Reliable sugar amounts for sweet, carbonated

[primerib]

Hi all, thanks for all the help you’ve given me thus far with my cider, and for your patience. Hopefully this will be my last new thread started for a while until I start my next brewing project. One more burning question to ask for now...

I’m curious, does anybody have a tried and tested method for sugar amounts when bottling a sweet/slightly sweet, carbonated cider (w/ bottle pasteurization method)?

I’ve seen varying reports and am unsure which way to go - one (particularly good) YouTube video on the subject suggested 1 can of frozen apple juice concentrate per gallon. For a 5 gallon batch, 5 cans sounds somewhat excessive, but I really have no reference point.

Does anybody who does this have a go-to?

 

[RPh_Guy]

Questions you need to answer:
1. How sweet do you want it (in gravity points)?
2. How much carbonation do you want (in volumes CO2)?

With your answer to #1 you can calculate how much sugar you need to leave it sweet. With your answer to #2 you can calculate how much sugar will be consumed for carbonation.
The sum is the total amount of sugar you need to add.

If you pasteurize at the right time you can easily hit both target sweetness and carbonation. Keep a separate sample when bottling (at the same temperature) to monitor SG.

Cheers

 

[Chalkyt]

As RPh Guy suggest it seems to be a bit of a balancing act with sweetness and pasteurization. So far I have relied on letting the cider ferment right down then top up with sugar or FAJC to about 1.005 before bottling.

Earlier this year (we are now in mid Spring here in Oz) I did this with two batches (WLP773 and SO4) which had been in secondary for a few month and which seemed to have stabilised around 1.002. So, by converting the difference of 0.003 worth of sugar into a bit of alcohol and CO2, I ended up with a nice petillant carbonation which is probably around two volumes of CO2, much the same as beer or sparkling mineral water. There was also just a touch of sweetness to offset the rather tart taste of fully fermented dry cider. I plucked these numbers out of Jollicoeur's Table 15.3 and they seem to have worked quite well.

Of course I don't know if the bottled cider then continued down to 1.000 or stopped again at 1.002 so the "gas" could be anywhere between two and three volumes and the slight sweetness could be due to residual sugar at 1.002 or the characteristics of the apples or yeasts. In any case it worked O.K.

You can also get there using the brewersfriend calculator for carbonation sugar quantities (or the rough measure of 2 tsp sugar per litre!).

The next step (in about six months time when we have apples again) is to try bottling at around 1.008 then pasteurise at around 1.005. This might be a bit tricky (I haven't pasteurised before) but seems worth a try as I found that before bottling, this year's ciders were "just right" with residual sugar at 1.005 but then naturally lost a bit of sweetness as carbonation progressed.

 

[primerib]

Questions you need to answer:
1. How sweet do you want it (in gravity points)?
2. How much carbonation do you want (in volumes CO2)?

With your answer to #1 you can calculate how much sugar you need to leave it sweet. With your answer to #2 you can calculate how much sugar will be consumed for carbonation.
The sum is the total amount of sugar you need to add.

If you pasteurize at the right time you can easily hit both target sweetness and carbonation. Keep a separate sample when bottling (at the same temperature) to monitor SG.

Cheers

I read somewhere to titrate heparin to ACTs >400 before putting my cider on bypass but I know at some institutions they go a bit higher. Just kidding, I read your handle and thought you’d get a kick out of that.

Honestly I don’t have a quantitative answer to either question, I would like the end product to probably be less sweet than the starting juice (SG 1.05) but not much less. In terms of carbonation I have no idea, how many volumes of CO2 is “pleasantly carbonated”?

Thanks for the feedback! I just don’t have enough background or frame of reference yet to know what I’m looking for.

 

[primerib]

Since it’s my first time and I would like to keep things simple, I believe that I will likely top up with FAJC to a palatable sweetness, perhaps at the same time playing around with a pinch or two of the acid blend the lady at the local homebrew store pressured me into purchasing, then add an additional conservative amount of priming sugar before bottling and monitoring carbonation like a hawk, because the prospect of bottle bombs does scare me (though maybe not as much as unpalatable cider).

Rph guy- I’ve read through the Pappers thread about bottle pasteurization - do you use that stovetop method and has it been successful for you?

 

[RPh_Guy]

do you use that stovetop method and has it been successful for you?

I enjoy dry cider.

Nothing wrong with using a more simple method. The advanced method I suggested is most reliable.

If you want repeatable results, measure the SG after you've sweetened to your taste. Then, after the cider is carbonated and pasteurized, degas and measure the FG. You'll be able to do it the exact same next time by measuring SG, or make adjustments scientifically.

add an additional conservative amount of priming sugar

If you're adding FAJC, just stick with that. You don't need additional corn sugar.

titrate heparin to ACTs >400

Haha!
My previous institution titrated by aPTT.

Cheers

 

[Maylar]

Typical carbonation consumes 2-3 gravity points of sugar. For my tastes, medium sweet at about 1.008-1.010 is just right, so raising gravity to 1.012 or so would leave you with a bubbly cider that's not too sweet.

 

[diyHardCider]

I second the opinion of around 3 gravity points for carb, and ~10 for sweetness.

I don't bottle pasteurize (so I don't have the figures for the full sugars required), but I have found that 1/4 cup FAJC per gallon will give you the 3 gravity points for the carb. Lot's of people use one container FAJC (1.5 cups) for a 5-gallon batch... it's easier to remember and you don't need to measure!

-Andrew
diyHardCider.com