Last Updated on Sunday, 4 April 2010 06:32 Written by admin Monday, 25 January 2010 10:45

Hard cider is one of those drinks that’s sort of on the fringe. It’s not beer, not wine, and doesn’t fit neatly into any larger category. That said, hard cider is still one of the most popular drinks for homebrewers. The following recipe for hard cider (also called Apple Wine or apfelwein) will make a 5 gallon batch and will cost you about 20 dollars. In the grand scheme of things, that’s pretty cheap. I mean, that’s what it costs to buy two cases of store bought hard cider and it considerably cheaper than a 5 gallon batch of beer. Without further ado, here is my Hard Cider Homebrew Recipe…

Step I – Assemble your equipment

If you’ve brewed beer before, you probably won’t need any other equipment. If this if your first brewing experience, you will need to buy some specialized equipment. If you don’t know where to get this, you can check our database of homebrew supply stores to find one if your area. Here is what you will need.

1. 5 gallon carboy – A carboy is a large glass container with a narrow opening that will be used for fermenting your hard cider.

2. Funnel – The best funnels to get are the ones from a homebrew supply store that have ridges on the outside which will allow airflow around the base of the funnel. If you want to use a regular funnel, you will need to hold it slightly above the mouth of the carboy to induce airflow.

3. 1 hole stopper (bung) – You’ll need to get one that is the right size for your carboy. Most carboys are sized so that a 6.5 will work but you may want to check just to make sure.

4.  Airlock – Either a 3 piece or S-Bubble airlock will work fine.

5. Measuring cup – You probably already have one of these, any type will work just fine.

Step 2 – Assemble your ingredients

1.  5 gallons apple juice – Go to the store and get the cheapest apple juice you can buy but MAKE SURE THAT IT DOESN’T CONTAIN POTASSIUM SORBATE!!!  The juice that you buy should only contain apples and water.  If it contains ascorbic acid, that is OK too.  If you choose apple juice with potassium sorbate, it will kill the yeast and will not ferment.

2.  2 pounds Dextrose (corn sugar) – You can get this at a homebrew supplier in 5 pound bags.  If you want, you can use table sugar but corn sugar will tend to ferment cleaner than table sugar.  If you want, you can try half corn sugar and half table sugar.

3.  1 packet of champagne yeast or wine yeast – Get this from a homebrew supplier.  A packet usually only costs about $1.50.  The problem is that if you order one online, shipping costs are often more than the cost of the packet itself.  I would recommend Red Star Montrachet Wine Yeast, Red Star Premier Curvee yeast, or Red Star Pasteur Champagne.

Step 3 – Sanitize your Equipment

Bacteria can cause off flavors and can completely ruin an otherwise good batch of hard cider.  I use either Starsan (which is a “no rinse” sanitizer and is available from your homebrew supply store.  In a pinch, you can use bleach to sanitize your homebrew equipment.  Add 1 tablespoon of bleach to a gallon of water and RINSE VERY WELL!!!!  It’s a good idea to keep a 5 gallon bucket of sanitizing solution ready while you’re brewing.  Keep your equipment soaking in this solution until you’re ready to use it.

Step 4 – It’s time to make the hard cider

Make sure to sanitize all of your equipment (althogh you probably already did that).

1.  Measure 1 cup of corn sugar into a ziplock bag or tupperware and set it aside.  You’ll use it later.

2.  Open a one gallon bottle of apple juice.  Use the funnel and pour half of it into the carboy.

3.  Measure out two cups of corn sugar.  Using the funnel, pour the two cups of corn sugar into the now half full bottle of apple juice.  Shake the bottle well.

4.  Repeat steps 2 and 3 with a second bottle of apple juice.  Then move on to step 5.

5.  Pour the corn sugar and apple juice mixture from the two bottles into the carboy using the funnel.

6.  Add all but 1 quart of the remaining 3 gallons of apple juice to the carboy.

7.  Pour the packet of yeast into the opening of the carboy.

8.  Pour the final quart of apple juice into the carboy being sure to wash all the yeast particles into the carboy.  You may have to wait for the foam to die down and be patient as you fill up the carboy because you will almost completely fill it up.  You can fill the carboy almost all the way up, leaving about two inches or so of air on the top.

