The Everything Hard Cider Book: All you need to know about making hard cider at home

Introduction

CIDER IS A BEVERAGE of long world standing that has sadly—in all but the most purist circles—fallen on hard times. Cider was so central and important that laws dictated that American settlers plant apple orchards. But this once-proud tradition faded in the face of a growing population, industry needs, and a shift of palates to beers produced by and for a new wave of immigrants.

Even in the United Kingdom, traditional homeland of hard core cider drinkers, cider has fallen on hard times. Gone are the complex, flavorful products produced by hand by cidermakers closely connected to the orchard where the apples grow. Instead most things labeled as cider are mass-produced sweet alcoholic sodas with a vague thought of things appley.

Put simply, real cider is a traditional form of fruit wine, albeit one made with apples and/or pears (perry). It can be anywhere from desert-dry to dessert-sweet. The carbonation ranges from nonexistent to gushing, like champagne. It may taste clean and simple or challenge your taste buds with acidity and an intense, ancient, and wild character.

So why cider now? Look at American culture over the past sixty years. The 1950s saw the great blandification of American tastes. Food became an industrialized commodity with a focus on convenience rather than taste. Periodically, little pockets of rebellion would kick up. The ’60s and ’70s saw the rise of the American wine industry. In the ’80s and ’90s, the first craft breweries began from the fevered experiments of homebrewers. As the country hit the turn of the millennium, real cooking became cool again.

The new craft beer and food movements gave rise to an revitalization of the local and traditional. Call it locavorism, if you must, but people have discovered the power of knowing where something is made and who made it. With that, cider is finally seeing its long-predicted renewal as a bright member of the American drinks squad. Serious money and talent is beginning to focus on the apple. Old-school craft brewers are eyeing the field and bring products to market. Farmers are happily following right along since they finally have a market that needs decent and odd apples for a good price.

Another compounding reason for cider’s growth is the rise in the interest of low-gluten diets. Low- or no-gluten diets are a response to the increased diagnosis of gluten intolerance like celiac disease. Unfortunately for sufferers, gluten is a combination of two very common proteins, gliadin and glutenin. Together they form gluten, a tough webby mesh that gives things like bread its chew.

Sadly, this means beer is out if you are gluten intolerant. Sure you can drink wine, but sometimes you want to relax with something bubbly and low-key like beer. You’ll notice that cider is being heavily promoted as gluten-free and why not? Cider tastes awesome while gluten-free beer, despite everyone’s best efforts, still tastes pretty blah.

No matter the reason you want to explore cider—be it dietary, historical, or just the want for a different taste—there’s a way to enjoy and appreciate the gift of the apple tree. It starts in your home. It requires just a few tools, a few ingredients, and a little patience. Put those together and you’re on your way to enjoy a great tradition!

CHAPTER 1

A Cider Primer

Cider played an important part in American history, and in many ways it was the country’s original drink. Unfortunately, the forces of Prohibition and industrialization conspired to reduce cider from its proud, noble perch to a sad, neglected state. But just as wine and beer enjoyed their own revivals, people who are interested in flavor, tradition, and craft are now rescuing cider.

Cider Apples Versus Culinary Apples

As you read about cider, you’ll notice a fair amount of discussion centering on culinary versus cider apples. What does this mean? Culinary apples are the eating or baking apples that you encounter in your supermarket produce section. Think your everyday Red Delicious, Golden Delicious, Fuji, or Granny Smith apples. These apples, even the tart Granny Smith, all contain a high amount of sugar with a restrained bitterness and acid level.

Cider apples used to be the dominant form of apple. The average orchard focused on these mean little hard globes. If you were to grab a traditional cider apple, like a Winesap or a Cox Pippin, and take a bite, you’d be floored by the flood of sharp and bitter flavors.

Instead of a wave of sugary sweetness, the juice is heavily acidic like a Granny Smith. The juice also carries an astringency that, to our modern tastes, rings alarm bells. A good comparison to this level of puckering is the taste of medicine, like aspirin, left on the tongue too long. Ironically, cider apples tend to be as sugar filled, if not more so, than culinary apples; you just can’t taste it due to the other sensations.

