The boil was good…no problem with the malt extract and the only hop addition was at the beginning (60 minutes). I moved the wort to a sink with ice water and brought the temperature down to 90F. Poured the wort into a bottling bucket and topped off to 2-1/2 gallon…maybe a little over. I was making sure that I wasn’t measuring the foam, but I may have gone slightly more. The recipe estimated that the OG would be 1.043 and I got 1.036 @72F, adjusted to 1.037 for calibration. This should be a pretty low alcohol brew. The recipe came up with 4.1%. With my lower OG, mine would be 3.54%, if I reach the estimated 1.01 FG.

I am pleased with the color and the flavor. Now it’s up to the yeast to work its magic! I’m using Safale s-04 yeast. The recipe doesn’t specify and the guy at the brew shop said s-04 would be fine and it is also what I use for some ciders.

I pitched half of a packet of the yeast in and sealed it/airlocked. I should have 5 to 7 days in fermentation.

On another topic, I gave the bottles of cider batch #4 a tip upside down and a swirl. Thinking it might wake up the yeast, if there’s any left. That was yesterday. Today, I opened my test bottle. No sound. Poured a very small amount into a glass and resealed the flip top. Color looks good and taste/sweetness are great…but…no carbonation at all. I have read that sometimes it happens 4 or 5 weeks after bottling, so I’ll keep an eye on it. If it never carbs, it will be a nice still cider. I wonder if I could use it in a SodaStream? Hmmm.

Last night, I also opened my first test bottle (ever) of crabapple cider.

This one was the tester for cider batch #1…what eventually came to be known as Sherlock’s Cumber, Batch #1. This bottle was primed with Munton’s CarTabs, which I did not use on the full batch. This bottle was dry and had a little less carbed than I prefer. I would have liked it more if it had be a little more “crisp”. Not bad for a first batch though. We’ll try some more at New Year’s Eve and see if the bottles primed with priming sugar are any better.

10:15 pm Stout progress: there is pretty aggressive bubbling in the airlock. It goes of about every 9 seconds, but when it goes, it perks several times. This is only my second time brewing beer and first time using the bottling bucket for fermentation. Cider batches and other beer batch were fermented in a 2 gallon primary fermentation bucket and they all seemed to bubble at increasing, then decreasing intervals, but not with the vigor being experienced this time. Just single bubbles in the past. I guess it could be due to the size of the bucket or the type of beer. Whatever the reason, it seems to be fermenting nicely.