Making Hard Cider

Sometime last year, I watched an episode of one of my favorite show, Escape To River Cottage. In this episode (the fifth one), the guy goes and helps make some cider and it just resounded with me – I want to make some.

Fast forward a year later and my good friend Zac and I finally make the dream come true. I have to say, Zac is quite the amazing friend. He found the apples and let me borrow his juicing machine.

Here’s a video:


I laugh at the beginning cause he called me the wrong Andrew in the first take. He had to stop and start over. Also disregard the dishes and what I’m wearing.

You can see in the short video what’s I’m doing. I put the apples in the hole, and juice comes out the other one. Then I put the juice into the funnel and it comes out in the gallon jug. I put a half a cup of brown sugar in the jug already along with some pectic enzyme to promote clarity in the finished product.

I actually haven’t started fermenting the fresh cider yet, when I finished last night, it was really foamy:
IMG_0008I put the jug in the fridge to see if the foam would go down. It didn’t, it looked like this in the morning:
IMG_4242Sorry, I didn’t feel like trying to mess with it too much. The image wouldn’t rotate.

And you can see in this (also unrotated photo) how it all settled:
IMG_4244

So I mixed it up this evening and the foam went away, and I’m letting it settle a little bit again before pitching the yeast into it.

I also had another jug of store bought apple juice that I added the same stuff to, plus about 4 oz of thawed frozen apple juice concentrate.
IMG_4238You can see the airlock on top.

Anyway, things are coming along nicely and hopefully soon I’ll have a bunch of hard cider to drink and share with friends. Here are some more random pictures that Zac took last night:

IMG_0006 IMG_0007 IMG_0005 IMG_0004 IMG_0002 IMG_0003

 

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