homemade hard cider

Learn how to brew your own easy and delicious hard cider with this simple recipe! Brewing your own hard cider is easy, affordable, and it tastes amazing. 

Hard Apple Cider

organic apple juice (without preservatives)

brown sugar

cinnamon

cloves

raisins

champagne yeast (or cote des blanc yeast)

Sanitize everything that will come into contact with your cider.&nbsp;

Heat ½ gallon of apple juice in a pot on medium heat, do not boil.

Add the brown sugar and stir to dissolve, then remove the pot from the heat.

Put the cinnamon stick, cloves, and raisins into the empty one gallon brewing jug.

Use the funnel to transfer the warm cider from the pot into the one gallon brewing jug. Allow the warm cider to steep with the spices for about 20 minutes.

Top off the jug with the remaining ½ gallon of apple juice, leaving 2 inches of headspace at the top of the jug. You will have a bit leftover apple juice.

Cap the jug and shake to combine everything.

Use a thermometer to check the temperature of the juice in the jug. When it has cooled to 90°F or less, you can add ½ package of yeast to the jug (doesn’t have to be exact). Store the opened package with the remaining yeast in the refrigerator for later use.

Cap the jug again and shake vigorously for about a minute or two to aerate the yeast.

Attach the airlock to the rubber stopper if you haven’t already, fill it with water to the fill line, then place it firmly on the top of the jug.

Put the jug in a cool (not cold) place out of direct sunlight to ferment. After several hours, or overnight, you will start to see bubbles forming in the jug and airlock.

Allow the cider to ferment for 3-4 weeks, until the bubbling in the jug and airlock has stopped.

Bottle the hard cider.

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Learn how to brew your own easy and delicious hard cider with this simple recipe!

How To Make Hard Cider

Homemade Hard Apple Cider is fun and easy to make, and highly customizable.  Make your Hard Apple Cider from apples, or purchased cider!

Homemade Hard Apple Cider

gallons Apple cider*

packets of wine yeast (We like Red Star “Cote de Blancs”

Optional Ingredients:***

Honey

Maple syrup

Molasses

Raisins

Cinnamon

Nutmeg

Cloves

In large stock pot, combine apple cider with the sugar. Heat to almost boiling, stirring until sugar is dissolved. Continue to heat for about 45 minutes – never allowing it to come to a boil. Remove from heat, cover with sanitized pot lid. (If you don’t have a 7-10 gallon stock pot or turkey fryer, you can do this in batches.)

Once mixture has cooled to room temperature, use a sanitized funnel to transfer cooled mixture to a sanitized 6.5-7.5 gallon fermenter. Using clean hands and sanitized utensils, add any flavoring ingredients you’ll be using to the fermenter. Go easy on the flavorings – you can always add more later, but cannot take it away if you overdo it!.

Using sanitized equipment, take a gravity reading. Keep track of the number! (This is an optional step, but will allow you to calculate your final ABV %)

Sprinkle yeast into fermenter, cover with sanitized air lock. Let sit, undisturbed, overnight.

Within 48 hours, you should notice fermentation activity – bubbles in the airlock, carbonation and /or swirling in the cider must. This means you’re good to go! Put the fermenter somewhere cool (not cold!), and leave it alone for a month or so.

Using sanitized equipment, rack the clarified cider off the sediment, into a clean, freshly sanitized 6.5 gallon carboy. Cap with sanitized airlock, leave it alone for another 2-3 months.

When you’ve let it clarify as much as you have patience for – with no more sediment being produced – you can move on to bottling:

For uncarbonated cider:

Using sanitized equipment, take a final gravity reading, then rack the cider into clean, sanitized beer bottles, and cap them. Allow to age for a month or so before drinking. (Like wine, the flavor improves with age!)

For naturally carbonated cider:

In a small pot, mix together 1 cup of water with 1 cup of sugar or brown sugar. Use a sanitized funnel to pour this into a sanitized large carboy. Rack the cider over into this carboy, swirling it as you go. Bottle cider as described in the previous step. Allow to age at least a month or two – residual yeast will ferment the added sugar, carbonating the cider.

Alternatively, you can rack the cider (without the added sugar syrup!) into a keg and force carbonate it, if you have the set up for that. That’s what we did with our last batch, and blew through it pretty quick during the tornado clean up! Chilled hard apple cider is just what’s needed for that sort of thing, LOL!

Enjoy.. and start planning for next year’s batch(es)!

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Top 2 homemade hard cider recipes from across the web

The most viewed homemade hard cider recipes by Recipe Cart users, saved from over 20,000 sites. Or, go to our Recipe Search Engineic_arrow_forward_48px

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Hard Apple Cider

Homemade Hard Apple Cider

The most viewed homemade hard cider recipes by Recipe Cart users, saved from over 20,000 sites. Or, go to our Recipe Search Engine