Lots of sediment after pressing..

[tom hull]

Hi there, I've just acquired some lovely juice thanks to a local cidery (about 140 litres, a mix of kingston black, michelin and improved foxwhelp. Innoculated 2 days ago with 71B yeast). This is my fist cider batch in a number of years so please forgive the ignorance on the basics.

There is a lot of sediment, much more than I've encountered in previous batches. (Pectinase was added at pressing). The juice provider said that it was fine to ferment with the sediment in but I am wondering about the best way to take gravity measurements. I tend to take samples from the tap at the bottom of the fermenter, but this is coming out in quite a slurry. I am not sure that any reading would reflect the 'reality' above the sediment, especially in the early stages..

Would you recomend opening the lid to take samples in this instance? (my concern there is letting air into the fermenter...

Thanks in advance for your thoughts!

[Ray Blockley]

If it's fermenting it should be fine to open the lid? You'll only have it open briefly to take enough juice for a reading; or like we do, simply settle the freshly sterilised hydrometer in the top of the juice to get your reading.

The sediment will settle & compact with time & as fermentation progresses.

Ray

Nottingham UK

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[Patrick McCauley]

It seems like overly-ripe fruit, or specific dessert varieties lead to these overy cloudy musts. There always seems to be lots of concern about opening tanks/ferementers(because the books always say oxygen is your enemy), but I've never had any issues. If your equipment has been sanitized and the fermentation is active, you shouldn't have any issues with too much oxygen getting in or with contamination, by simply checking the gravity. I'm regularly monitoring my fermentations by checking the gravity during fermentation(i just open the vessel and drop the hydrometer in), and don't ever have contamination issues. The key is to make sure that your hydrometer is sanitized. I use StarSan, which nukes everything apparently. 

Pat McCauley

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[tom hull]

Thanks all for your reassurances.. I'll just pop a star san'd hydrometer into the surface for my readings. Fermentation is active now so that protective layer of CO2 should help.

Patrick, interesting that you mention overly ripe fruit.. The cider maker who provided the juice kept the fruit in a cool store for about 2 months before getting it pressed. I think that this was for a variety of logistical reasons, but maybe also to maximise the sugars.

Is there a case for fining with gelatin or cold crashing before racking into demijohns when there is a very high amount of fruit sediment? These are beer techniques I have used fairly often but not sure if they apply to cider making. 

Thanks again

[Kirk Evans]

You're fine to pop a hydrometer in a vessel or take a sample while it's less than 2/3rds of the way through fermentation.

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[Kirk Evans]

It's better to take a reading off a clearer sample at the top of the vessel than anything with sediment for sure.

[Patrick McCauley]

I've been letting all of my ciders "settle" and clarify for 4-14 days before putting them into the fermenters. The fermentations tend to go slower and are much clearer this way, and easier to stop prior to dryness. Some juices tend to be clearer than others. I had some Harrison apples that I stored for a bit too long last fall, and I literally had half of the vat full of sediment before racking into my ferementer. I'm sure Claude or Andrew could explain it better than I could, but it seems to be more of an issue when the fruit is overly ripe in my experience.

Pat McCauley

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[Andrew Lea]

I would not advise fining with gelatin (or indeed with anything at all) before fermentation. You have gone to a lot of trouble to source some highish tannin fruit. By gelatine fining you will bind the tannin into the lees and effectively be throwing your money away. Also gelatin fining can easily be overdone and end up as the source of intractable hazes rather than their solution. Best avoided in the 21st century to be honest.

As far as I can understand, your sediment is down to the fact that you used pectinase on stored fruit so you most likely have a lot of partly degraded pectin at the bottom of your containers (as fruit matures the pectin becomes more soluble). This will almost certainly settle or consolidate after fermentation, but if you feel it’s a problem now you can just decant or rack it after a spell of chilling.

Andrew

[Andrew Lea]

Supplementary question - are you in the northern or Southern Hemisphere? If in the north, how has the juice been stored since it was pressed? Was it frozen and thawed? Or was it freshly pressed just before you received it?

Andrew

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> On 30 Jun 2023, at 10:21, Andrew Lea <ci...@cider.org.uk> wrote:
>
> I would not advise fining with gelatin (or indeed with anything at all) before fermentation. You have gone to a lot of trouble to source some highish tannin fruit. By gelatine fining you will bind the tannin into the lees and effectively be throwing your money away. Also gelatin fining can easily be overdone and end up as the source of intractable hazes rather than their solution. Best avoided in the 21st century to be honest.

[tom hull]

Hi Andrew, thanks for your clarity and advice. I shall not touch it!

I'm in the southern hemisphere in south west Victoria, Australia (Warrnambool) . The juice was freshly juiced last thursday and has been at about 10-12C since.

Ps it was treated with about 30ppm sulfite and pectinase by the cider maker/ fixer in Harcourt.

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[Andrew Lea]

Ah yes I remember Harcourt!

Everything sounds on track for you. Good luck!

Andrew

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> On 30 Jun 2023, at 14:06, tom hull <mountai...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi Andrew, thanks for your clarity and advice. I shall not touch it!

