HOW I SWEETEN TURBO CIDER (TRUCKERS ANTI-FREEZE)

[Geezah]

I make my brew up with a couple of jars of cheap honey, ferment to 1000 then bottle it up with 1tsp sugar for carbonation.
Dunno if its my pallet, but it certainly doesn't taste dry to me.
I got 20l to bottle up tommorrow

As Dreadskin would say...... grow some!

[trucker5774]

I make my brew up with a couple of jars of cheap honey, ferment to 1000 then bottle it up with 1tsp sugar for carbonation.
Dunno if its my pallet, but it certainly doesn't taste dry to me.
I got 20l to bottle up tommorrow

As Dreadskin would say...... grow some! :lol

Tell Mrs trucker

[Geezah]

The trick is to brew it so she doesn't like it.... all the more for the brewer innit!

[trucker5774]

Good point Geezah, but we do both enjoy getting wobbley and she puts up with kit all over the show, so it's a small reward! She doesn't like beer though

[Geezah]

I guess if you do AG you gotta keep her sweet

[jason123]

I can imagine the oven method of pastuerising being a bigger faff than anything else. Who's got an oven big enough for for 20l, you couldn't use plastic pet bottles and the bottles would be too hot to touch for ages afterwards. It'd take a whole day just to do it

[Laripu]

I can imagine the oven method of pastuerising being a bigger faff than anything else. Who's got an oven big enough for for 20l, you couldn't use plastic pet bottles and the bottles would be too hot to touch for ages afterwards. It'd take a whole day just to do it

A whole day! You must belong to a very powerful union! We work faster in America.

It would take 2 hours and 30 minutes during 2 hours and 15 minutes of which nothing is required of you. It would be done in two batches. I just measured, and I can easily put 24 half-litre Grolsch swing-top bottles in the my stove with lots of space between them. Those are what I use for cider. A 23-litre batch could use 46 of such bottles, but in practise I rarely use that many. In any case, two batches is sufficient for 24 litres, without crowding.

1. Put bottles in stove. Time: 3 minutes.
2. Turn the heat on, and the lowest setting I have on my stove is 170°F (77°C in more civilized Celsius units). It takes some time for them and the stove to heat them up; some time at pasteurization temperatures. To be 100% certain, I would make the total heat-up-and-pasteurize time 40 minutes.
3. Turn off the stove; it takes time to cool down. I'd leave them for 20 minutes, with the stove opened a few inches to let heat out.
4. Then take them out with oven mitts (in case they're too hot), and leave them on the counter if they need more cooling. 3 minutes.
5. Load in another batch of bottles. 3 minutes.
6. Repeat steps 2, 3, and 4 for the second batch. 1 hour 6 minutes.
Add another 15 minutes on the counter, and maybe add another few minutes for taking the bottles out of storage and putting them back into storage.
Total time: 2 hours 30 minutes, and during 2 hours and 15 minutes of which you're off doing something else important like watching Sky TV, smoking a cigarette of some kind, or checking for hairy moles on your private business.

But you're 100% right: don't use PET bottles.

Oh, and I did like learning the word "faff". It reminds me of "niff-naff", which I've used for years, and learned from an RAF F4-fighter pilot in the early 90's. There's something lovely and trivial-sounding about double 'f's.

[trucker5774]

I have never done anything like the above. Are there any issues with carbonated bottles/pressure/heat/seals etc. I keep having visions of bottles and ovens exploding

[Spud395]

How about the washers on the Grolsh swingtops, are they up to the heat of the oven?

[Laripu]

I have never done anything like the above. Are there any issues with carbonated bottles/pressure/heat/seals etc. I keep having visions of bottles and ovens exploding

How about the washers on the Grolsh swingtops, are they up to the heat of the oven?

These are both good objections. Both need to be properly tested, and I hereby volunteer to do so.

I will test two bottles.
1. a Grolsch swingtop containing TC made a long time ago
2. a 340 ml bottle of stout from 6 years ago that was a bit phenolic and I've been using to marinate meat detined for the BBQ.

I was saving it the cider for a my wife when she comes home from Germany, but this is in the interest of homebrew science and I'm making her more cider anyway.

I'll use the protocol I wrote about above. Both bottles in, start heating the stove to minimum temperature, and leave them in for 40 minutes. Turn off heat, open oven door, remove after 20 minutes and leave on counter for 15.

There will however be a metal pan underneath them in case of mishap, both in the stove and on the counter.

The goals are:
- to see whether either bottle explodes.
- to see what happens to the rubber seal in the Grolsch bottle and to the little plastic-y seal under the cap of the stout.
- to determine whether heating the stout will improve it any. (I doubt that will happen.)

