Aging cider and fermentation time-advice

[Henco]

Hi everyone, still very new to the cider game. Recently made my first few batches. Starting with 5 Litre (1.3 US gallons) batches to experiment and learn. The first of these has been going for 7 weeks now, starting SG was around 1.057. Used mix of home crushed juice that I made using a food processor and some store bought juice that was preservative free. Pasteurized on stove. Used Nottingham high performance ale yeast. Racked it after 2 weeks, SG at 1.021 and topped up with 250 ml of the store juice. 2 weeks ago I took another reading and it was at 1.009, today it was at 1.004. Fermentation temp has been pretty constant between 13'C and 16 'C (55 to 60 F). Took a taste of it and was pretty dry....not lots of apple flavor left, nice body to it. Don't mind dry, hoping aging would bring some of the flavor back?
I am definitely going for a sparkling cider and would look to bottle carb.

I have a couple of questions though: Does my fermentation time seem a bit long? Have read that cider benefits from slow,cool fermentation? Any of you guys tested this theory?
Second: Read that cold crashing would assist in clearing cider?
I have some Lallemand CBC-1 conditioning yeast that I want to use after cold crashing, letting it come back to room temp and then priming it with necessary sugar and recommended amount of CBC-1 yeast for bottle conditioning. Any advice/recommendations on this plan?
Lastly on aging: Would you recommend aging in bottle or rather I rack it again and let it age in my carboy? Recommended temperature and duration for aging?

 

[Chalkyt]

All sounds fairly normal. I tend to age in the bottle because recently I have bottled dry cider above 1.000 (i.e. around 1.005+) on the basis that 0.001 change in SG results in 0.5 atm of carbonation. For more apple flavour and sweetnes I have also bottled at 1.010 and heat pasteurised at around 1.006. (To do this I have a grolsch type bottle with a pressure gauge to monitor fermentation progress once bottled... if you have kept track of fermentation progress you can also just extrapolate the progress or use a plastic drink bottle and do a "squeeze test").

If you scratch around on the forum you will find some of my recent posts with data on pasteurising. Covid isolation has given me the chance to experiment with times and temperatures. Basically I have found that 15C bottles in a 65C water bath will reach 65C in about 10-12 minutes and generate 25 pasteurisation units (PUs).Leaving them there for another minute or two then removing and letting them cool down to 60C will take another 10-15 minutes and generate 35 PUs to reach the "accepted" target of 50 PUs. This approach minimises the risk of "cooking" the cider or generating bottle bombs (2 atm carbonation will generate around 80psi in the bottle at 65C).

Mind you, this doesn't need to be too precise as there is some evidence that anything over 30 PUs will do the job (it is just that Jolicoeur and Lea both recommend 50 PUs, and who am I to argue). The main thing is to make sure that the bottle temperature gets to 65C or a bit above as anything below 60C is not guaranteed to pasteurise.

 

[doublejef]

I don't think conditioning yeast is really needed, even if you do a crash cold, you still have enough yeast in your cider to bottle carb.