I love it when a plan comes together!

My Theory was correct! The cider cleared up perfectly and as you can see it is carbonated nicely too! A tip for first time hard-cider makers, if you want your cider to be carbonated you need to bottle it (with normal amount of priming sugar) when it's a little cloudy (about one week after fermenting). Just remember that the cider will have trub on the bottom so unless you like that trub taste you will been to pour it into a glass (like a cool Guinness glass) to drink it.

Next Roud of Hard Cider is Almost Ready!

The batch has finished fermenting and in now bottled! I just have to wait for it to get conditioned (become carbonated). It is very tasty this time a little cloudy but I think that will settle after conditioning. (OK so the glass of hard cider makes the batch look REALLY cloudy but that is from the bottom of cask and I had to tilt it to pour it, so a BUNCH of treb came out. The stuff in the bottles is quit clear.)

The reason I didn't wait for the cider to totally clear is one of the ways I'm trouble shooting the last batch not being carbonated after conditioning. I think the last batch almost all the yeast died before I bottled the cider. Clouding in brewing normally mean your yeast is still a live OR it can mean you messed up. I was very careful so I'm ruling out messed up.

I know I had mentioned in an earlier post that I thought the problem of low to no carbonation was due to not enough priming sugar. Well I didn't increase my priming sugar. I only want to test one thing at at time and after re-looking at the last batch I think no having enough active yeast was more the problem than not having enough priming sugar. Time will tell.

Conditioning should be finished by Sunday so I will let you know after that if this batch is more carbonated and how the taste compares.

WINTER IS HERE!! So bring on the beer! (well hard cider)

We have started to get hit with our hard snow storms the last few days and I'm going to go out on a limb and say the snow is here to stay! I got most of my winter prep done before the snow hit but as always there is still some things that I haven't done. So for the next week I will be clearing snow to clear leaves to over stuff up. So in order to get myself ready for a week of being cold and wet because I was lazy and didn't do these chores sooner, I'm putting off starting those chores to make some more hard apple cider!

Alright I know what your thinking "JUST GET THE CHORES DONE!" and I will but my loving, awesome and might I add very caring wife allowed me to buy the stuff to make hard apple cider so HERE WE ARE. Besides it only took about an hour and it will take two weeks to cooks. I figure it will be a good reward when I finally finish all my chores.

Cheers

HUGE THANK YOU TO EVERYONE

So after looking over my numbers I see I have broken the 1,000 pageviewed mark!!!! Thank you everyone for stopping by and taking a look at what I have been posting. I promise there will be more good stuff coming so keep coming back. Can't wait to pass the 10,000 mark!

THANKS AGAIN!!