When to Bottle Spontaneously Fermented Cider?

[bpalfrey10]

Hi, long time brewer and reader, first time poster. I put three gallons of unpasteurized cider in a carboy on 9/21/13. OG was 1.051. It took about 10 days to start bubbling, and now on 10/11/13 the bubbles have seemingly stopped although there might be a random one here again. I just took a gravity reading and did a taste test and it is at 1.006, delicious, and pretty carbonated. I want this to be a totally natural fermentation, not even going to add any type of sugar to carbonate.

My question is, should I let it go longer to see if gets down to 1.000 (which is where my champagne yeast ciders usually wind up), or can I risk bottling it now? In other words, if I put the cider in your typical 12 oz beer bottles, and the wild yeast eventually works its way down to 1.000 or even a little lower, is that going to create enough CO2 to give me a bottle bomb (bearing in mind that it's already pretty carbonated sitting in the carboy)?

Thanks so much!

 

[Thunder_Chicken]

Don't bottle yet. It should ferment out very dry. I'd give it at least another 2 weeks. The last points are often slow to come off in ciders.

You can't really use the remaining gravity points to prime your cider because you don't really know if it will end up at 1.000, 0.998, 0.988... If you don't know how much more fermentation is possible, you can't use it reliably for priming. Better to let it go dry and make sure the gravity stops, then put a measured amount of sugar back in.

 

[gregbathurst]

It depends if you are flexible about carbonation levels. Maybe you should wait another couple of points. You want 7-15 grams per litre, so convert sg to brix and you will have a better idea.