Homemade Hard Cider - maiden voyage

No advice but when I visited Germany they had some type of apple hard cider on tap. It was very tasty and had some carbonation. Keep us updated on your progress, it sounds interesting.

I've made apple wine a couple of times using the recipe off homebrewtalk.com. It's jolly rancher flavored rocket fuel. It's (5) gallons apple juice + (2) pounds sugar + (1) packet champagne yeast.

Just to update - I started fermenting last night. Although making hard cider is easy enough for a monkey to do, I managed to almost frick it up. I forgot to put my liquid (vodka) in the airlock before I was ready to plug up the jug, and I forgot to add my yeast nutrient. Had to unplug and put that in there.

Woke up this morning and it was bubbling. Now it's bubbling pretty good. Smells decent.

I am already getting ambitious about making 5 gallons and bottling it in a bunch of bottles so I can try it at different ages.

As simple is it is, I also find it very interesting. Good thing for beginners. Here is the yeast I used:

Red Star Cote de Blanc

There is NO foam in the bottle, so this description is accurate at least in that regard.

This is the kind of airlock I used:

LINK

a size 6 (I think; maybe 6.5) rubber stopper fits right in the bottle.

As noted, the yeast requires to yeast nutrient. Not all do.

Hmmm....

I am a homebrewer, but have been thinking of also brewing wine, mead, and now hard cider.

Homebrewing seems expensive and difficult, this seems more on my level

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Side note, have you tried the Crispin Hard Cider with Sake? Its delicious! Whole Foods sells it.

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My girlfriend had some at a beer festival. She requested a batch. The sake yeast is a little slow. Last I checked on it, it was tasting pretty good.

So my first batch came out just fine. It was dry, dry, dry. And I didn't add any extra sugar, so it wasn't very strong, really. I was impatient and ready to empty out the jug for another experiment.

Right now I have to experiments going. One gallon jug of store brand apple juice with about 3/4 cup of brown sugar, a packet of cote du blanc yeast. THe other is another gallon of the whole foods juice with a cup of dextrose. That one should be pretty strong.

Initial fermentation on those is done. Now I'm moving on to "racking." Got some stuff to siphon. I think I am going to siphon both into a big bucket (food grade; bought just for this purpose) after I taste a bit of both, and let the whole thing sit for a couple weeks, then bottle.

I read somewhere that it's a good idea to backsweeten the cider with zylitol, so what I'm going to do is find some of that and add it in with some more dextrose. THe zylitol will sweeten, and the dextrose will carb it in the bottles.

I didn't take any pics, but here is a pic of what mine looks like:



I can't really rave about the flavor of my first batch, because I wasn't trying very hard, but I definitely got me a little buzz out of the deal each time I drank some.

Oh yeah, I tried to make apple jack by freezing some of it, but I think it was not strong enough cider, so it all froze.

This is really a pretty fun hobby, and I can see myself making some beer at some point this winter.

Oh yeah, I put a thing of yeast into a jug of grape juice and put a rubber glove with a pinhole in it over the top of the job. After a couple days, the fermentation was complete and i had made wine in a plastic jug. This actually didn't taste too bad. I will definitely do this again and try harder.

Fun shite.

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obsession

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If I hear a person say "sugar" now, I immediately think of fermentation, and I haven't don't shite yet.

I just clicked on the homebrew thread and popped a woody looking at the one dude's sig pic with all those different colored jugs, and hearing the guy talk about how smooth his recent brew was.

I always wanted a good hobby . . . .

damn, it seems like this thread was started more recently than july

congrats on the success