Botteling My First Little Home Brew Experiment

Two weeks ago, I started a little experiment. I've started a fermentation using some pear juice, some Belgian Ale yeast, and a fermenter. The goal is to end up with some cider-like alcoholic drink.

I've had this fermenter laying around the house for a couple of years. I received it as a gift and never got to use it. Well today, after a few weeks of fermentation it's time to bottle the substance. And of course, this is the first time to test taste it.

The cider was already quite nice, given the fact that it was a bit warm due to the local heat wave in my area. To try and tweak it closer to what I would like it to taste, I decided to prime the cider before bottling it.

This means you add additional sugar such that it ferments a bit more in the bottle. As a result, the CO2 content will increase resulting in additional bubbles in the final product.

In order to compute the correct amount of sugar, I used this online calculator. Pretty straight forward. The only risk now is that the fermentation goes on for too long (due to an abundance of sugar) and the bottles explode. Let's hope I measured everything correctly ^^

This first test got me close to three full bottles of 750ml each. Let's hope the final result is tasty! I don't want to end up with bottles full of bad tasting drinks :P

I'll keep you guys posted on the final result :)

Cheers // Michel