Bottle carbing did nothing

[kwiley]

My cider is admittedly very old. I made it last fall, multiple unrelated batches (different apple varieties, different yeast varieties, varying racking and 2nd-3rd-fermentation schedules) and left it all in the basement for an entire year. So I suppose the yeast might have been truly and utterly gone by the time I started bottling in the past month. Obviously, I added sugar at the time of bottling. Again, I'm varying my technique experimentally, sometimes using dextrose priming corner sugar and sometimes using apple juice concentrate. At about ten days (I would need to check my notes, but it's been more than a week and less than two), I've opened a bottle from each of two unrelated batches and neither one had any carbonation at all. I realize ten days is a bit on the early side, but they were as flat as a sheet of paper.

I've read that sometimes people add a pinch of yeast during bottling to help bottle-carbing along, especially with long-aged ciders such as mine, but I've already done all the mixing and bottling. I was hoping that I could get away with simply uncapping them all, adding the tiniest amount of yeast to each bottle, and then recapping them. It'll cost me a few dollars worth of wasted caps, but otherwise I was hoping it would save my situation. I would rehydrate the yeast in advance and then attempt to deliver an extremely tiny amount to each bottle. Perhaps I could purchase a pipette, or perhaps it would be sufficient to simply dip a stick of some sort in the yeast, get it a bit gooey, and then simply insert the tip of the stick into a bottle without attempting any "volume" delivery like a dropper or anything of that sort. Once recapped, I suppose I could initially shake the bottles to distribute the yeast without harming the cider in any way.

Like I said, I know there's sugar in the bottles, ready to go. I explicitly added sugar at bottling time. So the problem has to be the yeast.

Thoughts?

 

[Maylar]

Rule of thumb is if it's over 5 months old you need to add a pinch of yeast.

 

[teddyearp]

I use bottling yeast all the time.
https://www.amazon.com/Lallemand-CB...ords=conditioning+yeast&qid=1630340168&sr=8-1

 

[marc1]

My cider is admittedly very old. I made it last fall, multiple unrelated batches (different apple varieties, different yeast varieties, varying racking and 2nd-3rd-fermentation schedules) and left it all in the basement for an entire year. So I suppose the yeast might have been truly and utterly gone by the time I started bottling in the past month. Obviously, I added sugar at the time of bottling. Again, I'm varying my technique experimentally, sometimes using dextrose priming corner sugar and sometimes using apple juice concentrate. At about ten days (I would need to check my notes, but it's been more than a week and less than two), I've opened a bottle from each of two unrelated batches and neither one had any carbonation at all. I realize ten days is a bit on the early side, but they were as flat as a sheet of paper.

I've read that sometimes people add a pinch of yeast during bottling to help bottle-carbing along, especially with long-aged ciders such as mine, but I've already done all the mixing and bottling. I was hoping that I could get away with simply uncapping them all, adding the tiniest amount of yeast to each bottle, and then recapping them. It'll cost me a few dollars worth of wasted caps, but otherwise I was hoping it would save my situation. I would rehydrate the yeast in advance and then attempt to deliver an extremely tiny amount to each bottle. Perhaps I could purchase a pipette, or perhaps it would be sufficient to simply dip a stick of some sort in the yeast, get it a bit gooey, and then simply insert the tip of the stick into a bottle without attempting any "volume" delivery like a dropper or anything of that sort. Once recapped, I suppose I could initially shake the bottles to distribute the yeast without harming the cider in any way.

Like I said, I know there's sugar in the bottles, ready to go. I explicitly added sugar at bottling time. So the problem has to be the yeast.

Thoughts?

I did something similar once with a beer that wasn't carbonating. Took the caps off, added a couple drops of slurry from a starter, recapped. It carbonated fine after that.

 

[kwiley]

Well, I opened every one of my bottles from three different batches. None were building up much carb *except* a single bottle that had been at the end of a bottling session and hadn't filled up, which I had topped off with another of my batches, so that one must have had some sleepy yeast in it. I put that one in the fridge instead of recarbing it. For the rest, I rehydrated a fraction of a yeast packet, not a special bottle-carbing yeast as indicated above, just a packet of Cider House Select I didn't use last year (and left in the fridge all year), and then used a straw with a thumb over the top as a "pipette" to deliver one drop to each bottle, recapped them, and gave them a really hard shake. One bottle accidentally got two drops, so I marked its label. That'll be an interesting accidental experiment to keep an eye on.

Now I wait.

 

[AzOr]

The amount of yeast shouldn’t really matter, only the amount of available sugar in the cider.