Clear juice vs cloudy juice fermentation

[Martin Rellstab]

To broaden my knowledge I've been reading up on some white wine techniques. It seems that a lot of wineries clarify the grape juice prior to fermentation. Apparently this will preserve the character of the grape variety better. 

Has anyone thoughts about this process with apples? Has anyone done side by side tests of clear and cloudy fermentations?

I've also been talking to a large commercial cider maker in Europe and for his 'methode champagnoise' ciders he clarifies the juice prior to the initial fermentation. If he doesn't do this he sometimes gets cloudy bottles during the 2nd fermentation. Is this just something he adopted from wine making or does this have some substance to it?

[Claude Jolicoeur]

Yes, it is quite common practice in commercial cider making to make an enzymatic clarification (aka debourbage), with or without fining and/or filtering, prior to fermentation.
Not so common with hobbyists, but I like to do it. I haven't done side-by-side tests though, but for sure it helps a lot for the final clarification at the end of fermentation.
Claude

[Andrew Lea]

But cider doesn’t / shouldn’t have direct varietal characteristics like grape wines do. 

However you may be interested in this study

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/store/10.1002/jib.197/asset/jib197.pdf?v=1&t=jb3bivx5&s=8b51aecb20b776a4d1ccd4b6f78d5557153f09e3

It was also shown many years ago at Long Ashton and elsewhere that higher levels of solids in wine and cider fermentations lead to higher fusel alcohol levels (eg reference 14 in that paper). You may or may not think this desirable. During maturation it may lead to a wider range of esters. 

Andrew 

Wittenham Hill Cider Portal
www.cider.org.uk

--
--
Visit our website: http://www.ciderworkshop.com
 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the "Cider Workshop" Google Group.
By joining the Cider Workshop, you agree to abide by our principles. Please see http://www.ciderworkshop.com/resources_principles.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Cider Workshop" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to cider-worksho...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to cider-w...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

[Andrew Lea]

Sorry that link is faulty. 

Try this and then download the full paper for free

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jib.197/abstract

Andrew 

Wittenham Hill Cider Portal
www.cider.org.uk

[Wes Cherry]

But cider doesn’t / shouldn’t have direct varietal characteristics like grape wines do. 

Interesting results from this study - that fermentation conditions determine cider characteristics more than fruit variety, but it’s not backed up by praxis in my experience.

For dessert fruit, our single varietal Newtown Pippin smells and tastes significantly different than Jonagolds fermented with the exact same conditions.   And they are nothing like any bittersweet cider made under the same conditions.   Maybe some evolved compounds are similar and reflect the yeast and processing conditions, but there would be no mistaking the two.

I would never mistake a kingston black for a porters perfection cider.  SV Kingston is pretty unique.

I don’t think a keeved pippin (if keeving is possible with pippin) would taste anything like a keeved dabinett.  

etc etc.

And, for what it’s worth, I recently have acquired a belt press, and have been worried about the lack of maceration time affecting color, flavor and aroma.  I macerated some Harry Master’s Jersey pomace for 1 hour and compared it to HMJ ground and pressed immediately.    The macerated juice had a very slightly darker tint, but upon completion of fermentation, I could not tell the two apart by any metric.   HMJ doesn’t have a lot of aroma, though.

-Wes

[Andrew Lea]

On 12/12/2017 23:14, Wes Cherry wrote:
>>> But cider doesn’t / shouldn’t have direct varietal characteristics
>>> like grape wines do.
>

> Interesting results from this study - that fermentation conditions
> determine cider characteristics more than fruit variety, but it’s not
> backed up by praxis in my experience.

Ah yes. I thought my (deliberately contentious) remark might raise some
eyebrows in the New World!

My perspective (and that of the paper cited) is very Eurocentric, or
British and French to be precise. Here, where we don't traditionally use
aromatic dessert apples for cider, there are very few cider apples with
a true varietal character that persists into the finished drink.
Kingston Black and Foxwhelp are about the only two that do, and even
there you might be hard pressed to pick them out reliably, especially in
a blend. There is nothing in our European cider apple world that is as
distinctive say as Sauvignon Blanc in the grape wine world. But once you
move into dessert apples as Wes says, then varietal characters can
become more prominent.

That's my take on it.

Andrew
--
near Oxford, UK

Wittenham Hill Cider Portal
www.cider.org.uk

www.amazon.co.uk/Craft-Cider-Making-Andrew-Lea/dp/1785000152

[Martin Rellstab]

Thank you Andrew for this interesting read. Some of the results are for sure not as expected. 

