Mixing in unfermented cider before bottling?

[mynie]

Please pardon a newby question...

I went with the brewshop clerk's recommendation and used champagne yeast in my yearly batch of hard apple cider. I just racked to secondary yesterday and it measured in at around 10.5% ABV... much higher than I had hoped.

And so I was wondering, would it be possible to use a half gallon or so of unfermented cider in lieu of priming sugar when I bottle? This seems almost too easy, though, so I was wondering if there are any pitfall I should avoid. I'm planning on boiling the unfermented cider for about 5 minutes, cooling it rapidly in an ice bath, and then simply adding it to the bottling bucket with the fermented cider.

 

[Kent88]

Maybe, but you need to be careful.

All that sugar is going to ferment out. You need to be careful and have a really good idea of how much sugar you are adding. Otherwise you might get bottle bombs. Also, make sure the apple juice doesn't have any stabilizer or preservative in it.

I've seen priming sugar calculators online that have a variety of sugars you can select from, so I recommend you search those and see what you can find. One of them might have apple juice on their list.

I'm not really sure what problem you are trying to solve, though. You said that it's too strong, but this won't decrease how strong it is. Adding apple juice isn't a bad idea, especially if you can find a priming sugar calculator that can help you, I just don't know if it will fix anything for you.

 

[Maylar]

I went with the brewshop clerk's recommendation and used champagne yeast in my yearly batch of hard apple cider. I just racked to secondary yesterday and it measured in at around 10.5% ABV... much higher than I had hoped.

how did you measure 10.5%? what was your starting and ending gravity?

 

[jseyfert3]

I went with the brewshop clerk's recommendation and used champagne yeast in my yearly batch of hard apple cider. I just racked to secondary yesterday and it measured in at around 10.5% ABV... much higher than I had hoped.

I assume you added sugar to the juice before fermenting to increase the ABV? If so, you don't have to hope on the final ABV. Cider regularly ferments out to somewhere around 1.000, plus or minus a couple points based on yeast and maybe juice used. So you can measure your IG and calculate an exact amount of sugar to add to hit whatever ABV you prefer.

I'm not really sure what problem you are trying to solve, though. You said that it's too strong, but this won't decrease how strong it is. Adding apple juice isn't a bad idea, especially if you can find a priming sugar calculator that can help you, I just don't know if it will fix anything for you.

If the batch is 10.5%, technically adding juice to prime would reduce ABV unless the juice has a really high SG. If juice with a SG of 1.050 is added, and assuming it would ferment down to 1.000, that juice is fermented on its own would be 6.5% ABV. So added juice with a SG of 1.050 is essentially like mixing 10.5% and 6.5% cider, which will end up with an ABV somewhere in between those two numbers.

Now, practically speaking it won't reduce it much at all most likely. If I did the math correctly, average amounts of priming sugar will increase ABV by ~0.4% ABV. So adding apple juice would eliminate this increase in ABV and very slightly lower the ABV, but that's about it. It certainly will not drop the ABV from 10.5% to 8% for example.

 

[Rick Stephens]

Typically you get around 25-29 grams of sugar for 8 ounce serving of apple juice. Same with frozen concentrate only the 27-29 grams are in each 2 ounces of concentrated juice.

I usually look to add around an ounce of sugar per gallon for priming. There is roughly 28 grams in an ounce. The math is easy to replace sugar with juice or concentrate.

Rick

 

[MarkKF]

I typically add 1/2 gal. of juice or the syrup from 1/2 gal. freeze concentrated when kegging. But my cider has sat over 6 mos. and I stabilize it first. Only bumps up the gravity 4 pts. but adds flavor.