Need some advice for secondary

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johnny5000

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I'm new to brewing + cider making, so I could use some advice here.

This picture is a couple of weeks old, but it gets the point across.

My gallon of cider is on the left. As you can see, about the bottom third of the jug is apple pulp & sediment. When I rack to a secondary, I'm going to have to replace a lot of that space with fresh juice.

My plan is to pasteurize about a half gallon of fresh juice to clean it, let it cool, rack the fermented cider to a clean jug and then top it off with the fresh juice.

Since I'm going to be replacing about 1/3 to 1/2 of the volume, should I pitch more yeast, or should there be enough yeast floating around in the old cider to properly ferment the new juice addition?
 
I would just add the juice. Take gravities before and after so you can anticipate the etoh level and if the yeast will exhaust and leave it sweet or dry it all out. The higher the etoh, the longer it will likely need to age.
 
Thanks for the reply, but last night before I saw your reply, I decided to rack the cider (and mead.)


The amount of juice I pasteurized turned out to be not-enough to fill the jug after siphoning the fermented cider off the lees, so I ended up just throwing caution to the wind and topping it off with fresh juice straight from the container and taking my chances with a little bit of wild yeast. Then I added a bit more Nottingham ale yeast just to be safe.

This being my first cider, it's a bit of a learning experience, but hopefully I'll end up with something drinkable.
 
I had a similar situation with all of the apple grunge in the bottom of the container. I strained (more accurately squeezed) it through some cheese cloth and that method seemed to retain most of the liquid in it, maybe lost about 1/4 of the volume but I believe most of that was solids. I did this on about 3 test batches and it did seem to slow fermentation quite a bit, so there must have still been fermentables in the solids. On one that I had about 1/4 of the mix wine grapes it basically halted fermentation altogether (1 bubble every 1-2 min)
 
It had pretty much stopped bubbling entirely before I racked it.

I checked on it last night- due to the new juice and yeast, it is now bubbling again like crazy. I'll give it a couple more weeks, and then probably rack again and let it age a while.
 
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