Moved to secondary, topped with juice, no bubbles

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ThePrisoner

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Fermented a gallon with 118 for 10 days, bubbles stopped so I racked to secondary and added 1litre of fresh juice to top it up to just below bottle neck. I would have expected with the addition of a little juice that bubbles would start again for a short while but there's nothing.
Worth adding a little yeast to the secondary?

I tried a warm water bath which worked but as soon as I remove them, everything slows again.
 
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The first question others will ask is "have you measured the gravity?" EC1118 (I assume that is what you have used) will ferment quite robustly so 10 days from something like SG 1.050 to SG 1.000 or below wouldn't be unusual. As there will still be lots of yeast, adding the extra juice (sugar) should have given them something to do.

I had a similar problem a while ago (different yeast) where fermentation stopped above 1.000 because the yeast ran out of nutrients (sometimes apples can be low in YAN and it can all get used up in a yeast feeding frenzy). In my case, adding DAP nutrient (no yeast) started everything up again. As a guide, if this is the problem you can expect adding 50ppm of DAP per litre (about 0.2g per gallon) to reactivate the yeast. Mind you, EC1118 has low nutrient demand and is a fairly reliable fermenter, so this might not be the problem, but it is worth a try.

Have a look at my post of 7 September for a bit more about this.
 
I had added nutrient. 1 tsp per gallon. I'm wondering if there's too much left over sulfite or something. I mean it's literally it stops completely, I put in a warm water bath and suddenly the bubbles start again. They're at room temp, it's not cold or anything.
 
One tsp of nutrient per gallon (probably about 200ppm of YAN) should be more than enough to ensure complete fermentation, especially with EC1118. What is the SG of the stopped cider? If you aren't able to measure it, "taste" should give you a rough idea. With EC1118 and nutrient, a fully fermented cider should be very dry and tart. i.e. no sugar left, hence no bubbles.

I have done a new yeast starter with nutrient in the past to kick things along, but now I don't think that extra yeast is necessary unless you have killed all the EC1118 which is quite unlikely given that it bubbled for up to 10 days. Even residual sulphite should have dissipated after a couple of days. The key to what is going on is to measure the current SG since as you suggest, adding extra juice (i.e. sugar) should have started it up again. Nevertheless, you might try adding a new starter if all else fails.

The extra litre of juice would have about 130g of "sugar" (really 110g of sugar plus other density components, but near enough for what we are talking about). So, when added to the gallon of "fully fermented" cider it should have resulted in SG 1.010 or around 27 g/L of sugar which would have been enough to continue fermenting.

So, if the current SG is substantially below 1.010 the fermentation has continued. If well above 1.010 then your original cider hasn't fully fermented. This might give you an idea of what is going on.

Cheers!

Whoops, edited the original post to change SG 1.008 to SG 1.010 because I forgot a US Gallon is just under four litres whereas I calculated on my "gallon" carboy which is 5 litres. It didn't make a big difference but might as well get it right... Sorry!
 
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