I'm about half-obsessed with fermentation; wine, bread, cider, yogurt, pickles--anything that has to do with the action of yeast on stuff to turn it into other stuff.
Since I quit working at a normal job and started writing full-time, I'm home a lot--so instead of getting up from my chair at the office and roaming around finding people at work I can joke with, I get up from my chair and make things. Two of the things I've been able to completely master are artisan-style breads and hard cider.
No kidding, I could live on my breads and hard cider--but I'd weigh 500 pounds. Just as an example, Sim came home today and said, "The house smells so nice--what are you making?" And when I told her it was a peanut butter, cinnamon, raisin loaf of whole wheat bread she just shook her head and mumbled something about the amount of bread in the house already. This didn't stop her from sampling a slice, it just let her exercise her "malcontent" muscle for a moment. Makes her feel better.
So since I'm finished working on the next novel for the day and she's doing yoga, I figured it wouldn't hurt to give you my instructions for making your own hard cider at home that is about ten times better than that sugary crap you buy from Angry Orchard or Woodchuck or even Stella Artois (a company that makes a great beer). And MY cider is going to cost you about a quarter a bottle--which is about 1/8th of what a bottle of crap cider costs at the convenience store.
In my opinion, making a gallon of hard cider is nonsense. This isn't something you just do on a whim; you need to invest a few bucks, but not many.
Sure, you can use a gallon jug and a balloon and make a gallon or something you might think is hard cider, but it's not.
If you're serious enough to have read this far, I'm going to ask you to trust me--take a leap of faith, make a small investment of about $50 in re-usable equipment. I'm a big fan of Amazon and you can get it all here, delivered, rather than having to go to a million different places...
Buy this (open these links in another tab):
https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B00DCC50BC/ref=twister_B07CMH43B5?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1
And buy this:
https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B000E62TCC/ref=oh_aui_search_detailpage?ie=UTF8&psc=1
And buy this:
https://smile.amazon.com/Drilled-Rubber-Stopper-Set/dp/B00A7VU52A/ref=sr_1_17?s=industrial&ie=UTF8&qid=1516324812&sr=1-17&keywords=rubber+stopper
And buy this:
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And buy this:
https://smile.amazon.com/Red-Star-Premier-Blanc-Champagne/dp/B07BH543RX/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1528226305&sr=8-2&keywords=red+star+champagne+yeast
And buy this:
https://smile.amazon.com/Star-San-4C-YKNL-FWNT-San-16oz/dp/B01N592OM6/ref=sr_1_fkmr1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1528225908&sr=8-1-fkmr1&keywords=star+san+16+oz.
And finally, buy this:
https://smile.amazon.com/Home-Brew-Ohio-H8-PQQ5-T5KB-Bottle/dp/B007VFBLNC/ref=sr_1_3?s=industrial&ie=UTF8&qid=1516324900&sr=1-3&keywords=BOTTLE+WAND
So now you've invested a bit more than $50 in equipment and you'll make it back in ONE batch of hard cider. Fifty bucks. Say it fast--see? It's nothing. And from now on, for the rest of your life, you'll have the best, highest alcohol content, hard cider you've ever had for the cost of apple juice, sugar, and a little time.
After this initial investment, a 3 gallon run of hard cider (that's 5 and a half six packs) will cost you about $15 versus $55 at the liquor/convenience store.
Let the games begin.
1. Mix up half an ounce of the StarSan sterilizer in a gallon of water. Wash out the fermenter, swish the sterilizing liquid around inside of it, and funnel it back into a gallon jug.
2. Buy 2 and a half gallons of store-bought apple juice. Make sure it has NO additional ingredients except Vitamin C (Ascorbic Acid). Dump half of a gallon jug into the fermenter, funnel 2# of regular white sugar into the remaining half gallon, put the lid back on and shake the bejesus out of it 2 or 3 times until the sugar is dissolved. Dump that apple juice/sugar solution into the fermenter. Now dump another gallon of apple juice into the fermenter. Now use the remaining 1/2 gallon of juice to make sure you've gotten all the sugar out of the first gallon and dump it into the fermenter. Add a can of apple juice concentrate and then add tap water or filtered water until the liquid in the fermenter is an inch from the top.
3. Pour in an envelope of Red Star champagne yeast. Don't use bread yeast or you'll ruin the whole damned thing.
4. Screw the lid on tightly, sanitize the rubber cork, sanitize the fermentation lock, fill the fermentation lock with either water, StarSan solution, or vodka, fit it into the cork, and place it into the tiny hole in the fermenter.
Note: The fermenter comes with a little plastic disc that fits into the hole for the fermentation lock. Feel free to use it instead of the cork, the fermentation lock, and the solution. It works fine. The plastic disc raises up to release the CO2 the yeast puts out when converting sugar to alcohol and when there's no more sugar, it falls back down and seals your brew. It's perfectly safe and perfectly fine. I just like the "glug-glug-glug" sound the fermentation lock makes and I like the visual of seeing the fermentation lock working.
5. Now just walk away. For the next 2 weeks, it's making alcohol. Leave it alone.
6. At the end of two weeks (or when your "glug-glug-glug" have slowed to about one "glug" every five minutes), remove the fermentation lock, remove the lid, pour in a can of defrosted frozen apple juice concentrate, and give the mixture a quick stir with a sanitized spoon. This apple juice concentrate gives the remaining yeast something to eat so they'll carbonate your finished product. If you don't want a carbonated product you can skip this step.
