How to Make Hard Cider - Easy Beginner Recipe

[Music] we bought an entire Chuck load of apples for $100 and made 50 gallons of hard cider in this video I'm going to tell you exactly how we did it and I'm going to give you the absolute best hard cider recipe of all time the first step is getting the apples uh in my first tip is absolutely do not buy nice apples buy cider or baking apples these are apples that have already fallen onto the ground and they're bruised or they're damaged these apples aren't good for eating raw but they're great for making cider and they're way cheaper like I said we got all of these apples for $100 if I would have bought the nice apples the equivalent amount would have literally been $660 so buy the cheap apples you can usually get these out in Orchard just talk to the people who run the place and tell them what you're doing and they'll take you to a room in the back where you can have all the bad apples you want after you get the apples rinse them off with the hose we've already done this and then start crushing them we're using a fancy electric Crusher that was loan To Us by Asheville Brewer Supply shout out out to those guys this Crusher did have a little bit of trouble with the larger apples and we weren't able to just dump a bunch of apples in at once like we thought we were going to be able to but I'll tell you what it did work a little bit better than the crusher we used last year um which was kind of like an old timey Crusher that I modified with an electric motor from Harbor Freight which was automated but it had the same issues it kind of jammed up when you threw large apples in uhoh put them in slower and so we had to cut the apples last year fortunately this year we didn't have to cut any apples we just tossed them all into the crusher which was pretty pretty nice after you crush an entire bucket full of apples you're going to want to press them we're using an antique style fruit press it's a bit slow but it's actually pretty easy to use my number one tip here is to add a nylon bag to the basket before you add the apples that makes emptying the basket really easy as far as operating the Press goes just add the apples and crank the handle until the juice stops [Music] flowing speaking of emptying crushed apples from the press my best advice is to throw it as close to the neighbor's yard as possible my best advice is to compost this stuff as far away from your house as possible because it kind of starts to smell after a little while all right once you have the juice you have a decision to make are you going to chemically treat The Cider or are you going to pasteurize with heat the purists are going to tell you you absolutely must use chemicals or you going to ruin the cider science tells us that that's not true somebody actually did an experiment and compared two different types of cider one treated with chemicals one heat pasture eyes and guess what the tasers weren't able to tell the difference now that said there is only one truly correct way to make cider and that is the way you prefer to make it so you do you since I'm not in chemicals and I happen to own a brewing supply company I'm going to use our sweet 20-gallon Brew system to heat pasteurize if I was making less than 50 gallons of cider I'd probably opt for our smaller Kettle the 10g system which is less expensive but just as rad the advantage of using our Brew system is that they both include stainless steel mesh baskets these will filter out any additional chunks of Apple that end up in your juice after pressing you definitely want to keep those out of the fermentor if you can our system also has a built-in heating element and a controller um which is important because you are going to want to heat the cider to 170° F exactly and no higher this is the temperature at which the juice will become pasturized and you don't want to go higher than that because I don't know what if the purist to WR and extremely hot heat does impact the flavor so we just go to 170 and then we chill it down which is the next step but before you do that make sure to to pour off a little bit of the hot cider into a mug and drink it because there may be nothing better on the planet than fresh hot cider all right if you prefer the chemical route you're going to want to transfer your cider to a food safe bucket and then add campon tablets according to the directions on the packaging it's usually one tablet per gallon and you're going to need to wait 24 to 36 hours for the Campton to do its thing and kill all the wild yeast and bacteria which by the way is what the heat processing does as well now The Next Step will be the same regardless of how you process your cider you're going to want to ferment it so you will add The Cider to either a food safe bucket a keg or a small countertop fermentor and then aerates it so Iration involves shaking the container for a minute or two this dissolves oxygen into the liquid that the yeast are going to need for proper fermentation we split our cider up into 10 different batches we put a bunch in cegs and we put some in countertop fermentors and we used 10 different types y of yeast my recommendation for the yeast is just to use whatever sounds good uh to you we love to experiment with different types of yeast because it adds so much in terms of the flavor variation oh and we even added some fruit extract to some of the batches I think we added guava and pineapple this guy is really the limit though for the creative part of the process you could add apple pie spices such as cinnamon you could add hops which we've done before uh that turned out really well so have fun with it once you've completed that step you'll add an airlock and then you will store the fermentor somewhere with a stable temperature around 70° f for I would say at least 2 weeks and as you can see we're fermenting most of our batches in our brand new 6 and 1/2 gallon stainless steel keg fermenters these things are totally changing the fermentation game because once the cider is ready we'll be able to put it on tap straight away since we've installed floating dip tubes in the specialized Lids which again is pretty pretty PR nice all right after the fermentation is finished the bad news is that the CER might not be ready to drink just yet cider often times needs some additional time to age and mature before it's really good this might be a few weeks this might be a few months we've had cider that literally was like the absolute best a year after we kegged it what you're going to need to do is just taste The Cider decide whether or not you like it that point and then decide to put it on tap or you could bottle it and drink that as soon as it's carbonated or you could keg or bottle and leave it sit for a year speaking of kegs and bottles and the Brew system and the oneg fermentor you can get all of those on our website cammers supply.com I read a couple additional notes off the top of my head here in terms of the process um we kind of batch processed the apples the first day so we crushed everything and then we pressed everything and then we heated everything and then we started that process over it turned out that it was about three times faster if one person was crushing and then we transferred that to the Press where another person was pressing and then once that was done it was put into the kettle which was heating up all the while we were doing the first two and we just never stopped that we actually live streamed the first day of this process I'll put a link to that in the description um it was ended up being like six hours and like I said we got about a third of the juice that we did the next day when we worked for like 3 hours so if you want to learn how not to do it watch the live stream video link below for real though there are a lot of different ways to make cider we've done this way a number of times in the past and it's always turned out great I'm sure you're going to see a lot of people in the comment section suggest other stuff like adding pectin and things like that to improve the yield I'm not saying you shouldn't do that I'm just saying we didn't and it's worked out great for us the way we've done it so I would say do what we do at a bare minimum because this is sort of a minimalist approach that we take um but if you want to get fancy with it and do more stuff go for it oh and PS we just started uh offering memberships on this channel it takes a lot of work and actually kind of a lot of money to make these videos and um we got our first couple of members Ethan Ma and Jesse Lance shout out to you guys if you like this content you want to see more of it please consider being a member thanks for watching

Channel: Clawhammer Supply

Views: 60,502

Keywords: homebrew, brewing, hard cider, hard cider recipe, fermentation, cooking, baking, apples

Id: 3KehfALvM5A

Length: 8min 10sec (490 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 16 2023