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Armed with a few more bottles of Farnum Hill cider to
evaluate, Ben and Alexis once again drove down to Somerville
for the weekend. I had been thinking of just priming and
bottling, letting the stuff carbonate in bottles, but at this
point it was little more than a week before xmas and these
bottles of cider were going to be our primary gifts. It seemed
like a good idea to have them ready to drink by xmas, which
could only be accomplished without doubts by force
carbonation.
First, we cleaned up and replaced the O-rings of some soda
kegs I had scored off ebay, then we sanitized and racked our
two secondaries into the two kegs.
Old Soda = Nasty
These went outside to get buried in the snow after being
pressurized to about 30psi from my CO2 cylinder. Periodically
throughout the day, we went outside and agitated the kegs
while attached to the gas feed to get the requisite amount of
carbon in.
Get in there, Carbon
We left them outside overnight at about 30F, and with some
more agitation and gassing they were ready to go the next
day. A keg of acorn brown ale was also treated simultaneously
with the two cider kegs, which is why there is three kegs in
the photos.
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Filling and Capping
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2005-12
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When the carb level was to our taste, we filled bottles using
my home made counterpressure filler. Maybe I'll put some
pictures of that up sometime. This process isn't quite as
clean as bottling using flat liquid and a siphon wand, but it
works pretty well and its nice not having to wait for it to
fizz up in the bottles. Ben and Alexis brought a collection of
used bottles (including some nice 750ml ones from the Farnum
Hill cider), which they cleaned the labels off, washed, and
sanitized. I bought a bunch of nice swing top 1L bottles from
7 Bridges Co-op.
Filling Bottles
Needless to say by this point we had done some extensive
" testing" of the product, which is fantastic by the
way! The upshot of all that premature enjoyment thought, was
that we ended up with only about 22L worth of filled bottles,
divided roughly half and half between the two cider variants.
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Design partially original and partially ripped off from other websites
by Holly Gates
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