Dissolved Oxygen in Packaged Cider

[Aidan Currie]

I am wondering if anyone measures dissolved oxygen levels and might reference an acceptable O2 level in packaged cider. This is assuming the cider is sterile filtered, force carbonated and packaged at around 30 ppm of SO2. 

I know from the brewery world, acceptable levels in packaged product are 50-100 ppb. I have also read that for wine, dissolved oxygen levels up to 1 ppm are fine because the added SO2 prevents a host of nasty oxidized flavors. Where does cider fall on this incredibly broad spectrum? 

For background, I am a craft cider maker in the Portland, Oregon, trying to establish a quality control point for dissolved oxygen that makes sense. 

Thanks for your help! 

Aidan

[Richard Reeves]

Aidan:

Having worked in a winery bottling line laboratory as QC I would tell you that one PPM O2 was the upper limit of acceptable O2 and anything above would be cause for shutting down the line and finding where the problem lay. The more usual measurements were in the 0.4-0.6 PPM range, on a good day we could run 0.2 PPM all day long, which perhaps makes the practical spectrum less "incredibly broad" then it might appear. If you add some flexibility to the equation based on alcohol percentage of the product being bottled (sheer speculation on my part) then the numbers get fairly close.

Alternatively,  FSO2 scavenges O2, but none of the beers I drink say "Contains Sulfites" on the label (unlike my wine), which might explain a ten-fold reduction in O2 tolerance between the "brewery world" and the wine world? As you say the cider in question would be bottled around 30 PPM (I'm assuming you mean free, not total?) SO2, perhaps the winery-type tolerances for O2 pickup are more applicable to your situation.

Richard Reeves   Lake County, California

[Andrew Lea]

On 20/02/2014 23:58, Aidan Currie wrote:

> I know from the brewery world, acceptable levels in packaged product are
> 50-100 ppb. I have also read that for wine, dissolved oxygen levels up
> to 1 ppm are fine because the added SO2 prevents a host of nasty
> oxidized flavors. Where does cider fall on this incredibly broad spectrum?

(Commercial) cider falls in pretty much with (white) wine. That is
because of their similar polyphenol content and the fact that SO2 is
nearly always added to maintain 30 ppm free. So any adverse effect of
oxygen is mitigated by the SO2. SO2 does not react with the oxygen
directly but with primary oxidation products of wine / cider (aldehydes
and oxygen radicals), hence blocking their further transformation.

However, canned ciders often do not contain free SO2 because of
potential corrosion of the can and the lacquer. An industry friend has
told me that a target DO value for them is <0.3 ppm, achieved by inert
gas sparging and purging.

Hope this helps.

Andrew


--
near Oxford, UK
Wittenham Hill Cider Portal
www.cider.org.uk