Hey!
my first cider is made, and I’m happy that I had no problems with it.
picking day was on the 3rd of October last year, and I have around 300litres (arround 80 gallons)
I have a couple of problems now, which I will solve like this, please give me any advice you can give me:
first is, that I have no more sugar in my Cider, it’s totally dry, but I want it sweet, so i will put 20grams of sugar per litre in there. I just have around 5 litres of apple juice left, so I can’t backsweeten it! I will do it different this year.
I haven’t pasteurised the cider yet, and I don’t think that I can do that due to the amount of Cider I have, how can I kill the yeast completely without pasteurising it? I need to kill the yeast, because I will put sugar in it again, and I want to store it for more than one day. any idea? how do you store your cider?
next is, that I want to give it a taste of elderflower, in may/june i can collect elderflowers for making a syrup, do you have any receipe? and how much elderflower syrup do i have to blend with cider? i guess it depends how strong the elderflower syrup is, isn’t it?
I will buy a 50-litre keg, some fittings and a bottle of CO2 for carbonating. next step will be that i will put CO2 in the cider-keg, I read this way of carbonating anywhere in the network, do you think it will work?
currently my cider is just a bit sparkling, but I want it really sparkling.
I bottle the cider and will close them with crown caps, do i have to sterilse them before i close them? And how can I make it, that there’s no more air in the bottle when I close it? I see no way for putting CO2 in the space between cap and cider. any idea?
thx for any advice you can give me!
Thx