Confused.

[moorebrews123]

Hi I have carboyed my cider and the airlock was bubbling at around 3 bubbles a minute. It hasn't had hardly any now for the last two days if any.

My batch now looks like this


What is the best thing to do next

 

[Maylar]

Looks like fermentation has pretty much stopped. But you should take a hydrometer reading to be sure.

You have lots of choices depending on what you desire for a final product. My preference is to rack it into a secondary bottle to get it off the lees and let it clear as much as it's going to. Then sweeten/carbonate/bottle.

Some people don't bother racking to secondary, and if your SG is below 1.000 you can bottle it now. Or just rack it into a fresh jug, refrigerate and drink it...

 

[moorebrews123]

What do you mean by racking it

 

[hunter_le five]

What do you mean by racking it

siphon the liquid off of the yeast cake and into another vessel - a process referred to as "racking" in brewing and winemaking nomenclature

 

[moorebrews123]

Do you mean to put into another carboy?

 

[moorebrews123]

Yeast cake?

 

[hunter_le five]

Do you mean to put into another carboy?

Sure, another carboy is fine. A siphon is generally used to keep from oxygenating the liquid or disturbing the yeast.

Yeast cake?

All that white stuff that has collected at the bottom of the carboy; the flocculated yeast. You want to leave as much of it behind as possible.

 

[moorebrews123]

I have already transferred my batch from my fermenting bin to my demijohns that was on Saturday, in total this has only been going for around 3 weeks. I can't see much else happening from changing it into another carboy, I would like it to clear though

 

[bernardsmith]

brewers tend to refer to the sediment and lees as "yeast cake" but in my experience the sediment from apples and the dead yeast does not pack quite as hard as the trub associated with barley grains and beer yeast.
Racking - or siphoning as it is known in the outside world means that you use gravity and air pressure to suck the liquid from the bottom of one container to the bottom of a second container. The advantage of siphoning and siphoning from the bottom to the bottom is that it reduces the amount of contact the liquid has with the air. Air can oxidize alcoholic beverages fairly rapidly (not in minutes or hours but rapidly, all the same) and oxidation spoils the color and the taste of your ciders, meads and wines.
That said, some folk, siphon (rack) from the bottom but allow the liquor to run down the inside walls of the target container. That technique has the effect of forcing out the carbon dioxide that is a by-product of the fermentation process (yeast transform simple sugars like fructose and sucrose into alcohol and CO2). CO2 DOES make for a sparkling drink (think champagne or beer) BUT half the weight of the sugar is converted into CO2. THAT is a great deal of CO2. if you bottle cider with that amount of CO2 in it and the temperature of the air around the bottle rises the pressure in the bottle can be greater than the cap or the bottle can stand... bottle bombs result. The simple solution is therefore to remove much of the CO2, and ONE method of removing CO2 is to "splash rack" - as it is called - your cider when you rack it (siphon it). That is, to allow the cider to run down the inside walls of the container. Another technique is simply to allow the cider to age a few weeks. The CO2 slowly escapes through the airlock (the reason for having an airlock in the first place). You can help the cider "degas" by allowing it to "age" in a warmer rather than a cooler place: liquids can hold more CO2 the colder it is. So aging your cider in a cupboard around 70 degrees will force more CO2 out than aging it in a cupboard around 55 degrees
Hope this helps remove some confusion.

 

[Newsman]

You can also "cold crash" (stick the demijohns in a refrigerator at near-freezing temps) for 48-72 hours to help the yeast cake pack down.

 

[moorebrews123]

How will I get the colour to clear

 

[hunter_le five]

How will I get the colour to clear

Time. The less you disturb it the faster it will happen. Cold crashing (as newsman said) can help speed up the process.

Generally you don't want the cider to sit on old yeast too long, so if a bunch of yeast compact at the bottom, it's a good idea to rack to a new container.

 

[moorebrews123]

I just measured it and it's at 3 lines higher than 1.00 tasted and was quite bitter

 

[BrewTech117]

so about 1.030 - that is where mine is at - i have light carbination and its only been fermenting for about 1 week (id assume you would be lower SG than that though)

 

[moorebrews123]

No I mean the other way closer to the 0.99

 

[number40fan]

So, .094? It is ready for whatever you want to do with it. You can move it to another carboy to get it off what yeast is left and add sugar to it to sweeten it.

 

[worlddivides]

So, .094? It is ready for whatever you want to do with it. You can move it to another carboy to get it off what yeast is left and add sugar to it to sweeten it.

.094 would mean over 100% alcohol, which is impossible even for the highest distilled industrial-grade alcohol (I believe 97% is the highest alcohol can normally get). And .94 would be around 15% ABV, so I think he means more like .97 or .98 which would be around 9% or 10% ABV.

 

[rekoob]

Not sure about his scale, had to look at one of mine. Goes from 1.000 up the hydrometer to .990, in 2s, so three lines past 1.000 on mine would be .994
Please correct me if im wrong here.

 

[Yooper]

Not sure about his scale, had to look at one of mine. Goes from 1.000 up the hydrometer to .990, in 2s, so three lines past 1.000 on mine would be .994
Please correct me if im wrong here.

That's correct, and many ciders are finished there but some will go down to .990.

In that photo, there is too much headspace in the carboy and too much in the way of lees. You said you moved it since then to the demijohn? If so, that's fine. Just make sure that the cider comes up to the neck, so that headspace is minimal, and wait 60 days for it to finish clearing. Then it probably will be ready to bottle.

