Spitz no spitter at 22% sugar

This will be our second try at cider too. A forum on cider would/could be helpful.

39th- I don’t know cider making from beans, but many yeasts have trouble fermenting once the alcohol level gets that high. 8% is pretty high for beer; champagne yeasts, if I have my facts right, can kick it up a little higher than ordinary wine, which tops out at 11 or 12 percent. So that might be part of it.

That’s quite a little bit more than I know for sure, but there it is for what it is worth!

I’ve been itching to ping this group for expertise on making SWEET CIDER (thick non-alcoholic juice from a single variety or a blend of different apples).

Not all sweet ciders are the same. I have had terrible sweet cider, and I have had incredibly delicious and fortifying sweet cider. I would love to hear others’ recipes and blend preferences.

This is not to disuade a discussion on hard cider, but as I get older, I just can’t drink the stuff much anymore due to health reasons.

Second President, John Adams, had a draft of his own hard cider every morning for breakfast at his Massachusetts homestead.

Every apple is different. Calville Blanc D’hiver is said to contain more Vitamin-C than an orange. Put it in your cider for its fortifying health benefits. Golden Russet is supposed to make an excellent sweet cider single-varietal (but now I’m not sure which one; American/Bullock or European). Same with Gravenstein, which I can confirm first-hand. Some say Honeycrisp too, but as much as I love eating Honeycrisp out-of-hand, I do not care for Honeycrisp single-varietal sweet cider.

On the hard side, Arkansas Black is supposed to make a great hard cider all on its own…

Etc, etc… Let’s have both discussions!

Well, here abouts they sell a pretty nice MacIntosh cider that is even better once it gets a little effervescent; I’m OK with it at just that stage- not too sweet, not too alcoholic, but just right.

:- )M

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American golden russet ripens sweet, and makes a great sweet cider, and is good for blending in hard cider. Few apples make a good single variety hard cider.

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Google Groups This is a cider forum with many very knowledgeable cider makers, including a few that have published books on fermenting cider

The Wittenham Hill Cider Pages Everything you would want to learn about cider, and then some, can be obtained on this site. If you want a good/great cider, you must start with good/great apples. Our modern desert apples do not make good cider, as they are usually too acidic, and the fuits are water logged due to the orchards pooring nitrogen to their trees. For a good cider apple, starve the tree of nutrients and the flavor will be more intense.

The European internet Forums are the most active. The US is just starting to rediscover Hard Cider. Most of the hard cider here is made from surplus watered down dessert apples with lots of added sugar. Its like only making wine with second rate concord grapes. Hard cider market share is growing fast. The gluten free fad is helping. I think it is what craft beer was 25 years ago. I am focusing my efforts on propagating and planting cider varieties. I have aspirations of making a living growing fruit and the prospect of selling at farmers markets and fruit auctions or worse, having to put on a agro tourism carnival is very depressing.

I just pitched the yeast on my second batch of hard cider and will try making perry this weekend. It will be a couple more years before my Spitzenbergs, Roxbury Russets and other cider apples bear so I am limited dessert apples for now. It sound like a refractometer would be a good tool to chose when to harvest and press apples.

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Spitz is just starting to ripen some of the fruit for me, took one on a little road trip yesterday and visited an acquaintance who has started his own cider label. I scored a couple barrels from him for bulk fermenting, and gave him an apple to try…he had a refractometer, and tested the juice which came out to 15 brix. Looking at my hydrometer scale, this would yield a cider of around 8% alcohal if fermented to full dryness.I can see why hard cider makers would value this sugary(and acidic) apple in a blend. Poverty Lane orchards grows these for their well known Farnum Hill ciders.

Womsbled, the research I’ve seen does not show a relationship between relatively high levels of supplemental nitrogen and lower brix levels. as counter intuitive as it may be. Getting up the brix in apples is apparently more about reducing irrigation unless the researchers are missing something (like that you have to starve the trees of N for multiple years).

In the humid parts of the country all we can usually do to get higher flavor is choose the right varieties and pray for a bit of drought. That is, outside of choosing weaker soils (with less water reservoir) to grow an orchard in the first place.

I’ve known commercial growers in the northeast that provide no added N for established trees because the soil provides all the trees need. I don’t think apple growers actually go for excessively juicing up their trees, but I don’t know much about modern production techniques, with tight rows of apple bushes. .

I just made a gallon of Macintosh, Macoun, Ashmeads Kernel, Honey Crisp, Golden Delicious and a few galas. Now I need to make it into hard cider.

Sweet! Sounds like it should have a good initial gravity. I am drinking a english imported (hard) cider I manage to get my hands on. The bittersweets do give add another dimension to the beverage. Maybe we could start a ongoing cider thread here. Let us know how it turns out.

