Bottling and carbing my apple juice cider

[blawjr]

I made about 1/2 gallon for my first try of making this, the fermentation has slowed almost completely so now i want to bottle it up and get it carbed a bit. I'd also like to sweeten it a little, can i add more apple juice to it to sweeten or should i just use some sugar? In other words, I don't know what I'm doing, how can I go about getting this into bottles? Help?

 

[oldmate]

There's already a thread on backsweetening a cider on the first page here: https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f32/backsweating-cider-248641/ If you have ever made beer before, you can carb it exactly the same way. I'm unsure of how much sugar per gallon it is, maybe someone else can chime in on that.

Read through that to get an idea of what's needed. First of all you will need a hydrometer so you can tell if the fermentation has finished. The bubbling is not a good method to rely on as cider can off-gas which gives the impression of fermentation or you may have a leak around the bung which would mean that there might not be any bubbles coming from the airlock. I think it would be safe to say that fermentation would be finished after 3 or 4 consistent readings over a period of the same amount of days, if not longer.

I assume you did this in the bottle? You can buy a siphon which could be as simple as a food-grade length of hosing to an auto-siphon. I suggest taking a trip to your LHBS to get these items!

 

[dinnerstick]

agree with previous thread. you should be pretty careful if you are adding a lot of sugar (or new juice) and then bottling in glass. it will continue to ferment in the bottle and possibly (probably) explode. if it is completely dry and you want to prime to get carbonation then just do the same as for beer- the poor man's calculation is a small teaspoon of table sugar to each beer bottle, but this is not going to give you very consistent results. you can use an online calculator like this one
http://www.tastybrew.com/calculators/priming.html
there are a lot of variables, just pick standard cider 2.25 volumes CO2 or something similar and see if you like the results, next time you'll know to add more or less. you can see from here that adding much more sugar than this amount is going to over-pressurize the bottles, leading to grenades.
dissolve the sugar in a little hot water, siphon the cider off of any sediment and into a clean pot, mix in the sugar water gently, and bottle

 

[blawjr]

Seeing as this was mostly just a fun experiment anyways I just went ahead and added a bit of apple juice to it, sweetened it to about where i wanted and bottled it then pasteurized it per the instructions of the sticky and threw it in the fridge. I'm assuming this killed the yeast left in suspension and hopefully i won't have any bottle bombs.

 

[dinnerstick]

pasteurized + fridge, you won't have bombs. i'm 99.35 % certain
hope you enjoy it