Two weeks ago I started my first batches of hard cider. They were one gallon each of pressed cider from a local orchard, plus pectic enzyme and about 1/4 packet of T-58. I didn’t add any sugar or adjuncts, OG=1.048. Fermented at 66F. They dropped clear in 14 days, gravity = 1.000. I racked them both to secondary and added 1/2 oz of Nelson Sauvin as dry hops to one of the batches.
I was a bit worried how it would turn out as the unfermented cider tasted super sweet and (seemingly) without much acidity to balance it out. The gravity sample tastes fantastic, however. It is pretty tart and has a nice apple flavor to it. I’d carb and bottle it right now, except for one small issue. There is still quite a powerful sulfur aroma. Will this age out? Would I have been better off leaving this in primary on the yeast? Should I raise/lower the temp to clear this out? Thanks for any help.
Was the cider sulfited? I’ve gotten sulfur from sulfiting the cider. You also may be getting some aroma from the yeast which T-58 will throw off peppery and spicy notes that you are interpreting as sufur. Age it to let the sufur drop out. As to the finished product, you did well with getting the cider dry and keeping the apple notes. Good job!
If the sulphur aroma doesn’t go away you can add a small piece of copper, like copper pipe, to the cider. Don’t use pennies. They’re mostly Zinc now, at least since ~1982. Cheers!!!
That depends on how bad it is and how much copper is introduced. It might take up to a day or two. Your nose is the best test. You can suspend the copper in beer/wine/mead/cider with sanitized fishing line or in a sanitized nylon and move it around to get in into contact with as much beer/mead/wine/cider as possible. It’s an amazing thing. I added a small section of copper tubing to the inside of my brew kettle as part of the dip tube and solved it. Cheers!!!
I haven’t tried it, but I liked the idea. I did find a review somewhere saying they had a hard time picking up the hops, so I figured I’d go with something in my typical IPA dry-hopping rate range. I figure the citrus/white wine of the Nelson Sauvin would be a nice pair with cider. I’ll report back with some tasting notes once it’s ready. I also have the advantage of having an unhopped batch of the same cider for blending should the hop character be totally overboard.
I’ve also been kicking around the idea for a sour graff, so I’m planning on doing some blending with Rodenbach Grand Cru, using both the hopped and unhopped cider.
I’ve had the Finn River dry hopped cider - you can definitely pick out the hops if you’re doing a cider tasting. If you’ve just had an IPA, then no. It is subdued but it was there.