Best Way To Prime a Cider

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sreichenberger

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Hello everyone,

Just a simple question: what's the best way to prime a cider? I want the cider to be as refreshing as possible, hence having it carbonated will be essential. Do you prime when bottling only? Do you use white or raw sugar? Is there a special sugar that is used? Any insights will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
 
You can use any sugar to prime but each sugar will be converted to CO2 (and alcohol) differently.

The best way to prime if you are using sugar is to add the sugar to a small volume of boiling water to dissolve and then add that cooled liquid to the bottling bucket and mix well. There are lots of calculators online that will give you a good idea of the amount of sugar you can safely add (beer bottles, for example, can only hold about 4 atmospheres of pressure and too much gas (more than about 2.5 atmospheres) will result in a gusher. The amount of sugar you will want to add also depends on the temperature at which you store the cider but a good rule of thumb is something like 10 g of sugar / Liter (or about 1.5 oz /gallon).
 
I use white sugar. I add a measured amount to each bottle instead of mixing it all in a bottling bucket. Some people use frozen concentrated apple juice to prime. I like the idea but have never tried it.
 
I usually prime using a hydrometer to add the right amount of sugar (or juice or AJC) to the bottling bucket for the amount of carbonation I want. The rule of thumb is to increase SG by 0.002 for each atmosphere of CO2 that you are after (i.e. increase by 0.004 for two atmospheres (30 psi) which gives a nice petillant carbonation similar to beer. I often use SO4 which can finish a bit above 1.000 so bottling at 1.005 will give me anything up to 2 atmospheres as I generally like carbonation for "mouthfeel" rather than robust fizz. If you want to be really clever, you can simply bottle when the SG has fallen to your desired carbonation level (but of course, this assumes that you know the what the SG will be when fermentation is finished... not always 1.000).

At first I tried adding dry sugar to the bottles at about a teaspoon per litre (roughly a quart) but the results were a bit inconsistent from bottle to bottle, so liquid form in a bottling bucket as suggested by bernardsmith is much more reliable.
 
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I usually use the same juice used to make the cider, or I use a wildflower honey to prime. Depends on how you want it to turn out, most sugars have a unique flavor that is imparted to the batch(minus corn sugar).
 
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