Hello fellow cider brewers.
I would like to share a short background on my first attempt at making home made cider from the various apple trees we have. Ill try to be quick as im sure you all have things to prepare.
What we did, after I had learnt as much as any lazy person could here.
http://www.cider.org.uk/part1.htm
1. picked apple from who knows what type of trees we have, 4 types. All I know is some were green and some red.
2. We sterilized the best we could using some sort of liquid for baby bottles that evaporates.
3. 7 hours or juicing using a centrifugal juicer produced 31 liters of juice. I know a press would be better but we used what we had.
4. Then, I think a mistake. We filtered the juiced into a large bucket using cloth rags and a sieve removing all the froffy stuff.
5. Put the juice into a 60 litre demijohn.
6. Heated some left over juice to 25 degrees and added 1 kg of sugar and the "Turbo" wine making yeast which comes with the food the yeast needs, then added it to the demijohn.
7. Replaced the bubble cap and watched it bubble like mad, about 2 bubbles a second, for a day before it settled down to around 1 every 5 secs.
The bubbles continued for a week before stopping and the cap leveling out equally, then no more bubbles. We was worried so added some more yeast and a cup of sugar ( not dissolved this time ) and the bubbles began again for around day. We did this again a week later without yeast and bubbles appeared at the top of the juice and in the cap.
Anyway its been near 4 weeks now and tomorrow we will test for alcohol content using one of those float things, ( sorry don't know the technical words ) Im pretty sure that during the initial filtering we did we must have removed some of the stuff from the juice it will need to help the yeast, maybe sugar?
If all goes well we will bottle it in clean plastic coke bottles in the cellar over winter. Then we plan to carbonate the cider with a soda stream whenever we fancy a drink.
Well here comes the question. Would it be ok to add more sugar if the alcohol content is low and so long as it doesn't taste like vinegar then leave it in the demijohn for a few more weeks?
I would like to share a short background on my first attempt at making home made cider from the various apple trees we have. Ill try to be quick as im sure you all have things to prepare.
What we did, after I had learnt as much as any lazy person could here.
http://www.cider.org.uk/part1.htm
1. picked apple from who knows what type of trees we have, 4 types. All I know is some were green and some red.
2. We sterilized the best we could using some sort of liquid for baby bottles that evaporates.
3. 7 hours or juicing using a centrifugal juicer produced 31 liters of juice. I know a press would be better but we used what we had.
4. Then, I think a mistake. We filtered the juiced into a large bucket using cloth rags and a sieve removing all the froffy stuff.
5. Put the juice into a 60 litre demijohn.
6. Heated some left over juice to 25 degrees and added 1 kg of sugar and the "Turbo" wine making yeast which comes with the food the yeast needs, then added it to the demijohn.
7. Replaced the bubble cap and watched it bubble like mad, about 2 bubbles a second, for a day before it settled down to around 1 every 5 secs.
The bubbles continued for a week before stopping and the cap leveling out equally, then no more bubbles. We was worried so added some more yeast and a cup of sugar ( not dissolved this time ) and the bubbles began again for around day. We did this again a week later without yeast and bubbles appeared at the top of the juice and in the cap.
Anyway its been near 4 weeks now and tomorrow we will test for alcohol content using one of those float things, ( sorry don't know the technical words ) Im pretty sure that during the initial filtering we did we must have removed some of the stuff from the juice it will need to help the yeast, maybe sugar?
If all goes well we will bottle it in clean plastic coke bottles in the cellar over winter. Then we plan to carbonate the cider with a soda stream whenever we fancy a drink.
Well here comes the question. Would it be ok to add more sugar if the alcohol content is low and so long as it doesn't taste like vinegar then leave it in the demijohn for a few more weeks?