Captincanuck
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- Oct 13, 2015
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Several weeks ago I picked 300+lb of free apples and thought I would make a couple different varieties of cider. I have done 20L dry at 7% (no added sugar), 20L sweet (adding brown sugar to bring the gravity up to 1.090) fermented to 1.045 then cold crashed. 20L I just canned as is for drinking at work. Now I want to bottle carbonate it and pasteurise it so I don't have to take up space in the keg fridge. This is my first time bottling, as I usually just keg; and I am having some issues. First off I did read (most of) the 120+ sticky on "easy stove top pasteurization" and thought I got it, but I must have missed something.
Here is what I did: After cold crashing and racking the cider I bottled into Grolsch bottles to 1.5" of the top, also 2 plastic coke bottles for pressure testing. Left them overnight. Next day the coke bottle was already hard as a identical test bottle that I pressurised with 20psi of CO2 (and water). So I popped one of the Grolsch bottles and it bubbled up nicely. No volcanic eruption or anything. And was nicely carbonated. So time to pasteurize. Got my water up to 160F and killed the heat. Started with 6 bottles. 3 min in and the seals started to blow out the sides of the bottles. At that temp there was still about 1/2" of head space so I don't think that was the isssue. So now finally my question. Why is this happening? The only thing I can think of is that I need to replace all the seals on the bottles (I picked them up today). But if there is a more obvious explanation that I'm just not getting (first timer here) please chime in. I would hate to rebottle it all with the new seals only for this to happen again.
Thanks
Here is what I did: After cold crashing and racking the cider I bottled into Grolsch bottles to 1.5" of the top, also 2 plastic coke bottles for pressure testing. Left them overnight. Next day the coke bottle was already hard as a identical test bottle that I pressurised with 20psi of CO2 (and water). So I popped one of the Grolsch bottles and it bubbled up nicely. No volcanic eruption or anything. And was nicely carbonated. So time to pasteurize. Got my water up to 160F and killed the heat. Started with 6 bottles. 3 min in and the seals started to blow out the sides of the bottles. At that temp there was still about 1/2" of head space so I don't think that was the isssue. So now finally my question. Why is this happening? The only thing I can think of is that I need to replace all the seals on the bottles (I picked them up today). But if there is a more obvious explanation that I'm just not getting (first timer here) please chime in. I would hate to rebottle it all with the new seals only for this to happen again.
Thanks
