Very quick bottle carbonation
terryc...@gmail.com
This is a “why is it so?” Question. I have just had a trial batch of cider bottle carbonate in 2-1/2 days!!! and would be interested in any opinions why this might be so and how to avoid it happening agin. It is a bit warmer here in summer than autumn which is "cider time", although the bottles were kept in our cool storeroom at 18C and I wouldn't have expected temperature to have that much effect on fermentation rate.
The background is that unlike the U.K.’s splendid year, we have no apples here in the mountains this year because of a killer “Antarctic breakout” frost in our part of Oz (two years in a row!). So, I have just done a trial batch with straight “bought” pink lady juice to figure out what I might do come Autumn. My normal process is to fully ferment to SG 1.000 then prime with straight SG1.050 juice to bring the SG up to 1.010 then bottle. This typically adds 20g/L fermentable sugar. (The bottled cider is then hot waterbath pasteurised when the pressure gauge on a test bottle shows 2 bar pressure indicating 2.5 vols C02 has been created, leaving about SG 1.005 or 10g/L sugar for sweetness).
Normally with my own apples this carbonation process takes well over a week, and I leave the bottles sitting around for at least that long before checking progress. However, when I was in the storeroom this morning (8 Jan) the gauge was over 2.1 bar, despite only bottling on 5 Jan in the afternoon. Wow… could have resulted in bottle bombs!
The test bottle fizz was about right when I opened it (something like 2+ volumes), but perhaps a bit less than I expected, possibly because the C02 hadn’t really had time to be fully absorbed. Bottling temperature was normal at 18C and it is now all pasteurised at 65C and labelled without any problems.
Any ideas whether bought and refined juice should ferment more quickly than unfiltered pressed juice which usually has a few solids floating around, or any other explanation. I don't want to get caught again and have to clean up a bottle bomb mess.
Cheers!
