Easy Hard Cider

This is a low-alcohol (theoretically around 3%) hard cider that’s quick and easy to make. Yummy, and sweet. 

Ingredients: 

1 gallon apple juice or cider (without preservatives)

1 to 1½ tsp yeast *

* Don’t use bread yeast. Use beer or ale yeast. Champaign yeast will make a dryer cider. I intend to try Belgian yeast one time. You can use wild apple yeast (from organic apple peels) in a manner similar to sourdough bread starter, but that’s more complex.

 

Special Equipment: 

Fermentation lock (or substitute)

Rubber stopper for bottle, with hole for Fermentation lock

Gallon jar (glass or plastic)

Instructions: 

Leave apple juice at room temperature. Remove a cup or so of the juice to a bowl, and heat to body temperature. Add the yeast to the warm juice to activate. When it starts bubbling, return it to the gallon jug and mix thoroughly.

Install the fermentation lock into the stopper, and seal the bottle. (It needs water in it to work right.)

Set the jar in a warm place to ferment for a week: a little longer for drier cider, a little shorter for sweeter cider. During this week, bubbles are good!

The next weekend, bottle your cider. Use containers that can handle pressure:

• Re-use (pint size?) soda-pop labels.
• Swing-type self-locking (“Lightning type closure”) bottles
• Crown caps (traditional bottle tops: requires a bottle opener to open, and requires a capping tool to seal).

Let the bottles set in a warm place for a day or a little more to carbonate. The pop bottles have an advantage: it’s easy to tell when they’ve carbonated enough: when the bottles are hard (as they would be when they’re full of fresh soda pop at the store), it’s enough.

Store the sealed bottles in the refrigerator.

Consume some time between “as soon as it’s cold” and three weeks or so.

Comment: If you let it ferment too long, you’ll need to age it (a year or more)

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Update: I've made 3 batches by now.

I added a step to the process: our home isn't incredibly warm, so I filled a pot with warm water, and put the fermenting gallon into it to keep it warm.

In the second batch, I heated it too much, late in the process, and killed the yeast, so the cider tasted good enough, but there was no carbonation to it.

In the third batch, I heated it often, but much more gently. Carbonation is fine, but it's over-fermented, and as a result, it's drier than is best.

I'm learning the process.