Beginner Hard Cider Recipe - Alcohol from Apple Juice

how to make a basic cider from start to finish so a couple years ago we made a basic cider and we added sugar to it so that makes it not really cider and more like a wine depending on your definition of wines and ciders so i thought you know what it's time it's 20 21 let's make a new basic cider video so here we go here's what we're gonna need to make this apple cider first we need apple juice about a gallon you need a one gallon fermenter that can be a wide mouth or a closed mouth i'm using a narrow mouth today yeast i'm using say fail so4 but you can use pretty much anything even bread yeast that's right you can make this with bread yeast i'm using a half packet of yeast if you're using anything that doesn't come in a packet you want about a teaspoon a bung and an airlock and then some optional things that are nice to have is a hydrometer and a graduated cylinder now before i get too far let me give a couple of explanations i said you can use pretty much any yeast and there's a good reason this should only probably come out to anywhere from a six to seven or maybe even eight percent abv in the end almost any yeast on the market can do that even bread yeast believe it or not it'll go to like 11 percent in most of our experiences with it but safel so4 is an ale yeast it's made to go to like 11 maybe 12 percent so it's perfect for this also your apple juice don't just use any old apple juice fresh squeezed is absolutely best if you can get the right kind of apple for that which is usually crab apples believe it or not but any apple that you like you can make cider from with varying degrees of taste success okay this happens to be just apple juice from the store really really simple can you use apple cider if you're in the u.s yeah it's just cloudy juice there's really no difference when it comes to fermenting they are essentially the same thing so i'm going to call it juice whether using cider or juice and cider is the finished product though in the u.s it's hard cider don't get me started we're just going to call it cider things to look for in your juice you want the most basic of ingredients ours is apple juice and ascorbic acid in parentheses it says vitamin c that is there simply to preserve the color and there's very little of it you want nothing that i like to call lights and ates things that end in those words because those are preservatives now you also want real apple juice there are apple juices out there that are filled with various other kinds of juices probably not going to make the best apple cider they might make something wonderful but it won't be apple cider so if you really want to make cider get real apple juice apple concentrate works also but that's a whole other thing not getting into it for the scope of this video something else i probably should have mentioned is a funnel they're always a really good thing to have they make your life much much easier first step in any fermentation is sanitization and we actually have a big bucket over there called turbos where we keep sanitizer liquid we are using a mixture of water and star sand according to the manufacturer's instructions and everything was just cleaned and washed using soap and water first and then we put them into the star sand for you know a few minutes and then let them drip dry right here on the table that way it keeps out all the bugs and infections that you really don't want in your burger so the first thing i want to do is get my apple juice into the fermenter and i know someone's going to ask can i ferment in the jug well while you can it's not necessarily the best way so my idea is you know there's some juices that come with one of these i think this is actually one of them that came with apple juice in it get that kind of juice that way you get a free fermenter along with it or you can look at it this way you buy the fermenter and get free juice however you like to see it something i'd like to point out is as i'm pouring this you're seeing foam build up inside there that's a good thing i am aerating this must that's another reason to not just do it in the container it came in because adding oxygen in the beginning phase of fermentation is a good thing for your yeast it'll help them to build a really strong colony and prevents sulfury eggy smells later on we do want to be very careful with how far up this we'd go because see this foam that's in here now the fermentation itself will actually create some foam on its own and it could go up into the airlock which could be bad but that just means you need to use a blow-off tube which is a whole other video remember when i was talking about aerating i'm going to drive that point home a little more what i'm going to do is use a completely solid stopper here i call it my thumb saver bung for reasons that will soon be explained i stick it in there and i give this a shake what i want to do is introduce more oxygen into that must into that juice i really want to get air in there it's a good thing for fermentation and i use the thumb saver bung because with a hole in there pushing so hard against it while you're shaking can actually start to hurt just a little bit you know maybe i have delicate thumbs i don't know but it seems to work for me people do this all sorts of ways they use air stones and things like that i have found through research that they don't make that much difference an air stone really doesn't help tremendously so so don't get too crazy about it you want to shake it up a little and get some in there that's the gist then comes your yeast now there's a lot of ways to see this this packet here does five gallons okay so it can do five of these i used to actually use like a fifth of it and try to gauge it but was i a fifth was i a little lower that gets a little bit scary so now i normally do a whole packet but i know this is going to be very low gravity more on gravity in just a second but i know it's going to be low enough that i don't really have to worry about it these yeasts aren't going to work that hard to make this so i'm just going to use half a packet and i'm going to eyeball that but um say fail makes these plastic packets so i got to grab my macgyver knife here and open it up you do have one of these right