How To: Basic Hard Cider the Easy Way

Cider Even an Educator Can Make

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First, we’re talking about Hard Cider, taking easily available apple juice or sweet cider and creating a wonderfully inebriating end product is as delicious and discombobulating. The resurgence of commercially available ciders like Hornsby’s, Wood Chuck, and similar, has not gone unnoticed by we teachers of science. At $9 a six pack, enjoying an occasional cider is a treat that at teachers’ salaries cannot be enjoyed very often. History shows that cider was the drink of choice for most Americans prior to our disastrous bout of prohibition. It wasn’t until after prohibition that “cider” meant anything other than “hard cider”.

The preference of the American people to be able to purchase food without preservatives is a boon for those would make their own cider. Most fruit juices are now available without preservatives and make an easy source of fermentable liquid. On the web you can find volumes of information on apple cider sweet and hard talking about fancy ways to blend different apples to get just the right taste. But… we are teachers, worse yet teachers in Florida, access to orchards is limited, and because of our exorbitant pay we are fiscally frugal (the terms my friends use to describe me is “Cheap Bastard”). So the goal is to make a good drinkable cider from inexpensive apple juice available at the grocery store.

Brewing hard cider from nonalcoholic, apple juice or cider is a simple process, and results are very good, if not outstanding. Personally I enjoy homemade hard cider to the commercial stuff. Below is a description to make a fairly stout dry cider, and options for making it sparkling etc.

The Ingredients

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Choose Your Juice. Find any preservative free apple juice or cider. To make it easy for you, Motts classic apple juice makes a good hard cider. I’m not so sure the people at the ultra-family friendly Motts want their classic apple juice promoted for home brewing, but it’s quality juice that’s been pasteurized, and is ready for fermenting. Whatever apple juice or cider you choose to buy start by checking the label to be sure the cider doesn’t contain chemical preservatives, because these will kill your yeast and your cider will not ferment. You can brew in smaller batches, but 5 gallons is the standard brewing size, so get yourself 5 gallons of apple juice or cider without preservatives, besides you need enough to share.

Yeast. Any wine or beer yeast will do, cider yeast is great but expensive, for ease of use, and simplicity I’ve had the best results with Red Star Champaign. They are available for less than a dollar on line, or about a dollar at a brewing supply store. The beauty of using Red Star Champaign yeast is that you can get good results with practically zero effort.

Sugar. Yeast turns sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide. As a teacher I want to go all nuts and explain and diagram and “teach” about yeast, biology and chemistry, but it’s boring and this is a simple method for making a good drinkable cider, so I’ll skip the deep science. What you need to know is more sugar = more alcohol.

I’ve had good luck with brown sugar and table sugar, these are disaccharides. Yeast prefers to dine on monosaccharides but can and will munch out on regular sugar, which again makes this cheap and easy. For this basic recipe were going to use 2 pounds (one package) of light brown sugar.

The Hardware

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You’re going to need some minimal supplies; a brewing vessel (carboy), universal carboy cap, an airlock, and some plastic tubing.

Carboy. You can get a 5 gallon carboy (fancy name for a big bottle) from your grocery store or Walmart. .You might even be able to get one from your office. If you buy one sterile and full of water for about $8 or less.

You’re going to have to keep out the roaming yeast, bacteria, and nasties from you fermenting cider. This is done by capping the carboy and putting in an airlock. From any home brewing supply you can get a carboy hood/cap that will hold your air lock and seal your carboy, this will cost from 2 to 5 dollars.

Airlock. Again online and from any home brewing store you can get an air lock, usually for around a dollar.


Tubing. To get your final product from the fermenting vessel to it’s final storage container(s), the easiest way is to siphon it from the brewing vessel using clear tubing (3/8 dia), readily available in the plumbing dept of your local hardware store.

There is lots of other stuff and ways to brew, using 5 gallon buckets with a lid is easier but costs a little more. If you like what you make and it becomes a hobby (like it has for me) then start shopping on line or visit your local brewing supply store. For those of you in the Tampa Bay area, just go to Southern Brewing and tell them you want to make hard cider (or wine, or beer) and they will set you up affordably and teach you more than you want to know. They even have a “fermentologist” working there.



Brewing

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Time to Brew, first get all the hardware ready by sanitizing it.

Sanitize . Wash your carboy, cap, and airlock then rinse thoroughly.

