Bread yeast cider and bottle carbing: Is it possible?

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Ritchell

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So I've decided to ferment a 1 gallon glass bottle of Whole Foods pasteurized apple juice. I'm going super low tech using what I can find at the grocery store and a hardware store. I've added an inordinate amount of sugar to the apple juice (read: bread yeast will die before the sugar is consumed) and it's currently buzzing away in the primary (this is day 3). I'm not really sure why I added all the sugar at the start, but it's done and there's nothing I can really do about it now. Assuming the bread yeast will not eat through all of the sugar present before dying, will this make bottle carbing impossible without a different yeast? My line of thinking is that the alcohol content will be high enough to kill any bread yeast I could hope to introduce, and thus, primed or not, bread yeast will not be able to produce more CO2 once bottled.

If this is the case I'm probably either stuck with sweet still cider or I will have to find a homebrew store, buy wine yeast and a hydrometer, and re-ferment with that until I get a stable read, at which point I could bottle with primer sugar. If I try to just add wine yeast prior to bottling I figure that I'd have no idea what the sugar content is and therefore could not control the bottle carbing worth a damn (possibly to explosive effect).

So am I stuck with sweet still?
 
Assuming the bread yeast will not eat through all of the sugar present before dying, will this make bottle carbing impossible without a different yeast?
So am I stuck with sweet still?

Correct
Adding another yeast will require letting it ferment out before bottling.
 
Hmm, I don't have easy access to anything other than bread yeast (since online shipping seems inordinate just for a packet of yeast). A pound of brown sugar in a gallon of apple juice seems like enough food to kill bread yeast though. Oh well, I suppose SWMBO will have to make due with still cider.
 
Did you find a source saying that bakers yeast will die out at a certain abv%? I would be interested in the source of this.
 
If you're making this for SWMBO, you might have to find a different yeast for future attempts. Either that or SWMBO may find a different brewer. (big grin).

Bread yeast is fine for experiments, but for the first coupla batchs, you're best off finding the "most successful" regular cider recipe (or "the best cider EVAR!"). Once you get a couple of "hey, that was easy, maybe next time it could be sweeter/lighter/chunkier/with bleach", etc., then you can go non-standard. Bread yeast, although some people have had useable results, can leave bready-yeasty flavors. Not the kind of first impression one wants w/ a SWMBO.

If you're too busy to go to the LHBS, then you need to find some alternate yeast cultures. Try the opera. Or low-hanging fruit.

Also, Carb Tabs. I haven't tried them, but my understanding is, they'll rile up a still cider.
 
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