Ingredients

• 6 x 1/2 gal Zeigler’s Organic Apple Cider (pasteurized, no preservatives)
• 3 tsp yeast nutrient (urea and diammonium phosphate)
• 1 packet Red Star Cote des Blancs dry yeast

Process

[2010-01-24] See the stuff after those three bullets up there? I mixed em together in a 3 gal glass carboy and sat it on the floor in a coolish spot (60-65*F). OG: 1.045

[2010-01-29] Gravity is 1.004  time to bottle.  Its dry as hell, and tart!  Need to sweeten this up a bit so that it gets bubbly, and so that it doesn’t make you cross eyed and puckery faced.  I’ve read that you want to get the gravity up to 1.010 to have enough sugar for carbonation.  I figured if I could get it to 1.020, then let it ferment in the bottles till its carbonated to my liking, maybe at that point it would be at near 1.010, which would leave a little sweetness to counteract the pucker.

Rather than calculate anything, I took a wild ass guess and dissolved 1/2 cup sugar and 1/4 cup honey in something like 1 cup of water, and added it to the fermented cider.  That got me to 1.010…whatever, good enough.  Even straight from the fermenter, this stuff is tingly, maybe it won’t need much time in the bottles to carbonate enough, and it won’t eat much sugar in the process.

[2010-01-30] after only like 14 hours in the bottles, its plenty fizzy. I don’t have enough cold storage for all this cider, so i’ve got to kill these yeasties with heat before the bottles blow up all over the place.  My cider book says submerge the bottles completely in a canner, and boil them for 60 seconds.  Sounds crazy, but I’ll give it a shot.

It would take forever for that much water to come to a boil from room temp, so I boiled the water in my brew pot, then killed the heat and added the bottles, then put the spurs to it again.  After 7 minutes, the water still wasn’t fully boiling, but one of the bottles decided it had enough, and blew itself to bits with a bang.  Sweet.  I killed the heat fast, but visions of picking glass out of my forearms kept me away from the remaining bottles for 5 or 10 minutes.  I eventually took the bottles out and let them cool.

I scoured the internet for a gentler (less ridiculous) approach to pasteurization for the second half of the cider.  One source suggested placing the bottles in 160*F water for 10 minutes.  This sounded reasonable to me, so I went for it.  I made a “test bottle” by filling an open bottle with room temp water, and placing a temp probe in it, so that I didn’t over- or under-cook the cider.

Well, 10 minutes in and my test bottle hadn’t hit 150, so I let it keep going.  A few minutes later, another bottle let go with a bang, so I decided that this batch was also cooked enough.  Next time I’ll skip the temp probe and just listen for the explosions.

This cider is pretty dang tart, with a nice dry finish.  I didn’t add any clarifiers to the batch, so its very cloudy, and a bit rosy in color (similar to the starting unfermented cider, but lighter).  I think it would actually be a pretty nice summer drink, it finishes almost like a good guezue.