Tuesday, July 26, 2016

Bottling Hard Cider - Priming with Juice (7/26/16)

Today I am bottling my hard cider, which has been fermenting for two weeks.


Normally, I prime my beer with sugar right before bottling so that the yeast eat the extra sugar and carbonate the beer over the next two weeks. For the cider, I will be priming with apple juice instead to give the final cider a more apple-y, sweet flavor.

For a 1-gallon batch of beer I use 1 oz of priming sugar, which is ~28 g. The apple juice I purchased has 28 g sugar per 8 fl oz (1 cup) so I will be adding that much juice to my cider before bottling it and letting it carbonate for two more weeks.

The cider's FG was 1.011 (and the OG was 1.063), so the cider is around 6.8% alcohol and 211 calories per 12 oz bottle.

However, the calorie count isn't exact because this was before I added the cup of apple juice - adding it changed the FG to 1.013, making a 12 oz bottle 212 calories according to the calculator from my last post. This is odd because the apple juice has 110 calories per cup, which should have added 10 calories to each of my 11 bottles. I'm not sure how that works since some of the sugars will be consumed in carbonation, so maybe I can take a final specific gravity reading on a finished bottle and find out. Still, we know it is somewhere around this level of calories.

Also, this is what happens when your bottle capper goes on crooked - don't keep pushing! To save some of the cider, I filtered it twice to make sure there was no glass in it and used a new bottle.


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