Apfelwein, Cote Des Blancs and Bottle carbing

Wow there are so many damn posts on Apfelwein that I've been searching for over an hour now, brain is starting to get tired... still haven't found the answer to my question.

I was planning on using the original recipe, only with Cote Des Blancs yeast to get a sweeter finish. Only problem is from what I gather, the Cote Des Blanc will die off completely from the alcohol, and there wont be enough left for carbonation.

Should I:

A. Repitch a little more yeast at bottling for carbing, If so, how much? Half a pack, or less?

B. Just use Montrachet yeast and sweeten a bit with some unfermentables, or wine flavoring at bottling.

Where did you hear that the yeast will die off in apfelwein? The advertised alcohol tolerance of Cotes des Blanc is 12%, so you should be fine.

If you used a different yeast that would cop out due to alcohol, adding a different yeast for bottling would be disastrous. The first yeast would have left sugar in the must if it died out, so adding a higher abv yeast would only start fermentation over again, but instead of only eating enough sugar to carb, it would eat all the sugars in there. AKA bottle bombs.

I have bottle carbed with cote de blanc, works just fine without adding any more yeast. Like the other guy said, it is a wine yeast with a fairly high tolerance and apfelwein is only about 8.5% at best.

I must have read a couple hundered apfelwein post yeasterday, and could have just "misremembered" (thanks Roger) or misread the info.

Cool, I'll use CDB yeast and ferment for around 4 weeks, then bottle with a cup of Corn Sugar.

So, Knarfks, did our Apfelwein come out a little sweet with the CDB yeast or was it still rather dry?

Bump...how did it turn out with the Cote Des Blancs?

I tweaked the recipe a bit swapping out a pound of corn sugar with some brown sugar and adding cinnamon and vanilla. Spoke to the guy at the LHBS and told him I wanted an overall sweeter result. He talked me into the Cote Des Blancs. Just pitched yesterday...bubbling slowly with no foam. How long should I expect the fermentation to be?

I used a champagne yeast for carbonating in bottles. It was Lalvin EC-1118 (red star label it Prise de Mousse).

Although you may have enough yeast left in the bottles to carbonate it, in my experience it took about 2 months to start getting carbonation.

knarfks said:

I have bottle carbed with cote de blanc, works just fine without adding any more yeast. Like the other guy said, it is a wine yeast with a fairly high tolerance and apfelwein is only about 8.5% at best.

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Yup, you'll be fine. I used CDB in 1 of my 6 batches so far and had no problems with bottle carbing at all.