9.  Put the stopper, bung, or carboy cap on the carboy, fit the airlock into the stopper, and fill your airlock with water.

Step 5 – Fermentation

Leave the carboy in a dark place like a closet at about 70 degrees for 3 weeks.  The mixture will get cloudy and bubbles will start to rise to the surface.  This is the process of fermentation.  The yeast that you sprinkled into the juice is reproducing and is “feeding” on the sugar in the juice and turning it into alcohol.  It’s pretty exciting!

Eventually you will get a layer of yeast forming on the bottom of the carboy.  Don’t worry, this is the normal course of events.  Once the juice clears and the bubbling stops, the cider is done fermenting.  Leave it for another week to make sure that all of the fermentation is completed.  The last thing you want to do is bottle the cider before the fermentation is done.  That’s that cause of bursting bottles and lots of mess!

Step 6 – Bottle

It’s about time to bottle your hard cider.  Hopefully you still have that cup of corn sugar from when you originally made the cider.  That sugar will be used to create a small second fermentation with some of the residual yeast which will create the carbon dioxide in the hard cider and will create carbonation.

For bottling your hard cider, you’ll need the following …

1.  A pan to boil the sugar in and some water

2.  A second 5 gallon container which can be either another carboy or a bottling bucket.  If you use a bottling bucket, MAKE SURE IT IS A FOOD GRADE CONTAINER.  That’s important.

3.  A 3/8″ hose, racking cane, bottling wand, and bottle capper.  All of these things can be found at your local homebrew shop or online.

4.  55 new and unused bottle caps.  (You can’t reuse bottle caps, there is no way to attach used caps to the bottles).

5.  The sugar

6.  Sanitizer

7.  Funnel

8.  55 clean and sanitized bottles

9.  A bottle brush for cleaning your bottles

Step 7 – Getting Ready to Bottle

Start by cleaning sanitizing your bottles.  Soak them to get the labels off and scrub out the insides with the bottle brush.  You’ll want to use One-Step sanitizer to make sure they’re sanitized.  Second, boil 1 cup of sugar in 2 pints of water for 10 minutes.  Sanitize your 55 bottle caps in a solution of One-Step sanitizer (you can start these soaking right away if you want).  Sanitize your bottling bucket and funnel.  If you’re using a second carboy, sanitize that.  Sanitize your all the rest of your equipment to include the bottling wand, racking cane, and hose.

Pour the boiled sugar water into the carboy or bottling bucket.  If you’re using a carboy, use that funnel to pour the sugar water in.

Step 8 – Siphon the Cider

Now, you will siphon the cider from the carboy to the bottling bucket (or second carboy).

1.  Put the carboy on a countertop.

2.  Put the racking cane (with the tip on it) into the full carboy.

3.  Fill the hose with clean water and hold your thumb over both ends.

4.  Place the cooled saucepan on the floor next to the carboy or bottling bucket.

5.  Attach one end of the host to the racking cane.

6.  Keeping your thumb over the open end of the hose, lower it to the saucepan.

This is the exciting part when the siphon starts and the water starts flowing followed by the cider.  Once the cider starts to flow (after the water has all flowed out) put your thumb back over the hose and then put it into the bottling bucket or carboy.  Allow it to siphon carefully.  This will mix the sugar and the cider.  Once the siphon is finished, take the racking cane out of the now-empty carboy, remove the tip, and place the cane into the full container.

Step 9 – Bottling

Now it’s time to bottle.  Lift the full bottling bucket/carboy up to the countertop. Arrange your bottles nearby, open ends up!  Repeat the siphoning process, except this time, attach the bottling wand to the end of the siphon hose. The bottling wand can turn the flow on and off, and therefore help you fill the bottles.  After you’ve got the siphon started, just go ahead and fill all the bottles, leaving about 1″ of clear space at the top.

NOTE: if there’s a big air bubble in the siphon hose, just tap it until the bubble comes down the line and out. If you loose the siphon, just start again.

Step 10 – Capping

To cap your hard cider bottles, you’ll definitely need a capper.  The capper is more or less self explainatory to figure out once you have one even but it’s very difficult to explain in words how to use.  For that reason, I’ll leave the figuring out of the bottle capper to you.

