We Don't Take Kindly to Cider Poachers

Finally got around to bottling the cider. Ever see Fantastic Mr. Fox? One of the farmers makes cider, a lot of cider. I wanted to bottle the cider sooner but after talking to a guy at the home brew store, he said that you want to wait for the cider to get under 1.000 specific gravity and it just wasn't doing it. Next time, I'm just going to bottle when it stops bubbling.

I was thinking about using wine bottles and corks but decided to go with capping bottles so I would end up with more bottles and less likely to waste any cider.

I watched several videos on youtube about capping before hand to see if there were any techniques I had not thought of. My setup was pretty simple, I clamped the capper on the corner of the table, and tide the siphon with the bottler filler wand tide to a mic stand over a bucket. I spent a lot of time cleaning the bottles, sanitizing them, and drying them. The toughest part was getting the labels off.

Since every hard cider I've ever had was carbonated, I wanted to carbonate mine. I added some priming sugar two days before bottling as well as some more yeast. I was a little worried after the first day because the cider wasn't bubbling. But by the second day they yeast was pumping out some more gas as well as alcohol! According to my calculations, the cider is 7.8% alcohol by volume and probably more since I added more sugar to carbonate it.

I found it was a lot easier pushing the bottle up into the wand rather than putting the wand in the bottle. It seemed to make less of a mess too.

After filling the bottle it was time for the capping.

The caps I used have oxygen absorbing pads in them. I heard people having a hard time getting a good seal on their bottles but I was having pretty good results this go around.
Everything was going smoothly until I ran out of bottles and had to clean some more. I decided to try some of the cider during the bottling process and it wasn't that good. I might change after two weeks of carbonating but I think my problem is that the yeast has eaten all the sugar so its no longer sweet. I'll have to come up with a solution for that. I read that a lot of people stop fermentation after they have gotten a desired amount of alcohol by cold crashing or adding potassium sorbate to kill off the yeast. Another solution is to back sweeten the cider with Sweet'n Low or some other fake sugar that the yeast won't eat.
Below you can see the final product. I did add some Sweet'n Low to a couple bottles to see how they turn out. I think if I do this again I'll go for a lower alcohol content and save some of those natural sugars in the cider.