You may think it strange that for most of history these unpalatable little buggers have been cherished, fostered, and shepherded around the world. The reason should be obvious, given that you are reading a hard cider book! When the juice is extracted and mixed with yeast (naturally occurring or introduced by the cider maker), the previously harsh characters change and begin to meld into a beverage of great character.

Most cider books will now stop and say, Don’t make cider with culinary apples. They can only make bland, insipid, boring cider. Use real cider apples! This is sound advice; cider apples do make better cider. The problem for most cider makers is the impracticality of procuring enough true cider apples without growing your own. Thankfully, there are a few tricks that you can use to transform bland culinary apple juice into a great-tasting cider.

Cider—Magic Apple Saver

Food spoilage has always been a big problem for humanity. To combat this, mankind developed a number of techniques, including pickling, salting, drying, preserving, and fermenting.

Picture a bag of apples. You store them somewhere cool, maybe your fridge. For a few weeks your apples are just fine—crisp, juicy, sweet. But slowly, imperceptively at first, the apples lose their crispness. Softness creeps in. The flesh turns mealy. Then faster, brown bruised spots that taste sickly sweet and just a little funky begin to appear. The apple withers and shrinks, the once-taut skin becoming wrinkly and rubbery.

Today, this is a cause for grumbling and a trip to the store to buy some more apples. Back in the day, it could spell disaster for you and your family. Even in the coolness of a proper root cellar, apples will only last for a few months.

The phrase bottom of the barrel has multiple origin stories attached to it, one of which relates to the notion that the apples at the bottom of the barrel were the least desirable due to age and bruising from the weight of the apples above.

People turned, as they always do, to the mystical art of fermentation. Why make booze out of something semiedible? You have to remember that fermentation is a natural part of the rotting process. But clever people realized that if they controlled the ferment, they could prevent the ruinous decay and get a bonus buzz out of it. The relaxing hit was a pleasant side effect, and it was a way to preserve calories and nutrition while providing something safe to drink.

While a barrel of apples may last for a few months, a barrel of cider remains consumable for a year. If the cider begins to spoil, you have vinegar, a wonderfully useful substance. Overall, that is a much better fate than a pile of rotten goo.

Think about it this way: Every major alcoholic beverage started life as a foodstuff that needed saving. Barley becomes beer, grapes become wine, corn becomes whiskey, and rice becomes sake.

Making Cider—A General View

To make cider, first you must find a source of apples, preferably cider apple varieties. You then grind (scrat) the apples into a coarse pulp.

The pulp is gathered into loose sieve bags (also known and sold as jelly strainer bags or cheeses). In days of old, the pulp was stacked in layers of straw and wooden platforms. The bags are then placed in a press and allowed to drain and filter through a sieve. As the free run juice stops flowing, the press is slowly cranked down until every last drop is extracted. This collected juice is called must. The remaining fruit sludge is referred to as pomace.

It takes about 36 apples to make 1 gallon of apple juice and, after fermentation, cider. This is another reason people loved cider. It takes up much less room!

The juice is placed in a fermenter, typically a bucket. Yeast is introduced, or the cider maker depends on the natural yeast carried in the apples from the orchard, to start fermentation. After a period of fermentation (2 weeks), the now-alcoholic cider is transferred, aged, bottled, and allowed to mature for a month or more before it’s ready to drink.

In this book, you’ll explore some of the gathering, grinding, and pressing steps, but most of the focus will center on selecting juice, fermentation, bottling, and drinking.

Cider in the United Kingdom

It would be fair to say that no countries on Earth are as closely identified with cider as Great Britain and Ireland. In part, this is because most of the canned and bottled cider found on shelves today are made or distributed by a British (H. P. Bulmer) or Irish (C&C Group) company. These two companies control a majority of the world’s cider manufacture.

