What is this, day eight of my home brew cider experiments? Finally got round to "racking" the cider, decanting it from its original demijohn to get rid of all the slurry at the bottom. It's all dead yeast I think. I sterilised a bucket and syphoned it out in to that, as I only have the one demijohn. I think I lost about 400ml through poor syphoning and not wanting to disturb too much of the muck at the bottom. I cleaned the original demijohn, and sterilised again, and poured it back in using a funnel made out of a sliced up plastic bottle (also sterilised). Not entirely sure what to do now. My recipe1 says
3) On the last day make up to about 4.7l (this allows for wastage). 4) Ideally the cider should now be racked (siphoned off the rubbish or "lees" at the bottom of the demijohn) into a clean demijohn or, if you do not have a second demijohn, a sterile white plastic bucket can be used, the contents are then returned to the demijohn after it has been cleaned. Keep the demijohn in a cool dark place for about a fortnight to allow more sediment to settle out before bottling.
What I've actually done is put it back in the demijohn and then topped up with more apple juice just to get rid of the air at the top, then put an airlock back in. That sounds about right. Now will leave it in a cool dark place for a week, and report back later. There does not seem to be any more fermenting going on at this point, I think the force is weak with this one.
Paul Clarke's blog - I live in A small town, Kent. Married + dad to two, I am a full-stack web engineer, + I do js / nodejs, some ruby, other languages ect ect. I like pubbing, parkrun, eating, home automation + other diy jiggery-pokery, history, genealogy, TV, squirrels, pirates, lego, and TIME TRAVEL.