Increasing sugar concentration by freezing

[BernardSmith]

A few days ago I froze a small container of pressed apple juice from a local orchard. The gravity of the juice was around 1.050. Today, I allowed the frozen juice to "thaw" in the fridge after turning the bottle upside down and allowed the thawing juice to be collected in a another container. After about 8 hours I measured the gravity of the collected juice and it was above 1.090. The amount of juice I collected was small in comparison to the amount that was still frozen (perhaps 1/5 ) but freezing and then drawing off the juices that thaw sooner rather than later results in a far more concentrated must. (the freezing point of the sugars is far higher than water and so sugars melt far sooner than the water)

I am planning on making a cider from this kind of juice... and so a question:

My local supermarket carries orchard pressed juice that has been inoculated with sorbate. Would this process of freezing the juice and then thawing the sugar concentrate result in significant removal of the sorbate or in significant concentration of this preservative? The sorbated apple juice is far less expensive than the juice I can buy directly from the orchard. Thoughts?

 

[dralarms]

Sorbate in its self won't stop fermentation. You can add enough of a starter yeast to make it go.

 

[seth8530]

Hmm, interesting question to be honest. I guess the best you can do is start it with a good starter. BTW, in the past I have thought about doing the same thing you are doing.. Best of luck!

 

[sour_grapes]

I would guess that it would concentrate it. Basically, any solute lowers the freezing point of the solution, which is also why your sugars get concentrated. This is also why we put salt on the roads in winter.

(the freezing point of the sugars is far higher than water and so sugars melt far sooner than the water)

This is not the correct way to think of it. Even naively, if the freezing point is higher, wouldn't the sugars take LONGER to "melt"? The way I described first is the better way to think about it.

 

[WVMountaineerJack]

Bernard, its about quality, you can only make cider to a certain level of quality with supermarket cider. You are lucky to be able to get good local fresh cider from an orchard, this is what you should be working with if good quality mattered to your cider. Instead you want to complain about what a local orchard charges and go use cheap imported juice, and with sorbate in it (good luck). Our local ciderworks sells their high quality cidermakers cider for 10$/gal, its got all those english cider apples in it, its amazingly good stuff, and for only 10$ gallon you get something you cant get, yet people complain about it comparing it to supermarket cheap cider, why are you making cider if you arent going to make the best stuff in the world? If you just want a weak bodied low flavor cider just buy the frozen concentrate and you can dilute it to whatever you gravity you want, get the one with no sorbate. WVMJ

 

[Runningwolf]

Bernard I know a winery that does the exact same thing you did and then they make a Apple ice wine out of it. This is not to be confused with freezing after fermentation. It might also be a great way to make a flavor pack.

Sent from my SCH-I535 using Wine Making mobile app

 

[grapeman]

What you are looking at doing will result in an apple wine, not hard cider. Cider can only be up to about 9% ABV, beyond that it is considered wine. It is the basis of making faux ice wine, but generally it is done to raise the brix even higher. Quite a bit of it is made in Canada and there are more places in the US making it all the time.

 

[BernardSmith]

Bernard, its about quality, you can only make cider to a certain level of quality with supermarket cider. You are lucky to be able to get good local fresh cider from an orchard, this is what you should be working with if good quality mattered to your cider. Instead you want to complain about what a local orchard charges and go use cheap imported juice, and with sorbate in it (good luck). Our local ciderworks sells their high quality cidermakers cider for 10$/gal, its got all those english cider apples in it, its amazingly good stuff, and for only 10$ gallon you get something you cant get, yet people complain about it comparing it to supermarket cheap cider, why are you making cider if you arent going to make the best stuff in the world? If you just want a weak bodied low flavor cider just buy the frozen concentrate and you can dilute it to whatever you gravity you want, get the one with no sorbate. WVMJ

No argument from me regarding the quality. Indeed I am making 6 gallons of apple wine (chaptalized to about 12 % ABV) from apples pressed by my local orchard, but the sorbated apple juices also come from nearby orchards. And yes, the quality may not be quite as good but I guess I simply want to see how easy or difficult it is to make a kind of frozen concentrate cider. My real and "pressing" issue is how many gallons of pressed apple juice at a gravity of 1.050 (+/-) will I need to produce one gallon of juice at a gravity greater than 1.080 and using the less expensive but still locally produced sorbated juice will give me an idea and so enable me to go back to the orchard and ask for enough juice to enable me to make at least a quality cider if not "the best stuff in the world"... But rather than toss the concentrate I might as well try to ferment it... and hence my question.

But here is another question. If I am hoping to double the sugar content by freeze -concentrating the juice does that simply mean that I need to expect to lose half the volume or is the relationship between the pressed apple juice and the concentrated juice more complex than that?

 

[seth8530]

No argument from me regarding the quality. Indeed I am making 6 gallons of apple wine (chaptalized to about 12 % ABV) from apples pressed by my local orchard, but the sorbated apple juices also come from nearby orchards. And yes, the quality may not be quite as good but I guess I simply want to see how easy or difficult it is to make a kind of frozen concentrate cider. My real and "pressing" issue is how many gallons of pressed apple juice at a gravity of 1.050 (+/-) will I need to produce one gallon of juice at a gravity greater than 1.080 and using the less expensive but still locally produced sorbated juice will give me an idea and so enable me to go back to the orchard and ask for enough juice to enable me to make at least a quality cider if not "the best stuff in the world"... But rather than toss the concentrate I might as well try to ferment it... and hence my question.

