Number 12 Cider — HOW TO BOTTLE AND CARBONATE HARD CIDER

[Music] all right hey welcome Steven Colin here from number 12 cider where we're gonna give a little tutorial today on how to bottle your homemade cider you might have watched our previous video how to make homemade cider and actually today we have that finished cider it's all ready to get bottled so we've got all of the equipment we need to do that today and maybe I'll let Colin take over as to what we have here for bottling so if you remember we started with a basic grocery store apple juice in this case I believe it was a couple bottles of old orchard and we put some French wine yeast in there and we fermented it out it's been about two months or so it's a good good length of time to know that the fermentation is complete I can tell it's done because all the bubbling that we saw early on is gone the top is clear I see that there's a Lee's or yeast that's kind of gathered on the bottom so kind of a layer of the Lee's down there we have a nice clear cider I've actually tested it which is something you should do took a wine thief and I pulled some off of here I used my hydrometer and I found out that in fact the specific gravity is at zero which means all the sugars been fermented out so at this point we're confident we have a nice dry cider and that's generally what Steve and I prefer so we are thinking we're ready to bottle this at this point and perhaps drink it soon the simplest thing to do for for making a carbonated cider at home this which is what we're gonna do we're gonna bottle it and we're gonna let it carbonate itself and then it's going to be ready to drink the simplest thing to do is to take the cider blend it in with some sugar for amenable sugar we call that priming sugar a specific dose of sugar that gives you the level of carbonation you're looking for without too much because you could blow up bottles that way and and then after you've packaged out and capped it let it sit for two to three weeks in room temperature that sugar will will ferment in the bottle and it'll in in that fermentation process it will create carbonation so when you after two or three weeks when you refrigerate it and crack it it'll have that nice Sparkle that you're looking for what we're not doing is Colin mentioned is back sweetening it today you can do that at home the the trick is to back sweeten something that is still alive it still has yeast in it you need to use a non fermentable sugar so people that are looking to sweeten instead of having a dry product like we're going for need to put something in there in addition to the priming sugar that is non fermentable and there's many products on the market today you can use things like stevia or Splenda there's products called xylitol and there's other products that are non fermentable sugars and the way you would do that if you're gonna back sweeten it is you take a little bit of before you put your priming sugar in it you take a little bit of your of your sweetening product like stevia and you'd test and decide how many grams per per 12 ounce or per liter that you would want to add to that and then in addition to adding that the the priming sugar you would add that as well so so that process you described is really the bottle conditioning process of taking a cider and making sure that when you drink it a couple weeks from now it has some sparkle to it you very easily if you don't like carbonation or you don't want any sparkle to it you could very easily just bottle this as still cider not add any of the sugars the non fermentable Zoar in that kind of stuff and just package it cap it refrigerate it and drink it yeah that would be a still cider with no sparkle we happen to like a little bit of sparkle on our site a little carbonation adds a little mouthfeel kind of rounds out the field of cider so we prefer to do that but you can do a still cider if you want as well alright so now we're going to wrap the cider we're gonna transfer it using this we show this in our last video this racking wand and that helps it it makes it really easy for us to siphon the cider from here to there you see there's a little foam activity in this that's natural that after this much time there's probably something going on there called the malolactic fermentation which is just a residual process so it's it's normal if there's a little bit of foam coming out of there so what we're gonna do while we're racking it is we're going to add our priming sugar so we dissolved our priming sugar which we measured at 20 grams per gallon and we dissolve that in some water and while we're racking we're going to mix that in so that that gets all blended in nicely you might consider stirring that around a little bit while you're blending it just to make sure you have that priming sugar throughout the liquid so that when you bottle it you get it enough of that priming sugar and each of the bottles to to get the carbonation you're looking for so take a couple of minutes we could mention that this is kind of a medium sparkle that we're going for our carbonation level you could go much lower like maybe eight grams per gallon for a very light Sparkle you could go as high as probably 40 40 to 50 grams per gallon for more of a champagne heavy Sparkle but we like kind of a medium sparkle for this we chose and we got a good circulation going here with the racking wand so I think we'll get a good mixture of the priming sugar with this with a cider okay so what we have now is racked cider ready for finishing it has a slight bit of sweetness to it which we just used plain old table sugar for in the end that should amount to a medium sparkle in a bottle and we want to have this as a dry cider we're going to now take it from this racking bucket and Steve's already set up the hoses and the bottle filler connection and we have washed clean sanitized and rinsed our bottles here which is a very important step obviously there's bacteria or things in there that shouldn't be it's gonna probably ruin our cider so you want to make sure you take that step seriously about sanitizing cleaning equipment but I think we're ready to go you've done all this and let's fill yeah okay and this is a we call this or a filling wand you can buy these at any brew supply store online it's just a wand that has a little button at the end so that when you press that in the bottom of the of the bucket of the bottle it'll start filling and and when you lift it out it will stop filling so you don't make a mess we have a bucket with with the spigot on the side again this is something you can buy at any brewery supply store online that allows us to you know pour out and use gravity we're not using a lot of gravity here we've got a capper basic capper you can get those again at a brewery supply store online and we've we sanitized some caps so I'll fill these up and Colin will start capping them and this site will be ready to to sit for a couple weeks before it's drinkable generally you want to leave a little bit of airspace in the top that will allow for some of that co2 during this bottle conditioning process to have some room I'd probably want to leave too much because you get a little bit too much oxygen in there which can eventually connect with the bacteria to probably ruin the cider so that's about right about an inch or two at the top I'm very simply going to set a cap on top we've got just a basic cap or you can get at any brewery store I've laid the cap nicely on this on the lid I'm going to make sure that this cap top kind of seats itself right in that little rim and once I have that I will then just very carefully once I know it's centered I can then crimp it down and that's just simply done and there's a finished bottle of cider what I would say about this is this sugar now will react with the yeast that's in the bottle we did not add any some people do that during this process we are always confident there's a certain amount of yeast in the cider still so we will assume that that's the case here it'll be enough to react with the sugar to create that co2 Sparkle so what we want to do with this now is create the environment for that yeast to be happy and do its job we'll set this in a kind of a maybe room temperature 60 to 70 degree room for about two weeks or so and that should be enough to take care of that process so now it's just a matter of setting it aside and hopefully in a couple weeks and be able to drink it alright that's it for home bottling feel free to send us questions if you have any there's a lot of different ways to package your Finnish cider product and we've we've done them all you know back sweetening with with non fermentable sugars but you can keg and that gives you some different options as well past your eyes faster and past your eyes here are number 12 we do a lot of canning that requires some specialized equipment but you can do all of those things so stay tuned we'll put another video out here once we get an opportunity you try this fine cider [Music]

Channel: Number 12 Cider

Views: 82,658

Keywords: hard cider, bottle conditioning, cider bottling, bottling hard cider, auto siphon, priming sugar, non-fermentable sugar, back sweetening, bottling bucket, bottling wand, how to make hard cider, hard apple cider, carbonate, carbonated hard cider, how to carbonate hard cider

Id: kMPCDo3tSVc

Length: 10min 11sec (611 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 03 2020