Step 11 – Aging

Mostly, you need to leave the cider alone for a week or two, to let the bottling sugar do it’s work and carbonate the cider.  In this time, the yeast that was roused up through the bottling process will also fall to the bottom of the bottles.  Letting cider age for 6 months or more will improve it’s taste, but it’ll be good even after a week or two.  Let it age for at least 2 weeks at room temp. Colder temps will stop the fermentation and you won’t get carbonation.

Step 12 – Drinking

Don’t drink too much – cider can sneak up on you! Don’t say I didn’t warn you.  When you drink the cider, pour it carefully into a glass. Leave about 1/2″ behind in the bottle, so you don’t pour yeast into the glass.  Nothing wrong w/the yeast, it just makes the cider cloudy and changes the flavor a bit. it’s actually really good for you – full of B vitamins.

ENJOY!

Last Updated on Sunday, 4 April 2010 06:32 Written by admin Sunday, 17 January 2010 08:53

A brilliantly clear wine is more appealling than a cloudy or hazy one. The cloudy or hazy wine may taste fine, but it does not look finished. This is why virtually all commercial wines are filtered. Sterile filtration is the ultimate act of clarifying a wine, leaving it sparkling clear,and pleasing to look at and virtually incapable of refermenting.

Filtration removes yeast, bacteria, and grape or fruit debris from the wine. This not only renders the wine instantly clear , it also makes the wine more stable because yeast or bacteria that could feed off residual sugar have been removed. As a result, the amount of SO2 and other chemical preservatives can be reduced.

There is another side to filtering a wine. As wine ages, certain flavor compounds combine and settle out and leave a sediment. This process smoothes the wine’s flavor and “bite” and is a desirable thing. Filtration removes these compounds right away, long before they can ever become sediment, but filtering can also remove compounds that give subtle and complex flavors to the wine. Thus, there is a trade-off.

Because filtration removes the small particles in the wine, if there are too many such particles the filter will clog and cease working. Very young or very cloudy wines will clog a filter too quickly to clear much of the wine. A clogged filter surface stops the flow of wine and can shorten the life of a powered pump filter. Therefore, you should only filter a wine that is almost clear already. It should have been racked at least twice, fined and racked again.

In fact, filtering is literally the last thing you should do to your wine before you bottle it. If you are going to cold stabilize your wine, do it before filtering. If you are going to bulk age it, do that before filtering it. Indeed, you should even add your crushed Campden and potassium sorbate (or sodium benzolate) to the wine before filtering. The Campden is especially important as filtering introduces a certain amount of oxygen into the wine. Because sulfites are antioxidants, their presence during filtration protects the wine from oxidation. You should have at least 50 ppm of sulfite (one crushed Campden tablet per gallon) before filtering.

There are basically three filtration systems. By far the cheapest type is a gravity flow filter. A filter body, containing a filter pad, is connected to the lower end of a siphon tube and the siphoning action pushes the wine through the filter. Wine leaving the filter flows directly into bottles. While inexpensive, this type of system is slow in the beginning and becomes slower still as the filter pads collect dead yeast and other particles from the wine. The second type is a hand pumped filtration system. A hand pump is used to push the wine through the tubing to the filter unit. This is faster than the first type requires two people to operate–one to steady and pump the unit and the other to switch bottles. The third type system is any number of powered pump filtration units. Typically, a powered mechanical pump pushes the wine through a filter or creates a vacuum which pulls the wine through the filter. These units are fast, efficient and much more expensive that the first two type systems.

Almost all filter systems come with three sizes of filter medium. This medium is typically a filter pad, but can also be a cartridge.

The coarsest pads or cartridges, usually called number 1 pads or cartridges, remove very large particles only. Use of this particular filter does not result in brilliantly clear wine and I have never found a reason to use one of them.

The medium pads, usually called number 2 pads, will remove haze-causing particles from red and white wine without stripping too much color and flavor. After a wine has gone through a number 2 pad it will show a significant change in clarity and brightness. Number 2 pads are the ones used for most wines and the only ones to use on red wine. These pads must be used before using a fine (number 3) pad.

