# Hard Apple Cider



## po boy (Jul 12, 2010)

Found a 3 qt bottle/jug of organic apple cider and would like to make hard cider using a simple recipe.

I have been playing with zong's sugar wine process. 

Any ideas?


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## ben70b (Jan 15, 2013)

do you have a hydrometer? you could add sugar till u get the possable alcahol by volume u want. if not, try a cup of sugar and airlock it or you can pitch the yeast without adding sugar, i've been playing with cider and wines a bit two and have several batches goin


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## po boy (Jul 12, 2010)

Yes Ben, I have a hydrometer.

Thanks for the info


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## dogrunner (Mar 2, 2009)

I love white labs english cider liquid yeast for my cider, it is great!!


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## trimpy (Mar 30, 2011)

EC-1118 champagne yeast makes a fantastic cider. To increase ABV without diminishing flavor, add frozen apple juice concentrate instead of sugar. To make a sweet final product add an unfermentable sugar like lactose or splenda or kill the yeast with sodium metabisulfite and back sweeten with more concentrate.


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## VeritasVincit (Jul 8, 2013)

trimpy said:


> EC-1118 champagne yeast makes a fantastic cider. To increase ABV without diminishing flavor, add frozen apple juice concentrate instead of sugar. To make a sweet final product add an unfermentable sugar like lactose or splenda or kill the yeast with sodium metabisulfite and back sweeten with more concentrate.


I used champagne yeast, white sugar, and store-bought cider. It turned out pretty good- nice and dry. I like a sweeter cider, so I tried to "improve" it by backsweetening with Stevia (it tastes good in a cup of tea! Why not 5 gallons of cider?). It was okay if you like sugar substitute, but now I've got a five gallon corny keg full of something I don't even want to drink. Wish I would have killed the yeast instead of trying to cheat. Good idea to backsweeten with juice concentrate, though if I do this again, I'm going to make friends with someone who has a cider press and do it the old-fashioned way. Until then, I'll stick to mixing up some Apple Pie with liquor. Everybody likes it better, anyways.


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## skootchingdog (Jun 30, 2013)

We made hard cider once, and it didn't really turn out the way we wanted. We used a champagne yeast. The juice fermented quickly, and we wanted sparkling cider, so we added a small amount of sugar at bottling. This is where we went wrong. The result was very dry, very high ETOH, and when you opened a bottle, you better be ready to catch in a much bigger glass. We didn't know about specialty yeasts, and don't own a kegging system, although that would help a lot (then we could stabilize, back sweeten, and carbonate).


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## ltbrnleghorn (May 25, 2013)

hey all...

I have two 5 gal. H20 jugs of apple cider cooking. I wish I had glass carboys, but I had to go with the new water jugs.

The apples are mostly falls, around six varieties. They were pressed last Saturday, so this is day seven. I am relying on native yeast. I understand that doing this is a wild card; I don't consider myself a gambler, but here I am gambling!

I had the jugs in an area of the house that was staying at 60* I drilled out a wine cork to fit a plastic C02 regulator in, and after a day or so, was seeing slight foam and a couple of bubbles/minute. I decided to move the jugs to a closet near the wood stove where it might be a little warmer and less drafty. The temp in the closet seems to stay at 66* There isn't a tremendous amount of foam on the top of the cider, and the carboys are making 8 bubbles/minute.

Anyone have any thoughts on what's cooking in my closet? And, based on the temps and the initial fermentation action, how long do you think it should and/or will be fermenting?

Thanks!


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## SouthernLiving (Sep 16, 2008)

We juice our own apples and use the recipe from the book '101 Wild Wines'. The only thing I do different is add a cup of sugar to the batch just before bottling to make it sparkle. Gotta be careful with that, too much sugar and you'll have a wine grenade. We've made two 5 gallon batches and both have been spledid.


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## Morris (Jul 16, 2014)

SouthernLiving said:


> We juice our own apples and use the recipe from the book '101 Wild Wines'. The only thing I do different is add a cup of sugar to the batch just before bottling to make it sparkle. Gotta be careful with that, too much sugar and you'll have a wine grenade. We've made two 5 gallon batches and both have been spledid.


Do you have a copy of that recipe you can send me?


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## Morris (Jul 16, 2014)

Guess not!


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## Cobber (May 22, 2015)

My biggest seller is Apple Cider Vinegar, I literally have people ring me and tell me it is the best they have ever tasted. I have read a lot about how to make a good cider so that I can make a good vinegar. 

