I just drank an excellent bottle of cider.

I would have gladly pitted it against  80% of all the ciders I’ve ever tasted. And it was mine. It was one of the current “Luck of the Irish” batch mentioned earlier.

The problem I now have is that the bottle I drank just before it wasn’t spot on. It was good, I drank it, but I wouldn’t have wanted it to be publicly judged.

This bottle, perhaps number 6 out of 12 was perfect.  Several but not all of the others from that batch were just as nice.

I don’t know how to achieve consistency in output. As previous notes can attest I precisely measured ingredients, aged the whole batch in exactly the same conditions, added the same amount of honey to it all on the same day and even handled every single empty bottle the same way.  Yet each blue tinted bottle is a universe unto itself, and I can’t fathom out how to be sure when I hand a bottle to a friend that he’s going to go home and enjoy the same refreshing drink I just had.
The only option I’ve come up with is to not bottle condition –age the cider in the bottles– but in a secondary fermentation container and then bottle when close to the date of consumption.  This gets me a less fizzy, slightly sweeter cider. But even then fermentation can slowly continue. My basement remains cool but not cool enough to stop fermentation completely. The test batch I made this way was well received, but I have to admit I missed the fizz and dryness more than I thought I would.

Scrubbing the web for ideas gets me only one thing I haven’t tried and that’s adding some sodium metabisulphite at the end of the process to kill the yeast where I want it to.  You use it to sterilize the bottles and equipment and to kill off any wild yeast that might be in your mix and so it follows that it would work to ‘fix’ the cider at the peak drinkabiltiy. Those same sources mention it affects the taste too, so there’s a trade off.

I’ll soon be starting the next batch, utilizing freshly pressed apple juice from a nearby orchard. (Link once I’m sure I can still buy some this year’s crop could be less than stellar from what I hear. I will do as they suggest, but the proof is in the tasting, and that will happen sometime in early October.  I’m excited and I can’t wait!