I'm a little baffled, here's the situation:
I was messing around and decided to ferment a half-gallon each of apple cider, POM pomegranate juice, and cherry juice. I boiled each one briefly (I would later find out you're not supposed to boil apple cider. Oops), cooled them, pitched 2g of champagne yeast, and let them all ferment around 70F for about 2 weeks (they had all completely stopped bubbling at this point). I then bottled them into 16 ounce flip-top bottles, each one with 1/8 ounce of table sugar and let them condition in the same box for 2-ish weeks around 70F. So here's the thing: when I opened them after this period, the cherry juice bottles were all perfectly carbonated and delicious. The cider and the pomegranate juice, however, were super flat and didn't so much as hiss when I opened the bottles.
So my question is: how could this be? All the variables were pretty much the same, except for the type of juice. A few of my guesses: 1) the original juices had different sugar contents, possibly with the cherry juice being the lowest, and the ABV after the initial fermentation was too high in the other two for the yeast to "wake back up". Is that kind of thing ever a concern? 2) The juices that ended up flat both had preservatives in them that weren't in the cherry juice, preventing the yeast from "waking back up" (I know the cider probably did, but I don't think the pomegranate juice did) 3) There's some other property of the different juices that caused this.
Thoughts?
I was messing around and decided to ferment a half-gallon each of apple cider, POM pomegranate juice, and cherry juice. I boiled each one briefly (I would later find out you're not supposed to boil apple cider. Oops), cooled them, pitched 2g of champagne yeast, and let them all ferment around 70F for about 2 weeks (they had all completely stopped bubbling at this point). I then bottled them into 16 ounce flip-top bottles, each one with 1/8 ounce of table sugar and let them condition in the same box for 2-ish weeks around 70F. So here's the thing: when I opened them after this period, the cherry juice bottles were all perfectly carbonated and delicious. The cider and the pomegranate juice, however, were super flat and didn't so much as hiss when I opened the bottles.
So my question is: how could this be? All the variables were pretty much the same, except for the type of juice. A few of my guesses: 1) the original juices had different sugar contents, possibly with the cherry juice being the lowest, and the ABV after the initial fermentation was too high in the other two for the yeast to "wake back up". Is that kind of thing ever a concern? 2) The juices that ended up flat both had preservatives in them that weren't in the cherry juice, preventing the yeast from "waking back up" (I know the cider probably did, but I don't think the pomegranate juice did) 3) There's some other property of the different juices that caused this.
Thoughts?