Farmer Jon's Old-Fashioned (Sort Of) Apple Cider

1 x 2.4kg pouch Mangrove Jack's Apple Cider Extract
1kg Dextrose
500g Demerara Sugar
Flavour and Sweetener additions
1 x Crushed Cinnamon Quill
1 x Mangrove Jack's Cider Yeast (M02) - Starter
1 x Mangrove Jack's Cider Yeast (M02) - Dry

Original Gravity: 1.054 (Adjusted for temperature)

First brew on the new stove (and first crack at making cider) and so far, so good. No glaringly obvious mistakes at this stage. To be honest, the new stove didn't do a hell of a lot better at reaching boil quickly, but a 30L stockpot is a hell of a job for any stove. At also didn't help that I started at basically room temperature.

Anyways, I dumped all the ingredients in the pot and let it boil away, adding a crushed cinnamon quil 10 minutes out for a little more flavour. Once everything was at 100C, the boil itself went without a hitch, as is the way with extract brews. However, it would have been nice to know there was a packet of yeast (among other things) inside the pouch in a partition. Never to mind. I pitched the dry yeast with the starter, so hopefully it'll go balls-deep and ferment the shit out of it!

Among other things, it was a chance to test my new cooling system; a rubbish bin with cold water into which I put two bags of ice. When I returned an hour or so later, the ice had melted and the wort had dropped to around 40C... not too damn bad! Because I'm impatient (and working tonight), I transferred it to the primary fermenter, topped it to 23L with cold water and got a good pitching temperature of 25C.

There was a little bit of overflow with the bucket, so I'll have to be a bit more careful next time. If I brew the next batch on a day off, time won't be such a concern, so I can take a little time and get the pitching temperature a little lower.

All in all, not a bad day's wort! After I'd read the hydrometer, I decided to drink the wort in the tube. It was incredibly sweet - like a really sweet wine - and I ended up spitting it out! Hopefully fermentation will turn some of the sugar to sweet, sweet booze and the taste with smooth out a bit.

Depending on what the final gravity reads, it should come out somewhere around 5.8% to 5.9% (Author's note: at the time of bottling, I got a reading of 6.6%... hell yeah! I guess I can attribute that to using two yeast sachets instead of one.), which is more or less where my mental arithmetic put it.