The first written evidence of cider in the United Kingdom comes from Norfolk, England, in A.D. 1204, as a record of payment. Farms would continue to use cider as payment for workers until the late 1800s, when the British parliament stopped the practice. Everywhere the apple grew, cider became popular. In Britain, the traditional cider lands are the rural counties that make up the West Country and the areas of Kent and East Anglia. In other words, the whole southern coast of England was engaged in growing apples and turning them to drink. The ciders varied regionally based on the types of apples that grew best in the various locales.

Beyond the farm, British pub culture embraced cider. Like the beer of the time, the ciders were served from casks and either pumped into the glass or poured from the barrel directly. The cider was served at cellar temperature, which is around 50°F–55°F; not warm, but definitely not the ice-cold 32°F–38°F preferred by modern lager drinkers.

Cider’s current reputation in the United Kingdom is in need of serious rehab. Long gone are the romantic visions of farmers ladling fresh cider from wooden barrels in the barn. Today, cider is something largely produced on the cheap, designed to hug the tax guidelines to pay minimal tax for maximal alcohol.

Hope is rising, though, as people long for a return to authentic, quality cider. The Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) is one of the groups leading the way. It is a special and rare treat to walk up to their Real Cider and Perry bar at the annual Great British Beer Festival (and at other festivals) and taste 100 percent artisanal, traditional cider.

Cider in America

When the first Europeans landed in the Americas, they were desperate for a drink. There’s a passage in a Pilgrim’s diary of the Mayflower’s voyage describing how the boat was forced to seek landfall because the beer supplies were running low. But when the Pilgrims hit the shore in 1620, all they found were native species of crab apples. Crab apples are a great spice to add to a cider, but you rarely want to make a fermented beverage wholly from them.

It was a few years later that subsequent waves of immigration finally brought the European apple to Boston. In short order, the first truly American varietals appeared, namely the Roxbury Russet, named for the former town-turned-city of Boston.

Given the rough-and-tumble nature of the American frontier, and the lack of resources available to most colonists, early apple-growing processes revolved around the planting of apple seeds and not grafted apple branches (scions) as are used today. This encouraged a wild flush of genetic diversity, and hundreds of new varieties appeared that were suited to the soils and weather of the Americas. Each subsequent wave of immigration brought new apple varieties and new cider styles to explore.

Just how popular was cider? Just prior to the American Revolution, everyone was drinking cider. It was plentiful, cheap, and more reliable than the local beer. Ironic, since the opposite was true in England. On average, more than 30 gallons were being made per year for each person in the colonies.

Booze used to play a huge role in American politics with candidates openly offering drinks in exchange for votes. Then as now, image mattered. Today you might see a presidential candidate drinking a tall glass of beer to convince everyone he is the kind of person you’d like to share a beer with. In 1840, William Henry Harrison used hard cider (and a log cabin) to convince voters that he was one of them and not born of a rich Virginia family.

What happened to cider? A few things occurred that, when combined, reduced the popularity and availability of hard cider as America’s drink of choice. The first was the titanic population shift from the farm to the city. Take this population movement and factor in waves of beer-loving immigrants (Germans, Austrians, Poles, etc.) and the rise of big breweries that could serve an urban crowd, and it’s no wonder that cider began to fall by the wayside. Like in the United Kingdom, the American cider industry couldn’t make the transition with the drinkers. Almost everyone who made cider still made it right on their farms for neighbors.

Since reliable sanitation or true pasteurization had yet to be discovered by this time (1840s–1850s), cider had to remain a steadfastly local trade. Shipping cider for any real distance meant a real possibility of a stale or sour glass being poured for a customer more than twenty miles away. In rural times, this was as far as you were likely to ever travel in your life. Like their counterparts in the United Kingdom, cider makers pushed the strength of their alcohol higher and higher with sugar to help their ciders survive the transport. It became a cheap means to get intoxicated.

Thomas Jefferson, that pen-wielding Founding Father, loved cider and had gathered at Monticello a panoply of apples, cider, and cider-making equipment.

Prohibition’s Effects on Cider

Ultimately, the now supremely boozy reputation of cider put it straight into the firing line of Prohibitionists, who used restricting cider’s alcoholic content as an early test for their efforts to ban all alcohol. In fact, it was the temperance movement that transformed the American and Canadian use of the word cider to include unfiltered sweet juice in an effort to change drinking habits.