As for my initial question - it looks like pre fermentation clarification and finning doesn't hurt the cider - in fact it may even improve it. It will be worth a try with the new saison fruit.f

Martin

[Wes Cherry]

Wait - the study compared a 60/40 Marie Ménard/Petit jaune to a 70/30 blend.

That’s not a very significant difference.   The study would be much more interesting and support a conclusion that varietal characteristics don’t influence aroma and flavor if they studied single varietal ciders of each apple.

-'//es Cherry

Dragon's Head Cider

Vashon Island, Wa US

www.dragonsheadcider.com

--

[Andrew Lea]

That’s not quite right. The first blend was 70MM / 30PJ. The second blend was 40MM / 60PJ. That’s a rather bigger contrast than you suggest. I agree that single varietals might have been more interesting. The thing is though that in Europe we hardly ever do single varietals. A blend of bitter(sharps) and bittersweets is the norm for us. So the study looked at what is usual in France, not what would be a more extreme situation. And the answer was that process is more important than blend composition. Not an unexpected conclusion in a French context, and especially where keeving is involved. 

I think the question you want to ask is can a person distinguish intra varietally between different European bittersharps and bittersweets? I believe in nearly all cases the answer is no. The apples just aren’t distinct enough one from another, within the two classes. Obviously the classes are distinct. 

My major criticism of the paper is not so much its experimental design, as that all the analysis is instrumental, not sensory. Anyone who has worked in beverage research knows that chemical analysis only takes you so far. Without sensory analysis by trained humans you are only getting part of the story. It is more expensive to do, for sure, and doubtless it wasn’t within the scope of the project, but by only analysing a handful of volatile components chemically you can miss an awful lot of sensory information and interactions, even though the authors do claim to be analysing the most odour active cider volatiles (which is in itself an issue of debate). 

I still think it a useful paper though. There’s precious little good modern cider science around. 

Andrew 

Wittenham Hill Cider Portal
www.cider.org.uk

[Dana Glei]

Very interesting discussion thread.  Thank you, Andrew, for sharing the Villière et al. (2012) paper.

Martin, I hope you do investigate the effects of debourbage (preferably experimental-control design)...I will be very interested to hear the results.  I haven't done any experiments with pre-fermentation debourbage myself, but I am very curious to know whether it makes a difference on the resulting flavors.  

Howver, I did a little low-tech experiment with post-fermentation fining (more details) below and concluded that the batches without bentonite fining tasted better (albeit they were generally more cloudy) than those with bentonite fining.  That was based on blind taste-testing on 10 people (my partner and I and my 8 guinea pig friends).  So, I have put the bentonite on the shelf and don't have any plans to use it again.  

If you want to know more details re: my experiment with post-fermentation fining... 

1) I started with 5 different  juices (all store-bought, pasteurized:  3 were organic and unfiltered; 2 were not organic and already cleared).   

2) I pitched the same yeast in all 5 juices and did a side-by-side fermentation, attempting to treat all to the same conditions.  FYI:  I was aiming for a "stuck" fermentation to retain some residual sugars, so I did multiple rackings.  [I did NOT use any sulfite.  I treated the 3 unfiltered juices with pectinase the day before I pitched the yeast, but I did not add pectinase to the 2 clarified juices.  I did, however, treat some of the juices with malic acid to get the pH down to 3.8.] 

 

3)  By Day 97, all fermentations were stuck, but some of the juices fermented more quickly than others and thus, the final O.G. ranged from 1.005 to 1.013.  All 5 batches were still rather cloudy.  [Not a surprise since the must had been pasteurized.  Andrea Lea and Claude Jolicoeur helped answer my question about that a year of so ago when they explained that the pastuerization process may create a "heat set complex" that make the pectin haze permanent.]

4)  I split each of the 5 batches in half and bottled 1/2 of each batch "as is" (despite its cloudiness).  The other half of each batch I 

treated with Bentonite slurry at the recommended dosage and sulfite (20 PPM for Batches #1-3 with pH~3.8 and 10 PPM for Batches #4-5 with pH~3.6).

5) Two weeks post-Bentonite, 2 of the 3 batches had cleared up fairly well; the other two batches not so much (one of which had been treated with pectinase pre-fermentation and the other had not been given pectinase but started out perfectly clear).  I racked all of the batches off the sediment.

6) After letting it settle for another 3 weeks (Day 131), two of the batches were very clear (were initially unfiltered, but treated with pectinase pre-fermenation), another two were somewhat clear (one treated and the other not treated with pectinase), and the final batch was still very cloudy (originally clear juice that had NOT been treated with pectinase).

