Homebrewing, Part the Second

My cider has been in its growlers for not half an hour, and already it’s misbehaving. Specifically, it’s trying to crawl out of one of the airlocks as the fermentation gas leaks out. I get that Chinese-water-torture feeling where you see exactly what is about to happen but are powerless to stop it.

In case you missed it, I set about my first ever homebrew experiment a few weeks ago. Things were going well then, and I thought the rest of the experiment would go smoothly. Exactly when I started to relax, the cider started to get up to tricks.

Disaster strikes

I suspect the cider was creeping out of the jug because it was too warm in my apartment—as I stated in part one, cider optimally ferments at 60-75 degrees, and warmer temperatures will put the yeast in overdrive. I conveniently picked the first week of 80-degree weather in a solid month of moderate-to-crisp autumn temperatures to start this project. Woe.

Typically, more experienced and better-equipped homebrewers solve this by installing a “blowoff valve” over the mouth of their fermentation jugs, which is basically a large version of an airlock that feeds fermentation gases and gunk into a cup of water via tubing. I still have yet to buy my tubing, so I take some random Internet forum advice suggesting that if I remove the valve and leave the stopper opening covered with tin-foil, it’s off-gassing enough that fresh air sneaking in isn’t so much of a concern. I leave the cider like this overnight.

By the next morning it appears to have stopped overreacting, so I re-sanitize and replace the valves. For a while, they’re bubbling along fine, but as the temperature rises, the cider starts to creep into the valves again. A couple of times I flush, re-sanitize, and replace them, while covering the stopper openings with tinfoil. The cider keeps creeping in, so I decide to just let them overflow for a while.

So much for this project being not much work; it’s like babysitting an endlessly gurgling infant. Let this be a warning: if you do have cooler parts to your house, like a basement or garage, having your cider somewhere relatively cool is not a trivial matter. Otherwise your yeast will do its terrible impression of a volcano all over whatever surface you’re storing the jugs on.

Furthermore, the need for repeated santizings is a vote for having some dedicated sanitizing solution on hand that doesn’t require this onerous soak-in-bleach, rinse-in-boiled-water workflow. But since blow-off gunk started collecting within the airlocks and in the bungs, they did kind of need a soak anyway. It’s also a vote for more easily disassembled airlocks, as the continuous tube ones are difficult to clean once they’ve been violated by cider-creep.

Eventually, the blow-off dies down, and my cider settles into a gentle bubbling. I actually find myself mesmerized by the gurgle when I sit down to check it. It's hypnotic.

More disaster strikes, but this is all my fault

After about a week, the airlocks have nearly ceased bubbling—at less than a bubble a minute, the yeast inside has more or less chewed all of the sugar it can into alcohol. There are many directions you can go from this point, including adding more sugar to increase the alcohol content, flavors, carbonation, and so forth, but I’m trying to keep this simple.

The next step is to transfer the cider to a secondary fermentation vessel. At this point, much of the yeast has settled out to the bottom of the growlers, and moving the cider to new growlers before bottling it will help separate it better. It’s not absolutely essential, but if you have the time and the extra vessel for it, it’s worth getting as much yeast out as you can.

But here is also where problems start with the lo-fi methods I’ve chosen. I’ve read that it is possible to strain cider, rather than trying to siphon it away from the dregs, but that recommendation was… unusual, to say the least. Hence, I’m using the tubing I mentioned in the last installment to siphon the cider into new growlers. Siphoning turns out to be both the niftiest and the simplest thing I’ve seen in terms of physics principles at work, and it's the thing most likely to turn on you before you even understand what’s going on.

Siphoning can be done with an auto-siphon, which, like much homebrew equipment, is kind of expensive for being a somewhat complex piece of plastic, but it gives you some control over the forces at work. I instead opt to risk spilling cider all over my floor.

Siphoning is a lot of physics. I could explain it, or I could just tell you to try to get a sense of it by playing around with some water first. Basically, you’re going to create an uneven pressure situation in your tubing using water, suck cider into the tube behind the water, dump the water, and then work the uneven pressure to your advantage to pull cider out of one growler and into another.

