Cider has been sitting for 4 months, time to drink?

[browntown52]

This is my first adventure with cider. I used the whole foods organic, no additive cider that comes in the nice 1 gallon bottles. I drank a little to establish headspace and then added ½ tsp of Fermaid-K & ⅕ a packet of cooper’s diy yeast to each bottle.

I fermented with #6 stoppers and airlocks for about 3 weeks. Racked to a corny keg, purged air, and put on 10psi of co2 in the kegerator at 36 degrees F.

It's been on co2 in the fridge for three months now. Time to drink? I've read lots of posts about backsweetening with xylitol, concentrated juice, dextrose, etc. Is it worth exposing to air to add these things, or should I just sweeten each glass as it comes out of the tap? We're only talking about 1.5 gallons of cider here, so it is not a big catastrophe if I screw things up. Most of the literature talks about sweetening while bottling - but since I'm kegging I wasn't sure the way to go about it.

Thanks in advance.

 

[porterpounder]

Back-sweetening in the keg all at once is easier and if it is kept cold enough, and you drink it quick enough, can be done with simple syrup rather than the artificial junk.

It is easy to do it at serving if you have the sweetener. I'd recommend a syrup as crystalized sugar or sweetener may cause a carbonated cider to foam when the stuff is added to the glass.

Cider can be good for quite a long time in a keg. It should be ready to drink now.

 

[browntown52]

Thank you, that helps. I think since we're only talking about 6--8 tall glasses here, I'll just get some quality syrup sweetener, as I like dry cider and the wife likes sweet. That way I only risk screwing up a glass at a time, vs the whole schibang.