I just ate my first-ever Esopus Spitzenburg. I found these today at a local organic grocer. Packaging says they were shipped cross-country from Oregon.

I’m not sure if this sample was representative, but here’s what ran through my mind eating my first Spitz:

Beautiful looking apple. Red over yellow and orange. Smallish size. Compact. Soft biting texture, but not all-the-way gone mealy. Fairly juicy in a Gravenstein sort of way. Zingy sweet-sour flavor (I can see why @alan likes it). Kind of a subtle nutty almond-like savory component. Acidulous flavors of kiwi and grape along with an earthy red raspberry. Tastes a little like a York Imperial crossed with an overripe Jonathan.

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Those don’t look anything like the apples we were picking a couple weeks ago and it almost seems that either my Spitz is another variety or yours are. The funny thing is, when I look them up for photos, some look like mine and some like yours. Mine are a darker more solid red and completely and beautifully speckled - like yellow- tan freckles.

You should try to find some that are grown locally- they do grow them at Monticello, and though the weather there is probably warmer now that in T. Jefferson’s day, it used to be very good for Spitz.

Check out Bob’s pics of the Spitz I grow. Orchard Visit with Alan - #89 by BobVance

I’m late to this thread…lots of good stuff.

I did the same thing with a similar result when Matt posted it in the Date thread (which is what lead me here). My first thought was that it could have to do with how sun-exposed the fruit was, but in the other thread you said:

Maybe that site had such good sun exposure that even the less perfect fruits still got plenty.

The other possibility that occurred to me is that there is more than one version of Spitzenburg out there. That could help address another point that has eaten at me a bit- why did the fruit and leaves on your tree look so good, when it is supposed to be especially susceptible to scab. The Braeburn next to it had plenty of scab, so it isn’t like the site isn’t afflicted.

In case anyone doesn’t want to follow the link (though it is well worth it :slight_smile: ):

I’ve never grown it, but I usually pick some up at the farmer’s market in November. I’ve tried them right away, but they seem a bit bland. Keeping them in the fridge for about a month seems to bring out more flavor and the texture maintains pretty well. I agree with the “piney” description, though it isn’t overpowering.

Can’t forget Golden Russet. My all time high for it was 23 brix. I picked some with the Spitz and they ranged from 16-21, in the ones I’ve sampled so far. And recently, I picked a Winston with 22 brix.

I was originally going to say that Egremont Russet gets to similar levels as Golden Russet, but I found a post I made 2 years ago, where I had one (heavily damaged by rots and insects) where it hit 26 brix, an all time high for apples (for me).

The Spitz you picked from is not very vigorous, for some reason- last year I thought it was dying but it looked better this year. There was some scab on the other Spitz.

Scab was difficult to control on that site because mowing was not done in spring- the Macintosh were nearly all ruined as were half of the Macouns (most years there is zero scab there)- I grow Brae at my own orchard in a tree that is very vigorous and self shading and also doesn’t get sun until mid-morning but I’ve never had a spot of scab on it. Same spray sched at both sites.

The point is that the evidence of relative scab susceptibility is somewhat questionable.

I didn’t realize that Scab was so irregular. I thought that fireblight was the unpredictable, almost capricious disease. Do you have scab on the other trees in your orchard, or have you been able to completely knock it down over the years with consistent spraying and mowing?

I don’t think I am able to discern all that subtlety. But, I just ate another to give it a try. Part of the apple was starting to soften a bit and interestingly, that part had 22 brix, while the harder parts had 20. I didn’t sense the kiwi or grape, but I could taste a hint of the raspberry, especially when I first started eating it. A fruity, aromatic, sweet yet acidic apple. It was very good and reminded me of Kidds Orange Red.

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Because it was so cool and wet in June this year, scab pressure probably lasted a couple weeks more than usual and because I didn’t anticipate this I had some scab at 3 sites out of all I manage- you just happened to have visited a couple of them. I’ve never had a spot of scab on my own trees with my 3-spray program to control it, as is the case of most orchards I manage. The sites you visited has a higher concentration of apple trees than most I manage- so that likely is part of the issue.

I had heard that Tom J used to import his Spitz apples from NY.

Often the problem with heirlooms is that the quality they achieve is very regionally affected. Just as importantly, they often depend on specific soil types to achieve highest quality. Modern varieties are probably more universally adaptable so that they can more easily be marketed with a reliable taste, texture and appearance profile. Of course, how an apple does in the Hudson Valley and Washington State is the most important thing to the commercial industry in this country. But the value of patents world wide rely on a much wider range of adaptability.

If TJ actually considered NY Spitz such a superior apple that he preferred them to what he could grow in his own vast orchard, it is a huge endorsement for trying to grow it anywhere with a similar climate to southern.NY. His Spitz probably came from orchards on sites very close to where I now work.

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