Apfelwein - Backsweetening With Juice

[Gated312]

Hey everyone,
First time posting on the forum, although I've been reading threads for the last several months. The site, community, and knowledge here is truly great! Look forward to hopefully being a part of it all.

So I have a batch of Apfelwein I'm giving out for Christmas. I let it ferment dry, and it's just over 9%. Half I bottled unsweetened and carbonated. And the other half I'm going to backsweeten, and make into a stove-top mulled version (adding brown sugar, cinnamon, cloves when its heated). Seeing as it already has a pretty robust alcoholic content (which will probably be off-putting to some people), I'll backsweeten with juice at about a half and half ratio with juice and cider. I tried several test runs and seem to have the portions just right; tastes awesome too!

Might be an easy question, but I'm new to cider altogether. So I'll probably prevent fermenting with k-sorb (and maybe campden tablets too?) just to be safe. Should I be adding it before the juice or after? Also, should the amount of k-sorb be according to how many gallons the final product will be? Or just how much it is right now?

Thanks

 

[Yooper]

Hey everyone,
First time posting on the forum, although I've been reading threads for the last several months. The site, community, and knowledge here is truly great! Look forward to hopefully being a part of it all.

So I have a batch of Apfelwein I'm giving out for Christmas. I let it ferment dry, and it's just over 9%. Half I bottled unsweetened and carbonated. And the other half I'm going to backsweeten, and make into a stove-top mulled version (adding brown sugar, cinnamon, cloves when its heated). Seeing as it already has a pretty robust alcoholic content (which will probably be off-putting to some people), I'll backsweeten with juice at about a half and half ratio with juice and cider. I tried several test runs and seem to have the portions just right; tastes awesome too!

Might be an easy question, but I'm new to cider altogether. So I'll probably prevent fermenting with k-sorb (and maybe campden tablets too?) just to be safe. Should I be adding it before the juice or after? Also, should the amount of k-sorb be according to how many gallons the final product will be? Or just how much it is right now?

Thanks

You'll add the campden and sorbate to the cider before you sweeten. I'd suggest adding the campden and sorbate to a new carboy and racking the cider into it, to get it off of any residual yeast that may be in the lees in the cider. Sorbate doesn't stop fermentation or kill yeast, but it keeps yeast from reproducing. It won't stop any active yeast that are already in there, that's why it's good to rack it off of the lees. Anyway, after you stabilize with the sorbate and campden, you can wait a few days and then sweeten. Let it sit another couple of days to ensure fermentation doesn't restart, and then you can bottle.

The "dosage" of the campden and sorbate is based on the amount of cider you have.

 

[Gated312]

So it took a while, but I followed your steps for sweetening my cider. It has been three days since adding the juice, and SG is the same as it was when I added the juice. The cider was clear, but has become cloudy and somewhat foamy on top...should I continue to the bottling step or wait and see if the SG drops?

 

[HexKrak]

I'd wait. Foamy sounds a lot like new krausen forming to me.

 

[Gated312]

Well i just got home from school and checked the SG. It dropped from 1.022 to about 1.020 in the course of about 6 hours. Course of action?

If new krausen is evidence of fermenting, which I highly suspect it is, i'd like to stop it, not let it ferment dry again.

 

[fermenteverything]

i'm not positive but i think there's a way to chill it to a point that the yeast goes dormant