As Prohibition loomed, thousands and thousands of apple trees were destroyed in an attempt to hamper cider making. This was the major death blow for hard cider as a common drink, and it led to the nearly total destruction of the once-startling variety of American apples.

After that point, apple growers focused on a few simple, marketable varieties that could be easily cloned, were hardy, stored well, looked pretty, and tasted sweet. Thanks to refrigeration technology, apples for eating were available to Americans year-round for the first time.

Who was Johnny Appleseed?

Johnny Appleseed, born Jonathan Chapman, was born in 1774, in Leominster, Massachusetts. At the age of eighteen, he and his younger brother, Nathaniel, set out for America’s wild frontier. Chapman learned the craft of apple growing and his nurseries provided valuable tree stock for newly arriving settlers. Sold for a few cents a plant, the trees allowed settlers to establish a firm claim to their new lands. The varieties that he planted were wild, not like today’s popular hand-eating strains. They were funky, earthy, sharp apples perfectly suited for cider making. Today, one lone survivor of Chapman’s planting efforts can be found on a farm in Nova, Ohio.

Today, growers are paying a price for the apple monoculture fostered during Prohibition. Apple trees became genetically stagnant, and new diseases have evolved that, unchecked by massive chemical spraying, can tear through a modern apple orchard in no time at all.

Fortunately, a lone Soviet botanist who survived Stalin’s purges, and who knew of the origin of the apple in Kazakhstan, caught the attention of American scientists. He showed them the wild groves of Almaty, a city known for its apples. Cuttings and seedlings have been transferred to government research orchards in the United States where they have been studied and bred to find new varieties that meet modern needs.

American Cider Today

Thanks to the growth and interest in artisanal products like bread, cheese, wine, and beer, cider finally seems to be back on the road to becoming a great American tradition.

Remember, the combined effect of Prohibition and agricultural disasters wiped out a good portion of America’s cider apple orchards. People’s changing drinking habits nearly finished the job as most orchards turned to popular eating apples to survive. However when most orchards around the world produce Red Delicious apples, the price falls precipitously.

The financial pressure of cheap culinary apples has given incentive to orchard growers to explore thousands of lost heirloom varieties. Growers have reported that the prices they can fetch for quality cider apples are many times that of the regular supermarket apple. These pioneers have also been responsible for producing the first wave of craft ciders, effectively recovering the lost art and teaching others about quality cider.

Others are finally noticing and getting into the game, and new cideries are opening seemingly every month. John Hall, the founder of Goose Island Brewing, is taking the proceeds of the brewery’s sale to Anheuser-Busch InBev and is working with a new cider group in Illinois. Vermont Cider Company, makers of the Woodchuck brand, controls 50 percent of America’s cider market but were just bought by the Irish C&C Group. Boston Beer Company, brewers of Sam Adams, launched a cider brand—Angry Orchard. Miller has acquired two cider makers—Crispin and Fox Barrel—to make and sell cider for the company. Even Anheuser-Busch has gotten into the mix with a light cider released under their Michelob Ultra brand. Not surprisingly, some of these brands are better than others.

If you haven’t yet raced to your local good spirits emporium to try what ciders are available to you, then there’s been no better time to do it than now!

CHAPTER 2

Your First Batch

Now that you’ve got a basic background in cider and apples, it’s time to make your first cider! This chapter contains the basic foundation, not just for cider making, but also for all sorts of fermentations—beer, wine, mead, sake, etc. Consider this your fermentation primer. Pay close attention and later you’ll see just how easy it is to expand your skills. In a short 4–6 weeks, you’ll be enjoying your first homemade cider!

What to Expect

The earliest fermentations happened completely by accident. There were no careful controls, no efforts at sanitation or understanding of contamination. One day, someone discovered that their apples had gone bad in a particularly interesting way. So in that same vein, your job right now is to not stress and overcomplicate your cider’s life but rather to pursue simplicity. The basic steps of cider making are these:

THE CIDER-MAKING CHECKLIST

Produce (or buy) your juice

Add sulfite to your juice

Wait 24 hours (optional—don’t worry about this until later)

Clean and sanitize your fermenters

Ferment the juice for 2–3 weeks (Congrats, it’s officially cider!)