I'll let you know. While this is going on, I will be watching the Tampa Bay Buccaneers (American) football team probably being beaten by the Carolina Panthers. While this is not one of the activities I previously reccomended, I maintain that it is the moral equivalent of checking for hairy moles on your private business...

[Spud395]

Great I love a good experiment

[Laripu]

The oven reached 170°F in exactly 6 minutes. Had I put 24 bottles in instead of only 2, it might have taken longer.

Once the 40 minutes were over, instead of waiting with the bottles in the oven, I took them out immediately and put them on the glass-top stove. They were hot, but I used a tea-towel to pick them up and that was fine. After five minutes I could touch them. After twenty minutes I put them in the fridge for a few hours.

When they were cool I opened both and examined the gaskets of both the Grolsch cap and the regular cap. Both were fine. I perceived no damage to either. There was no apparent affect on the taste of the cider. The stout was an ancient crappy phenolic stout, and it tasted the same; it had not improved.

Once I had tasted the half-litre of cider, I attempted sweetening it to see how much sugar it needed. For a half-litre, 10 grams of white sugar sweetened it a little, 15 grams sweetened it to where I liked it, and 20 grams was too sweet for my taste.
So for a 23 litre batch, fermented to dryness, I would use 23*30 grams = 690 grams, plus another 60 grams for carbonation for a total of 750 grams per 23 liter batch.

So this procedure is certainly do-able. There are two questions remaining:
1. How long should the bottles be left to carbonate before the pasteurization procedure? and
2. Will heating up to 170°F over 40 minutes be sufficient to stop all fermentation?

I think question 1 can be answered by filling one very small PET bottle (e.g. a 200 ml mini-soft drink bottle), and testing its hardness every day. When it gets very hard, the batch is carbonated and it is time to pasteurize. As to question 2, only time will tell for sure; or someone else could test that and publish the results here. I'm going to take the risk with the next batch of TC I make. (But we won't know for months.)

EDIT: one other piece of good news... while waiting for bottles to heat and then cool, I watched my (American) football team win handily over Carolina. It seems we finally have a quarterback worth his contract. Also I had a nice piece of cheddar cheese and a couple of pieces of dark chocolate, both good sources of vitamin CH.

[trucker5774]

Well done Laripu I imagine the yeast will have been killed off at 170f (about 76C) Hopefully someone will know for sure what temperature kills yeast for sure. When you opened the cider maybe you could have transferred it to a PET bottle and given it a good shake to de-gas it. Having done that then sealed the PET bottle, it could be kept at 20C to establish if any pressure built up again?

If this system is a runner then I make try it, but with the short cut of starting with a higher gravity and bottling early, rather than waiting for fermentation to complete then doing secondary fermentation.

Just thought of a problem...........I don't use glass bottles and don't have a capper

[Spud395]

Just thought of a problem...........I don't use glass bottles and don't have a capper

Crash and burn

Nice work Laripu, the frontiers of TC brewing have again been pushed out

[Laripu]

Well done Laripu I imagine the yeast will have been killed off at 170f (about 76C) Hopefully someone will know for sure what temperature kills yeast for sure. When you opened the cider maybe you could have transferred it to a PET bottle and given it a good shake to de-gas it. Having done that then sealed the PET bottle, it could be kept at 20C to establish if any pressure built up again?

If this system is a runner then I make try it, but with the short cut of starting with a higher gravity and bottling early, rather than waiting for fermentation to complete then doing secondary fermentation.

Just thought of a problem...........I don't use glass bottles and don't have a capper

Another worth while thing to try is to take some live yeast from a fermentation and transfer it into a bottle with some wort. Pasteurize, and then wait a month and see whether there is any carbonation. (I'll get a chance to do that next weekend when I siphon my "Imperial Kölsch" to a secondary fermenter. That yeast has been fermenting at 61°F for over 2 weeks and shows no sign of stopping. Yesterday I counted airlock bubbles - still 4 per minute. I hope it finishes by next weekend, because it's the Kölsch yeast from the bottom of that primary that I'm planning to use for my TC. I'll post the results here.)

Do you use plastic bottles? I can tell you from experience that drinking from plastic is bad for you. Whenever I used plastic water bottles, it horribly exacerbated the leg cramps I occasionally get. I've cut out 90% of my use of plastic in any context, and things have improved dramatically. I don't know your age or what natural shocks your flesh is heir to (like that? ... a little Hamlet reference?), but for me.. plastic causes problems.