Holistic Happiness

Of all the steps involved in home brewing beer or cider, bottling is often the most intimidating part. I certainly experienced a little pre-bottling anxiety myself. However, I have good news! After all was said and done, and my fridge overfloweth with fine cider, bottling really didn’t seem like such a big deal anymore. Sure, it’s going to be a little messy and it takes some time, but my advice is to try to enjoy the process and focus on the imminent rewards. So put on some music or a podcast, roll up your sleeves, and get to it.

First, let’s talk bottles. Since this was my first round of making cider ever, I really wanted to pull out all the stops. I wanted a carbonated dry product that I could reseal if I didn’t want to drink an entire bottle at once. With these considerations in mind, I opted for 16 ounce Grolsch-Style flip-top bottles. However, when bottling day came, I quickly realized I didn’t have enough bottles on hand. I lucked out when I ran into some 64 ounce growlers at a local supply store with a screw top lid. While these saved my bacon in this case, I can’t say I really recommend them. They didn’t produce quite the same amount of carbonation and once opened, you were pretty well committed to drinking it all at once. They have been a hit at parties, though! With bottles and growlers ready to go, I mixed my sanitizing solution and prepared my bottling station. I decided to use a big plastic tub for submerging all of my bottles and growlers and then placed them on a dish rack (dedicated to brewing bottles only) to dry in batches.

Next, I cleared and sanitized plenty of counter space to work with and opened my pouch of dextrose to use as a priming sugar for my bottles. At this point, I did something that in retrospect was a batch-saving idea – I tasted a little cup of the cider. The cider was pretty ok: dry, flavorful, clean and alcoholic, but there was no trace of sweetness at this point. I probably let my first fermentation go a day or two longer than I should have, but I was relying on my hydrometer to steer me correctly. Tasting the cider, I determined that using dextrose alone as a priming sugar would only create a carbonated version of what I was drinking. I needed a somewhat non-fermentable sugar and decided maple syrup would be the best choice. Having used some maple syrup in the past as a priming sugar for brewing beer, I knew from experience that it would ferment only somewhat and impart a sweet syrupy flavor to the beer. It isn’t quite fermentable enough on its own to produce nice carbonation, but in combination with the dextrose I gambled that it would create a dry, semi-sweet, carbonated cider in the end. This gamble really ended up paying off in the end.

Once my bottles had air dried completely, I sanitized my autosiphon and experimented with siphoning a little of the sanitizing solution into a separate vessel. It took a few pumps to get it going, but ultimately created a more rapid flow than I would have liked. Despite the handy plastic crimping mechanism to cease the flow, I simply wasn’t altogether comfortable using the siphon. Of course, this was my first siphoning experience in a long while and I’m sure there is an easier way to use it, but for the sake of time and cleanliness, I decided to take an alternate route. Seeing that I had a second fermentation bucket and a spare spigot, I drilled a whole in the premade spigot insert and attached my sanitized spigot to the second bucket, which of course was sanitized thoroughly as well. At this point, I simply transferred my cider from one bucket to the other, but it may be wise to have a friend help you execute this move as the bucket does have some heft when it’s full of cider. I then let the yeast settle once again to the bottom for about an hour before returning to my bottling station.

By this point, I had a fair number of my bottles sanitized and air dried to where I could start priming and filling the bottles systematically. At first, I struggled finding a way to add the dextrose to the bottles without creating a powdered mess down the sides and on my counter space. I tried using small spoons and tips of narrow knives with some success, but this made it pretty difficult to measure how much dextrose was being added to each bottle. After priming about a dozen bottles, I opted to create an easy funnel made of notebook paper. This saved me so much time and a lot of dextrose as well. I then carefully measured what I thought would be a good amount of maple syrup – probably about ½ tablespoon per bottle – into each bottle and began to carefully fill each bottle out of the spigot. I opted to set my fermenter bucket on the edge of my counter top to make it easier to use the spigot (again, it would be good to have someone help you lift it onto the counter). I found that I could fill each bottle up about ¾ of the way and then it would foam to the top. Once the foam resided, I could top it off by opening the spigot only slightly to create a slower flow and produce less foam. Once filled, I clamped each bottle top down securely and placed the bottles in a big plastic container so that on the off chance that a bottle would become super carbonated and blow the top, the container would catch the mess instead of my hardwood floors.

This turned out to be a very easy and efficient system. My wife helped by sanitizing, drying and adding the priming sugar and syrup to each bottle while I filled them with the spigot and clamped them shut. In about an hour, we had all of our growlers and bottles filled. Fortunately, the spigot sits high enough in the fermenter bucket to where the yeast can settle below it, so we didn’t run any risk of sediment in our bottles. So far, we’ve opened and drank about 75% of the bottles after they sat for an additional two weeks at room temperature and a week in the refrigerator. Each bottle has been somewhat unique in that we didn’t measure the dextrose or maple syrup with extreme precision, but all in all they have been wonderfully flavored and nicely carbonated. I haven’t detected any contamination in any of the bottles I’ve opened, which was a worry with the spigot system. Whether you use a spigot or the siphon, be sure to give yourself more time than you think to fill the bottles and expect a little bit of spillage no matter how careful you are. Personally, I find the aroma of a little spilled apple cider in my kitchen to be quite pleasant. I hope you find a way to enjoy the whole process knowing that the fruits of your labor will be well worth the effort and mess. Cheers to you and yours!