Cider Update III

Update III, the ill-conceived, bastard child of update II.  Snicker...

We bottled the first 5 gallons of cider when my sister, Kim, came by to hang out.  It hasn't finished with the yeast settling yet, so they will probably take a month or more of bottle conditioning before they're ready to drink.  We used the new bottle capper that my coworker Matt gave/lent us (he just kegs anymore), and it worked great.

When we racked from the secondary carboy into the bottling bucket, the SG was 0.996, the same as it had been when we racked into the secondary carboy, so we are certain now that fermentation was complete and we've just been waiting for the yeasty-beasties to settle down.

The cider is pretty tasty, on its own, but we decided to up the ante a little bit by adding some malic acid when we bottled, I think somewhere on the order of 1 tsp, which added quite a bit of sour apple flavor to the juice.  We also used 3 cans of apple juice concentrate as the sugar source for carbonation.   The combination of sugar and some extra apple flavor was delicious.

After adding the malic acid and the concentrate, the SG was back up at 1.070.  This is higher than the starting gravity at the very beginning, so we may have just doubled the strength of the cider, or potentially made for explosive (or extremely foamy) bottled product.  As a precaution, we put all the bottles inside a rubbermaid tub to keep the carpet safe. 

Next up:  Bottling the Beast, Tasting the Beauty