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Backsweeten with honey

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turner03

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Would like to back sweeten with honey today before bottling. Can someone provide me with step by step. I have 4.5 gallon that is nice and clear with a 1.000 gravity. I have wild flower honey.
 
Is it stabilized or do you plan on pasteurizing ? When adding the extra sugar you will have to do one or the other or risk having bottle bombs.

It's really just as simple as making a syrup with honey with boiling water (or warmed up cider) and adding it to taste into the bottling bucket (just make sure to give it a good stir, though not too rough or vigorous because you don't want to oxidize it).
 
I plan to add Camden tabs to stabilize. Should I wait any time between adding tabs and adding honey?
 
Why boil the honey? It's shelf stable and all that will do is convert the sugars and blow off the honey taste. Unless you're using raw honey, that liquid gold honey you have is pasteurized. Don't boil it. Same goes for maple syrup that's unopened. These are shelf stable products and are not 'alive'.

Campden alone won't kill the active brewers yeast. It inhibits their reproduction because of the sulfites, but it won't kill the live yeast, which will just go dormant. They will still ferment the honey. Campden does kill wild yeasts or bacteria though, which is different. You'd have to add sorbate and campden to kill your brewer's yeast as sorbate works best with some sulfite.

But yes.. You would add the tabs, the sorbate, wait 24-48 hrs with a paper towel rubberbanded over the top of your carboy. The sulfite will escape and eliminate the sulfur smell. But you will still have a 'still' cider..

If you want that then add campden and sorbate. If you want it carb'ed, you'd have to figure out how much sugar is in the honey, which is kind of impossible because there are too many variables. The yeast will continue to eat the honey and produce C02 until you pasteurize, put it in the fridge, or are 100% sure all the fermentable sugars are gone at 1.010 and the precise amount of honey is added during bottling.

If you do it, bottle a plastic pop bottle as your first and last and check them for hardness to be sure you don't have grenades. There are a lot of stickies and thread about these subjects here too. You can find a lot of techniques.
 
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