Sour cider!

[nobody]

K-Metabisulfite is great for clearing chloring and chloramines from your initial water, but it's not much of a sanitizer in my opinion.
I do beer more often than ciders or meads, but I use the same cleaning process for all of them.
I use Powdered Brewery Wash (PBW) immediately after bottling/canning my ciders, meads and beer to clean everything and remove all organic material. Then, on brew day, I use a iodine based sanitizer such as BTF Iodophor (no rinse needed if used at proper dilution) to make sure there are no wild yeasts or bacteria in my equipment.
Good luck.
R

[Crash Gordon]

Post by nobody
BTF Iodophor

I'm going to pick up a bottle of this and try it out.

I started a batch on 3/15; I looked around to see how folks were using
the metabisulfite and decided to try 1/8tsp per gallon as an additive.
I'll find out in a couple of months if this made any difference.

[Crash Gordon]

Post by Crash Gordon
I started a batch on 3/15; I looked around to see how folks were using
the metabisulfite and decided to try 1/8tsp per gallon as an additive.
I'll find out in a couple of months if this made any difference.

It made a huge difference! All the sour is gone. I added 1/8 tsp/gal
potassium metabisulfite to in-progress batches as well (I start a new
batch on the 1st and 15th each month) and it seems to have done the
trick for all of them. I'm not detecting any sulfurous notes in the
final product.

Some folks said that the sourness fades after a few months of storage,
so I have some samples that I've set aside to be opened in 2025 but
that's just an exercise at this point.