How long to mature in bottles?

[Angus MacDonald]

Labels don't bother me too much. I figure when push comes to shove, a bit of sellotape and paper with writing does the job. These aren't going to any fairs or competitions.

 

[Maylar]

Ya but it's crude to reuse old bottles without taking off the labels. You'll want to soak & scrub them anyway to get residue out, and as I suggested Guinness labels will slide right off. Some others use NASA engineered monkey snot for glue and you need a knife to remove them.

 

[Angus MacDonald]

I've taken to washing out glass bottles with cold water almost immediately after use so that when it comes time to steralise, there's not too much scrubbing to do.

 

[Angus MacDonald]

Ok so I was planning on giving the cider three weeks but I took a test reading just in case it was ready, due to the low sugar content in the original mix. The final reading was 0.998 which means I'm now sterilising my bottles, ready for bottling. I'm thinking of splitting the batch into two when bottling and only carbing half of them. The cider ended up medium dry, which is good. I think it calculated out to about 4.4% but I'm not sure.

 

[Angus MacDonald]

One of the still bottles.