Apfelwein Carbonated at Bottling Time?

Hey everyone. I just bottled my second batch of EdWort's Apfelwein, but oddly enough, as I was pumping the siphon, I realized the apfelwein was already carbonated.

The stuff had sat in a carboy for about a month and a half (I would have let it go longer, but I wanted to free up a carboy for other beers), and it had an airlock with vodka in it, so any carbon dioxide would have been able to escape I thought. It's only slightly carbonated, but enough to make bottling a pain. Does anyone have any ideas as to why this happened?

Yep! That's very common in young wines, ciders, and meads. What happens is there is still some residual co2 in the cider, especially at cool temperatures, but it's not fermenting and making more, so it doesn't have enough pressure to push out through the airlock. So, that blanket of co2 stays in the carboy, and some of it remains dissolved in the liquid.

Wines that are supposed to be still (not sparkling) eventually do release that co2, or they are degassed manually. Sometimes just racking is enough to degas it, but sometimes it's actually done with a whip and a drill to "knock out" the co2. Usually, my wines sit around long enough to get rid of all of the co2 on their own (I just bottled a two year old rhubarb wine a couple of days ago!) but bottling a younger wine/cider/mead may require degassing.

Hmm. Interesting. I will have to keep that in mind next batch I make. I seemed to avoid it last time just by letting it sit for 4-5 months. Thanks.

So is oxidation not a worry as with beer? You can just use something to agitate the solution to knock out the gas with no worries in cider?