Alcohol %

[bigboots]

Ciders tend to ferment like most WOWs i.e. they fizz rather than froth. After 48 hours if you can't see anything on the surface get down really close to the fermenter and LISTEN. You should hear it fizzing. Timewise, leave for 2/3 weeks.
With regard to bottling, use a full average teaspoon of sugar per 500ml bottle. Depending on how full you fill your 5 gallon fermenter it should yield 40/50 500ml bottles. Weigh 5 teaspoonfuls on your digital scales then multiply accordingly to calculate for batch priming.
Another thing.......BUY A HYDROMETER! If you buy 1 immediately and use it you will get a reasonable indication of your SG.
Cider yeast and champagne yeast both tend to give a FG of 1.000(approx.) An FG around this for 3 days on the trot will tell you it has finished. Every 10 points above 1.000 in your initial reading would suggest 1.3% alcohol. So for example 1.050 should give approx. 6.5% if the wort ferments down to 1.000.
HTH :

 

[ericmark]

That is interesting so different to cider I made. Today I use an anti-freeze hydrometer as a pipet to draw the liquid which has a very small tube which would have likely penetrated the crust with out a problem but when cider was made I had to draw off with syphon tube and pushing it through the crust caused bits to break off and it was hard to get sample out of demijohn until near complete. Also clearly the sediment and crust were reducing so yeast must be acting on them so any hydrometer reading would only give minimum ABV likely it would exceed that once the crust and sediment was worked on by the yeast.

As to activity it was like watching a lava lamp with bits braking off the crust and sinking and sediment erupting it was quite fascinating to watch.

As to time will be bottling last lot in next few days so end of November was last lot of apples picked so four months in demijohn although some of the September stuff was drunk at Christmas. I did a demijohn at a time it's a lot of work juicing apples so around 3/4 full demijohn a batch.

End product was rather dry but OK. Air lock activity to start with was like beer but the activity tapered off more gradually and well after the air lock had reduced to a bubble every 5 minutes the activity could still be seen as I said like a lava lamp. Two trees one being a multi-variety tree and apples kept separate between trees mine more like a cooking apple than eating apple gave really varying results some batches the sediment was hard others it remained fluid but result tasted the same.

Problem was the cider took up most of my demijohns just at the time when I should have been making Lager to take advantage of ambient temperature in garage. I will admit my Winter beer tastes far better than summer beer even though same kit and same method. Clearly all cider is a Winter brew as that's when we get apples.