Planning ABV

So i know there are lots of spread sheets to help with this. I'm just a little muddled on the details. Getting ready to start another 1g batch of cider (i've been doing these to tide me over while my feer ferments and bottles), and i want to shoot for a higher ABV and actually plan this one... High end White House AJ was on sale 1.5g for $5.00 so i bough it. Ingredients read apple juice, and apple juice from concentrate. 100% natural and pasteurized, so i'm guessing (hoping) it's UV pasteurized straight AJ.

Can you use the "nutritional info" to help you plan your abv? According to the bottle it's 416g of sugar per 1\2 gallon, so i've be at 800g of sugar in the 1 gallon batch. The AJ is "no sugar added" so this should be 100% easily fermented fructose.

I'm rambling really. So basically i have 1 gallon of AJ, and i want to end at 7% abv... can anyone give me a step by step for using those spreadsheet to reach that end?

Thanks.

well, depends on the spreadsheet. You can figure out the degrees Plato pretty easily if you know the sugar mass. Each 1g of sugar in 100g liquid is 1*P. 1/2 gallon is about 2L, or 2000mL, that is, 2000g of liquid give or take. Divide 416 by 20, and we have 6g of sugar per 100mL liquid or so. So the apple juice is about 6*P. In more common homebrew parlance, each *P is 4 SG points, so the OG is 1.024. Such a solution, if fermented out, would have an alcohol content of about 3.2%.

Note that this is very rough, as I don't know the density of the apple juice. And figuring that out from just the weights and volumes given isn't possible. A hydrometer will give you the only accurate measurement of the percent sugar in solution. But it seems as though this is a pretty diluted apple juice. The 'apple juice from concentrate' they add seems to be for the purpose of watering it down. Straight apple juice is generally more like 1.050-1.060, more than double that.

You could add apple juice concentrate to it. Or you could get actually straight apple juice or cider; that will get you to about 7%.

If you have a hydrometer, check the SG and report back. It will double-check my rough and dirty estimates, and anyways the SG is the number that most spreadsheets will be looking for, not nutritional facts. Just knowing the liquid volume and the sugar mass doesn't tell you enough.

Will the SG of the apple juice actually be "definitive" for the FG of the cider? I understand if you just took water and added sugar until you got a certain SG that would be 100% ferment-able, but since we don't know how much of the SG of the apple juice is sugar, and how much is other parts, i would think that would muddle the math? I'll grab a SG reading in the morning and report back with it.

The SG tells you how much sugar is in the solution. With liquids like wort where a significant degree of non-fermentable sugar may be present, it's true that you can't know exactly how much of the sugars will ferment without more info than just a SG reading. But with apple juice, all the sugars will be fermentable; if you let it ferment all the way (i.e., don't stop it with preservatives) it will ferment down to 1.000 - perhaps even a bit lower, as the presence of alcohol thins the liquid up a bit.

It may seem like a complex solution like apple juice, which has all sorts of aromatic compounds, proteins, and acids in it may throw of a hydrometer. But all these compounds exist in tiny amounts, and do not significantly alter the viscosity of water. The hydrometer will tell you the sugar content, nothing more.

Basically, if you're fermenting apple juice, you can count on it fermenting down all the way unless you stop it. So the potential alcohol listed for the OG you take will be, more or less, the finishing alcohol content.

Late as usual... Anyway...

The apple juice had a SG of 1.060 (i misquoted the ingridents... they are "apple juice, concentrated apple juice". I still pitched 1lbs of dextrose in, and my OG when it went into the fermentation vessle was 1.080... according to my hydro this would ferment out to 11% (not that i'd be unhappy if it did) but i still question if apple juice wouldn't have stuff in it besides water, and sugar that would add too gravity reading.... Pointless anyway...

It's fermenting away with Saf-XXXX heffy yeast. I doubt that would tolerate an ABV of 11%, but who knows... i do the cider in 1G batches for cost... and so i can do insane things like this .

There are things in apple juice other than sugar, and they do affect the viscosity. A tiny amount. With ordinary homebrewing equipment, you shouldn't be able to notice the difference between it and sugar water w/ the same volume of sugar.
If it doesn't go to 11%, you'll have sweet cider. Many people try hard to get that, so maybe that's not so bad. Why are you using hefeweizen yeast? Are you trying to get some of its distinctive flavors? That could be an interesting experiment.

I pitched champagne yeast on my first attempt at cider. The end product (pulled quite early to get a better batch going) had a quite distinct champagne flavor (fine with me) and the SWMBO didn't like it, even though she likes the canned cider I've bought in the past. So i'm trading to the hefe yeast to see if it's more suited to her tastes. Got the idea browsing some other peoples recipes here on the site.

Thanks for explaining the viscosity a bit better.