Experience is a great way to learn right? So after 6 years of cidermaking, I tried pressing scrap apples from someones tree. Unknown variety - probably red delicious or macintosh, but I’m sure it is a single variety. The juice was sweet and tasted good, though the cider from my local orchard tastes much more complex. Now that it is fermented out, BLAHHH. It is just very uninteresting, little flavor or aroma of anything that was once apples, and I’m used to very dry cider but this is like alcoholic water. Pretty uninspiring. I think it needs to be doctored up and brought to a party.
A little evaporation and recondensing would fix it nicely. 8)
That’s what usually happens when you ferment a single variety of eating apples. You can doctor it with apple juice concentrate before taking it to that party. Or you can do the evaporation trick ;D
Does it need any citric or lactic acid?
My understanding is you can backsweeten or just ferment to taste and then stun the yeast with potassium metabisulfite. I’ve always backsweetened with a can or two of frozen concentrate and then kept the keg cold, but I guess then you could do the K2S2O5 as well to keep it from kicking the ferment back in.