Hard Cider Made Easy

So first things first, find a friend with 7 mature apple trees and tell him you can turn them into alcohol. The apples, not the trees. Next, with your friends help, collect as many apples as you can and invite him over to learn how to make said alcohol. Making alcohol is always easier with an extra set of hands. And of course, drinking alcohol with a friend, while you work, raises moral.

We could have gotten more apples out of his trees but it was getting dark and this seemed like a lot. So many people have fruit trees and let the fruit drop every year. If you are one of those people, and you live in or near SW Ohio, let me know. We can work out a 'you give me fruit, I give you alcohol' kinda deal.

My friend Mike, you know the guy with the apples, also owns a semi-industrial juicer. In the olden days you would need to press apples in a huge, heavy apple press. Even though we had the advantage of an electric juicer, it still took us a few hours to process all of the apples. Not sure if the multiple greyhounds had anything to do with that.

We filled my aluminum brew kettle up twice. That is a lot of apple juice! Mike saved the pulp for his chickens. I am sure they are happy about that.

Doesn't this look delicious? We didn't run the juice though a sieve or filter so a lot of the pulp and particulates got into the brew kettle. Not a big deal and much easier this way.

I think Mike convinced himself (I had nothing to do with it, I swear), that he needs one of these 210,000 BTU propane burners. I think you may need some convincing. You need a 210,000 BTU propane burner! Don't buy one of the cheap turkey fryer ones. You are going to have a lot of weight sitting on it and it needs to be sturdy. Plus this doubles as a turkey fryer! There is a link in the side bar if you want to know more details about this burner.

Right, I was suppose to tell you how to make hard cider. It is simple really:

• Juice a bunch of apples.
• Heat the juice to 160 degrees and hold it at that temp for 8 minutes. 
• Cool the juice down fast, I have a wort chiller but you can use an ice bath around the kettle.
• Transfer the juice to a carboy.
• Add yeast nutrient to the carboy.
• Add yeast to the carboy.
• Put on an airlock.
• Wait 2-3 weeks.

You can also make hard cider without heating the apple juice. I have not done this but it seems most people do it this way. Side note: I don't think one of my blog posts have been unamended after reddit gives their 3 scents. Seriously reddit always gives me great feedback or some meaningful suggestions. Thanks!

So you want to make cider without heating the juice? There are two schools of thought.

School number one:

• Juice a bunch of apples.
• Transfer juice to a carboy.
• Add yeast nutrient to the carboy.
• Add yeast to the carboy.
• Put on an airlock.
• Wait 2-3 weeks.

School number two:

• Juice a bunch of apples.
• Transfer juice to a carboy.
• Add campden tablets to juice.
• Wait 24-28 hours.
• Add yeast nutrient to the carboy.
• Add yeast to the carboy.
• Put on an airlock.
• Wait 2-3 weeks.

I have only done the pasteurization method, but it seems the majority of people I have talked to use either campden tabs, or are the more adventurous types, and just pitch yeast after they juice.

You want to place your carboys in a temperature stable area. I always ferment alcohol in my laundry room. There are a few thousand worms living in that bin behind the carboys. If your worms are happy, your yeast will be happy. If you don't have a bin with thousands of worms in your house, you are doing it wrong.

Our elusive feline Guenhwyvar (Guen for short), approves of her masters alcohol endeavors.

The white sediment on the very bottom is the yeast cake. There are trillions of yeast just laying around after a three day bender. The bread looking stuff on top of the yeast is apple pulp.This is the primary fermentation.You leave most of this stuff behind when you "rack" or transfer the alcohol to the secondary fermentation.

Our other cat Err apparently does not care for my alcohol operation. I am racking the primary into the secondary here. It is good to have a ton of carboys laying around. The more you have, the more you can brew!

You can see a small amount of yeast left on the bottom after the secondary fermentation.










Here I am racking the secondary into the bottling bucket. The brown one gallon carboy is an experiment Dara is doing. She put a bunch of shredded ginger into the carboy before fermentation. We will see how it turned out soon.

