Easy & affordable homemade hard cider

Homemade hard cider on the cheap!

Making your own hard cider is fun and so easy you really won't believe it. You can use a traditional brewers kit with buckets and airlocks and all that - or you can make do with stuff you probably have on hand already. I recommend trying it the cheap way first - make a gallon and see if you like it. Later on you can always buy the buckets and ramp up your production if you like. This recipe is for one gallon and you can adjust it accordingly with one slight change - one packet of yeast will do up to 5 gallons.
Equipment you need:
2 clean 2 liter soda bottles with lids
2 Regular balloons
Juice pitcher that will hold 2 liters
Large pot & something to stir with
funnel
safety pin

Ingredients you need:
1 pound Sugar - brown or white - I usually use both together
1 packet yeast - can be dry yeast or champagne yeast. Champagne yeast gives a better flavor to finished product but it's easy enough to fix it up if you just use regular yeast. Dry Yeast is in your baking isle at the grocery store and is sold in three pack strips for about $1.19. Champagne yeast runs about 50 cents a pack and is sold individually at home brew stores.
3 cans frozen juice concentrate - Very Important - It must NOT contain any preservatives! No Potassium sorbate, no sodium citrate or any other odd unknown ingredient. It can have asorbic acid which is just vitamin C. Other than that it can't have any chemical sounding indgredients. You really want it to be just juice from concentrate. Generally speaking that means no Welch's brand because it has sodium citrate in it. Old Orchard is fine and so is Langers. It seems most store brand are fine also but be sure and read the label. You can also use regular juice rather than frozen but you'll need to buy a whole gallon and same rule applies as far as not having any kind of preservatives. Generally it is cheaper and easier to just work with the frozen - especially on your first try. And yes - the juice can be any flavor you want although most people start with apple. After you get the hang of it you can even combine different flavors - whatever you want to do.

The main principle of making homemade alcohol is that yeast turns sugar into alcohol. You can basically say that yeast eats sugar and craps alcohol - and that is a beautiful thing! With about a pound of sugar to each gallon I get about 9% alcohol content. More sugar and yeast equals more alcohol content. Trust me though - 9% is a pretty high level. Store bought hard cider is usually 5%. Also be aware that the sugar you put in to start will be gone by the end - if you want to make your cider sweeter it won't do any good to add more sugar at the start! I'll tell you later how to sweeten your finished product.

So are you ready? Open your cans and dump the contents into your pot (on a medium low setting) - don't add the recommended amount of water to it. Add your sugar and stir until until it dissolves. If you want to kill any wild yeast that might be in the juice already - let it warm to about 140 degrees for a half hour to 45 minutes. The deal with wild yeast is that you have no idea if it is there or isn't and if it will make your finished product better, worse or no effect. Some people skip this step and just warm it enough to dissolve the sugar. No matter what you choose - don't let it boil or you'll end up with a cloudy or hazy finished product.

Once your juice is ready, use the funnel and split it between the two 2 liter bottles as evenly you can. Now you can add the water as recommended on the concentrated juice label. If you can't add as much water as they recommend - don't worry, it will just make the flavor a little bolder. Put the lids on the bottles and let it sit until it gets to room temperature. I generally just start mine in the evening and let it sit overnight so I'm not so tempted to toss the yeast in early.

Rinse out your balloons to get the powder out of them. While they have water in them, use a safety pin to poke 5 or 6 holes in the balloon then dump the water out. This is how the carbon dioxide created by the fermentation process is going to get out of the bottle without letting anything else back in. If you have a hydrometer and want to measure your alcohol content, now is the time to take the initial reading before the yeast goes in. Now put your yeast in splitting it between the two 2 liter bottles. Don't stress over this part - the single packet of yeast is enough to make 5 gallons of cider with so guestimating is plenty good enough. Stretch the balloon over the opening of the bottles and put the lids away somewhere that you can find them in a few weeks. Put the bottles somewhere they won't need to be moved and is dark and cool - between 60 and 70 degrees is best. In a day or two the balloon will inflate - generally to about the size of a golf ball or maybe a cue ball. This means the fermentation process is working fine. It won't blow up any bigger because the pin holes are letting the carbon dioxide out.

Your done with the major part, now the rest is super easy and requires no precision at all. Let it sit about 10 days to two weeks without messing with it at all. Then, very gently remove the balloon and pour the cider into a pitcher or some other container - try very hard not to disturb the sediment at the bottom of the two liter bottle while your doing this. After the cider is in the pitcher, rinse out the two liter bottle to get rid of all the sediment and then pour the cider back in, put the balloon back on and put it back where it was. You can actually skip this step entirely and it will still work but your finished product will have a much stronger yeast taste to it.

Let it sit another 10 days to two weeks. It really only takes three weeks start to finish but I've had better taste results when I give it 4 weeks total. Gently pour into your pitcher and rinse out the two liter. Now you have a choice to make - do you want to wait three more weeks and make a carbonated hard cider or just drink it now? Personally - I'm not patient enough to let it carbonate so I'd just put it back in the 2 liter bottle and put the cap on it (you did save the cap didn't you?). If you have a hydrometer and want to know your alcohol content - now is the time to take your second measurement and figure out how much alcohol is in there (there should be a chart and directions that came with the hydrometer). If you want to carbonate your cider, heat up a small amount of water and dissolve 3-4 tablespoons of sugar in it. Pour it into your 2 liter bottle, pour the cider back in, cap it and wait another three weeks and it will carbonate.

If your flavor isn't bold enough or sweet enough, get another can of frozen concentrate and add the pure juice to your 2 liter bottles with no extra water. You can also add more sugar now if you want but be aware that if you do add sugar and leave the cap on without releasing the pressure periodically - you'll end up with a carbonated drink. Actually, it will carbonate on it's own eventually but I think it takes a few months to do it on it's own.

Hard Cider doesn't last long around my house because I have several friends that really love it too. However, I've read that it ages just like wine and gets better and better as it ages. I hear that it is amazing after about 9 months but I've yet to be able to keep it around long enough to find out - in spite of the fact that I mostly make mine in 5 gallon batches! Another thing to be aware of is that when your first able to drink it, your cider will be cloudy. If your wanting it to look nice and clear, it will need to sit about another 2-3 weeks after the second time you get rid of the sediment. If it still has a lot of sediment, you might have to repeat the step with the pitcher again.

If you like it and want to make larger amounts, you can get a basic bewers kit with 6.5 gallon buckets. You'll also need to consider how you want to store it, bottles? Kegs? Something else? Also you need to be aware that if you do bottle it, your cider needs to have a specific gravity of less than one or you risk having bottles explode from pressure. There is a way around this though - if you heat your cider up again to 140 for 45 minutes, that will kill any active yeast that is left so you won't have any more fermentation going on and hence - no pressure build up. Be sure to let it cool down again before bottling. I personally haven't done this so I'm just telling what I've read. If your wanting to get serious I recommend doing more research and see what more experienced people than me have to say about it.

Have fun & enjoy!