Rack (gently transfer) the cider

Clarify for 2–3 weeks

Package (bottle) the cider

Chill the cider

Drink!

Executing all of these steps may take as long 2–6 months, but the total active time commitment can be measured in a handful of hours. Most of your time as a cider maker is spent letting the juice and yeast work their quiet magic. For the first few days, you’ll want to check on the cider daily to track the most active part of the ferment, but that will only be a few minutes per day at most.

The longest time you’ll actively spend with your cider is when it comes time to bottle it. If you’re making a few gallons, you can expect to spend a couple of hours sanitizing bottles, preparing and transferring the cider, and then getting it sealed into the bottles. There are steps you can take to minimize that time, but that will be discussed in later chapters.

For now, just know that each batch of cider will demand around 4 total hours of your time. Surprisingly, as your batch size grows, the time doesn’t multiply. Instead of 4 hours for 1 gallon of cider, 5 gallons will probably only require 5 hours of time (mostly for sanitizing and filling the extra bottles). Take that into consideration as you start thinking about how much cider you want to make!

What You Need for Your First Batch

Your first task as a cider maker will be to gather up your ingredients and your basic equipment. This first batch is simple and designed to make a little less than a gallon of cider that will be ready to drink in 6 weeks. Don’t be surprised if on your first taste you find the cider a little bland. You’ll learn later how to take even the dullest cider and make it sing.

For your first batch you will need:

1-gallon glass jug (two if you want a sparkling cider)

4' clear, food-grade polyvinyl tubing ³⁄8" in diameter

1 gallon fresh, raw, sweet apple cider (preferably from an orchard or a good brand like Trader Joe’s Current Crop Gravenstein Apple Juice)

1 packet dry beer or ale yeast (not bread yeast!)

¹⁄2 teaspoon yeast nutrient (optional)

Bleach

Aluminum foil

4 (1-liter) soda or sparkling-water bottles with caps

Most of these items can be found at your local grocery store. The jugs, tubing, yeast, and yeast nutrient can be found at your local home-brewing shop or at numerous online retailers. The tubing can be found either at the homebrew store or the hardware store. See Appendix B for more sources.

Can I use a plastic jug for fermentation?

You’ve no doubt noticed that apple juice tends to come in plastic bottles. Can you make your cider in those same jugs? You’ll probably be safe for one batch, but don’t trust them beyond that since the plastic in those bottles isn’t intended to hold up to the stress of repeated use. In addition, unless the bottle held something sparkling previously, don’t use it for bottling!

If you have a friend who brews or makes wine, consider asking him to get involved with your first batch. If he hasn’t experimented with cider before, he will probably be grateful for the opportunity to exercise his skills.

Juice

Your primary concern as a cider maker is finding the best juice possible. No matter how skilled you become, the initial quality of your juice drives the ultimate character of your cider. Getting great apple juice involves more than popping off to the supermarket. Fortunately, in this day of artisanal tastes and interest in eating locally produced food, you have many more options than before.

What do you need to look for? Your ideal juice will be sweet but not cloying. It should taste bright and zippy but not sour, and finally earthy and just a touch astringent. The typical American sweet juice probably won’t hit all of these notes, but there are ways to adjust your raw juice.

The best juices are the least processed—cloudy, cold, and raw. It sounds odd since modern society is obsessed with clarity, but the more cloudy the juice, the more interesting the cider. Why? Unfiltered juice has at least one fewer step involved in it, and all those proteins and other unfiltered elements can have a flavorful impact on your cider.

Read your labels closely! If the juice you’re looking at has potassium sorbate or sodium benzoate in it, skip it. Both will prevent a successful ferment and make you a sad cider maker. Remember, the fewer ingredients in your cider, the better!

So where should you go to find your juice? Here are a few options:

Orchards. Honest-to-goodness apple orchards are by far