I have the time and the cool spring is just about gone so I decided to bottle this batch today. I predicted about an hour to bottle 36 pint or slightly larger bottles of cider. It took nearly 3 hours! Mainly because I hadn’t washed the bottles ahead of time. I had to do two washes of each bottle before putting anything in them and it was quite the assembly line. With only one worker, me!
I measured the SG and it hit right at the medium dry cider reading, 1.1 I think but I’ll have to look closer at my meter. Course this is before it ages in the bottles a couple of months and each bottle got about a teaspoon and a half of honey added right in. I KNOW I should be more precise but it was already a huge production. And its not like I’m selling this stuff, I’m gonna drink it, and if I’m lucky, find someone who wants to taste it. Maybe even Andrew, since its named after him. dunno.
I had saved enough bottles that I had plenty to recycle and didn’t have to use the few that wouldn’t come clean. I experimented on this point a bit with good results. WHEN I was emptying the bottles (ie: drinking the cider) I would rinse the bottle immediately and then pour in an inch or so of the VWP Cleaner Steriliser cleaning solution. I didn’t cap the bottles that didn’t have lids (Grolsh style) but ket them upright and in the shed till needed. I think that helped a lot in the cleaning process at this end of the process. I will do that with the whole batch next time. It really hard to get down into a bottle and clean out dried cider and mould so if I can keep it from growing in the first place all the better. I think I’ll ask the cider forum I follow to see what system others have come up with. Surely keeping them with food grade sulfite solution till needed, rinsed out, washed again with full strength solution, rinse and wash and rinse again. Surely that’s as clean as they need to be. I guess the proof will be at the far end of the process when I open it in September.
The keyboard I’m using is dropping spaces and other things, I’m just too fast for it I guess. Cheap Apple knockoff. Hmmmn, that might have potential as a name for the next batch come October…