Fermenting
Wild against cultured yeast: two carboys from one pressing
For three autumns I argued with myself about whether to trust the yeast that comes in on the apples or add a packet of something reliable. In 2025 I stopped arguing and split one batch in two, and this is what the cellar did with them.
- Written
- 15 February 2026
- Re-read and corrected
- 3 May 2026
- Reading
- 7 minutes
- Orchard
- north of Vilnius
i.
Why the question kept coming back
My first cider, in 2021, was wild by accident. A bucket of juice was left in the cellar under a cloth while I went back to town for a week, and when I came back it was fizzing gently and smelled of bread. It turned into something dry, cloudy and very good, and I have been chasing it since. The problem was that the next two wild batches were not good at all. One stalled halfway and tasted of sweet vinegar by spring, and the other developed a smell I can only describe as struck matches and never quite lost it.
The cultured batches, meanwhile, were reliable and a little dull. They started within a day, finished dry in about three weeks and tasted clean, but they all tasted clean in the same way, whichever trees had gone into them. After three years of that I wanted to know whether the difference was the yeast or everything else I had changed at the same time, and the only way to find out was to change one thing and hold the rest still.
ii.
How the split was set up
The juice was a single blend from the 2025 pressing: roughly two parts Antonovka to one part Pepin, with a few kilos of the Bottom Russet for tannin. It was siphoned off its sediment on the Sunday morning and divided into two twenty-three litre glass carboys, filled to the same mark from the same bucket, alternating jugs so that neither got more of the top or the bottom. Starting gravity in both was 1.050. Both went into the cellar side by side, on the same shelf, at a temperature that sat between eleven and thirteen degrees for the whole of October.
The cultured carboy got a dry wine yeast rehydrated in warm water, the same kind I have used since 2022. The wild carboy got nothing at all, and neither carboy got any sulphite, which is where I departed from the more careful advice. I wanted the only difference to be the yeast, and sulphiting the wild one would have changed which yeasts survived. Both were fitted with airlocks and left alone, apart from a gravity reading every Sunday and a note of the smell when I lifted the airlock.
iii.
What the cellar did through the winter
The cultured carboy behaved exactly as the packet promised. It was bubbling steadily by the second morning, reached 1.010 after ten days and finished at 0.998 after twenty-four days, at which point it was racked off the yeast into a clean carboy. It smelled of green apple and very little else throughout, and tasted sharp, thin and correct. The wild carboy did nothing visible for four days, which is always the anxious part, and then started so slowly that for a week I could only see it by watching the airlock for a full minute. It took nine weeks to reach 1.004 and then seemed to stop.
What happened next is the reason I would do this again. In late January the cellar warmed slightly during a thaw and the wild carboy started moving again, very gently, and at the same time the sharpness that dominated both batches in December began to soften in the wild one and not in the other. I think that was the second, softer fermentation that turns the harsher apple acid into a milder one, and I think the cultured batch never had it because it was racked clean and early. I am not certain, and the log says so, but the change in taste was not subtle.
iv.
Tasting them side by side in spring
In April both were bottled still, and six of us tasted them blind on the plot on the first warm Sunday of the year. Five of the six preferred the wild one. The descriptions were more interesting than the vote: the cultured cider was called clean, sharp and a little empty, and the wild one was called rounder, cloudier, slightly farmyard and more like apples. The one person who preferred the cultured batch said the wild one smelled faintly of a barn, and he was not wrong. It did, a little, and that is part of what I liked about it.
My conclusion is narrower than I hoped. The wild batch was better this time, from this juice, in this cellar, in a winter that happened to have a thaw at the right moment. It was also slower, less predictable and one bad week away from the struck-match batch of 2023. For 2026 I will do the split again with a different blend, and I will keep one cultured carboy going regardless, because the neighbours are owed something drinkable whatever the wild yeast decides to do.
Figures on this page were copied out of the paper log, where they were written with the hydrometer still floating in the jar. Nothing here is advice for anyone else's cellar. Last amended 3 May 2026.