Cracked open the 10 litre MJ keg this evening, and it’s good. There’s a little bit of sweetness there, but also a nice tang, and practically none of the naffness that we had from the dessert apples. It’s drinkable in its own right, and I wonder how it would fare with a touch of flavouring (blueberry, etc) or a bit more sugar.
As for mouth-feel, it’s difficult to know how much CO2 / Beer Gas this was been exposed to since kegging, but right now it’s slightly sparkling, which works well with the dry | sweet balance. Any more bubbles and it would highlight the tartness, less and it would just be flat. Not a bad effort.
Approximately 8 litres went into a 10 litre MJ mini keg which was then put on 15 PSI brew gas, think it’s 70/30 mixture. Not really too bothered if this doesn’t add any carbonation, I’m just keen to get it out of the fermentor and put away.
I also bottled 6 or 8 plain 330 ml lager bottles, each with 30 ml Erythritol and one carbonation drop. The sugar was poured straight in and hadn’t really dissolved when I checked a week later, but the carbonation drops were gone. Let’s leave these alone for a couple of months and see what happens.
Not much going on here; the fermentation curve has flattened out a couple of days ago, and the heating / cooling cycles have stretched out.
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I’m seeing bubbles from the airlock every few seconds, the Tilt is reporting activity, and Inkbird has just switched on the chiller, indicating that fermentation is producing heat in the FV. We’re approximately 24 hours after pitching and I’m glad to see that the Campden tablets we added two days ago haven’t affected the yeast. Now we just wait.
The shipment of White Labs WLP775 arrived this morning, so I let the slurry sachet come up to temperature before pitching half of it directly into the fermenter. The other half is going off to Farmer Jim for his batch to play with.
Managed to squeeze 18 litres out of our fist pure cider apple harvest, took 10 litres home and set them off in my SS Brewtech 10 litre bucket along with 1 litre of dessert apple juice, also from today’s pressing. The yeast hasn’t arrived yet so I added one crushed Campden tablet to slow things down.
Farmer Jim measured his half of the batch with a traditional hydrometer and saw 1.048, so I’m going to run with my calibrated Tilt’s reading of 1.047.