Diluting juice from old wrinkly apples for hard cider

Question

I've juiced about 50kg of wonderful heritage apples that I stored over winter. They've dried out a lot. When scratting the pulp was almost dry to the touch, and the resulting juice was practically syrup... For each load on my 18l press I got about 2l juice. Delicious but I want to make hard cider and I don't want it to be wine strength!

Any ideas how much I should dilute it to get it back to 'proper' levels when the apples were fresh? Either based on experience or target gravity... For instance assuming it will ferment to 1.000 then 1.04 gives 5%, 1.07 gives 9% etc.

Answer 1

You will need to take your specific gravity or the syrup, and use a top off calculator to figure out how much to dilute it by

Example

you have 5 gallons of syrup at 1.110

and you want your gravity at 1.050

you would add 5.5 gallons of water to get 1.052 with a total volume of 10.5 gallons.

G1 x V1 = G2 x V2 where G is gravity in pts and V is volume.