7)  I bottled all of those batches on Day 131.

8)  Six weeks after bottling the batches with Bentonite (2.5 mos after bottling batches without Bentonite), I did a blinded tasting with myself, my partner, and 8 of our guinea pig friends (none of us are true cider connoisseurs, but we have opinions about what we like and don't like).

Conclusions from the blinded tasting:

1)  I am not going to bother with Bentonite in the future.  While Bentonite did yield better clarity for some juices, there was very little evidence that it improved flavor.  In fact, in most cases, it appeared to be detrimental to the flavor.  For the two juices that scored the best in the tasting, the majority of raters preferred the non-Bentonited version (Whole Food 365: the non-Bentonite version won by a landslide:  9 to 1; Safeway O Organics: the non-Bentonite version won 5 to 4, with one person who could not distinguish a difference).  The only juice in which the Bentonite version won was the juice that scored the worst in our tasting (Oliver’s Market organic juice made from local apples:  bentonite version won 6 to 2, with 2 people who were unable to distinguish a difference).

2) If I am using a pasteurized, store-bought juice, I will only use Whole Foods 365 or O Organics juice from now on.  [Kirklands, Trader Joe’s and Oliver’s were clear losers.]

3) Like Chris and I, our friends also like residual sugars (the final scores were directly related to the amount of residual sugar in the finished cider).

4) Next time, I will include a truly “dry” cider in the tasting so the raters know what “dry” really tastes like.  Even I was too hard on the “losers”.  I gave the worst one a score of 2.  Yet, I have made many batches of cider that are far worse than that, and I have tasted a lot of commercial ciders that were also way worse.  A local commercial cider that tasted (to me) like shoe polish comes to mind…

 

Winners and Losers

------------------

The overall winner (with a mean score of 8.2 out of 10) was Whole Foods 365 Organic juice without bentonite.  This was the sweetest cider (FG=1.013 at the time of bottling, which puts it in the “medium-sweet” category by BJCP guidelines) with ABV 5.2%.  Comments included:  Yum!  Light body, floral, bright notes, slightly sweet & smooth, light body, not much smell.

 

The runner up (with a mean score of 7.3) was Safeway’s O Organics juice without bentonite.  It was not quite as sweet (FG=1.009 at bottling, putting it at the top of the “medium” category) with ABV 5.5%.  Comments included:  Full-bodied, smokey, more apple flavor than the version with bentonite, good carbonation, nice aroma, good sweetness, some character, balanced, acidic aftertaste, tart, sharp complex, slightly sulphury, good carbonation.

 

Third and fourth place went to O Organic with bentonite (mean=7.0). It had better clarity than the version without bentonite, but a strange after flavor.  To me (and several others), it had clear diacytl (butterscotch) aroma/flavor (which I liked, even though I know it is considered a defect).  One person noted that is tasted almost like a moscato.

Fourth place went to Whole Foods with bentonite (mean=6.7), respectively.  One person thought it had caramelly notes (said thought it was "darker than the version without bentonite").  A bit bitter.  One person thought it tasted more like wine (higher alcohol) than the version without bentonite.

 

Trader Joe's took 5th & 6th place.  People noted off aromas, high acidity, thin, watery.

Kirland (Costco) took 7th and 8th place.  Some thought it bitter (one person said, “tastes like ear wax").  Odd smell, very sharp, odd aftertaste, tasteless.

Oliver’s Organic juice took last place (9th place at mean=4.4 for the version with bentonite, 10th place at mean=4.3 for the version without bentonite).  Lacked flavor (or odd flavor), odd after-taste.  Almost everyone said it was “dry” (FG=1.005 at the time of bottling, which would put it in lower end of the “medium” category with ABV 7.0%, but I think it probably bottle conditioned and fermented out at least some of that sugar…nonetheless I suspect it is still very far from “dry”).  

Cheers,

Dana Glei

Budding Cider Maker in Sonoma County, CA

(and social demographer who enjoys the opportunity to play around with experimental-control research design, which I don't get to do my day job)

[Wes Cherry]

Update on the HMJ macerated vs non-macerated experiment.

Upon further inspection, the macerated pomace HMJ is very slightly darker in color and a slight bit less cloudy.  Macerated cider also is more rounded and less angular than the non-macerated cider.  The differences aren’t dramatic though.   The macerated HMJ also has a very slight VA taint.  Not bad, but noticeable.  The HMJs pressed out at 4.2 and I brought the ta down to 3.7 with malic before adding KMS, so some of the VA could have started during maceration.  

-Wes