Bottle Carbonating Hard Cider

Brewing Processes
1

Hey all!

Made my first hard cider last year.  SG: 1.054, FG: 0.996
It was pretty dry at the end and I figured I would be safe adding priming sugar before bottling.  I calculated and measured, boiled, etc…I paced myself and drank the cider over the course of 6 months.  What I found is that some of the bottles tasted a little sweeter but had no carbonation.  Other bottles were still dry with an extremely small amount of carbonation.  I used a liquid yeast for cider with an alcohol tolerance of 16%, so I don’t think that was the issue. 
I’ll be having another go at it using cider from a local orchard here in about a week.  I’ve always been confused about whether or not all of the sugar in a cider/beer needs to be gone before adding priming sugar, should I rack it multiple times to get as much yeast sediment out as I can, etc…I ended up having about a dozen bottle bombs in the last batch of beer I made, but I had used priming tablets for those.  Just a little wary since I bottle bombed the beer and seemed to have undercarbonated the cider.

I’d love to have a dry, fizzy cider this year.  Any help would be aprreciated!

2

Do you batch prime or bottle prime? When I make cider, I let it ferment a long time (maybe a month or so) so it’s totally fermented out, then batch prime using corn sugar. I haven’t ever had either a bomb or a no carb, so I have to assume my method works.

3

Hey Denny!  I believe I batch primed with a bag of priming sugar from some brewing site.  After about two weeks, I got my first gravity reading below 1.000.  I basically racked the cider on top of the priming solution, stirred it gently, and bottled it.

4

Pretty much what I do, too