Well, that was weird. I poured a glass of Runt from the keg in order to check up on carbonation progress, and it was totally flat yet impossibly sweet! Not believing my taste buds I offered it to Patience for a second opinion, and she not only praised it highly but declined to return the glass – a first if ever there was one.

When I poured myself a fresh glass it was much less sweet, and almost back to the expected levels of dryness, i.e. sour. Thinking about it for a moment, it became clear that when I added the sugar to the keg and then poured in the cider it must have not mixed properly with the sugar, which had sunk to the bottom and was the first thing that was dispensed via the dip tube. Interesting.

Having guessed that we were now back to square one in terms of sweetness I mixed 300g of Xylitol with some water, which I then poured into the keg before well and truly agitating it. 24 hours on and it tastes uniformly sweet after several glasses, and now there’s some headspace in the keg we’re also beginning to see first signs of carbonation.

#wisdom: 300g of sugar is about right for 10 litres of cider (so 600 – 650g for a Cornelius keg) but it needs to be dissolved in water and thoroughly mixed in, not just chucked into the keg before cider is filled.