Bottling Wine and Happy Accidents
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Apple Pie Cyser is one of my most popular recipes. While I have a set recipe, each batch is a little different. Sometimes a tweak sounds like a good idea… and it is… a goof that turned out really well. Other times, not so much.
So let me tell you about a time things went pretty well.
Follow the Recipe… Sort of
So a couple years ago, I used my base recipe for Apple Pie Cyser (click here to read it), but decided to mess with the flavor a bit by adding raisins. This was intended to do two things: add a little “something” to the flavor, and boost the yeast with extra nutrients. I also adjusted the back-sweetening mix after primary fermentation.
How Many Raisins Are Too Many?
I turned to a well-known resource: The world-famous Joe Mattioli’s Ancient Orange and Spice Mead recipe. Joe includes a handful of raisins (around 25 raisins for the 1-gallon recipe) to assist with the fermentation. If you’re looking for a fast, easy mead, this recipe rocks. It’s so good right out of primary fermentation it’s hard to leave alone so it can age — and you can be drinking it a month or so after you start it if you like.
Using Joe’s “raisin ratio” as a base — 25 raisins per gallon — I added about 1 cup of raisins (somewhere north of 100 raisins) to my 6-gallon batch. I also wanted to see if I could reduce the sweetness of the original recipe and get a little more “bite,” so I switched from Lalvin 71B-1122 Wine Yeast to Lalvin’s KIV-1116 Yeast for Winemaking, which emphasizes the “fruity” flavors in white wines.
Finally, because you can never get too spicy (heh), I doubled the cinnamon sticks to 6, and used about 5 tablespoons of Apple Pie Spice instead of 1.
When primary fermentation was done and it was time for back-sweetening, I reduced the dark brown sugar by about 1/3 and added an extra 1/2 gallon of apple juice (not concentrate). Then came the OOPS!
OOPS! (Happy Accident)
For back-sweetening, I include 2 cans of frozen apple juice concentrate per 3 gallons. It boosts the apple flavor in the mix, and provides extra sweetness.
This year… I wasn’t paying attention: I thought I was adding plain apple juice concentrate. After I’d blithely added the concentrate, I discovered I had added Apple-Strawberry-Kiwi!
Needless to say, this led to some worried moments as I waited for the secondary fermentation and clearing to occur. I can easily see strawberry in apple cyser… but kiwi!?! Did I turn 6 gallons of manly cyser into a girly drink?
Oh me of little faith. I shouldn’t have worried so much. Some of the best things have happened because of mistakes. For example, the iconic Slinky toy was invented when a clumsy engineer dropped a spring he was working on.
So a month or so later, I carefully did the first taste test — and, dang, that was good! The strawberry and kiwi flavors meshed with the raisin flavor in an awesome way.
Another month in secondary fermentation, and I was really happy with the results. Long story short, this one went in my recipe notes for future use.
Lesson: Don’t Be Afraid to Experiment (Within Reason)
The lesson I take away from this is, when things don’t happen the “right” way, good things can still come forth — and to remember not to be afraid to experiment a little.
Oh, and write down what you do. It really sucks to come up with something awesome and not be able to recreate it.
Originally published on my blog, russwhaley.com (no longer active)
