news-server.socal.rr.com wrote:
> My recipe for hard cider is this:
> 5 -6 gallons of apple cider
> 5 pounds of brown sugar
> a little bit of honey
> champagne yeast.
>
> It fermeted for about 2 weeks, and has been clearing nicely for about
> another 2 weeks, but it's still sour. I'd like to sweeten it up. I was
> thinking of adding apple juice (maybe a gallon) - but I don't want the yeast
> to eat the sugars in it - so I was thinking of getting some w/ preservatives
> in it. Will this cause the yeast not to eat it? I also want to make it
> sparkling. I was going to add priming sugar before bottling. Will the
> yeast eat the priming sugar w/ preserved apple juice in there?
>
> -Lars

I had the same idea last year to make a sparkling sweet cider, and I
got 2 suggestions from this group: pear juice, which contains some
sorbitol, which tastes sweet but is not fermentable. Another
suggestion was household corn syrup, which is likewise a few percent
non-fermentable.

I tried these suggestions this year with my cider, and I also used
Wyeast cider yeast, and well, it didn't come out perfect. The yeast is
able to ferment well above 7 % alcohol, and is eating up all my
priming/sweetening suger -- I can tell from some small bottles I've
been sampling. I'm hoping that chilling the bottles will slow the
process down enough so my cider is, at least, off-dry by new year's.

Here's the thread from way back when:
http://groups.google.com/group/rec.c...76e 8f9eb42d5