Adding exogenous tannin to cider from culinary cider

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Amateur cidermakers (like me) often have difficulty sourcing traditional cider apples and have to make-do with culinary varieties. I have asked questions about this before and have received excellent advice.

Although addition of malic acid is easy enough for adjusting acidity, doing something about tannin (or at least “how much to use”) is bit more difficult.

There is a paper from Cornell University which looked at consumer acceptance of culinary apple ciders with added tannin. Although the paper wasn’t “super scientific” it seems that ciders with roughly 300 – 500 ppm GAE were most acceptable to consumers.

There are some options for those of us without access to “proper” cider apples. These include black tea, tannin powder, oak chips, skin from red apples etc. The recommended rate for tannin powder seems to be 5g/100L but without any reference to what GAE this might result in. Similarly for black tea, oak etc I can’t find any information regarding what sort of GAE might result.

I am happy to follow “recipe” or manufacturer’s recommendations, but it would be nice to know if there is any reference material that will give a GAE (or %) for these additions.

Thanks in advance if anyone can help.