Bottles of turbo cider
Monday evening saw me with stuff scattered in various parts of the kitchen, trying to find enough worktop so that I could bottle up the batch of turbo cider made from my home brew cider recipe. In some countries plain apple juice is called cider, so for the benefit of those visitors, this is an alcoholic or hard cider not just a pressed apple juice, even though that is how this drink started.
Bottling your home brew can be a bit of a palaver but it does make it much easier to serve cold, straight from the fridge rather than trying to get a pressure barrel into the fridge or serving your alcohol warm. In hot weather, you cannot beat a nice cold drink so this makes it worth all the extra effort that it takes in my book.
I have now found that it pays to get yourself organised before you start doing anything, as there is a lot to make sure you have ready when you are going to bottle home brew. You cannot really afford to take time out half way through doing it to start sterilising stuff you forgot, as things are getting contaminated all the time from sterilising and rinsing until they are sealed. It is much better to have everything sterilised then rinse it all out just before you start.
In our case, the things we needed sterilised, rinsed and ready to use were:-
Nearly ready to drink
- Syphon tube
- Filter bag
- Bucket
- Hydrometer
- Glass
- Funnel
- Bottles
- Spoon
I started by carefully putting the filter bag over the bucket, then carefully syphoning out the cider, being careful not to disturb the sediment. This makes sure that we filter out all the bits of elderflower we added without stirring up all the gunk from the bottle of the demijohn.
Once this was done, some of the filtered cider was added to the glass and the final specific gravity was measured (1.000) in this case. The contents of the glass were then poured back except a little taster 
mmm that is nice.
We talked about how to finish the brew, should we go for a flat brew, fizzy or in between and as Tracy preferred fizzy, we added an ounce of sugar dissolved in some of the cider to the bucket so that secondary fermentation could carbonate the cider some more in the bottles.
It was then just a case of giving it a good stir to mix up the sugar and pouring it carefully into the bottles before sealing them and washing off the outside to ensure there was no sticky residue left from where we poured the drink in.
We have ended up with 9 half litre bottles of very tasty cider at around 5.5%, which is being left for a week or two before drinking to give it a chance to fizz up, if we wanted a flat cider we could have degassed it or if we had wanted a semi fizzy drink, it was very nice to drink straight away. This cider is slightly thicker than a normal shop bought cider and I find this quite pleasant but it could have been diluted a little if you did not like this.
Later on in the year, I will be looking forward to making another batch with fresh apples from our own trees and I can’t wait to see how that tastes.
Do you have any brewing success or failure stories to share and are there any hints or tips you wish you had found out ages ago.
