After my earlier post, I decided that I could probably bottle things pretty quickly “before lunch” <cough>.  I cleaned up the bottles by simply putting a tiny amount of cleaning and sterilising powder in them and filling with warm water.

Though both have been bubbling away gently in the garage, I ‘d found that they had not changed their specific gravity at all.  When syphoning, I found that they were already rather fizzy – I put this down to the garage being cold and the carbon dioxide being more soluble in cold liquids than warm ones.

All my recipes say bottle with priming sugar – at least a teaspoon full.  Given that these were fizzing as bottled and that my first cider has bottles as hard as bricks I erred on the side of caution and did half a teaspoon per bottle.

The final alcohol levels in these are for the perry, 5.9% and the cider 6.1%.  I got a tiny taste of the perry and it seemed OK, a lot better than when I racked it off and put it in the garage.  I guess that like cider, it needs quite a while to sort itself out.

Finally, I found the cider and perry look almost identical, so I need to find a labelling system that is easy to recycle/remove.