Cider - can you bottle straight from the bucket?

[Grunaki]

I've just got my first cider kit - a 'Black Rock' one-can one.

From looking at the instructions (which look pretty simple TBH!) I just need to empty the contents of the can into my fermentation bucket with a couple of litres of hot water, dump in a kilo of sugar, give it a good stir, top it off to 23 litres with water, check it's at the right temperature, throw in the yeast, put on the lid and forget about it for about 2 weeks until it's the right gravity and has stopped fizzing.. Then add about a teaspoon of sugar per 750ml bottle and siphon the cider over, cap it and leave it for 5 weeks until it's ready to drink.

(I got a new bucket with an airlock for this project, as I've heard that cider can make lots of gas)

I'm new to the whole process, but the first two batches I've made were beers, and you had to leave them in the bucket for about 3 days until they hit the right gravity and then siphon them into a carboy to clarify.. You need to do that with Wine too. Looks like you can just leave it in the bucket with Cider. Is that correct?

 

[Brewtrog]

You don't really need to do it with beer or wine. The only reason to take it off the lees is that they can impart off flavours after a while, I follow the rule of thumb of if it gets to an inch of lees I rack it. As a guess there's no pulp, so you're not taking the cider off of the pulp, so you won't need to rack it for that reason. The less racking you do, the less you lose from racking.

 

[Grunaki]

You don't really need to do it with beer or wine. The only reason to take it off the lees is that they can impart off flavours after a while, I follow the rule of thumb of if it gets to an inch of lees I rack it. As a guess there's no pulp, so you're not taking the cider off of the pulp, so you won't need to rack it for that reason. The less racking you do, the less you lose from racking.

Fair enough, makes sense.. The beers I've made came with bentonite as a clarification and yeast encouragement agent though, so when I racked it over, there was this big muddy mess left in the bottom of the bucket.. So yeah, I think it needed doing in that case..

When I racked my first batch of beer over to the carboy, it resembled river mud.. It's been a week now and it's clarifying nicely and there's about a half-inch of sediment on the bottom.

I had to reenforce a shelf in my basement so I could stick the carboys on it.. I had just had it on the landing of my basement stairs, but my Dad reminded me that I was going to have to move it up high to drain it back into the bucket when I sugar it, and that would kick all the sediment up again, so I built a frame with rear legs for this shelf in our basement (the previous owner of our house had tacked it on the underside of the basement stairs, but he'd just built a frame for the front and tacked an 'L-shape' of veneered chipboard to the frame and the bottom of the stairs - I had to frame the rest of it out with 2X4s so it could hold a fair bit of weight) it's about four feet high by four feet across and about 2 feet deep.. It can easily take two carboys - maybe 3 if I pushed them close together. If I'm doing the cider in the bucket though, I might just leave it on the landing.. I can line bottles up on the steps and rack them that way..