Great thread. Was looking around for this info for awhile.
Info: I have a 3 gallon batch of 100% natural cider that I have added nothing to. I let it go with its native yeast since November. The juice was brought to me from CiderDays. OG 1.050, Last time I checked, FG was 1.002ish. I also have 3 separate gallons to experiment with.
Here is my plan.
I am going to heat up water in my brew kettle to 180 - 190 and put it in a big cooler. When it reaches 175ish, I'll put the prewarmed bottles in and let them sit with the lid closed for safety.
My issue I am struggling with is the addition of sugar. I plan on using raw honey mixed with preboiled water. I saw Pappers say that he now does one gallon of fresh juice to 3 gallons of fermented juice. I wanted to keep it simple like this but I really dont want to change the flavor of what I have. This is a special blend of apples specifically for hard cider. In fact, it tastes better than any other still, dry cider I have had so far.
For the big 3 gallon batch, we have decided on 8 oz of raw honey in half a gallon of boiled distilled water. We are looking for a low carb, low sweetness beverage showcasing the cider as plain and enjoyable as possible. We have a short window to pasteurize in. We plan on bottling on Friday and pasteurize on Sunday or Monday.
Some info we used to figure out 8 oz of honey -
Natures Promise AJ - 240 grams of sugar in half gallon.
Raw honey - 374 g. in 16 oz.
This would equal 10.26 oz. honey for the same amount of sugar (according to my accountant/SO). We are going with 8 to keep it safe, on the dry side, and low carb.
Does this sound good?
Anything wrong with raw honey?
Thanks in advance.
P.S.
I think it would be REALLY REALLY helpful to include some baseline numbers (in the OP) to go by when calculating sugar amounts for back sweetening / carbing.
This might even help people prevent some of the bombs.
EDIT:
After reading through more of this long thread I found some useful info.
The philosophy is that you want to sweeten until you are happy, then add the amount of carb sugar you need.
We sweetened 1.003 FG to about 1.008. We used organic brown sugar from whole foods in boiled water mixed in the bottling bucket.
6 oz. /4 c. (only used about 3 c. of the mixture). It still tastes dry but has more apple flavor. Exactly what we want.
We used the NB carb calculator (
http://www.northernbrewer.com/priming-sugar-calculator) to get to about 2 carb vols.
This was about 0.25 c in about 2 cups of water.
We did this last night and the plastic bottle is slightly firmer than an identical bottle filled with water this morning.
We only filled the bottles to just over the bottom of the longnecks. I even went so far as to weigh out the bottles. Empty, some were under 7 oz and some over. We kept the heavier bottles.
The batch is safe in a tupperware tote with some dumbells on top. Finally found a good use for them.
This is fun.