Matthew's Journal

It's been about a month since I topped up my cider; whilst it was pretty clearly finished a couple of weeks after that, I needed a fair chunk of time free to bottle it, and today was the first opportunity.

The process took about 70 minutes, most of which was faffing with cleaning and rinsing (the bottles all need sterilising (and rinsing, which seems to take about 4 fill-empty cycles), as do the tubes, caps, funnel, etc.). The instructions suggest using "Splenda" to sweeten the final product (the sugar you add at this stage gets fermented to gently carbonate the cider, so doesn't result in final sweetness); this seemed pretty heretical to me, so I only added some to half the bottles (those with silver caps).

Syphoning wasn't too bad, as I had a racking cane (sits in the fermentation vessel, helps to stop you syphoning up crud) and a bottling stick (push-valve on the end of a rod). I was a bit worried about getting the syphon going (which involves about 1/2 filling the tubing with water before putting one end in the cider, and then opening the valve) without getting water in my cider, but it turned out not to be too tricky.

I got four litres of cider out, and then about half a pint left over; I used this to check the final gravity, and to sample the produce :)

The final gravity was 1.002, so the cider is 6.3% abv. It's a dry cider (obviously!), but without the chemical overtones that some dry ciders have. It's not the most complex brew ever, but quite moreish. I'll be interested to see how it tastes once secondary fermentation has taken place (in about 2-3 weeks)...