The Bramley cider is as tart as you’d expect and is best drunk mixed with apple juice.
The perry is pretty challenging. Just a fizzy alcoholic drink without much flavour.
The Newport Mixture is the best and actually like cider.
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.
After posting about demijohns, I thought it might be an idea to actually check the specific gravity of the quince, grape and perry. Here are the results.
| Date | Specific Gravity | Alcohol Content |
|---|---|---|
| 4th November 2013 | 1,110 | 0% |
| 13th November 2013 | 1,070 | 5.3% |
| 27th December 2013 | 1,038 | 9.5% |
| 15th February 2014 | 1,035 | 9.9% |
The recipe says “When fermentation has ceased, rack the wine into a clean jar and place in a cooler environment and leave. When the wine is clear and stable siphon into bottles”. Fermentation is slow but visible (and the utility room is 16°C), and with alcohol of 9.5% I am happy to leave it going as is. Back to the utility room. It is still rather cloudy, so I wonder if I should not have added pectolase at the start. I looked at whether you can add it later and it looks like you can, so I’ll wait and see what happens when the fermentation really slows down (you can still see obvious bubbles). If it does not stop being cloudy I will add some pectolase and see if the fermentation speeds up again.
| Date | Specific Gravity | Alcohol Content |
|---|---|---|
| 22nd November 2013 (Grape Juice) | 1,066 | 0% |
| 22nd November 2013 (Juice + 100g fructose + 100g caster) | 1,078 | 0% |
| 27th December 2013 | 996 | 10.9% |
According to my “wine from white grapes” recipe, I need to act on this, rack it off and degas it. So I got one of my father-in-law’s recent gifts, sterilised it (it was already clean – thank you David), and syphoned the wine in. Weirdly the new demijohn was significantly smaller in volume than the old one and I didn’t realise until I had a fair sized puddle on the floor. This is actually good news, because there is no air gap. At the same time I put in a Campden tablet and some potassium sorbate to knock the yeast out and allow the carbon dioxide to come out with a shake or two over the next few days “degassing”.
| Date | Specific Gravity | Alcohol Content |
|---|---|---|
| 21st October 2013 | 1,050? | 0% |
| 7th November 2013 | 1,010 | 5.7% |
| 27th December 2013 | 1,010 | 5.7% |
Very confused about this one, that has been slowly fermenting for weeks without changing its alcohol content. I think I might just bottle it without adding much sugar for the fizz – the bottles from the first round of cider I made are rock hard and I suspect I will need wellies when I open them.
| Date | Specific Gravity | Alcohol Content |
|---|---|---|
| 7th November 2013 | 1,050 | 0% |
| 19th November 2013 | 1,000 | 6.6% |
| 19th November 2013 (after apple juice) | 1,004 | 6.1% |
| 27th December 2013 | 1,004 | 6.1% |
Another that has been fermenting slowly without much change in alcohol. Probably needs bottling like the perry.
I think I have mucked up the Newport cider by the specific gravity get too low. When I checked today it was 1.000, but if I had followed my instructions I should have stopped it earlier.
“Do not allow the gravity to drop below 1.005 unless a very dry cider is preferred.”
So I racked it off and whacked in nearly a litre of apple juice from a carton. This brought the specific gravity up to 1.004. I guess it will be digested by the yeast anyway, but hopefully in the garage it will be too cold for that and it will be sweeter.
I am also a little perturbed by the colour, which looks more “scrumpy” than “cider” to me. I used granulated sugar with this one rather than brown sugar so that may explain it. It is also rather cloudy, but hopefully it will sort itself out in the garage, where the Perry is looking pretty clear. It too is rather green, but the photo doesn’t show it very well.
The recipe from cider-making.co.uk said it would have a specific gravity of 1.010 at the end of fermentation, and it was spot on. The recipe says rack off and bottle. I am not sure if this is rack off, wait a bit, then bottle; or bottle straight away. 
Either way, I needed the temperature checking demijohn for my cider so racked off (moved in to a new demijohn) it would be. There was a lot of sediment, meaning that the racked off demijohn was rather far from the top (nearly a litre down). I now know you can top up with sugar water at this stage. I wasn’t sure how much sugar to put in but after internal debate I decided that sugar with og 1.030 would be about right to keep the overall alcohol content the same. I will do the calculations another day.
Like the cider earlier, I tasted this brew. It was actually not that nice. Just that bland homebrew sort of taste. Maybe it is the yeast, maybe it just needs to age. Off to the garage it went, already bubbling away as the sugar was digested by the remaining yeast.
