Originally published in the November/December 2014 2014 issue of Zymurgy magazine
by Nathan Williams
Ice cider, like ordinary hard cider, is a fermented drink made from apples, but the juice from the apples is concentrated before fermentation by freezing—that’s the ice part—and fermentation is halted prematurely, leaving significant residual sweetness. The resulting product is clear, usually still, with a nearly syrupy viscosity, and interplay among sweet, alcoholic, and tart flavors.
The final flavor profile is more recognizably apple than that of most dry ciders. It’s not something you drink a pint of—ice cider is more akin to an aperitif or dessert drink, similar to eiswein or botrytis (noble rot) wines such as Sauternes.
Note: Ice cider is not applejack, which is what you get if you freeze regular hard cider to concentrate the alcohol. Applejack tastes completely different and concentrating the alcohol can put you on the wrong side of the home distilling law.
Ice cider is a fairly recent innovation, generally credited to Quebec’s Christian Barthomeuf and Pierre Lafond in the early 1990s. Barthomeuf owned a struggling vineyard and winery and had tried making ice wine without much success. Looking for something new, he realized that a similar process could be applied to the locally-abundant apple crop. Lafond made a similar realization, and in addition to producing ice cider, he worked on the legal process of making it a recognized product in Canada. He gave it the name “ice cider,” or in the original French, cidre de glace. By 1999, ice cider was available as a retail product, and since then more producers have appeared in Canada and the U.S. The two originators both still produce ice cider from their own cideries, Clos Saragnat and Cidrerie St-Nicolas.
In Quebec, to be considered authentic cidre de glace, the product must, among other things, be frozen naturally (outdoors), but it is not at all necessary to obey Quebec’s rules to make good ice cider. Indeed, it is worth considering breaking other rules with the addition of different fruits, spices, sugars, or wood aging once the basic process is understood.
Getting Started
Making ice cider starts with fresh (sweet) cider. It should be fermentable, meaning not treated with preservatives like potassium sorbate. Cider that has been pasteurized or UV-treated is acceptable.
Plan for a 25-percent yield—four gallons of sweet cider for every gallon of resulting ice cider. You might reach up to 33 per- cent if you get lucky. Dust off any smaller fermenting vessels you have in the 1- to 3-gallon range.
With hard cider, the selection of apples makes a big difference in the result, with varying amounts of sugars, acids, tannins, and other flavor compounds. If you have made hard cider, you know that the “eating” or dessert apples most commonly grown in the U.S. don’t make great cider by themselves. But with ice cider, the variety is less important. Ice cider doesn’t depend on tannins in the same way, and excellent ice cider can be made, as most Quebec cidermakers make it, entirely out of dessert apples. Some even make single-varietal ice ciders from Honeycrisp apples, a popular table variety.
Whatever variety you choose, the juice needs to be concentrated by freezing. The juice is frozen solid (cryo-concentration) and then slowly thawed, and the liquid that runs off is collected. The first portion to thaw contains a much higher concentration of sugars and other dissolved material from the juice. This runoff—with a total volume of a quarter to a third of the original volume of juice—is then fermented. Starting measurements of 30 to 40 degrees Brix (starting gravity of 1.120- 1.160) are typical.
The simplest way to freeze the juice is to use a chest freezer. A temperature controller is a great investment for managing fermentation. A common 6.5-gallon bottling bucket fits the bill well and the bottom valve can be used for draining. The bucket can be safely filled with 5.5 gallons of liquid—maybe 6 if you like to live dangerously. Consider putting the bucket in the freezer before filling it with juice to avoid straining your back. However, you will still have to lift it out when it finishes freezing.
Individual one-gallon plastic jugs will also work, if you don’t have the freezer space. Simply remove two cups of liquid from each before freezing so the ice can expand.
Extraction
Once the juice is frozen all the way through and you’re ready to extract, you’ll need a collection vessel and a hose connected to the bucket’s drain valve. Remove the bucket from the freezer, open up the valve, and prepare to wait a while for runoff to start, possibly several hours. Check on it every half hour or hour. The ambient temperature will affect the speed; if you’re doing the runoff in a basement in the depths of winter, 12 to 16 hours is normal. One-gallon jugs can simply be inverted over containers and will thaw more quickly.
