apple or water?

[BrewChoPs]

swapping some or all the water in a 5 gallon brew for good quality applejuice?

Make sure it is very high quality juice and this malty "graff" could be fantastic. Understand the flavors you are building together from malts, yeast, hops and apple juice variety. Try to pick ingredients that will compliment each other or you may invent a nasty acidic puke flavor instead.

I think Randy Moser's Radical Brewing and Ray Daniels' Designing Great Beers may lend some advice for adding fruit to beer just extrapolating more for an apple juice.

The other thing to watch out for is that apple juice is a very high percentage of water (unless you get true cider making apples) you'll have some gravity math to do.

If you get true cider making apples it is important to identify the varieties. Bittersweets ( Jersey varieties) and Bittersharps (like Kingston Black) will act like bittering hops plus tannin. With cider apples, you will have to deal a lot more with bitterness, tannin and acid balancing.

Good Luck.

[spiderwrangler]

The other thing to watch out for is that apple juice is a very high percentage of water (unless you get true cider making apples) you'll have some gravity math to do..

Not sure what way you are cautioning, but IIRC, apple juice comes in above 1.040, so if you do all juice, you will already have quite a bit of sugars...

Another thing I didn't think to mention before was that using juice for water is probably going to be easier in an extract based batch than all grain... I have no idea what the mineral profile of apple juice would be, but am guessing it would be lacking in a number of the important ones...

[NHbeerscene]

One of the first brews I made was an apple ale. The directions said that you could use the included flavoring or add apple cider to the base beer. The cider would have to be preservative free though. Now that my brew partner (not in the brokeback mountain sense) and I are building a press and some of that juice will be diverted to brewing.

[spiderwrangler]

Now that my brew partner (not in the brokeback mountain sense)...

Because you're city guys instead of shepherds?

[NHbeerscene]

Got it in one

[Ozwald]

Now that my brew partner (not in the brokeback mountain sense)...

Because you're city guys instead of shepherds?

I was going to say cause neither wears a cowboy hat, but nicely done.

[Bugeater]

I'm brewing a graff this morning after tasting a fantastic one yesterday. The recipe is really quite simple. 2.5 gallons of of a 1.040-1.050 wort (mine is 4# maris otter, 1/2 # 60L crystal, about 15 ibu with santiam hops) mixed with another 2.5 gallons of fresh pressed unpasteurized apple juice and about 3# brown sugar. The natural yeasts will take care of the fermentation. You need the extra sugar to get the gravity up to where the alcohol level will become toxic to the acetobacter before it turns the entire batch to vinegar. At the end of fermentation I will add a quart of tart cherry juice concentrate. You end up with a complex sour beer/cider tasting very much like an excellent kriek.

Our club spent the afternoon yesterday picking a wide variety of apples from the heritage orchard near Arbor Lodge State Park. Mostly apples that we had never heard of, most not grown commercially for many decades. Due to the dry summer, the apples were exceptionally sweet. The gravity of the juice tested out at 1.059! Normally it's around 1.050 for the local apples.

I'll let you know how mine comes out sometime next year.

Wayne

[Billy Klubb]

IIf it's clear & yellowish, you don't want it. Look for that cloudy brown juice.

Brown and cloudy could be a sign of dehydration or a UT infection....

what if it's real thick, like corn syrup, and green?