Here is Mike racking one of the smaller batches into the bottling bucket. We decided to mix this carboy with the cider from the carboy on the left. This gave us about 5 gallons in the bucket.

You have to be careful when you get close to the yeast cake on the bottom. The device I am using is an auto-siphon. This will suck up any liquid so when you get to the bottom you need to be careful not to let too much yeast get into the bucket.

Once you get your cider in the bucket you need to "prime" it if you want carbonated cider, which we did. You need to put some form of sugar in at this point. We used priming sugar at a ratio of 1 ounce by weight priming sugar to every gallon of cider you have. The yeast will wake up and eat this sugar, making a tiny bit more alcohol, and as a by product, CO2. With the bottles capped, the CO2 will build up and slowly carbonate the cider. This takes anywhere from 3-5 weeks. You need to be careful not to over prime your bottles. They can explode if you give the yeast to much sugar. It is one thing to get woken up in the middle of the night to exploding bottles, it is much worse to go to open a bottle and have it explode in your hand. Be careful and know your ratio.

I use a no rinse sanitizer called Star San. This stuff is great because you do not have to rinse the bottle out after you sanitize it. For all you hippies out there screaming chemicals are bad, just remember you are drinking them in every beer you have ever drank in your entire life. So either make your own beer without sanitizers, which will get infected and taste like band-aids, or just go on with your life and enjoy a good beer. Seriously though, I couldn't do a better job talking about no rinse sanitizers than the guy who invented Star San. Here is a great podcast on the subject. It is an interview with Charlie Talley, the inventor of Star San. If you want to get into brewing, I highly recommend the podcast Basic Brewing, which has been around since 2005. It is actually one of the first podcasts I ever listened to, it is really well done and a great resource. 

Here are the bottles Mike and I went to all the trouble of drinking so we could fill them with, well... more alcohol. Make sure they are not twist off and that you rinsed them out very well before you store them. I bought a 12 pack of 22 ounce bottles from the brew store for mike and I to split.

So here is my haul! Mike has the other half. Not bad for a couple guys standing around, cutting up apples, and drinking alcohol.

All Grain Brewing

I have officially upgraded my brewery. That black burner puts out over 210,000 BTU's! A small upgrade from the old gas stove...

So here is the new set up. My three tier system now consist of ladders, saw horses and the ground. 180 degree water flows out of the bucket on the top level to the mash tun (pictured below full of grains) then the wort (sugar water) flows out of the mash tun into a collection pot (two pictures down).  

The 180 degree water goes into this apparatus called a sparge arm. It sprinkles the water into the mash tun so it does not disturb the grain bed.  

When the water makes it all the way through the mash tun it flows into this collection pot. This process is called the "sparge". During the sparge you slowly let the wort out of the mash tun until you get a clear stream without debris. 

You then put all the wort into this large aluminum brew kettle. We usually get about 6 1/2 - 7 gallons of wort. 

This is Master Brewer and friend Nissen checking the specific gravity of the wort before the boil. In this application specific gravity is a measure of sugar suspended in solution. 

Now its time to put this awesome burner to the test. It use to take us over an hour to bring the wort to boil. With the new burner I believe we had a rolling boil in 25 minutes!

It is very important to cool the wort down to around 75 degrees from boiling as fast as you can. Those two copper tubes sticking out of the kettle are part of a heat exchanger called a wort chiller. It is pictured in the second image. Cold water goes in from a hose and hot water flows out into the bucket next to the kettle.

Once the wort is cooled down it is "racked" (transfered) to a "carboy" (large glass fermentation vessel) using an auto-siphon. After the carboy is filled you need to aerate the wort. We use a large plastic spoon handle to mix air into the wort. Once it is properly aerated we inoculate the wort with our yeast culture and put an airlock on the carboy. It is then stored in a cool dark place for three weeks. I racked this particular beer straight into a keg and was drinking it before it was a month old!