How to make home-made cider

In theory it is very easy to make cider; at the most basic level, all you have to do is press some fresh apple juice and then leave it to ferment. Once it stops bubbling you have cider.

So in a way, this is a hobby which is only as hard as you want to make it. But of course - the more you know, the better your end result will be 😄

So let me go into unnecessary detail....

In this guide, I will cover the following steps:

1. Picking apples
2. Juicing the apples
3. Fermenting the juice
4. Bottling the cider
5. Aging the cider
6. Drinking the cider

Enjoy!

Picking apples

Good apples will have a good balance of sugar, acid and tannins, as sugars are converted to alcohol, and acid and tannins provide taste, mouthfeel, and depth - and help balance each other out for a pleasant experience.

There are several ways to achieve this balance, and it largely depends on the kind of apples you can source.

Cooking apples

In Denmark we have access to some great cooking apples which can be used to create single-variety ciders, e.g.:

• Belle de Boskoop
• Ingrid Marie
• Rød Aroma

These apples are ideal because they naturally contain high levels of sugar, acid, and tannin, and so you don't need to do much with them except press them and ferment the juice. As they are high in acids, they make excellent sparkling ciders.

You want to pick these as late as you can - October/November - and also store them for a bit after you've picked them - this breaks down some of the pectin in the apples, and they mature and develop a higher sugar content if they are left for a bit after being picked.

Dessert apples

You can also use dessert apples like Discovery if that's what you have access to, but often the cider you end up with is a little bit bland because once the sugar is turned into alcohol there really isn't much taste left. So if you have access to dessert apples, you need to add the missing components in other ways.

Basically, your options are:

• Blend the juice with other juices
• Buy tannins and malic acid in powder form and add them to the juice
• Use other means - oak chips, hops, black tea, sloe - to add more depth to the end result

I make a summer-cider using dessert apples juice and then add 10% juice from crab apples, called 'paradisæbler" in Danish, which also grow in my garden.

Blending apples

If you've got access to all sorts of apples you can consider a blend. Professionals will measure the precise sugar/acid/tannin levels of their juice and blend accordingly, but if you're going by instinct you should go for:

• 50-60% sweet apples
• 10-30% bitter apples
• 10-20% sour apples

We don't really grow bitter apples in Denmark - they're typically known as cider apples - but if you can find some wild apples in the woods they're sometimes bitter (and sour). If you want to spit them out and they make your mouth pucker up they're probably good for cider.

Juicing the apples

You can juice the apples any way you like - seriously. It doesn't make a difference, as long as you get juice. First couple of years I used a juicer - it worked... ok, but it took a long time and there was a lot of filtering and cleaning to do from the way it produces juice, with lots of solids in the juice. And the Belle de Boskoop flesh - my preferred apple - tended to get stuck in the juicer as it's quite tough and dry.

These days I borrow equipment from a colleague - an electric apple crusher...

...and a heavy-duty apple cider press:

But this equipment is expensive - so figure out what your budget is and maybe start small. All you have to do is find a way to get at least 10 litres of fresh apple juice and you're good, and you can always buy that apple crusher next autumn.

Fermenting the juice

In theory, all you have to do to ferment freshly pressed apple juice is leave it be - there's a ton of wild yeast in and on apples, and nature will take care of the rest.

But I'm going to recommend that you do things a little bit more controlled, so you're more likely to get something tasty out of it.

Sugar content

You should buy a hydrometer and measure the sugar content of the juice. You will get a reading between 1040 and 1070, which corresponds to 5.25-9% alcohol if you ferment it into it's dry - and you usually do, it is by far the easiest way to make cider. We call the initial reading the original gravity (OG). Write it down, you will forget what it was when a few months have passed.

Measuring the OG serves two purposes:

• You can calculate the final alcohol percent of the cider when it's done
• If you measure gravity along the way, you know when the cider is done fermenting

You may want to get a hold of a 100 ml graduated cylinder as well, as it makes it easier to measure sugar content without having to pour a whole litre. This is especially important when you're measuring the cider during fermentation to see if the fermentation is done.

Fermentation vessel

A fermentation vessel is a thing you ferment cider in. It needs to be large enough to hold the juice, small enough so that there isn't too much air in it while the cider ferments, and as airtight as is possible.

I use a combination of fermentation buckets - large food-grade buckets with a lid and a tap - and glass demijohns of varying sizes.

Of the two, I trust the glass demijohns more when it comes to quality - I am not convinced the fermentation buckets are airtight enough - but I'm not going to lie, it is super convenient with a tap when it comes to bottling your cider.