 

[bernardsmith]

.094 would mean over 100% alcohol, which is impossible even for the highest distilled industrial-grade alcohol (I believe 97% is the highest alcohol can normally get). And .94 would be around 15% ABV, so I think he means more like .97 or .98 which would be around 9% or 10% ABV.

Sorry, worlddivides but I don't think so. Pure water will have a density of 1.000 but alcohol is in fact less dense than water (it will float on water) so wine (or cider ) can easily have a specific gravity below 1.000 - It still contains a fair amount of water but some of the liquid is alcohol and so when you measure its density it might be .998 or .996 or .994. Not sure how often it will enough alcohol in it to read much below .994 but I am sure that it is possible.
That said, knowing the final gravity does not provide any information on the ABV (alcohol by volume) because if you had 2.5 lbs of fermentable sugar in 1 gallon of water the ABV would be about 12 percent but if you had only 1 lb of sugar in the same volume of water the ABV would be about 5.5% but both could have ended with a gravity of .994. You need to know the starting specific gravity and the final specific gravity to gain any idea of the actual ABV.
Now wine ain't beer. The sugars in wine, mead and cider are 100 percent fermentable. Beer may contain sugars which are too complex to ferment in any simple way and so they may cease fermenting when the gravity is still much higher than 1.000. Wine, on the other hand does not typically contain any non fermentable sugars so unless you mishandle the yeast deliberately or accidentally all the sugars will be converted to alcohol

 

[hunter_le five]

.094 =/= .994


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[number40fan]

^^ Yep. That is what I meant. .994.

 

[worlddivides]

Sorry, worlddivides but I don't think so. Pure water will have a density of 1.000 but alcohol is in fact less dense than water (it will float on water) so wine (or cider ) can easily have a specific gravity below 1.000 - It still contains a fair amount of water but some of the liquid is alcohol and so when you measure its density it might be .998 or .996 or .994. Not sure how often it will enough alcohol in it to read much below .994 but I am sure that it is possible.
That said, knowing the final gravity does not provide any information on the ABV (alcohol by volume) because if you had 2.5 lbs of fermentable sugar in 1 gallon of water the ABV would be about 12 percent but if you had only 1 lb of sugar in the same volume of water the ABV would be about 5.5% but both could have ended with a gravity of .994. You need to know the starting specific gravity and the final specific gravity to gain any idea of the actual ABV.
Now wine ain't beer. The sugars in wine, mead and cider are 100 percent fermentable. Beer may contain sugars which are too complex to ferment in any simple way and so they may cease fermenting when the gravity is still much higher than 1.000. Wine, on the other hand does not typically contain any non fermentable sugars so unless you mishandle the yeast deliberately or accidentally all the sugars will be converted to alcohol

You might want to re-read what I wrote.

And you also might want to re-read that number a couple of times. And think about it.

.094, if it were theoretically possible (which it is not), would result in something like 130% alcohol. Something like 5,000% attenuation.

Even if you had a starting gravity of 1.0000, a finishing gravity of 0.094 would be something like 115% or 120% alcohol. In other words, impossible.

 

[bernardsmith]

You might want to re-read what I wrote.

And you also might want to re-read that number a couple of times. And think about it.

.094, if it were theoretically possible (which it is not), would result in something like 130% alcohol. Something like 5,000% attenuation.

Even if you had a starting gravity of 1.0000, a finishing gravity of 0.094 would be something like 115% or 120% alcohol. In other words, impossible.

Perhaps our disagreement is due to the figure I assumed was meant (.994) and which indeed was the figure I referred to and discussed and the figure you read more literally (.094). Perhaps we are both more in agreement than our posts might otherwise suggest. But even so, knowing only the finishing specific gravity cannot give you any idea of the ABV. One mead might be at .994 and have 12 percent ABV and a cider with the same gravity might be 5 percent ABV. whereas an elderberry wine that finished at 1.005 may be 15 percent ABV

 

[worlddivides]

Perhaps our disagreement is due to the figure I assumed was meant (.994) and which indeed was the figure I referred to and discussed and the figure you read more literally (.094). Perhaps we are both more in agreement than our posts might otherwise suggest. But even so, knowing only the finishing specific gravity cannot give you any idea of the ABV. One mead might be at .994 and have 12 percent ABV and a cider with the same gravity might be 5 percent ABV. whereas an elderberry wine that finished at 1.005 may be 15 percent ABV

That is true. That's why it kind of irked me that you were basically agreeing with everything I had said yet saying that I was completely wrong, almost as if you hadn't even read what I'd written.

I was not saying that 12% or 15% ABV was impossible. In fact, theoretically, you could get pretty close to 20% if you had enough sugar and a yeast strong enough to tolerate that high level of alcohol. It just seemed more like what he was saying would be closer to .96 or even .97 than to .94.

 

[bernardsmith]

That is true. That's why it kind of irked me that you were basically agreeing with everything I had said yet saying that I was completely wrong, almost as if you hadn't even read what I'd written.

I was not saying that 12% or 15% ABV was impossible. In fact, theoretically, you could get pretty close to 20% if you had enough sugar and a yeast strong enough to tolerate that high level of alcohol. It just seemed more like what he was saying would be closer to .96 or even .97 than to .94.

Truth is I was /am far less interested in whether we are talking about 12 vs 15 % ABV than whether it is possible to get a SG reading of .99X and I assumed that you were saying that that was impossible whereas what you were in fact saying was that .09X was impossible. Me - I assumed that the OP miss-typed and I guess that you assumed that the question was to be treated seriously and that the OP having written .09X that was really the question.