Unless you are using cider varieties, it is impossible to get enough acid and tannin out of eating apples to make a well balanced hard cider. The solution is to use 10-20% wild or crab apples. I use up to 20% wild apples as crab apples are far between here. Wild apples are apples that grow from seed, they are never true to type and usually more tart and bitter (not always). I find these apples all over the place, usually beside the road but also along creeks. We have a cooking variety here called Granny Smith which is more tart than your usual eating apple, you could use 10% of that but still need to find a source of tannin. You could also cheat and use malic acid and white wine tannin additions if you want.

Any yeast will ferment apple juice, EC1118 is a very reliable fermenter but I use Vintners Harvest Wine Yeast &#8211; CY17 and Safale SO5, CY17 for the more aromatic apples (delicious family for example) and SO5 for the other types and then blend the different ciders together. Wine yeast is going to give you a more fruity product, beer yeast a more flinty, edgy, product. I always add 0.2g of Di Ammonium Phosphate (aka yeast nutrient) to make sure there is enough nitrogen for the yeast because it is standard wine industry practice, I dont know if low N can be a problem with apples as it can be with grapes, but it is cheap and I know from my own past research that the yeast gobble it up within a couple of days. 

Hygiene and air contact control is absolutely necessary with hard apple cider as it does not seem to resist oxidation as well as beer and wine. Cider went out of fashion 100 years ago as it became easier to reliably make clean (free of faults) wines and beer. It tends to oxidze to something between vinegar and hard cider very easily. In some parts of England they called it "pig squeal cider" as that was the sound you made when drinking it, or "the kind of cider it took two men to hold you down as you drank it". If you bottle it as soon as it has finished its fermentation then you should not have this problem. But...

Malo-lactic fermentation MLF will occur in un-sulfered cider when it gets over 21C / 70F. This is a slow, bacterial fermentation that converts malic acid to lactic acid and thus slightly raises the pH or decreases the acidity of the cider. If this happens in the bottle it will usually ruin the cider as it produces some off flavours which are usually blown off in barrel of vat fermentation, it also produces diacetyl, which has a buttery flavour, so you have to decide if you want MLF or want to stop it either by SO2 addition or keeping below 70F.


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## DisasterCupcake (Jan 3, 2015)

Hi, 

Just thought I'd join the convo for some of your tips! We just pressed our own apples for cider for the first time this year. 

We only used a couple varieties of apples, and I just filled the fermentation vessels last week. According to the instructions i've been following, I'm supposed to let it stand open until it stops foaming- adding fresh cider to keep the containers full. Then add the oxygen limiter cork for the remaining duration. 

We didn't add any yeasts =/ the instructions didn't say anything about it. But isn't yeast a wine thing?


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## Cobber (May 22, 2015)

You add yeas to beer too, but because beer is cooked before fermentation the yeast you add will be the one doing the fermentation. With fruit it is not as simple as that as there are a lot of wild yeast involved in the fermentation in the first percent or two.

If the pH of the juice was below 3.5 then you have a good chance of getting good wild yeast to ferment your juice. The adding of yeast is sometimes helpful as you are adding a yeast that you know will give certain fermentation characteristics, like ferment to dryness for example.

You can always test the apple juice pH and add malic acid to bring it below 3.5, 3.3 is even better.

Making good cider is really hard, harder than wine or beer, there is a good reason it went out of fashion 100 years ago and only come back in fashion in the last decade or two, and that is because we now have the technology and equipment to make a clean cider. Most cider they made was pretty awful stuff, they called it "pig squeal cider" because that was the sound you made when drinking it, or "the kind of cider it takes two men to hold you down while you drink it".

I wouldnt leave it open but leave enough space for the foaming and put a loose cover on the opening. Then the airlock thing is good.

When you get to the end of the yeast fermentation you will have to decide how to handle the lees (muck at the bottom), uf you are going to drink it within a month then you can leave it there, if you are going to leave in glass or stainless steel then you have to decant the cider off the lees.


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## MNBobcat (Feb 4, 2011)

You can use a yeast for making ale as they'll also make a good hard apple cider. The type of yeast can have a big effect on the final taste. I would contact your local supply house and get a recommendation on your yeast. Also, make sure to measure the specific gravity and add sugar if necessary to get the alcohol content that you want.


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## simi-steading (Sep 27, 2012)

I hadn't seen this thread before... COOL...

I just got done bottling up a 3 gallon batch of cider this morning... (nothing like sampling some fine alcohol at 9am ) This time I went with WhiteHouse brand cider. I also use Lucky Leaf apple juice... I'd use real apples, but they are just too expensive in this area... 

I use Red Star Pasteur Champagne yeast, or now they are calling it Pasteur Blanc.

