Peach Cider: A Swing and a Miss
I recently brewed some hard peach cider (I think peach and apple taste good together). I used three quarts of sweet cider and one quart of peach juice, used wine yeast because I didn't feel like buying a dedicated cider yeast. Forgot to record the starting gravity, but it was in the 5-7% range, about where you expect ciders to be.
I bottled it yesterday. It's not terrible, but it's not great either. The peach flavor definitely comes through, but the apples have contributed a sour Granmy Smith note, and the two don't mesh well. This sometimes happens when I make ciders, even out of sweet dessert apples. I think my brain often represents dry apple beverages that way; there's no longer any sweetness to mask the malic acid. I guess I could backsweeten it, but then I wouldn't be able to bottle-carbonate, and I really prefer cider to be dry and fizzy.1
Or sweet, still, and spiced — a warm, mulled cider is lovely when it's cold. But it's the wrong time of year, and I don't think peach would work well in a brew like that.↩