Fill a bucket, pot or whatever with water and a cap full of chlorine bleach and soak the carboy cap, and airlock to kill off any coodies for 30 min. Add 2 caps of chlorine bleach to the carboy and fill it water and let it sit for 30 min. If the Carboy is a sealed unopened full water container you can skip this and just open the carboy and dump out the water.

While the hardware is soaking in the bleach make a simple syrup from the brown sugar by dissolving it in about a quart of water. The only way a quart of water will dissolve 2 pounds of sugar is to heat it up, it doesn’t matter if you boil it but I find that a medium heat and stirring often will dissolve the sugar and make nice simple syrup. This is similar to making a simple syrup for making rock candy.

Being careful not to contaminate the cleaned and sanitized hardware rinse it, then rinse it again, the chlorine bleach used to kill bad coodies will also kill the yeast.

Next, pour the simple syrup into your sanitized fermentation vessel and pour all the apple juice in on top of that, keep your apple juice bottles; you will need them for your finished product. Wash and rinse them for bottling day.

Pitch the Yeast. Pitiching the yeast is a fancy brewer’s way of saying start-er-up. This is where choosing Red Star Champaign yeast is a benefit. Open the yeast pack and dump into your fermenting vessel. There are lots of complicated and messy ways of pitching yeast, but I’ve never had to do more than dumping the yeast into the carboy, or brewing bucket.

Ferment. Put on the carboy cap and affix the air lock then fill the air lock with water, if your paranoid use vodka as the alchol will kill any coodies that try to get by. In a day or so it will start bubbling, let it go till it stops bubbling. The gas it’s releasing is carbon dioxide, a byproduct of the fermentation process. Congratulations, your apple juice is on its way to becoming a delicious, inebriating elixir of the gods! Well to be the elixir of the gods use Honey instead of sugar (that technically makes it a mead not a cider but it’s damn good). This bubbling should subside within two weeks, signifying an end to the primary fermentation. After that, let the cider sit another day or two (up to a week) to allow the yeast to settle out.


Options For Bottling

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There are a couple of different ways you can go at this point:

Bottle the Cider Now. If you want to bottle the cider immediately, sanitize the bottles the apple juice came in and the clear tubing you purchased from the hardware store using a little chlorine bleach and soaking them for 30 min before thoroughly rinsing them. Use the tubing to siphon the new hard cider into bottles put the lids on them and enjoy.

You can let the bottled hard cider sit for another two weeks and clarify in the plastic jugs. When you first bottled your cider it will probably be a little cloudy, not to worry it’s just floating yeast. Your cider will probably be “still” (i.e., not fizzy) unless you let it age for several months. Hard cider is more like wine than beer, and the flavor will improve as it ages, but feel free to start drinking it now.

Option A: Let it Clarify. If you only use one fermenter, your cider will taste fine, but may not be perfectly clear because it will probably still have some suspended yeast. To reduce cloudiness, siphon your cider into a secondary fermenter (another carboy). Sanitize this carboy like the first before filling it with cider. Once you’ve siphoned your cider into the secondary fermenter, put a sanitized lid and airlock. A week to a month should be ample time for the cider to clarify. After it’s aged for as long as you can stand, bottle it as above. This cider will most definitely be “still,” with no bubbles.

Option B: Make Sparkling Cider. Regardless of whether you decide to bottle immediately or let it clarify in a secondary fermenter, if you want “sparkling” cider, you’ll have to add a couple steps at bottling time and quite a bit more equipment including glass bottles, or growlers, caps and a capper. Save making sparkling cider for when your more enthusiastic or are willing to spend a $50 or so in start costs.

If you insist on sparkling Cider - First, boil 1 cup water with three-fourths cup honey or brown sugar. Pour this mixture into a sanitized bottling bucket (i.e., another fermentation bucket with a spigot at the bottom). Then, siphon your cider over from your fermentation bucket to the bottling bucket. The honey or brown sugar syrup and cider should mix together naturally, but stir slowly with a sanitized spoon if you feel it is necessary. Then, bottle as you would normally. You’ll have to let this sit a bit longer than the still cider, so the residual yeast will have time to ferment the sugar you added and carbonate the cider inside the bottle.

Drink the Cider! At this point, it’s time to start drinking your cider and thinking about brewing your next batch. With time and experience, your skills will grow and your recipes will become more complex. Soon, you’ll be making cider that delights your friends and terrifies your enemies.