I also use Diammonium Phosphate to help increase yeast activity. I try and ferment mine somewhere between 75 and 80F.. I add a teaspoon of the Diammonium Phosphate at the start, another after a full day, and a third (one teaspoon per gallon) on the 3rd day of fermentation.

Usually the fermentation is done in 4 -6 days.

Today I bottled with brown sugar as my prime... (we like fizzy cider) I've no tried that before, but will be interested to see how that works out.. 

Yes, I know I'm playing with some green cider, but I never have been able to sit around and let it keep going into a second fermentation.. Maybe some day I will..

The cider I make is very similar to an expensive beer we really like, called Deus... The fizz, and even somewhat the flavor reminds us of it.. It's a Belgian beer that is bottled and riddled exactly like high end champagne... 

I'd like to hear how others are making theirs. I've got a lot of other ways I'd like to try, but I always worry I won't like it, or since it sat so long, the chance of H2S or a wild undesirable flavored yeast will invade it.. 

I keep going back to my fast and simple way every time I say I'm gonna let it set...


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## simi-steading (Sep 27, 2012)

DisasterCupcake said:


> Hi,
> 
> Just thought I'd join the convo for some of your tips! We just pressed our own apples for cider for the first time this year.
> 
> ...


I wish you luck with this... Some times wild yeast can make something pretty spectacular... but most times not...

With leaving the top open, your biggest threat is mold spores...


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## MNBobcat (Feb 4, 2011)

You leave the top open because fermentation is an aerobic process requiring air for the fermentation to happen. By "open" it means covered but not tightly sealed. You also want to stir twice a day.

Once you rack off to a secondary and start secondary fermentation its an anaerobic process where you don't want air and then use an airlock. 

But when you don't use campden tablets to kill the wild yeast and wait 24 hours and then add your cultured yeast -- you have no idea what you'll end up with. You might just get vinegar.


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## simi-steading (Sep 27, 2012)

What I meant by leaving the top open, was using no air lock, and not adding yeast, as DisasterCupcake said they have done... That will be strictly wild yeast, plus the chance of mold growing. 

Even for the first fermentation, you want an air lock to keep things as clean as possible..


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## DisasterCupcake (Jan 3, 2015)

yes I suppose there is a risk of contamination... 

According to the directions I have the open top (and it was covered with clean cheesecloth) is relatively safe from contamination because the aerobic fermentation is giving off gas which keeps most things from floating in. 

While the top was open, the foam was quite voluminous- it poured over the sides for days. I've never tried anything like this before, and it was a little surprising how much there was. 

I wouldn't mind having apple cider vinegar anyways. It's just kind of an experiment! Thanks for the info


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## MNBobcat (Feb 4, 2011)

simi-steading said:


> Even for the first fermentation, you want an air lock to keep things as clean as possible..


Several wineries around here ferment in these:










They either leave the tops open or throw a cloth across the top to keep the dust off.


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## Cobber (May 22, 2015)

Some yeast strains produce a lot of foam. One of the attributes of the commercial ones is low foam production, you can imagine in a huge tank in the wineries and cideries how much you can loose if the top 10% of your 10,000 gallon tank is all foam or it comes out over the sides.


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## MNBobcat (Feb 4, 2011)

Cobber,

Do the wineries use tanks with variable lids on your side of the pond?


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## vicker (Jul 11, 2003)

I hVe had great luck making hard cider by just letting my jug of cider sit out. I actually learned it by accident. I was living of grid and using a cooler with ice blocks for keeping a few things. I had bought 4 gallons of cider, had one in my cooler and three in a fridge in town. I'd have to replace my ice every four or five days and the cider in the cooler had been opened. It started to fizz when I opened it after about a week. I started burping it every day, and when it started to slow down I tighter the lid good and tight. Another couple of weeks and I had a wonderfully cabonated hard cider. 

I bought those ciders from the orchard and they had been pasteurized with ultraviolet light. I fermented the other three as well and have done it several times with cider from the store. It works great and I have yet to have one fail or turn bad.


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## Dashley_Aretus (Jun 5, 2014)

What do you use to juice your apples? I have a juicer, however the manual says not to run it longer than 1/2 hour, and from what ive read it takes 16lbs to make 1gal of cider!


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## Cobber (May 22, 2015)

MNBobcat said:


> Cobber,
> 
> Do the wineries use tanks with variable lids on your side of the pond?


Only just saw this, yes some of the smaller and medium sized ones do, they are fairly good but a bit more expensive.


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## Cobber (May 22, 2015)

I use a cyclone juicer that takes whole apples. I run them for 10 minutes on and 10 minutes off while I sort and wash the apples I am about to juice, I get through about 100 pounds of apples in 6 hours and get from 50-65% yield.


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