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[Patrick McCauley]

Hi Andrew. As an alternative to keeving, I've occasionally fined the freshly pressed must with pectinase, and received a clarified product prior to fermentation. The results are similar to a keeve, with an extremely slow fermentation that is easy to stop. I assume that this would lead to a reduction in tannin like it would with the gelatin fining? How would that be different than keeving? Is there also a tannin reduction in a successful keeve?

Pat McCauley

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[Andrew Lea]

I think you may be confusing the difference between keeving and fining.  Keeving is not just clarification - it’s specifically the removal of positively charged nitrogenous nutrients. This old slide deck of mine may help? http://www.cider.org.uk/keeving.pdf

I believe it may be possible to remove some nutrients onto a pectin gel at the bottom of a vat - what Gary Awdey used to describe as a “bottom keeve”. However, I have never done it myself.  Claude may be able to comment further on this. And it wouldn’t be as efficient when using a full spectrum pectinase because it really needs the full but demethylated pectin backbone to adsorb and remove the nutrients (for which you need just a PME), rather than the truncated fragments you get from a full spectrum pectinase cocktail (PME +PG+PL).

As for tannin removal, you are forgetting the electrostatic aspect of fining. So, tannin is negatively charged and gelatine is positively charged at cider pH. Hence they neutralise each other and tannin is removed onto the gelatine / tannin gel.  But pectin is also negatively charged at cider pH so it does not complex with tannin and the tannin is not removed from the system by pectin / pectinase. In short, there is no appreciable tannin reduction during keeving.

Hope this helps.

Andrew 

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[Claude Jolicoeur]

Le lundi 3 juillet 2023 à 16:44:05 UTC-4, Andrew Lea a écrit :

I believe it may be possible to remove some nutrients onto a pectin gel at the bottom of a vat - what Gary Awdey used to describe as a “bottom keeve”. However, I have never done it myself.  Claude may be able to comment further on this. And it wouldn’t be as efficient when using a full spectrum pectinase because it really needs the full but demethylated pectin backbone to adsorb and remove the nutrients (for which you need just a PME), rather than the truncated fragments you get from a full spectrum pectinase cocktail (PME +PG+PL).

I think there is another factor in play there. I personally have no experience with what Gary called "bottom keeve" as this never happened to me. But I also think a pre-fermentation clarification by a debourbage using full spectrum pectinase and optionally some fining agent may yield a result very similar to what can be achieved with a successful keeve.

The sort of obvious reasoning is that if a clarified juice is put in fermentation, most of the yeast biomass will reside at the bottom of the tank as yeast needs some suspended particles within the fermenting mash to stay suspended. Hence, if most of the yeast cells are at the bottom, a simple racking done early on will remove most of the yeast biomass and the N nutrients this yeast population will have consumed. Following this racking, the fermentation will continue slowly in a similar way as after a keeve.

On a non-clarified juice, the yeast stays suspended in the fermenting mash as the hazyness provides plenty of micro-particles to which the yeast cells may stick, and a racking is then much less efficient for removing yeast biomass and N.

[Andrew Lea]

Thanks Claude. You have provided a very clear explanation of the way in which débourbage might work to slow down a fermentation. 

Andrew

On 3 Jul 2023, at 22:40, Claude Jolicoeur <cjol...@gmail.com> wrote:

I think there is another factor in play there. I personally have no experience with what Gary called "bottom keeve" as this never happened to me. But I also think a pre-fermentation clarification by a debourbage using full spectrum pectinase and optionally some fining agent may yield a result very similar to what can be achieved with a successful keeve.

The sort of obvious reasoning is that if a clarified juice is put in fermentation, most of the yeast biomass will reside at the bottom of the tank as yeast needs some suspended particles within the fermenting mash to stay suspended. Hence, if most of the yeast cells are at the bottom, a simple racking done early on will remove most of the yeast biomass and the N nutrients this yeast population will have consumed. Following this racking, the fermentation will continue slowly in a similar way as after a keeve.

On a non-clarified juice, the yeast stays suspended in the fermenting mash as the hazyness provides plenty of micro-particles to which the yeast cells may stick, and a racking is then much less efficient for removing yeast biomass and N.

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[Patrick McCauley]

Thank you, Claude and Andrew. I had never heard the word "debourbage" applied to cider making in any of the books, though it sounds like this is common in the making of white wine, so perhaps it might be time to do more experimentation of this technique with regards to cider? I recently had an article published in Malus zine, which is partially about this technique, though I didn’t know it had a proper name. It seems that early American cider makers were doing something similar to this, and it was in these primary sources where I had first read about it. 

Over the past few years I've been trying variations on this, and receiving very similar results to a keeve, though this is much more consistent than my attempts at keeving. Probably just because I have too many high acid, lower-tannin apples around here, that don't form a proper cap. It's these high acid apples that make reserving a bit of residual sugar essential, in my opinion. For those who don't get Malus, I've just basically been sulfiting the juice with 25ppm, and letting is sit and settle in the cold cellar for 4-14 days, and then racking into the fermenter. Adding pectinase can aid in the clearing if necessary. Occasionally, it seems that this technique can almost be too effective in removing yeasts and nutrients, and the fermentations can sometimes be reluctant to begin fermenting for months. If your goal is to make sweet or semi-sweet ciders, and you are having issues sourcing the PME for keeving, or don't have the proper apples for successful keeves, this could be worth trying.

Pat McCauley

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