We have a lovely lady who stops by every now and then for a bite of homecooked food (social distancing of course) and she gives us bottles of Bramley apple juice as a thank you. I put the first one into the ongoing batch of Grimstead Green since I didn’t have any actual apples from Grimmers to put in( last year’s harvest was very limited and I hadn’t been making cider all year so it went into pies and stuff .)

Anyway, I had three more bottles and decided to make another short batch in my demiJohn. I could have used that fourth bottle to make an average-sized batch but instead, I had about 150 grams of honey that was getting hard and needed using up. So I added that to some warm water to make up another bottle and added in the yeast that SHOULD have gone into the main batch months ago. I couldn’t find it at the time, and it only reappeared after the primary fermentation! It’s my preferred yeast LC-118. That and some ‘nutrient’ from the John Bull kit and some of the generic yeast that came with it.

I needn’t have worried, once those little beasties got added to the pure apple juice it took off within minutes! I know this would have been a good oppurtunity to test another flavor or even add pears to it but I just couldn’t. I had to go with what I know and avoid turning my back on all the years of snubbing flavored cider. 🙂

That is a lot more honey than what usually ends up in my batches (proportionally speaking) so I’ll be interested in seeing how it tastes and maybe scaling up the amount of honey in my next full-size batch.