7. Attach your sanitized tubing to your sanitized bottling wand. Then attach the other end of the tubing to the sanitized spigot in the fermenter.
Note: You'll see that I use the word "sanitized" a lot. It's important but it's no big deal. If you'd like, you can fill a little spray bottle with Starsan solution and spray everything well with the solution. Just let it sit there for a minute and it's "sanitized." To sanitize the bottles, I use a funnel and the gallon jug of liquid. Fill each bottle about half way, give it a shake, and pour the liquid into the next bottle. The foam from the Starsan solution is no problem--do not "fear the foam." It will not harm your beverage at all. Try not to spill Starsan onto countertops and floors, though--especially if it's undiluted.
8. Now, open the spigot, insert the bottling wand into sanitized screw-cap plastic bottles, and fill each one. You can either use old 2-liter soda bottles you've rinsed and sanitized or you can get on Amazon and buy re-usable plastic bottles and caps designed for beer and/or cider.
https://smile.amazon.com/Coopers-Oxygen-Barrier-Brewing-Bottling/dp/B00428AXYY/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1522946255&sr=8-1&keywords=cooper+beer+bottles
9. Screw on the sanitized caps and put the full bottles in a closet for a week before starting to check them for carbonation (when they're perfectly carbonated, the bottles will be rock-hard--no give at all). At this point, you'll have great, carbonated hard cider.
10. When the bottles are hard, they're ready to drink. You can leave the bottles at room temperature or refrigerate them (to be on the safe side, if you choose to leave them at room temperature, keep them inside a plastic garbage bag or in a large Rubbermaid container--I've never had a problem with over-carbonation, but there's always the chance a bottle could explode if there was too much residual sugar in it--this happens occasionally, but rarely, to new brewers because they tend to be very impatient and bottle before it's time). Hard cider is better right out of the refrigerator.
NOTE: Using 2# of sugar will give you an alcohol percentage of approximately 8%. If you want the 5% you get from Woodchuck, don't add any sugar at all. If you want 10% increase it to 3#. The more sugar, the longer you're going to have to do your initial ferment, but you'll figure that out. In any event, when your "glug-glug-glugs" from the initial ferment have slowed to about one "glug" every five minutes, regardless of the number of days, you're ready to bottle.
If you drink in moderation, you can keep this little home science experiment going and never be without. This traditional Irish/English hard cider will be approximately 8% alcohol, it'll be dry (not sweet), and it'll be all natural (organic, if you want to buy organic apple juice and sugar).
If you prefer sweet carbonated cider, you'll have to do what's called "backsweetening" and it's just a bit of a pain-in-the-ass. You'll have to buy Xylitol--a sweetener that yeast won't eat, and add it to your cider right before bottling. I would recommend you do this:
1. Before beginning bottling, empty in HALF of the can of frozen apple juice concentrate.
2. Add 2 tablespoons of Xylitol to the remaining concentrate in the can with a sterilized spoon.
3. Stir the concentrate/Xylitol mixture until the Xylitol is dissolved.
4. Add the mix to the hard cider, give it a gentle stir, and proceed with bottling.
Personally, I don't like the sweetness. You might. Try a batch both ways--they'll both be very drinkable, but you might prefer one over the other.
Alternately, if you have a sweet tooth, you could add a teaspoon of sugar to your cider as you pour it but sometimes that'll give you an overwhelming fizz.
I keep two cases in reserve, drink out of another one, and also have a bunch of empty 1-liter diet Root Beer bottles (Publix brand) on hand just in case I get ahead of myself.
A 3-gallon hard cider run will give you 1 case of 15-740ML bottles, 1 case of 12-one liter bottles, or 2 cases of 12-ounce bottles. There are some really cool glass bottles out there with those Grolsch-style tops and I've got a few cases of them. They look good, they're expensive, the tops are a bit of a pain in the ass to get on vs. screw-caps, and if you give a bottle away and the recipient doesn't bring the bottle back to you, you tend to view him/her as a prick from then on. Not worth it to me. Plus, that whole rare "bottle bomb" thing I told you about could be a lot worse with a glass bottle than a plastic bottle.
Although your hard cider will be very, very, very drinkable after 2 weeks of aging/carbonating, it gets better with any additional aging. The longer you can leave it alone, the smoother it gets.
You'll want to pour your cider into a glass rather than drink it from the bottle because the yeast in the cider settles to the bottom of the bottles when it's out of food (sugar). As it falls to the bottom, your cider clears. If you keep picking up the bottle and chugging a few swallows, you're going to disturb the yeast and the cider will get cloudy. No harm in that--in fact, the yeast is a great source of Vitamin B-12, but it doesn't look as nice. So pour your bottle gently and slowly into a tall glass. When the bottles are empty, fill them halfway with water, put the cap on, give them a shake, and dump the remaining yeast down the drain--bottles are ready for the next batch (after sanitizing).
I've read that two years is the shelf life on home-brewed cider; after that it could turn into apple cider vinegar.
Well, I've never had a batch that lasted two months, let alone two years, but...apple cider vinegar is good for you, too, so it's a win-win.
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