I have made a huge mistake

Ok, so I bottled my cider (just apple juice and nottingham yeast) this weekend. I was going to split the batch, some with priming sugar and age for a while, and some with 3 1/2oz of apple juice as back sweetening and consume strait away. I was going to let the back sweetened bunch carb for a couple days and then pasteurize. My mistake was that I failed to sort the separate bottles and am now forced to pasteurize the whole batch in order to avoid bottle bombs. My question is will a pasteurized cider still "age" without any live yeast?

Based on what I've read from pappers; bottle pasteurized, carbonated, sweet cider does not keep well in the long-term.

Yes, cider will still age even after it has been pasteurized.

UlyssesGrant said:

Based on what I've read from pappers; bottle pasteurized, carbonated, sweet cider does not keep well in the long-term.

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I have to disagree with this based on personal experience. I've made 10-15 gallons of pasteurized, carbonated sweet cider every year for the past four or five years, and I nearly always keep a couple of bottles back for 8 or 9 months, and I've never had any problems with them whatsoever. I think the pasteurization kills the yeast and anything else which might cause stability issues, so that I don't notice much of a difference between cider that is a month old or 10 months old.

jerrodm said:

I have to disagree with this based on personal experience. I've made 10-15 gallons of pasteurized, carbonated sweet cider every year for the past four or five years, and I nearly always keep a couple of bottles back for 8 or 9 months, and I've never had any problems with them whatsoever. I think the pasteurization kills the yeast and anything else which might cause stability issues, so that I don't notice much of a difference between cider that is a month old or 10 months old.

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I would say that something that is 10 months old is hardly "aged"! "Aged" normally means long term.

That's true. I was thinking that the OP's question related more to whether cider will bottle condition after it's been pasteurized, but they used the term "age".

In the other thread that Ulysses mentioned, where Pappers was discussing cider pasteurization, he's basically doing session ciders, with relatively low OG (1.05 or so I think) and I think he mentions that he drinks them quickly enough that they don't have a chance to sit around long. (See esp. posts 24 & 25) I don't know if others have had issues with the stability of pasteurized cider, but in my experience it's been no problem whatsoever.

The cider I make is, like Pappers's, relatively low ABV, not meant for long-term aging (more than a year, like what you're referring to). I just didn't want the OP to get the idea that they can't keep bottles of pasteurized cider around for several months--I've had plenty of bottles that I dusted off after a year (or more) and they tasted perfectly fine.