Number 3 pads are for sterile filtering. One pass through these pads will remove 80% of the yeast cells in the wine and two passes will reduce the yeast population to the point where further fermentation is unlikely. They will leave wine as clear and bright as water. However, these pads are so fine that they are capable of removing both color and flavor compounds from wine. Delicately flavored wine can be ruined, and red wine can be stripped of color and left pink. These pads are used mainly on white wines that contain residual sugar.

Pages with more information on Finishing Wine:

1.  Stopping Fermentation

2.  Cold Stabilization

3.  Oaking with Chips

4.  Clarifying Wine

5.  Degassing Wine

6.  Filtering

7.  Bulk Aging

Last Updated on Sunday, 4 April 2010 06:36 Written by admin Thursday, 14 January 2010 11:50

There has been much talk lately about plans for plastic conical fermenters.  I found the following plans here.  They were based on this forum post which was written by Beershastas at Northern Brewer.  If anyone else has other good plans, please post them in a comment to this post or else on our forums.

This is my conical fermenter. Based on the conical tank from US Plastics, it seemed perfect to do 10 – 13 gallon batches and the price seemed great.

The conical holds 17 gal though it is rated at 15 on the web site. Clearly marked gallon markings on the side, big top opening, easy to clean. Looked like a great place to start, now I just needed to turn it into the Fermenter I knew it could be.

I put the blowoff in the center of the lid instead of the top of the tank because I figured it would geve me a couple of extra inches clearance from the wort. I drilled the hole in the lid with a 7/8″ spade bit. Was a little concerned using a spade bit but it cut the plastic beautifully.

Here are the parts for the blowoff. After the initial assembly I decided to go with a 1/2″ barbed fitting for the top for the direct feed from my counterfow chiller.

Starting with a threaded 1/2″ PVC coupling going to a 1/2″ brass close nipple with a hose o-ring over it for the inside of the lid. I found a socket that fit the couplings ridges nicely and it made tightening easier.

Put it though the hole and add another O-ring on the outside.

Then I connected the 1/2″ PVC threaded elbow to another threaded coupling with a short piece of 1/2″ PVC pipe. I finished it off with a 1/2″ barb fitting. When the elbow is connected to the brass nipple and tightened it makes a nice airtight seal.

Then I had to do something about the gap between the plastic of the conical tank and the black screw ring the lid attached to.

First I took out the screws holding the lid on. Then, examining the gap between the ring and the fermenter I figured it would take about a tube of silicone sealer to close the gap. After checking a couple of big guy hardware stores for food safe silicone and coming up empty I found DAP 50 year silicone at my local hardware store. Pure silicone and fda approved food safe.

Rough up the ring and the body of the fermenter with sandpaper before applying sealer. Be sure not to roughen anything that will not be covered with silicone.

Lay big beads of silicone around the inside of the upper and lower lips of the ring and press it in place being sure not to line up the screw holes and making it squeeze out of the entire outside and all of the screw holes. Fill in the inner gap between the tank and the ring and press it in and smooth it out with your finger.

Don’t try and smooth the silicone around the outer ring and screw holes – just let it harden in globs – much easier to clean up later. Use the whole tube – you want to solidly fill the area between the ring and the tank.

I tried a lot of things to seal the lid and finally settled on rubber foam weatherstripping. Beershasta uses another Frost King product, a solid ridged rubber weatherstrip. I sanitize it with alchohol every time I use it and change it every couple of batches.

I used a 3/4″ PVC valve at the bottom reduced from the 2″ threaded opening. When I did this I connected a 2″ threaded pvc coupling to a 2″x1 1/4″ reducer to a 45° street L to a 1 1/4″x3/4″ reducer to a short piece of 3/4″ PVC Pipe to the 3/4″ valve.

There were some major pockets in the 1 1/4″x3/4″ reducer so I filled them with food safe 2 part epoxy putty and smoothed it out so that it had no nooks or crannies to catch any nasties. I put the 45° in there to make it easier to dump on a relatively short stand. If I had had a higher ceiling in my basement it probably would have been better with a taller stand and a vertical dump.

I didn’t take any pictures when I installed my racking arm – these are Beershastas originals that I patterned mine after. Its pretty simple – another 7/8″ hole about ” up from the base, Attach the copper tube on the inside with a compression fitting after bending it to the curved shape. Getting this tube bent without kinking requires a tubing bender. I bought a spring type one at my local hardware store for about $3.

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