As you can see, fermentation vessels come in all sizes. I used to do a lot of smaller 5L and 10L brews, but I've discovered that if something comes out great, I don't like having made only 5 or 10 litres. And the cleanup is pretty much the same regardless of the size of the fermentation vessel.

All fermentation vessels should be fitted with an airlock or bubbler which is filled with a bit of vodka or distilled water. During fermentation, the yeast produces lots of CO2, and you need to let that out somehow or the vessel will pop. At the same time, the liquid prevents oxygen (and flies) from entering and ruining the cider.

Yeast

Yeast is rarely talked about - which is a shame, as the yeast you use has almost as much impact on the final cider as the juice has. For instance, you must decide if you want to use wild yeast(s) or commercial yeast.

To start with wild yeast, apples are naturally full of the little buggers, and after pressing the juice they will start to immediately turn sugar into alcohol. You don't know how it will turn out, but in my experience they've always turned out great as long as you take measures to ferment the juice at as low of a temperature as possible. I do this by fermenting my ciders outside, on the north side of the house, emulating the traditional method used for English farmhouse ciders.

If you want a more consistent result you should consider using commercial yeast - and there are many kinds, depending on what you want the end product to end up as:

• Nottingham Ale yeast is often used to create sweeter more fragrant ciders. I use this when I want to sweeten a cider a bit with e.g. erythritol before bottling
• Lalvin EC-1118 is a yeast which is excellent if you're shooting for a more champagne-like style. I often combine this yeast with oak chips for a true apple-champagne style cider.
• Lalvin 71B is a vin nouveau yeast which can metabolize 20-40% of the malic acid in a juice, so I've experimented with this yeast for sour juices. I've had mixed results and probably won't use it again, but it might well be on me.
• Mangrove Jack's M02 Cider is a very popular cider yeast which is claimed to produce crisp and flavourful ciders. I've only used it once, but it did perform well.

But - there are literally dozens of yeasts out there to try out, even more so if you want to try your hand at brewing fruit wines. I consistently come back to Nottingham, EC-1118, and wild yeast - all with great and different results, imho.

Each yeast will have instructions on the pack, but the basic process is to rehydrate the dried yeast in luke-warm water and then just pour it into the cider. Some yeasts perform better when just being sprinkled on top of the cider, though, so make sure you read the fine print.

Many recipes and cider books recommend that you add sulphate dioxide (campden) to the juice to stun the wild yeast before adding commercial yeast, but in my experience this is completely unnecessary - commercial yeast is vastly more performant and will outcompete the wild strains almost immediately.

Adding stuff

There are many reasons why you might want to add something to a cider during fermentation; maybe you want to fix some flaw in the cider like a lack of tannins or acidity, maybe you want to add more sugar and create an apple wine, or maybe you're just looking to experiment.

Here are some interesting things to experiment with:

• Oak-chips add tannins and a sort of sweetness to a cider
• Hops add tannins and mouth feel to a cider
• Crab apple juice adds colour, fragrance, acid, and tannins to a cider

You can also simply buy and add powdered malic acid or wine tannins, but I like to use more "natural" ingredients - I guess I'm a bit romantic like that. But do what works for you. And don't limit yourself to my list above, go wild 😃

Some people also add yeast nutrient before fermentation - I've never done it, and I haven't noticed any adverse effects from not doing so. In fact, my fermentations are usually super active without nutrients, and I struggle more with slowing it down than speeding it up. Your mileage may vary, but I'd say

Racking

Racking is the process of transferring your fermenting liquid from one container to another, and in the process leaving behind sediment/lees and slowing fermentation down. I've never done this - in my experience, time will clear even the most cloudy of ciders, and I prefer to slow down fermentation by fermenting outside at a low temperature.

But if you have a lot of solids in your juice (I don't) it might be worth doing, or if you're back sweetening and need to mix in an additive before bottling without stirring up the lees.

The easiest way to rack is to use an auto-siphon and place the container you want to move the cider to at a lower level than the original fermentation vessel. Do a few pumps with the auto-siphon and gravity will take care of the rest - without oxygenating the liquid too much, which has an adverse effect on the quality.

Bottling the cider

At some point your cider stops bubbling, and at that point it is likely ready to bottle. I like to leave it in the fermentation vessel to mature for a few months, as it helps the cider clear up completely, but it's up to you what you want to do.

Another way to make the cider settle and clear before bottling is to cold crash it - which means you store it for 24 hours at refrigerator temperatures. Most of the suspended solids and yeast in the cider will sink to the bottom.

