added the lilikoi juice to secondary, when the yeast is less active and has already consumed most of the fermentable sugar in the wort--I didn't want my lilikoi aroma to be blown away by all the carbon dioxide produced with the yeast's initial feeding frenzy. Also, because of my desire to capture as much lilikoi aroma as possible, I treated the juice with only a very delicate pasteurizing process--raising it to 160 degrees Fahrenheit over the course of 20 minutes--before adding it to the carboy. I would have liked to pitch it in directly, with no pasteurizing at all, but Hawaii's warm, fertile environment is full of potential beer-contaminants, making off-flavors a much greater threat here than they were in my San Francisco-based brewing.



In the end I only added about four ounces of lilikoi to about a five gallon batch of beer, dropping it into the bottom of my secondary fermenter and then racking the beer on top. It may not seem like much, but lilikoi is (like I said before) a very potent, very distinct flavor, and I'd rather add too little than too much. My general approach to adjunct ingredients is to shoot for an effect that will be notable, but not overwhelming. I want the drinker to notice something unusual about the beer, but to have to concentrate in order to decipher what it is.

I'm planning on letting the beer sit in secondary for another two weeks, and then bottling. So it'll be about another month before I know whether four ounces was the right amount.