Yeast Cake Reuse - Part 1- The Cider Experiment -

I've been brewing every week or other week for the past 12 months and one thing that constantly bothers me is how much yeast I throw away after I bottle. Surely I can make better use of this yeast cake?

The driving factor behind this was laziness. How can I do create something super simple, cheap, fast that would also taste good.

The ingredients:

• Apple Juice Concentrate - 1 can
• Peach Nectar - 1.05 quarts
• Apple Juice - 6 quarts

The Process

After racking the beer out of the carboy I simply put the stopper back on. I did leave a tiny layer of beer. Once I finished bottling I used a sanitized funnel and poured all of the ingredients directly into the carboy, then capped it with the stopper. I placed this back into my freezer/fermentation chamber at 67 degrees.

 

I left this in the chamber for one week until the primary fermentation finished. I then left the carboy in the basement at around 70 degrees for another week. Next, I racked into a bottling bucket using another container of peach nectar in place of the bottling sugar, and bottled.

I had used several 12 oz bottles for testing bottles. After 2 weeks the first taste of the cider was not promising. It had a horrible smell and taste which I've narrowed down to acetaldehyde. Using the peach nectar as priming sugar left a ton of sediment at the bottom of each bottle.

I tried several more bottles over the course of the next month and a half. It took approximately twelve weeks for this off flavor to completely dissipate. What was left was a dry cider, with a slightly hoppy taste to it, and a slight peach flavor to it. It was drinkable and somewhat pleasing with a decent amount of alcohol.

I will give this another try soon. I will leave the cider to ferment a minimum of four weeks, maybe six.