Recent content by RileyOG

Thank you for that detailed response. I will try to digest, because things seem confusing. (My degree was in history, not chemistry.) It gets a little more confusing. When I was doing this test, I tried it on both a 23.7 oz plastic bottle and on a 32 oz swing top bottle. Since the plastic...

You were right. I used a 23.7 ounce plastic bottle and added 44 grams of table sugar. I let it sit for a week and there was no carbonation, although I didn't check SG. I'm guessing that my hydrometer under-reporting SG by 8 points was what "worked" for me in the past. I must have thought...

First, my drunken ramble: Post Zombie holocaust self-sufficient homestead farm: "Kids, how many times have I told you, do NOT put walkers on the compost pile." Now my pitch: If you live in Southern California, and you want an Irish night, with LOCAL cider..

Thanks. That makes sense for a flat, dry cider, but if you want to bottle carbonate, it sounds like you could be in trouble, even if you waited for, like, 1.002, since it might make it down to 0.997.

At the risk of tiring everyone out, what is the highest SG you would risk bottling cider? Seems to me I remember 1.005 being mentioned in one of the cider recipe books.

At the risk of sounding dumb, when you say "points" on a hydrometer, with reference to SG, you are talking about "thousandths," right? You are probably right. I will wait a few days on the plastic bottle test and see if the yeast did anything with the primer.

That's what I'm really getting at -- the probability of "worn out yeast." Even though my hydrometer was off, this yeast apparently kept working in the bottles, so I'm going to try adding very small amounts of primer and see if I can coax the remainder into bubbles. Next batch, live and learn.

RE: "Just so we're clear - you bottled without priming sugar but now you'd like to try carbonating some of the bottles three weeks later?" Yes. As @dmtaylor observed, it looks like my hydrometer is off. It appears to register 0.008 lower than actual. Nonetheless, the bottled cider...

Thanks! I just took the attached picture in distilled water and it comes in at 0.992, which means -- what? -- my final SG should have been 0.996 (0.988+(1-0.992)). The meter is reading lower by 0.008, so add that to anything measured? I should have been more clear in my original post. I...

Yes, we have two restaurants on the farm. I'm talking about hard cider. A neighbor, and relative, brews hard cider. We buy it from him and we charge $22 for a 22 oz bottle and it flies..

I have a batch of fortified cider that started out at 1.07 SG and finished off at 0.988 SG. (10.76 ABV by my calculation) I kept it in a 3 gallon carboy for 62 days and then bottled it in 32 oz swing-top bottles. I used Nottingham high performance ale yeast which I believe has a 14% ABV...

We wouldn't be very large scale. All we know is that we can't keep the locally grown cider on our shelves and we charge a LOT for it.

Thank you!

Thanks. Will do..