But here is another question. If I am hoping to double the sugar content by freeze -concentrating the juice does that simply mean that I need to expect to lose half the volume or is the relationship between the pressed apple juice and the concentrated juice more complex than that?

Well, I can give you a theoretical answer to the last part of your question.

Brix= Gsugar/(Gsugar+Gwater) ie Brix is the mass percent of sugar in your solution.

Using this, I wrote a short MATLAB script to that solves for the mass percent of water you should have left over if you sweetened the apple juice by removing only the water from the solution (not quite how it works in real life I dont think). However, this should give you a good idea of the kind of challenges you might face to make this work.

Once I wrote the MATLAB script I used it to solve for different levels of sweetness compared to the initial sweetness. Ie 1X as sweet, 2X,3X,4X. Then, I took the corresponding water Ratios and plotted them in Excel. As you can see, it gives a nice exponential curve. I then did a curve fit of the exponential to give approximate water ratios for varying levels of sweetness.

The important thing to remember about the data that I generated is that gives you a good rough idea of how much you would need to reduce the volume if you lived in a perfect world where you could remove only the water from the solution.

The PDF of the excel file is attached and the MATLAB code is below.



Gs=25;
Gw=100;
Gwi=Gw
Brixi=Gs/(Gw+Gs);
Brixf=0;
Ratio=Brixf/Brixi;
while Ratio<5
Gw=Gw-.001;
Brixf=Gs/(Gw+Gs);

Ratio=Brixf/Brixi;
end
Ratio
Brixf
Gwf=Gw
WaterFraction=Gwf/Gwi

View attachment Sugar Curve for Removing Water.pdf

 

[BernardSmith]

Well, I can give you a theoretical answer to the last part of your question.

Brix= Gsugar/(Gsugar+Gwater) ie Brix is the mass percent of sugar in your solution.

Using this, I wrote a short MATLAB script to that solves for the mass percent of water you should have left over if you sweetened the apple juice by removing only the water from the solution (not quite how it works in real life I dont think). However, this should give you a good idea of the kind of challenges you might face to make this work.

Once I wrote the MATLAB script I used it to solve for different levels of sweetness compared to the initial sweetness. Ie 1X as sweet, 2X,3X,4X. Then, I took the corresponding water Ratios and plotted them in Excel. As you can see, it gives a nice exponential curve. I then did a curve fit of the exponential to give approximate water ratios for varying levels of sweetness.

The important thing to remember about the data that I generated is that gives you a good rough idea of how much you would need to reduce the volume if you lived in a perfect world where you could remove only the water from the solution.

The PDF of the excel file is attached and the MATLAB code is below.



Gs=25;
Gw=100;
Gwi=Gw
Brixi=Gs/(Gw+Gs);
Brixf=0;
Ratio=Brixf/Brixi;
while Ratio<5
Gw=Gw-.001;
Brixf=Gs/(Gw+Gs);

Ratio=Brixf/Brixi;
end
Ratio
Brixf
Gwf=Gw
WaterFraction=Gwf/Gwi

Many thanks.
So by doubling the sugar content (removing the water by freezing) I am indeed going to lose more than 50 percent of the volume (about 60 percent), so if I start with 6 gallons I will end up with about 3.5

 

[seth8530]

Almost! If you start with 6 gallons and you double the sugar you would have around 40% left over which means closer to 2.4 gallons. However, in reality I fear you might end up having even less. Remember, this assumes that you can perfectly remove the water and not any of the sugar.

 

[BernardSmith]

Almost! If you start with 6 gallons and you double the sugar you would have around 40% left over which means closer to 2.4 gallons. However, in reality I fear you might end up having even less. Remember, this assumes that you can perfectly remove the water and not any of the sugar.

Arghhh I was hoping that I would get the 60% and not the 40% but when I experimented with a pint or so of juice it was closer to the 40 - closer but a good deal less (I would have said around 20%). I guess I am going to have to buy about 4 gallons for every 1 gallon I hope to make. This can make a man want to take up drinking!

 

[seth8530]

Heh yeah, their Is a reason why ice wine is not cheap.

 

[WVMountaineerJack]

http://www.edenicecider.com/abouticecider.html A little searching for ice cider will help you from reinventing the wheel. I think winemaker mag had a big article on it a couple years ago, very nice rig where they froze better bottles full of apple juice and then made a rack to hold them while they thawed and each one had a funnel and a tube leading into a single carboy that they constantly took SG readings from. Others go a step further and let the apples themselves freeze and then after they thaw a little slowly press them to get the juice. For the rule intensive group the juice has to be frozen naturally outside, not in a big freezer, little hard to freeze those big IBCs unless it gets really cold, maybe this year a lot of people could have made ice cider easily. WVMJ

 

[BernardSmith]

I bought 3 gallons of apple juice (gravity was around 1.050) , removed about 12 oz and then froze them. I then took out one gallon at a time and allowed the melting juice to drip into a large mouthed jar for about an hour or two until the jar contained about 1/3 gallon of juice. I measured the gravity and it was a hair above 1.084. I now have 1 gallon quietly fermenting (71B)...