Pasteurizing Sparkling Cider

I make what some people call a simple draft-style cider.  Its easy to drink, light, not complex, sparkling and semi-sweet.  I don't enter it into contests, its not that kind of cider, but we like it. 

Tonight, I pasteurized our latest batch.  Pasteurizing is necessary for the process I use - to stop the yeast after the bottles are carbonated but not over carbonated.  If the yeast kept going, soon we would have bottle grenades.  Unlike beer, where the yeast only eat some of the complex sugars from the mash, they devour all of the simple apple sugars. 

I pasteurize on the stove top and put together a tutorial (with pictures) for other cider makers who have run up against the cunundrum of making bottle conditioned, semi-sweet (not bone dry) sparkling cider.  You can see the pasteurizing tutorial here.

I came up with the process after Hugh and I spent a half-day working at the local brewery in the village of Ribe, Denmark - one of my tasks was loading and unloading their simple bottle pasteurizer. 

Before pasteurizing, my process is very simple.  For this batch, I poured three gallons of grocery store apple juice (without preservatives) into a small carboy, added pectic enzyme (to keep the pectins in the juice from solidifying or getting hazy) and Danstar Nottingham yeast.  Let it ferment until bone dry, about a week. 

Then I added three-quarters of a gallon of apple juice to the bottling bucket, then racked the fermented juice into the bucket.  The new juice both backsweetens the very dry cider and primes it for bottle conditioning.  After bottling, I wait a couple of days and begin checking on carbonation, nothing's wasted - I always drink with test bottles!  For this batch, I bottled on Saturday and pasteurized on Wednesday.