Home Brewing—Racking Day
Finally got a chance to rack off the hard cider. It ended up going 6 weeks instead of 4 because of schedule conflicts and an untimely cold on the part of my helper.
The cider looks great! It was only burping about once every 10 mins so the yeast did it’s job eating all that nice juice sugar.
Got a nice line of goobers (aka sediment) on the bottom of the carboy. Smelled nice and fermenty to.
As before, everything has been washed, sanitized, and left to dry.
Got my helper and we are racking!!
I found after my first try at this that racking it into a new clean glass jar worked better when adding the corn sugar so as not to disturb the sediment and end up with floaties in the cider.
Old bar pickle jars are great for this!
I have an auto siphon that I use and it’s well worth the money. Plus a spring loaded bottle filler. Saves on overflowing and losing your cider or whatever else your making. You can see it in the pic of all the sanitized stuff above. It’s the tubing stuff.
Now that it’s in a new container I add the corn sugar to it. Take 1oz corn sugar and add it to 1/2C boiling water and simmer until it all dissolves. Takes 2-4 mins. Let this cool down to around 70 degrees. Add that into your cider. The corn sugar gives the yeast left in there a food source and as it eats it farts out your carbonation!!
Now come bottling. Once more I use the auto siphon and add the bottle filler the other end. Once it’s all bottled the caps are put on
All that is left is to wash off your bottles and mark them if you desire. I put a C on the cap so I know it’s cider and not the mead which is still fermenting away
We got 20 1/2 bottles out of 2 gallons of cider. Not too bad!! The 1/2 bottle was for quality control. It tastes really good but more sour than I was expecting considering the sweetness of the apples used. It’s quite tart on the tongue.
Theoretically it should sit for 3-6 months for the carbonation to develop. I suspect the shearing crew will not wait that long!!
Here’s a picture of the mead. Another 2 months and that will be racked off for its secondary fermentation. Then bottled after another 6 months
Blessed Be!!
When I was in college (1,000 years ago) we would buy a gallon of fresh apple juice from the local orchard. We would store the glass jug by the radiators in our room and wait for the lid to pop off. Then we knew the cider was ready to drink. So primitive. It's a wonder I made it to graduation.
Oh man - tart cider is my favorite! I’m smacking my lips over here thinking about it.