1 gallon first time batch

I was bored this afternoon and decided to make a gallon batch of cider. I did some reading and sort of winged it as far as the recipe goes.

1 gallon 100% pure pressed pasteurized cider
3/4 cup cane sugar
1/2 tsp muntons dry active yeast (I went with that because I had it on hand)

OG came in at 1.068

I'm going to try and back sweeten it with dark brown sugar and molasses. I'll bottle it and let it carb up in glass bottles with one plastic bottle so I can keep an eye on carbonation levels then try my hand at pasteurizing it. Hopefully it'll turn out ok. Any suggestions for future batches would be greatly appreciated.

What do you call the ssetup of tubing to the glass of liquid? Is it a kind of blow off tube in replace of an airlock?

jstrong said:

What do you call the ssetup of tubing to the glass of liquid? Is it a kind of blow off tube in replace of an airlock?

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Yeah it's a blow off tube. I mostly brew beer and didn't know what to expect as far as fermentation speed and how much co2 and foam it would develop so I went with a blow off tube to be on the safe side. The first batch of beer I ever made blew out the airlock and I ended up cleaning beer off the ceiling. Ever since then I go with blow off tubes until the heaven fermentation has finished.

I'm gonna try to sweeten cider too. Is the plastic bottle is to help to read right carbonation? I've heard about ciders carbing in 3 hours. How were u gonna pasteurize it ?

DirtyD69 said:

I'm gonna try to sweeten cider too. Is the plastic bottle is to help to read right carbonation? I've heard about ciders carbing in 3 hours. How were u gonna pasteurize it ?

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Yeah the plastic bottle is so you can tell how much carbonation are in the bottles. I'm just going to use an old 20oz Pepsi bottle for that. Once it is carbed up I'm going to try and pasteurize the glass bottles. There's a really good thread on here that explains how to do it. I'd like to do a 5 gallon batch but I want to get the methods dialed in before I go with a batch that big.

Yeah I think I know which thread u r talking about. Basically dip ur bottles for 10 min into a 190 F water. I'm just afraid they might blow up.

Blowoff tube probably not necessary, cider low krausen...
Be careful with back sweetening, to avoid bottlebombs.
I've only made dry hard cider...

This is my first Cider and it definitely needed a blowoff tube. The Carboy on the right is Cider with English Ale Yeast and the one on the Left is Apple Juice with the same English Ale Yeast. both have been chugging strong for 6days and counting.

My first cider definitely needed a blow off tube. Used a sweet mead Wyeast smack pack and it was volcanic for several hours.

LunchBoxPKT said:

This is my first Cider and it definitely needed a blowoff tube. The Carboy on the right is Cider with English Ale Yeast and the one on the Left is Apple Juice with the same English Ale Yeast. both have been chugging strong for 6days and counting.

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I thought mine would need one but I didn't get a very active fermentation. I just used about 1/4 package of mutons dry yeast so that could be the reason. But I say better safe than sorry