You “prime” the tubing by filling it with some water. If you stick one end in the growler full of cider and stick another end into a bowl at a slightly lower elevation, the cider will travel from the growler to the bowl. Practice first with some bottles or bowls and water to get a sense of how it works.



Because I have no auto-siphoning tool, I have to start and stop the flow by holding the low end of the tube up, stopping one end with my finger, or some combination thereof. It’s tricky, and unless you are many times more dextrous and coordinated than I, you’re going to spill some (or a lot) of cider.

So I prime my (sanitized) hose, stick one end in a growler full of cider, and point the other end into a large bowl to draw in the cider and let the priming water out. Once the cider is drawn through, I plug it, move it to the new (sanitized) growler, and let the cider flow.



Of course, gravity works against me, and there’s not enough of a pressure difference between the two ends to get the cider moving, so I pick the end-growler up and move it closer to the floor. This gets the flow going again. I try to pluck the end of the hose in the starting growler away when the level gets too close to the dregs, but I’m sure some made the transfer. I have to leave behind a painful amount of cider.

Originally I thought I was going to get about 10 bottles out of this equation, but with the quantity of cider I’m going to have to leave behind for filtration purposes (twice, now), it will be less. Naturally, I also spill some cider on the floor during this process, when it starts coming too fast into the priming water bowl, and I jerk the hose around in panic spasms. Like I said, practice. Since I only had three growlers, I had to play a bit of musical chairs, siphoning out of the first into the third, then washing and re-sanitizing the first to siphon the second’s cider into it.

After the brew sits for another week in its new vessels, yet more yeast has settled out of it, and it’s time to bottle. I’ve saved a bunch of cider and beer bottles, picked up some caps for $4, and bought one of those clunky, expensive bottle cappers.

Bottling, or more accurately, flooring

As I said in part one, you can technically “bottle” into a growler as long as you still have the cap for it. Since this is still cider we’re making, you wouldn’t even have to drink it all in one sitting, technically. So that process is easy—re-siphon again into new growlers, cap, and store.

Bottling with the old-fashioned siphon method proved to be extremely cumbersome, as I had to stop and start the flow between every 12 ounces of beer. If you watch the video above, you can see that I do the first two bottles perfectly. Things go downhill from there.

I have two main problems: Usually I can get the priming water out OK and start flow into a bottle. But if I don’t time ending the flow right, the bottle overflows, cider goes everywhere. Even if that doesn’t happen, I tend to lose the siphon balance in my hose and have to re-prime it with new water. Just go into this expecting to lose and to re-do several steps—there are no winners, except the cider that wanted to be on your floor. Or cheat and just get an auto-siphon tool.





By the end, there is cider on my floor, on my table, on my socks, surprisingly none on my person, but a good amount of it in the bottles. There are eight bottles in total, which I capped and put in the refrigerator.

There are few benefits to tiny-batch homebrewing—ask the hours I’ve spent ferrying cider between glass vessels to net eight measly bottles—but one is that you can stash it all in your fridge, where you know that any residual yeast will be too cold to rouse itself to action, so none of your bottles will burst. Yes, that is a danger, so you could bottle in plastic soda bottles, which will at least give you some warning by swelling into weird shapes before popping.

Here’s to doing things we might regret

The last thing I do is taste the cider, so I can find out whether to give up now and dump everything into the gutter. I pour off a little into a tiny glass and… hesitantly… sip.

Shockingly, it’s not revolting. The flavor is not terribly off, and it still does taste like apples. I’d read not to expect that. It’s pretty sour—makes sense, since the yeast would have eaten all the sugar—but it doesn’t taste funky, or like bleach, which I’d feared after many warnings about using bleach as a sanitizer. It’s not super-alcoholic, either; in fact it's pretty drinkable, on the whole. The last sip or two are pretty yeasty, which means there is probably yet more spent yeast I’ll have to avoid at the bottom of the bottles. But yes, I think I could stomach this knowing it will lead to inebriation. Small victories.

In part three, I’m going to taste the cider again, extensively (too extensively, probably) to see if the flavor improves at all. Supposedly, aging can help a lot. I’ll also cover flavor alteration methods, triumphs, regrets, and what advice you, the readers, have to offer to those of us who are new to homebrewing. Until then, here’s a toast to making things far more difficult than they need to be.

Listing image by Casey johnston