Making cider in a wine bottle... ?

Hi this was just an experiment. I had a little yeast left over ( didn't scrape it all out.) from making my apflewein. so i rinsed the rest into a empty clean wine bottle. And threw a balloon on it. The next day it was expanded and i could see the yeast working. I just had opened a bottle of apple juice for my kid and thought lets see if ittle work. The apple juice has other juices in it but no preservatives. I also poured a little sugar in before hand.

So my question is would this ferment faster or will it still take the month to finish off ?

SO now i have mystery apflewein, that should be interesting. And its capped with a pin poked ballon. (it is bubbleing fast)

Anyone have a guess ? ?

Well, it should be finished fermenting pretty quickly. How quickly it'll be drinkable may be another story. Cider that has fermented dry can take quite a while to smooth out - and you'll want to get it off that yeast at some point sooner than that.

Fermentation (at least in things that aren't really high in OG) is a pretty quick process; it generally is done within 1-7 days of fermentation starting. The part that takes longer is cleanup and maturation.

The gallon of apfelwein i have going should be drinkable in a month from start to finish. would this take longer to mellow out because its only a wine bottle size ??

Im thinking about racking into a second bottle in about 2 weeks would that help anything ?

The size shouldn't make any difference in that regard. I would rack to a second bottle once the yeast drops if you're going to keep it around for more than a few months, otherwise maybe not.

I've found that apple ciders can be quite good quite quickly if you stop the fermentation a bit before completion - say at 1.010 - 1.020 or so. If they ferment dry, they take a long time to become good, even if backsweetened. That said, the very best cider I've made has been spontaneously fermented to dryness, bottled very slightly before that so it carbonates in the bottle, and left to age for 9 months.

But if your timeframe for cider is one month, and the stuff in the bottle is done the same way, I would expect it to be done in the same timeframe. Since it (from what I can tell from your first post) is a different source juice, it'll be ready on the same timeframe a full-sized batch of that would have been ready. Time will tell.