Craft Hard Cider: Recipes, Tips, and Ideas for Making & Enjoying Hard Cider
I have returned from my European adventure and am back home in Southern Arizona. Therefore, I am again shipping cider yeast to those in the contiguous United States. You may remember that I was experimenting with various non-Saccharomyces yeast strains (search “non-Saccharomyces” below for more of those articles) from the USDA culture center in Illinois. … Continue reading Exploring Non-Saccharomyces Yeast: Cider Yeast
We have probably all heard the idiom "You say toe-mah-toe, I say toe-may-toe". Is that like saying a wild ferment and a natural ferment? Are they the same or do they mean different things? What about commercial yeast? As these errant thoughts started swirling in my head, I thought this is the perfect topic for a Cider Musing. I can … Continue reading Cider Musings: Wild or Natural
Spoiler Alert: If you haven’t taken Cider Quiz #1, click here to take it before exploring the answers. I included links to various articles about aroma faults and what causes them at the bottom of this post. These can provide additional references and information that talks about causes and potential impacts to cider quality. You can also … Continue reading Cider Quiz Answers: Question #5
Bucket with Film YeastYeast versus Mold: Yeast is the smooth white and mold is the fuzzy green/blackMold on top of Cider If you’ve read many of my articles, you know I often answer questions with “it depends”. However, that doesn’t mean we can’t define practices that are generally helpful and will not create problems when … Continue reading Cider Rules: Oxygen
Languages often have multiple words that can mean the same thing. They also have words that can mean many different things depending on the context or situation in which they are used. Saying it is chilly, cool, or brisk this morning basically means the same thing. You might want a jacket. The temperature is low. … Continue reading Volatile Acidity Versus Vinegar
Sugars impact on acetic acid production in wine. Did you know that the amount of sugar in your juice can impact the amount of acetic acid produced. As noted in the Handbook on Enology(1), wines with higher specific gravity produced more acetic acid when fermented with Saccharomyces cerevisiae yeasts. As shown in the above chart, … Continue reading Cider Facts: Sugar and Acetic Acid
Chemoorganotroph: Creating energy from organic compounds. You must wonder where I find some of my cider words, especially a word like chemoorganotroph. It sounds made up, but I promise that it’s not. I was reading the Handbook of Enology Volume 1 (1), when I came across this gem of a word. The book highlighted how … Continue reading Cider Words: Chemoorganotroph
I have the pleasure of interacting with people from all over the world and at all levels of cider making experience. But, no matter how many books and research papers papers I read, apples I assess, yeasts I trial, or experiments I conduct, I am fundamentally just a home craft cider maker. When I write … Continue reading Cider Equipment: Fermentation
Scientifically, yeast are identified by a classification methodology. They are part of the fungi kingdom and they will have different families and orders(1). For alcoholic beverages makers, like hard cider makers, we usually focus and talk about three classifications for yeast. The first and highest level is the genus. Saccharomyces is a genus of yeast. … Continue reading Cider Yeast: Classifications
Yeast Regulation: Upregulating and Downregulating Yeast are single cell organisms that are seeking to survive and thrive in whatever environment they find themselves. As a single cell organism, we might be inclined to think of them as simple but, that would be a mistake. Yeast have a vast amount of processes they perform to live … Continue reading Cider Words: Yeast Regulation
PricklyCider.com 