Alrighty, the spiced apple\/pear is in the final stage before bottling – fining.
\nThe particular method I’m using is gelatin. You mix up a very little bit in with some hot water (1 teaspoon of gelatin to a cup of water, per FIVE GALLONS of beer\/wine\/cider) and stir it in with the cider. The gelatin will congeal around all the particulate matter in the cider and precipitate it to the bottom over the course of a few days, after which you bottle it.
\nI started the fining a couple of hours ago, and it’s already quite visibly precipitating all the miniscule flotsam and jetsam out of the good stuff.<\/p>\n
It’s turned out ever so slightly carbonated, which is rather nice as I was going for a sparkling-type cider anyway. Specific gravity is now 1.004, which puts it at right around 6.3%, although I suspect it’s slighty higher since I didn’t calibrate for my original reading of 1.052 – the cider was much warmer, and thus gave a lower reading than it should have. I guesstimate around 7% abv, which is a little high for a cider, but still lower than your typical wine. There’s also a good bit of residual sugar still, so it’s not quite so dry.
\nAlso picked up a new yeast to try – \u00a0a very neutral champagne yeast, so it has a higher temperature tolerance as well as imparting very little flavor to the cider itself, which is a problem with the Wyeast I’m using now… it’s kind of beery. This champagne yeast is even recommended for carbonating soft drinks, so I think it’ll be a good one to use on my next batch.
\nI’m not going to be using raw ciders as source material for the next one; I had an experimental batch using normal “apple juice” as its base and it was turning out better than any so far until I noticed some unwanted cultures growing in the bottle (I blame lax sanitation procedures on my part). I’m going to scale that up and do it properly this time.<\/p>\n
It seems spammers have started posting comments on my updates. I’m not sure exactly how they’re finding it, and my spam filter isn’t catching them. Wheeeee.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Alrighty, the spiced apple\/pear is in the final stage before bottling – fining. The particular method I’m using is gelatin. You mix up a very little bit in with some hot water (1 teaspoon of gelatin to a cup of…
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