Sanitising and Bottling

I finally got around to sanitising and bottling at the weekend. Again using the Thin Bleach and Vinegar Method.

I used a dishwasher rack to drain the bottles as before.

Sanitising and Draining the bottles

I had a final gravity reading of close to 1000 giving me the expected alcohol content of 6%.

Final Gravity Reading ~1000

The brew tastes good, if a little dry, and has already been used to successfully baste a roast ham. As can be seen, the cider is quite cloudy due to using cloudy apple juice, this doesn't bother me but could probably be clarified with some finings in future batches.

Finished Product

My growing collection of swing-top bottles proved it's worth. The swing-tops are much easier to remove old labels from and much quicker to close when bottling. The only small problem I had when bottling was that the table I stored the fermenter on was quite low which made it difficult to use the Little Bottler, leave at least 3 feet between the ground and the fermenter tap to make life easy, especially with the longer 750ml lemonade bottles.

All should be ready to drink before Christmas, in the meantime I picked up a couple of bottles of Aspall's Premier Cru and Sheppy's Single Variety to tide me over.