Things To Do With Honey

Things To Do With Honey. Part III. Making Cyser By Pete Ricks For those of you who may be wondering what Cyser is, it is fermented Apple Juice and Honey. This is Part III of a multi-part series about what to brew with honey. There are so many different variations of what you can brew with honey and this is one of them. Honey and apple juice blend together nicely to make for a refreshing, sweet beverage. For my cyser, I wanted a semi-sweet to sweet result as I didn't want the tartness of the apples to overcome the aroma and flavor of the Arizona Desert Honey. I was also using a new yeast, White Labs English Cider, as this was supposed to bring out the full flavor of the apples. What I ended up with was a sweet, apple drink that was 11.3% ABV, not that you can tell. The residual sweetness masks the alcohol and can make consumption of this cyser rather deceptive. So what do you need to make a cyser? For mine, I used ~12 lbs of Crocket's Desert Honey, which you can see I have a 5 gallon bucket of, 3 gallons of Gravenstine Apple Juice, about 1 1/2 gallons of filtered water, and some yeast. That's it! Simple, and pure. You might have noticed that I made a starter for this batch and it was an interesting one too. For this starter, I drizzled about 150 ml of honey into my starter flask and then added some apple juice to bring it up to about 800ml. I then boiled it for 10-15 minutes. My starter size ended up being 800 ml total after the vial of yeast was added and I let it go for a couple of days to build up a few billion hungry yeast cells. Here are a few pictures that I took while making the starter. After you have pasteurized the contents of the flask by boiling them for 15 minutes, place a foil wrapper over the top and stick it in some cool water. I like to cool my starters by sticking them in a sink with circulating cold water for about 5-10 minutes. After it has cooled down a little, you can stick it in a smaller container with ice to get some rapid chill action going. Don't cool it below 70-75 degrees though as that is the temperature we need to pitch the yeast. Which brings us to the yeast. As previously mentioned, I used the White Labs English Cider yeast for this Cyser and I pitched it at 72 degrees. After a couple of days, I had a nice batch of yeast cells ready to go to work. This was going to be a high gravity batch so I needed a nice batch of yeast. Since I was using 3 gallons of Apple Juice, this was a job for the big brewpot outside and not one I could do on the stove. I pasteurized the honey, apple juice, and filtered water together at 195 degrees for 20 minutes and then cooled it down to 75 which is when I pitched the starter. I guess there is some debate as to whether you are supposed to heat apple juice up but it didn't seem to affect the flavor of the apples in this batch. When in doubt, pasteurize! The fermentation took off in normal fashion and after a couple of days, I had apple chunks flying around everywhere inside the carboy. After about a week, it died down and I took a reading. 1.025. I let it ferment for a couple more days to 1.018 and then chilled it down and racked it into a secondary fermenter. I then chilled it for a few weeks at 30 degrees and racked it into a corny keg. So there you have it. Smardass Apple Cyser. 11.3% ABV and crystal clear. So much for heating up them apples.