On 10/3/13 5:09 PM, wrote:
It's the first time I am making cider, I have juiced my apples and
added the yeast. The first couple of nights the airlock was going
nuts, bubbles every 10 to 20 seconds now it has slowed down a lot to
bubbles every 1 to 2 minutes, is this right?


Posted to another group due to lack of activity at rural group.

Dean Hoffman" wrote:
On 10/3/13 5:09 PM, wrote:
It's the first time I am making cider, I have juiced my apples and
added the yeast. The first couple of nights the airlock was going
nuts, bubbles every 10 to 20 seconds now it has slowed down a lot to
bubbles every 1 to 2 minutes, is this right?


Posted to another group due to lack of activity at rural group.

Mine usually goes crazy for several days, but I usually add honey or corn sugar,
so it may have more food. You could measure the specific gravity. Cider will
usually go to near 0 or even -1 when it is fermented out. Mine often sits in the
carboy until the next year when I need the carboys again, but certainly doesn't
need all that time. It does come out very clear.

rec.crafts.brewing or rec.crafts.winemaking bot have some activity for this sort
of question.

[quote='Dean Hoffman[_13_];3129824']On 10/3/13 5:09 PM, wrote:
It's the first time I am making cider, I have juiced my apples and
added the yeast. The first couple of nights the airlock was going
nuts, bubbles every 10 to 20 seconds now it has slowed down a lot to
bubbles every 1 to 2 minutes, is this right?


I've been making my own beer for well over 25 years, and I can tell you that what you're seeing is correct if you're wanting to make a very low alcohol content cider.

If you wanted a higher alcohol content cider, you'd add sugar to the apple juice so that the yeast would have more sugar to convert into alcohol. When you do that, you don't even use an air lock for the first week or so. You just put the sweetened apple juice in a food grade plastic pail, add your yeast and cover with a piece of plastic of some kind; even a garbage bag that will fit over the pail will do. In that case, if your quiet, you should be able to HEAR the fermentation process because of all the bubbles breaking at the surface.

You don't want to add sugar while your juice is in a secondary fermenter because the CO2 that's produced will be too much for the air lock. Sterilize a plastic pail, siphon your apple juice into the pail and stir in anywhere from 1 to 2 two pound bags of sugar while stirring, and then cover with plastic and tie the plastic down loosely around the pail so that the CO2 can escape. Within 24 hours you should have foam at the surface of your juice. Once the foam starts to break and you see areas of liquid juice at the surface, then siphon the juice into your secondary fermenter and use your air lock.

I expect this is your first batch of alcohol of any kind.

This web site won't let me edit a post more than once for some reason. So, the following is how I meant to revise that last post:

You won't hear the fermentation in the primary fermenter because of the foam at the surface. You have to wait for the foam to start breaking up before you'll see bubbles in the open areas of juice and hear a "fiiizzzzz" sound coming from all the bubbles breaking at the surface of the juice.

You don't want to add sugar while your juice is in a secondary fermenter (the big bottle) because the foam that's produced will overwhelm the air lock and you'll have foam coming out of it instead of CO2 bubbles.

So, if you want to fix this batch of cider, sterilize a plastic pail large enough to hold your entire batch, siphon your apple juice into the pail and stir in anywhere from 4 to 8 pounds of sugar for every 5 gallons of juice you're fermenting. Then cover the pail with plastic and tie the plastic down loosely around the pail so that the CO2 can escape. I like to use clear plastic garbage bags because their transparancy allows you to see what's going on inside the primary fermenter (the pail). (Often, though, the fog that forms on the inside of the plastic makes it hard to see what's happening without the use of a strong light.

Within 24 hours you should have foam at the surface of your juice. Once the foam starts to break and you see open areas of liquid juice at the surface, then siphon the juice into your secondary fermenter and use your air lock. You might wait and extra couple of days after you see the first open areas at the surface of the juice. That's because the sooner you transfer to the secondary fermenter (the big bottle) the greater the liklihood that the amount of CO2 produced will overwhelm the air lock and cause foam to spew out of it. Also, when you siphon a liquid, you lower the pressure on it causing CO2 to come out of solution. So, after "racking" or siphoning your cider into the secondary fermenter (the big bottle) you'll notice that the fermentation appears to have stopped. It hasn't stopped. It's just that CO2 came out of solution with the siphoning, and the juice is no longer saturated with CO2, so the CO2 that is produced by fermentation is going into solution into the juice. Once the juice is once again saturated with CO2, continued fermentation will cause your air lock to start bubbling again.

Don't bottle until the fermentation is effectively finished. Otherwise the fermentation that continues inside the bottles will result in your cider being under pressure, and in a worst case horror scenario, that could be a little dangerous if someone dropped the bottle and it shattered.

On 10/3/2013 10:40 PM, Dean Hoffman wrote:
On 10/3/13 5:09 PM, wrote:
It's the first time I am making cider, I have juiced my apples and
added the yeast. The first couple of nights the airlock was going
nuts, bubbles every 10 to 20 seconds now it has slowed down a lot to
bubbles every 1 to 2 minutes, is this right?


It could be right, or not. If you are telling the truth, it's right. If
you're not telling the truth, it's not right.



..
Christopher A. Young
Learn about Jesus
www.lds.org
..

On 10/4/2013 1:28 AM, nestork wrote:
This web site won't let me edit a post more than once for some reason.
So, the following is how I meant to revise that last post:

You won't hear the fermentation in the primary fermenter because of the
foam at the surface. You have to wait for the foam to start breaking up
before you'll see bubbles in the open areas of juice and hear a
"fiiizzzzz" sound coming from all the bubbles breaking at the surface of
the juice.

