Rocketfuel. The experiment to see how high I could push our own apple juice by adding yeast and sugar has yielded eight bottles of highly delicious, moderately debilitating fruity beverage – and that’s just an early sample from the trial jar. Crucially I neglected to get a gravity reading after adding the last batch of sugar at the start of December, but I have faith in my calculations at the time. Either way she’s at 0.996 at time of bottling. Going to write this one down as a conservative 8%, definitely to be repeated.

Another small hiccup was when I realised that the bottling wand doesn’t fit into the narrow hole on this demijohn. Instead of fudging something with a spare piece of tubing I decided to carefully decant into another vessel and syphons from there, with the risk that there will be some aeration and sediment in the bottles as a result. I briefly considered leaving the decanted brew to settle in the garage overnight before bottling, but the aeration was giving me doubts – better to put up with a small amount of sediment and get it bottled. Hope I’m right.

Anyway, we have eight clear flip-top 500 ml cider bottles, individually numbered:

• Bottles 1-4 have 15 ml Erythritol and 2x Cooper’s carbonation drops (target 750 ml)
• Bottles 5-8 have 10 ml Erythritol and 2x Easybrew carbonation drops (target 500 ml)

I realise I’m playing with fire by carbing so high on half my precious batch, but whenever I’ve used a target of 500 ml on my beer brews they haven’t been what I would call fizzy. OK for beer, but not what I’m hoping for with high-percentage cider. I’m storing these in the server room at 20.5 ℃ for 5 days and then moving to the garage for conditioning. Fingers crossed.