Before you bottle, draw a small sample of the finished cider and measure the final gravity (FG) using the hydrometer you used to calculate the original gravity (OG).

• If your FG is more than 1010, you might have a stuck fermentation and should be careful. If you bottle cider with a high sugar content left and the fermentation process starts again your bottles might explode - bad times all around
• If your FG is lower than 1010 you're probably ok and you should then calculate the alcohol percentage

You're now ready to bottle. The process is pretty simple, you either use the auto-siphon mentioned above or a tap on the fermentation vessel to fill bottles, add some sort of closing mechanism - cap, cork, whatever - and job's done.

But depending on what kind of cider you want out of it there are a few more steps.

Méthode traditionnelle

The méthode traditionelle is the method used to create sparkling wines like champagne, sekt, cava, and prosecco all over Europe and probably elsewhere.

When using this method, you ferment the cider to dryness - you've already done that - and then bottle it with a bit of sugar (tirage or priming sugar). The remaining yeast in the liquid will then turn the priming sugar into CO2, lovely bubbles, a process which is called the second fermentation.

How much sugar you want to add pr. litre as tirage depends on how sparkly you want the cider to be. I typically go for 10g/l - but you can use this useful calculator to figure out what you should add.

In Danish shops you can get sugar cubes which weigh exactly 2g/piece. I add 4 of those to a standard 750ml champagne bottle and it should give you something like 4 volumes CO2 - less than champagne, more than most beers.

You can stop at this point, if you're ok with the finished cider having some sediment at the bottom. I stop at this point and just store my ciders for 1-2 years before drinking.

But if you want to do it by the book...

After the second fermentation, you leave the cider to mature (in a wine cellar of course) for at least 15 months, after which you disgorge the bottles - a process where you:

• Place the bottles in special racks (pupitres)
• Slowly turn the bottles over a period of months to make the lees and yeast collect near the cap (remuage)
• Freeze the neck of the bottles, then open them so the yeast shoots out due to pressure (dégorgement)
• Add a little bit of still cider, sulphites, and sugar (dosage)
• Reseal the bottles with a more permanent cap or cork

If you're doing all of these steps you're doing the full methode traditionelle which is used by experts across the world. But it's a lot of work 😄

Pét-Nat

Short for pétillant naturel meaning 'naturally sparkly', this is a method where you bottle the cider a little bit before it is done fermenting. It will ferment to dryness in the bottle, becoming naturally sparkly. It requires you to measure how far along the fermentation process is, and also have some idea of how dry you can expect the cider to go.

This method is popular with low-intervention wine enthusiasts and will probably score you some points with them.

Still cider

You can also do still ciders - a style which is quite popular in the UK. The advantage of this method is that it's easy to create a sweet cider - you can add sulphitesto the wine to kill all yeast, wait 24 hours to let the sulphur dissipate, then back-sweeten with regular table sugar and bottle in wine bottles or whatever you have without worrying about bottle bombs.

Aging the cider

You can drink your cider at any point, but often they get better as they age:

• The fermentation process will eat all sugars and leave sharp citric and malic acids - when aged, they mellow out and some of them turn into lactic acids, which are milder and more pleasant
• At times, the fermentation process also produces some unpleasant aromas which smell like e.g. sulphur. They also often "age out" of the cider.
• Bottle conditioning also help a lot of very pleasant-smelling organic compounds - esters - become more pronounced as the cider ages

In my experience, almost all ciders should be aged for 12 months - and most will benefit from 24 months at a cool stable temperature.

Drinking the cider

So - it's finally time to enjoy your cider :) Well done! This part is easy!

Serve your cider chilled in a glass which suits the style you went for. Since my ciders are sparkling and dry, I typically go for a champagne-flute or coupé (for the fragrant ciders), but as long as you enjoy your cider you're golden.

Enjoy!

Appendix A: Equipment

This is a list of equipment which it is useful to own or borrow when you're making home made cider. It's divided into sections corresponding to the different steps of the process. I will expand this when I have time 😃

Picking apples
Refractometer - used to measure the sugar content of apples

Pressing apples
Apple crusher
Fruit press
or
Juicer

Fermentation
Hydrometer
Graduated cylinder
Fermentation vessel(s)
Airlock

Bottling
Auto-siphon + bottling wand
Bottles
Priming sugar
Corks
Musettes
Musette-tightener

Cleaning
You need to clean a LOT - so you should get some food-grade disinfectant like StarSan

Appendix B: Cider styles

Here are some traditional styles of cider to try out:

• English cider
• French cider
• Hopped ciders
• Cysers
• Asturian ciders