thisissami
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- Dec 20, 2017
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To give you some context:
I've just made my first ever batch of cider. I made a little over 3 gallons (that's how much juice the 80 apples I bought produced). It went through the primary fermentation, and all that super sweet apple juice has turned into very dry cider. I used champagne yeast, and it went right through all the sugars.
I've racked said cider into 3 1 gallon carboys. To one of them, I added a whole bunch of cane sugar to boost up the alcohol level significantly, and the other two I've left as is.
Said two dry ciders (with no sugar added to them) don't seem to be fermenting. I'll watch their airlocks for minutes at a time, and there is no bubbles at all. Looking into the carboy, I don't see any bubbles either. With dry cider, what do I gain by doing this secondary racking, instead of going straight into bottles?
There's two things I can think of:
1) There's still fermentation going on, but it's so slow that I'm missing the bubbles.
2) It was literally just to get the cider away from the sediment-full bucket, so that when I *now* rack to bottles from these carboys, I will have much clearer cider than going straight from the bucket.
If it's the latter thing above - why let these carboys sit out beyond the couple hours it takes for everything to settle?
Is there something else going on that I'm not aware of?
I'd love to learn more about the reasoning for all this, and would highly appreciate any insight you veteran fermentors have to share!!
I've just made my first ever batch of cider. I made a little over 3 gallons (that's how much juice the 80 apples I bought produced). It went through the primary fermentation, and all that super sweet apple juice has turned into very dry cider. I used champagne yeast, and it went right through all the sugars.
I've racked said cider into 3 1 gallon carboys. To one of them, I added a whole bunch of cane sugar to boost up the alcohol level significantly, and the other two I've left as is.
Said two dry ciders (with no sugar added to them) don't seem to be fermenting. I'll watch their airlocks for minutes at a time, and there is no bubbles at all. Looking into the carboy, I don't see any bubbles either. With dry cider, what do I gain by doing this secondary racking, instead of going straight into bottles?
There's two things I can think of:
1) There's still fermentation going on, but it's so slow that I'm missing the bubbles.
2) It was literally just to get the cider away from the sediment-full bucket, so that when I *now* rack to bottles from these carboys, I will have much clearer cider than going straight from the bucket.
If it's the latter thing above - why let these carboys sit out beyond the couple hours it takes for everything to settle?
Is there something else going on that I'm not aware of?
I'd love to learn more about the reasoning for all this, and would highly appreciate any insight you veteran fermentors have to share!!