Equipment needed
- Large glass carboy or food grade pail (6 ½ gallons is best)
- Air lock (cheap bubble kind is fine)
- Plastic tubing (about 6 feet)
- Two cases of beer bottles
- Bottle caps and caper
- 5 gallons of apple cider (no preservatives)
- 2 tbsp pectin enzyme (optional)
- 1 pack of dry champagne yeast
- ¾ cup fructose sugar
- liquid bleach
- Prepare the juice for fermentation. First rinse inside of the fermentation container with liquid bleach to kill wild yeasts. Rinse the bleach out with water. Then dump 5 gallons of apple cider into the carboy or pail. Stir in the pectinase. (This makes the cider a little less cloudy, but does nothing for flavor.) Stir in the package of yeast. Cover and place the airlock on.
- Allow the mix to ferment about a week. Bubbling should be quite intense in about a day.
- Clean, sanitized, and rinse the other pail or bucket.
- Transfer the juice to this temporary container, by siphoning with the plastic tubing (rinse first). Try to keep the mud behind. Cover. Dump the mud in the lawn to fertilize the grass. Wash and rinse the carboy, then transfer the juice back. Cover and replace the airlock.
- Allow the mix to ferment another week. Bubbling will slow down quite a lot.
- Clean, sanitize, and rinse the other pail again. Place ¾ cup of fructose sugar in a large measuring cup, add enough water to dissolve and microwave for about 2 minutes. (This heats it up to thoroughly dissolve the sugar and kills any organisms.) Dump the warm sugar solution into the transfer pail.
- Siphon the now hard cider into the transfer pail with the priming sugar solution. Gently. Cover while you clean the bottles.
- Rinse the empty beer bottles in a bleach solution first, then wash the bleach away with water.
- Gently siphon the cider into the clean beer bottles. Stop about every six bottles to cap them.
- Put all filled bottles into the case, close the flaps, and place in the garage for at least 6 months. The yeast will chomp on the small amount of priming sugar in solution and release gas for fizz.
2 comments:
Dennis, does this mean that you are changing your profession and becoming a cider producer? I never knew how to make it, since we make only plum, pear and peach brandy, wine (used to, not any more) and, sometimes apple vinegar. And all that makes my father, like my grandfather before him.
Making my own beer and cider has been a hobby of mine for over 20 years. Beer is "instant gratification," in that you know if you messed up right away. I brew 5 US gallons at a time, which makes two cases of beer.
Cider is like wine - you do not know the quality of what you made for quite some time - generally at least a year. My cider-making occurs about every other year.
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