acowutter

Recipes 

I will deffenatly tighten up my sanitation , but on my bottle of sanatazer . It does say that there is no need to rinse , but I will always measure and rinse from now on , or , just switch to star San or something

bottlebomber

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Holy crap...

GinKings

Recipes 

I used Iodophor for years w/o rinsing, with no problems. Unless your gonna boil the water first, I think rinsing is a risk. The water coming out of your kitchen faucet isn't sterilized.

In your original post you stated that you ferment to 1.020 and then add potassium sorbate to halt fermentation. Is that working for you? How much are you adding? Sorbate should not be able to stop a fermentation, since it only keeps the yeast from reproducing. It doesn't kill the yeast.

acowutter

Recipes 

Im only adding about 4 1/2 -5 tsp ( sorta hard to measure unless I'm weighing it out in grams) but yeah it works fine for my sweetness level I wanted , and I usually would just rerack it and drink it before anything was an issue , but I only did that for one of the batches ( it worked out ok )..

So I guess bottom line is that I'm really not doing any thing wrong process wise , besides, Posablely my sanitation habits??

GinKings

Recipes 

I think 5 tsp of sorbate is way too much. That's one tsp per gallon. I have two bottles of sorbate. The directions on one says 1/2 tsp per gallon and the other says 1/4 tsp per gallon. You might want to check the directions on yours.

Sorbate does not stop fermentation, nor does it kill yeast. To keep your cider from fermenting too dry, I'd suggest stopping fermentation by cold crashing the cider. The yeast will become dormant and drop out of suspension. Then, rack off the sediment. This will leave most of the yeast behind. Then, you can add the sorbate if you like.