Very Fine Apples

I’ve got a carboy of apple wine in my cellar that I haven’t talked about very much. I started it up before I had the ‘blog, so that’s one reason it hasn’t gotten much mention here… The other reason is that it just hasn’t been doing very well.

I started with about five gallons of cider from the Lesser Farms orchard in deepest, darkest Dexter. That, some sugar and some yeast were pretty much all that I needed… I don’t have the exact recipe handy, but I’ll see if I can dig it up and post it later.

Anyway, the fermentation went well and it sat in the basement for about ten months mellowing away, but the whole thing stayed very very cloudy. It was lighter in color than apple cider, but it had the same haze. Shining a flashlight into it lit the whole thing up, but it didn’t pass through. In contrast, the pumpkin wine had settled out pretty nicely after about six months with just a little bit of residual haze.

I tried adding some pectin enzyme back in early August, but as of last week it hadn’t had much effect. There was only a faint dusting of sediment on the bottom. So on Friday, after getting a bunch of other stuff done, I added the finings that I’d ordered from Homebrew Heaven. The package contained two little bottles, one labeled Gelatin the other Kieselsol. You pour in the gelatin and stir gently for about 30 seconds before adding the other stuff, then put the stopper back in and wait at least two weeks before bottling it or racking it off to another carboy.

My fiancee and I went down to the cellar on Sunday to check if there had been any progress, and all I can say is WOW! I mean, there’s enough of a WOW that I’m tempted to use the much despised <blink> tag around the word WOW. Seriously. WOW!

The stuff is almost crystal clear. If you hold a flashlight right up against the carboy, you can barely see some haze. There’s an inch deep layer of sediment at the bottom. I wish I’d taken some before-after pictures, it’s that amazing. Two days with finings did what nearly a year just sitting there couldn’t.

We should be bottling it in about a month. After that, I’m gonna order some more of that stuff for the other wines when they’re closer to ready.