When it starts draining (more like dripping), test the sugar content. Gathering enough runoff to use as a sample for a hydrometer takes time. A better choice is a refractometer, which needs only a few drops to take a measurement. Since the usual range for a refractometer is 0 to 30 degrees Brix, and, especially at the beginning of the extraction process, the sugar range will be higher than that, you will need to get creative. To take the measurement, make a precise 50:50 dilution of the runoff with a small syringe—such as 2mL runoff and 2mL water—read the sugar level on the refractometer, and double that.
Keep collecting runoff until you have one-quarter of the original volume of juice, then stir and measure the overall sugar level. If it is above 30 Brix, you are in good shape—you could stop now, or you could continue to collect a little bit more. If it is substantially below that—say, below 28 Brix—stop collecting.
If the remaining liquid still seems to have a reasonable amount of sugar—over 10 Brix—you might want to collect a second volume of liquid (a second runnings of sort) then re-freeze and re-extract this, to get another dose of liquid at the desired concentration. Similarly, if your first extraction didn’t hit your target, try a second round of freezing and extracting. Some commercial operators work this way, doing one round of cryo-concentration to 20 Brix, then another to 25, and then a final one to get past 30.
Freezing using the natural cold of the outdoors, if your climate allows, is another option. Wait to press your apples, or keep the sweet juice chilled until it falls below freezing on a daily basis. Once the temperature is 30° For below overnight, put the cider outside in plastic containers, as described previously. It may take a while to completely freeze, as the daily temperature changes partially thaw and refreeze the juice several times. This is good: the freezing and thawing cycles will cause the sugars and the water to separate and migrate further apart, so that when you do extract, you get better efficiency. Once it is frozen solid, thaw and drain as previously described.
Fermentation
Fermentation of the concentrated juice into ice cider is a familiar process for experienced cidermakers. It’s important to ferment low (cool) and slow, but you do want to get the fermentation started, so the concentrated juice should be warmed to 60° F before pitching. Once it starts fermenting, consider moving it somewhere cooler.
Select yeast with relatively low attenuation. This is not the time to get out the champagne or turbo yeast. Wine yeasts are a good choice, especially those for sweeter wines like Riesling. Sweet mead yeasts and some English cider yeasts are also suitable. Lalvin 71B is a recommend- ed dry yeast. The use of yeast nutrient is debatable—some prefer a vigorous initial fermentation, while others prefer a slow fermentation that is more easily halted.
Avoid fermenting ice cider to a completely dry finish, since residual sugar is key to the flavor balance and style. Target approxi- mately 1.050 for the finishing gravity. Monitor the fermentation carefully to make sure it isn’t fermenting too fast, and once it gets toward the target gravity, stop it completely. The sugar remaining in the cider can lead to guaranteed bottle bombs if any yeast is still active. If fermentation stalls out naturally before reaching your target—at 1.060 instead of 1.050, for example—call it done; don’t try to reactivate the yeast.
The standard winemaking technique to stop fermentation is repeated racking. Rack the cider off the lees into a clean vessel, let it sit for a week or two to let anything settle out, and repeat. This method works fairly well, but it is significantly enhanced if you can cold-crash the cider first. If you have a chest freezer with a temperature controller, put the cider in at a temperature just above freezing and let it settle out before each racking.
If preferred, you can guarantee that the yeast is finished either by adding potassium sorbate or by sterile filtering. Both approaches can have flavor issues, which you may or may not be sensitive to. Sorbate is certainly cheaper and easier, but since you’re doing something as crazy as making ice cider, “cheap and easy” might not be how you approach the task.
Conventional packaging is to use skinny, corked glass bottles of 375mL or occasionally smaller. Ice cider tends to be quite pretty, in the amber range depending on the apples involved, and there are no hops and no risks of skunking, so clear glass is preferred to showcase the appearance. It doesn’t need to age in the bottl to be enjoyed, so you can immediately sit back and enjoy this relatively new star of the cider world.
Nathan Williams has been homebrewing for 15 years, ever since his computer hobby turned professional and he needed a new hobby. He is an officer of the Boston Wort Processors and a regular at Franklin County Cider Days in Massachusetts.
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