Moonlight Meadery Boys N Berries clone

Ingredients

4 gallons (15 L) sweet apple cider
1 gallon (4 L) boysenberry puree
4 Campden tablets
1 packet Lalvin Narbonne 71B-1122 yeast
1.5 tsp. Go-Ferm

Step by step

Add juices and Campden tablets to a sanitized fermenter. Place sanitized airlock onto fermenter and wait 24 hours. After the 24 hours, prepare yeast by adding the 1.5 tsp. of Go-Ferm to 1⁄2 cup of hot water and mix. Let the mixture cool to 104 °F (40 °C) and then add the active dried yeast. After 15 minutes (yeast should begin to foam), stir well to mix the yeast into a slurry. Pour the yeast slurry into the fermenter. Seal fermenter with a sanitized airlock and put fermenter in an area that is 65 °F (18 °C).

When fermentation stops and the specific gravity as measured by a hydrometer is stable (has not changed over the course of several days), it is ready to transfer the cider into a secondary fermenter. Sanitize your secondary fermenter and siphoning equipment. Carefully siphon the fruited cider into the secondary fermenter. Leave as much sediment as possible in the primary fermenter. Let the cider clarify in the secondary fermenter. You may wish to add a fining agent such as isinglass to facilitate clearing, and/or potassium sorbate to prevent further fermentation.

At this point in the process you’re going to want to taste your cider and see what final adjustments need to be made. This is where your skills really will shine as you need to balance the acidity, and sweetness.

I recommend using sanitized siphoning equipment to pull a small amount of cider to sample, and if needed, then back sweeten to taste and stabilize. Options for back sweeting are limitless — you could use fruit juice, sugar, honey, etc. The challenge is not to ruin what you have worked so hard at. The fermentation process causes particular matter to drop, and when you rack off the sediment it results in your clear finished product. If you were to add juice to back sweeten, you should expect that this will leave some sediment in the fruited cider. However, you can get a rather amazing fruit note by adding juice to the finished fruited cider.

If you wish to bottle condition your stabilized cider, wait 24 hours and then add priming sugar. Use a bottle-conditioning calculator to get the right carbonation level. Bottle conditioning will produce a dry cider and cannot be used if sorbate has been added to stabilize a sweet cider.

You can bottle or keg your fruited cider the same way you would your homebrew. Hard fruit ciders can be consumed after two weeks of bottling and aged for six months or more to achieve superior flavor.