Last night I had a small taste of the two March batches. There was surprisingly little difference in taste between Batch A which has been in the fridge since it was bottled in March, and Batch B which has been in the second fermentation bottle during the same amount of time. Batch A was cloudly, and Batch B was ‘flatter’ though I expect both batches to have little or no fizz because they’re ‘still cider’ batches.\u00a0 I suppose there’s a third batch which is the 10 or so bottles of Batch A I put in the basement after about a month. Those should have fizz from the tablespoon of honey I added when I bottled them. I’ll call them Batch C though they are actually a subset of Batch A.\u00a0 Follow all that??<\/p>\n
Anyway…<\/p>\n
Since Friday would have been the end of the second month since bottling I took today to bottle up Batch B and add 1 tablespoon (aprox. 15ml) of honey to each. I use a measuring spoon and a funnel but its still a bit messier than I’d like it to be and the bottles are filling up before I can get a tablespoon of honey into the next bottle. I will have to think about how to ‘prep’ the bottles before adding the cider because its quite a complicated dance to keep the cider flowing thru the siphon which takes two hands to start, then squeeze out a tablespoon of honey and tip that into a funnel while keeping an eye on the first bottle so it doesn’t overflow.\u00a0 I tried microwaving the bottle of honey so it would flow better but I just scalded my hands and after the third bottle it was back to room temp anyway.<\/p>\n
Oh well, I will think upon it and try something else, maybe go to Demerara sugar though I do like the subtle taste of honey…then I’d have the problem of getting it ground fine enough…<\/p>\n
So set your cider clocks for June 15th my friends, I’ll have twenty plus bottles of cider ready for tasting.<\/p>\n
I’m thinking I might have to educate some palates in that tasting. I’ve been collecting various ciders from Martins and I can do a little taste test around that date. I am picturing a blind test of my cider against 4 commercial brands.\u00a0 Five if they bring back Original Sin; it was pulled from the shelf last I looked.\u00a0 If I win then I’ve got the process down enough to lock it in, if I lose I’ll know what people want it to taste like and tweak in that direction.<\/p>\n
I wonder who I can get to come over and taste it though… I wonder…<\/p>\n
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Last night I had a small taste of the two March batches. There was surprisingly little difference in taste between Batch A which has been in the fridge since it was bottled in March, and Batch B which has been in the second fermentation bottle during the same amount of time. Batch A was cloudly, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3556","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cidermaking","missing-thumbnail"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pDxlf-Vm","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vrharbor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3556","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vrharbor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vrharbor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vrharbor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vrharbor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3556"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vrharbor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3556\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vrharbor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3556"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vrharbor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3556"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vrharbor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3556"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}