Juice & Strain: Cider Making of the Future from Homebrewers Association
As a homebrewer, if you’ve found yourself with a surplus of homegrown apples, chances are you’ve considered fermenting your own cider. Cider making resources generally introduce the pulp and press technique for extracting juice—a process involving equipment used to grind up raw apples and press the…
Cider making made simple at home (video)
- Thoroughly wash and rinse apples. Do not use windfall apples, as they may be contaminated with bacteria.
- Clean and sanitize all equipment and your cider making area.
- Set up one bucket for collecting juice and one for pomace. Place the smaller bucket (with holes drilled in the bottom) within a larger bucket. In the smaller bucket, place the mesh bag. The pommace bucket is simply an empty, large bucket.
- Set up the juicer. Attach the tubing to the “juice-out” spout and have it feed into the mesh bag of the juice bucket.
- Process the apples in the juicer, emptying the pomace from juicer’s filter into the pomace bucket as necessary.
- Once all apples are processed, allow the contents in the straining bucket to drain until no more juice appears to be dripping. The bag can be wrung out to get the last few percent of juice.
- Transfer the juice into a clean and sanitized fermenter.
- Pitch the yeast according to its instructions. Stewart uses Saccharomyces bayanus, yeast typical in wine and cider fermentations.
- Ferment until dry. Stewart ferments at room temperature (18-20°C; 64.5-68°F) and will bottle once the gravity has dropped to or below 1.000.
- Bottle or keg after ensuring fermentation has ceased. Cider can be “still” (un-carbonated) or “sparkling” (carbonated). For sparkling cider, priming can be achieved in much the same way when bottling beer.
Apfelwein (German hard-apple cider): The easiest thing you will ever brew
Apfelwein is easy. If you’ve never brewed something before, it is a great thing to try. It is forgiving of fermentation temperatures so warm weather won’t hurt it. It really just takes a little patience. The good thing is you can put it together, throw it in a closet and forget about it. A few basic brewing supplies, ingredients mostly available at a local grocery store and time.
Apple juice choice
Treetop (3-apple blend and normal), Motts, Target brand, First Street (Smart & Final), Kirkland (Costco), Albertsons (clear and unfiltered), Simply Apple, Trader Joe’s (McIntosh, Gravenstein and Fresh Press, Used the unfiltered stuff too, but it’s discontinued now), Martinelli’s, Mrs Gooch (Whole Foods).
So Far the Martinelli’s has been the best, but it’s a bit expensive (although on sale for $5 a gallon at Costco right now), after that it’s the Trader Joe’s Fresh Press. Treetop is middle of the road, Kirkland is not from concentrate, but lacks in the acid and tannin department. Wost has been the Smart & Final stuff.