Sanitation

Either you all just jumped to the bottom or are really dedicated readers that last post was long.

Any how the sanitation for fermenting in a container that already contained the juice you are going to ferment means you are sanitizing the things that are not already inside the juice container so settle down people.

I've talked about Star San before, but if you don't buy that at a brew store or online there are other options that require you to be mindful of and are readily available at most drug stores.  I am talking of course about Iodine solutions,  or bleach solutions.  John Palmer has a great page on what and when to clean and sanitize as well as all the solution guidelines on his How to Brew site.

The things you need to clean and or sanitize for the Brain Dead simple recipe posted are the bottles, and the aluminum foil that you cover the juice container with.  Right that is all.  Less important that a few little Richards made it sound huh?  In most cases when you are actually brewing you sanitize everything you put into or but your beer into.  For this case you are trying to not put anything into your vessel, no utensils and especially keep your filthy hands out of it.

Now when you try to bottle, not having a racking cane or bottle wand is doing to make this task challenging and you are going to have to take some precautions here because what I'm outlining has all sorts of opportunity to be a mess, but with care I think could actually turn out fine.  After the Apfelwein is done fermenting you will want to wash and sanitize your the bottles you plan on using. Removing the labels is going to be all on you, I use PBW as a cleaning agent as it makes the labels just fall off, and quickly removes the glue as well. You have to get PBW at a brew store or online, and I use gloves but it works faster than anything else I know of. The directions for the size my brewstore sells it in is for a 5 gallon batch of pbw which is murderously overkill for 10 or so bottles. I've done 48x12oz and 24x22oz of bottles in a 5 gallon batch, so this stuff is pretty potent and a waste on just few bottles to plan ahead and clean a few cases of empties for use later.

If you don't want to mess with sanitizer and washing solutions you can run bottles that don't have any crud in the bottom of them through the dishwasher on a full cycle with no detergent and no rinse aid. If you don't know how to disable the jet dry part of your dishwashers cycle don't use your dishwasher. I only suggest it because you get your cleaning and sanitizing done in one step, and most people can accomplish this. If you don't use the dishwasher, you will need to make a bleach or Iodophor solution and follow the John Palmer's guide for how long it takes the solution you choose to sanitize. Iodophor takes 10 minutes to sanitize and bleach takes 20 minutes. For reference Star San does the same in 30 seconds! Have I mentioned how amazing Star San is?

Once the bottles are clean you should prime them with corn sugar. I Figured that about 1/2 a teaspoon of dextrose per 12oz bottle for priming, so use a funnel to get that in the bottom of the bottle to start with. Then we need to sanitize the funnel and reasonable size piece of cheese cloth. Once sanitized you will take the cheese cloth and make a well in the funnel to catch particles as you pour from your juice container into the bottles. You are aiming for just filling the fat part of the neck on your bottle. Use any bottle conditioned beer for reference on how full to fill the bottles (Sierra Nevada brand does bottle conditioning) when it gets to be the point of only pouring trub (the crud that is at the bottom) it is up to you, but I would choose to abandon the liquid that is with the trub, it just won't taste as good.

Cap those bottles and keep them at room temperature to allow them to carbonate for about 2 weeks and then you can put them in the fridge to drink. People that are really into this say that it only gets better with time so 3 months is good, 6 months is great, 9 months will blow your mind. Your first batch I doubt you will be able to resist jumping in to drink them, but if you have a few of these going at any given time you will have a steady stream of them ready to drink. Good luck, and let me know if anyone gives this a try.

The most simple, brain dead recipe I can think of

Okay I've been working on this thought for a while now here is the most basic recipe I can think of.  It is for Apfelwein, a German Hard Cider.  The post show how to go full bore for 5 gallons, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with this recipe.  You will notice that in his post he uses TreeTop Apple Juice.  I know that it is available in Seattle, and I believe it is distributed nationwide.  For you international folks you may have to improvise as an American brand.  The reason that they choose TreeTop is there are no preservatives added, these preservatives will kill your yeast.  You can buy it in 64oz (1/2 gallon) bottles and I believe that some places sell it in 128oz (1 gallon) containers.  I think for your time it is worth finding the 1 gallon as this is only ~10 bottles of Apfelwein.

Go look for a local homebrew store, the things you will be getting here depend on how much time and money you want to spend.  The most basic trip will be to get Dexterose (corn sugar) and a champagne yeast.  Tell them what you are doing, and if it is anything like my homebrew store the staff will be very helpful.  Ask if they have brewed with the yeast that they are directing you to, and find out about the type of Kräusen it makes. Because our vessel is very limited in size we want little to no Kräusen. The champagne yeast I used I believe did, but yeast mentioned in the recipe I linked to allegedly does not. For bonus points you can also get an airlock and stopper while at the homebrew store. I believe they run about $3 or so and are really pretty handy. If you are so inclined you could get the swing top bottles here I believe they where around $2 dollars each or $25 for a case of 12-16oz bottles. If you choose to drink your way through bottles to reuse you will need to buy a capper and spare caps. The capper runs ~$20 and a bag of 144 caps (I have no idea why 144) is ~$4. If you plan on making more than 1 gallon of Apfelwein at a time you might consider some of the other equipment I outlined in the previous post (carboy, racking cane ect.) otherwise you are done here.

Now purists will get on me for this but the point of this post is to be as basic as you can manage to be so here goes, we are going to ferment in the container that the juice comes in unless you bought more equipment. We are starting at room temperature 60-80 degrees, too hot and too cold stress the yeast out so really you should aim for these temps if you can and for the love of god don't just use baking yeast. Go buy actual yeast otherwise your results will not be worth the time and modest money you invested. The most basic way to proceed is remove 1/2 cup of juice from the 64oz container or 1 cup of juice from the 128oz container, and replace that with and equal amount of corn sugar (dextrose) replace the cap and shake it well to get the sugar mixed up. You may be able to remove less juice after you determine how much head space you need for fermentation, but to be safe try the numbers I used. After that you will add a fraction of the yeast packet, for the most part there is no real way to screw this up with over pitch so if you are too lazy to figure out 1/4 or so of the packet just dump the majority of it in.

Now to keep other junk out of the Apfelwein we need some aluminium foil to make a loose, but not too loose fitting cap. The yeast will produce CO₂ so it needs to get out and not create pressure in your vessel.

Now here comes the hard part:

Leave it alone for the next month or preferably 2 months.  Yes you read that right, it takes forever.  This is why it is worth the time to make bigger batches.

Once you have waited for it to clarify for about 2 months you can bottle with a 1/2 teaspoon of dextrose per 12oz bottle and cap them.  Now you get to wait another 2 weeks at least before you put them in the fridge to drink.

Extra bonus points that where not covered here:
Sanitation.

I read the steps and realized I never talked about sanitation, but this post is already ridiculously long so that will have to wait.