You don't want to add sugar while your juice is in a secondary fermenter
(the big bottle) because the foam that's produced will overwhelm the air
lock and you'll have foam coming out of it instead of CO2 bubbles.

So, if you want to fix this batch of cider, sterilize a plastic pail
large enough to hold your entire batch, siphon your apple juice into the
pail and stir in anywhere from 4 to 8 pounds of sugar for every 5
gallons of juice you're fermenting. Then cover the pail with plastic
and tie the plastic down loosely around the pail so that the CO2 can
escape. I like to use clear plastic garbage bags because their
transparancy allows you to see what's going on inside the primary
fermenter (the pail). (Often, though, the fog that forms on the inside
of the plastic makes it hard to see what's happening without the use of
a strong light.

Within 24 hours you should have foam at the surface of your juice. Once
the foam starts to break and you see open areas of liquid juice at the
surface, then siphon the juice into your secondary fermenter and use
your air lock. You might wait and extra couple of days after you see
the first open areas at the surface of the juice. That's because the
sooner you transfer to the secondary fermenter (the big bottle) the
greater the liklihood that the amount of CO2 produced will overwhelm the
air lock and cause foam to spew out of it. Also, when you siphon a
liquid, you lower the pressure on it causing CO2 to come out of
solution. So, after "racking" or siphoning your cider into the
secondary fermenter (the big bottle) you'll notice that the fermentation
appears to have stopped. It hasn't stopped. It's just that CO2 came
out of solution with the siphoning, and the juice is no longer saturated
with CO2, so the CO2 that is produced by fermentation is going into
solution into the juice. Once the juice is once again saturated with
CO2, continued fermentation will cause your air lock to start bubbling
again.

Don't bottle until the fermentation is effectively finished. Otherwise
the fermentation that continues inside the bottles will result in your
cider being under pressure, and in a worst case horror scenario, that
could be a little dangerous if someone dropped the bottle and it
shattered.





Been a long time since I made wine but this is essentially the same
thing. You would judge final alcohol content by intial specific
gravity. I would use a wine yeast that was tolerant to so many ppm
sulfur dioxide to knock out other bad yeasts. Usually run primary
fermentation in a large covered food safe covered garbage type can then
secondary slow fermentation in a jar with a bubbler. When bubbles stop,
it is safe to bottle. Beer is made similarly except you brew to a
certain specific gravity leaving enough sugar to ferment in the bottle
and carbonate or let go flat and add sugar.

Also made root beer for kids. You mix extract with sugar and yeast,
immediately bottle and after a day or two refrigerate to stop fermentation.

Welcome to microbiology 101.

Napoleon Bonepart recognized the importance of wine to France's economy and commissioned the emminent French scientist, Louis Pasteur, to find out why some batches of wine would turn into vinegar. This was the biggest scientific mystery of the 18th century, on par with our quest to find dark matter in the universe. Louis Pasteur soon discovered that several different types of natural fungii grow on the surface of grapes, and one kind will turn the sugar into acetic acid while the other kind will turn sugar into alcohol.

Both kinds of yeast exist naturally on the grape's skin, and the vinegar kills the wine yeast while the alcohol kills the acetic acid yeast, so whichever yeast gets the upper hand at the beginning of fermentation generally goes on to win the war and convert the grape juice to either alcohol or acetic acid.

It was Camden tablets, named after the town of Camden in France where Pasteur made this discovery, and Camden tablets are now what we call sodium or potassium metabisulphate, which are the chemicals we use to sterilize our equipment. The only difference is that camden tablets are compacted into tablet form whereas metabisulphite is a powder until dissolved into water.

Pasteur's solution to the problem was to use sodium metabisulphate to kill ALL of the wild yeast in the batch of stomped grapes, allow time for the sulpher dioxide to escape from the grape juice and then add wine yeast, thereby ensuring that the batch would turn to wine, not vinegar.

But...

Wine yeast is not more tolerant of sulpher dioxide than beer yeast...

Wine yeast is more tolerant of alcohol, and will ferment to an alcohol content of over 12 percent, and theoretically up to about 15 percent if left for long enough. Beer yeast tops out at about 6 percent, or if left long enough, about 8 percent.

Louis Pasteur is renown for many discoveries. He was the first to inject sheep with dead Anthrax virus which caused them to develop immunity to live anthrax virus and therefore survive the anthrax epidemic that killed off most of the sheep in Europe in the 1700's. His idea of killing bacteria AFTER packaging it in sealed containers, commonly called "Pasteurization" is still one of the ways we keep food fresh for months and even years. Louis Pasteur is known as the Father of Microbiology and the Father of Immunology. So, not only is he the founder of two great fields of modern science, he also solved the greatest mystery of the 18th century, which was why grape juice sometimes turned into vinegar instead of wine. The man wasn't brilliant, he simply understood something that no one else did; that tiny living creatures that were too small to see existed in the natural environment and could cause diseases in people and animals and cause food to go bad and rot. Pasteur wasn't a genius, he just was aware of the existance of microorganisms at a time when no one else was.

I always made my beer the same way champagne is made...

Allow fermentation to proceed to completion, and then add sugar when bottling. That way, fermentation begins anew in the bottle, carbonating the beer as the added sugar ferments.

I would add 2 cups of sugar to my batch of beer, stir, and then siphon the sweetened beer into 1 liter soft drink plastic bottles.

But, I agree that it can be made by bottling the beer before fermentation is complete.