Andy Chase

For the record, I just bottled my first batch of cider.

I'm not terribly optimistic about the way bottling went. I wound up being a bit sloppy, and there were probably plenty of opportunities for random contamination to occur. Plus I think some of the sanitizing solution I was using in the siphon backwashed into the cider, because the hose I was using to bottle was too large for my racking cane and air got in where the two were connected.

I wouldn't be too concerned about that normally except it's a small batch - maybe 1.75 gallons, and I was using diluted bleach because I'm out of OneStep. If the finished product has a piquant poolwater aftertaste, I'll know why.

Everything went quite well to date, though - I started with two gallons of unfiltered apple juice from Whole Foods (at the time I got it in my head to try making hard cider, none of the local orchards had started selling cider yet), measured the Original Gravity at 1.050, and pitched a packet of Lalvin champagne yeast on 10/16.

Two weeks later, the gravity was down to .990 (this is definitely a very dry cider. smells a bit like white wine), and I racked the cider from the 5 gallon donut filling bucket I used as a primary fermentor (Go ask your local donut shop - they'll probably be happy to set some aside for you) back to the glass bottles the juice originally came in.

Tonight the gravity was still at .990, so I decided to bottle. When all was said and done, I wound up with 15 12 ounce bottles, just shy of 1.5 gallons - which is good, because that was the exact amount I had measured priming sugar for. According to the calculation I found somewhere on the internet, the alcohol content for this batch is about 7.84% ABV.

Siphoning was clumsy. False starts, the aforementioned backwash... in the end there was a fair amount of bare-hands/open air contact... hopefully though the higher alcohol content plus the fact that my hands were pretty well sanitized themselves means nothing foreign will start growing in the bottles. I'll be interested to see what I wind up with in a couple of weeks; hopefully it will be nicely carbonated just in time for Thanksgiving. I briefly considered priming with maple syrup instead of sugar, but decided to stick to the basics this first time around.

Of course, everything I've read indicates that this stuff should really be aged for at least a year to reach its full potential. I'll have to post a taste test next year.