I gave my cider a name. Often times I just use the page number in my brewing logbook. But sometimes, it is fun just to do things for the heck of it. 952 is my street address because this cider is exclusively from apples on my tree (and only apples).

A lot of times in wine there are adjuncts added for various purposes. There is sugar for alcohol, yeast nutrient for successful takeoff and pH buffering for final taste. This is nothing but apple juice and yeast. What I wanted with this was to understand what the component of fruit would do.

The person I purchased the apple press from also gave me a refractometer. This is a device that measures sugar by looking at how much light is bent in the juice. I measured 13 Brix. As a home brewer, I am used to looking at specific gravity so this translates to about 1.059 or more importantly about 7% finished alcohol content. This was the reason that I didn’t add any sugar.

I used a small bit of cider to make my turkey brine for Thanksgiving. It was at that time I noticed some mold growing on the top. Before that point, I was on the fence for whether I would brew it or drink it. Turns out, my mind was made pretty quickly once I realized that I needed to act or lose it all. Maybe in the future, I will freeze gallons to keep some non-alcoholic on hand.

I have one text on cider making. It doesn’t come with a lot of instructions or starter recipes. If I had an actual pH meter, I could figure out whether my actual acid content was where I wanted. For now, I am going to just benchmark with taste. A pH meter is on my list but there are a lot of other things in front of it at this point.

I am also trying something new this time. Another reason why I dislike bottling is that there is a differential between different bottles. My theory is that the density of the bottling sugar causes it to settle to the bottom when added to a minimal stirred and ready to bottle beer. Another thing I got with my cider press were some sugar pellets. The idea is that a pellet is added to each 12oz bottle. This ensures the same amount of sugar is in each bottle. And, that translates into uniform carbonation in each bottle.

I am going to use 22oz bottles so that is two pellets per bottle. I am really interested to see how this is going to work. I find it irritating when one bottle starts bubbling over and another bottle is nearly flat. It also effects taste as well, clearly not my preference.

End Your Programming Routine: I don’t know exactly what the programming is today. Decision is better than analysis paralysis? I am especially prone to that when I invest a significant amount of effort into something. I want to justify that my effort was the best possible outcome or something like that. My prediction is that this effort will be inferior to what you can buy. But, I will learn some things and at least it is going to be saved for consumption.