i didn't put it on the list of things that you need but i i might have to because you know they're good to have i'm just gonna dump in about half it's not that critical because like we said this whole packet can do five gallons so you know if i'm a little bit off so what the rest of this i'm going to fold up put a piece of tape on and stick it in the fridge keep them in your fridge they will last a long long time now i want to get that yeast in there a little bit just just gonna swirl this up a touch if i do a full on shake i'm likely to get some up the sides and it'll just stick there and it'll never get to do its job so just a little bit of a swirl to get it in there is all it really needs you don't have to mix it those yeast will find a way trust me next we want to take a reading now this is a hydrometer reading just a uh it's a glass tube with gradations on the side to measure the density of liquid which will tell us how much sugars we have in here and our potential alcohol now the question comes up a lot should i take the reading before or after i add the yeast in all honesty it doesn't make a difference as long as you do it after adding the yeast not too long after adding these because they are going to get to work and they may start creating some alcohol so if you wait like you know a week and then take a reading that reading isn't going to be worth anything but if you do it within you know a few seconds or a few minutes probably not much of an issue so i think that's where that idea comes from and just like most apple juices they usually fall between 1.050 and 1.055 gravity this one is 1.052 specific gravity which if you don't understand any of that we do have some videos on explaining abv and how to calculate it things like that they'll be linked in the description of this video but just suffice to say that 1.052 original gravity if that fermented out to fully dry which it probably will comes out to about 7 abv pretty respectable for a cider right since most of them range between three and six percent so this is a little bit strong could have even diluted it just a touch if you really wanted to to make it go a little further that's a whole other video what i'm going to do next is pour this back in some people don't do this i am not some people the reason why is everything has been sanitized so i'm not worried about it there's nothing wrong with this if i didn't sanitize my graduated cylinder or my hydrometer then it might be a problem and you could be introducing harmful bacteria that could ruin your brew and i'm not even kidding they could make it taste really awful or turn it into vinegar you don't want that trust me next thing we want to do is seal this up now we don't want to seal it seal it what we want to do is make a one-way valve so to speak so that's where a bung and airlock comes in the bung holds the airlock in place obviously and the air lock works like the s-trap in your sink gases come up and go down and out they get through the liquid which that liquid is sanitizer fluid by the way the same stuff we use in our sanitizer bucket you can also use like cheap liquor or alcohol use scorsby scotch because i happen to have a bottle of it laying around for whatever reason from years and years ago but you do not want to use plain water because bugs can actually swim through that and can get in here when i say bugs i mean like fruit flies they really love going after fermentations the smell of the co2 and things like that really attract them so be very very careful with that sanitization is key one very important thing you always want to do when you're making a fermentation no matter how many times you've done it is take some notes so i'm going to make a label for this one i'm calling it basic cider the things that go on this label are today's date which is november 16 2021 it's apple juice so it's publix apple juice by the way for those of you that know what publix is it also has say fail so4 yeast half a packet and our original gravity was 1.052 that's it for this one and i don't um stand on much pomp and circumstance here when it comes to these kind of labels because we tend to make a lot of brews so you know good old masking tape and recycled paper stuff that we printed one side on already works for me you know rather than throwing it away or shredding it just reuse it and i just stick that right on there and there you have it so this is going to go sit for a little while until it starts up and i will come back and show you how it's doing all right so here we are about 24 hours in this actually started in just a few hours but um you know we decided to give it a full day it's now in a fully active fermentation and as you can see there is bubbles in the airlock we have good bubble airlock activity if you travel farther down you see there is a small layer where the bubbles are starting to create a little tiny foam layer but this is nothing at all remotely uh something to worry about because it's there's plenty of room that it's not going to get into our airlock but more importantly that little tiny foam layer is created by all these little tiny bubbles that are zooming up the side and that is one of the telltale signs that we know we have a good active fermentation going all right so i'm just going to give this a swirl and see how it goes now the swirl at this point all it does is gets everything back into solution and it pushes out some of the co2 you can do it a little bit more if you want to that's fine no harm done just the more you do it the more gas is going to come out that kind of thing so expect to see more airlock activity it can actually help fermentation along now when brian did the swirl all the stuff that had already started to settle out to the bottom is now being reincorporated into the must and so if you're doing this at home you may see chunks of white looking material that is just yeast and other sediment that has come out of your fermentation that is nothing to worry about and absolutely normal this is just gonna sit for probably about a week usually ciders of this kind of gravity don't take super long and we'll be back with the next part so this is some of what's going on inside the apple cider people ask all the time about all the white stuff at the bottom this is a little bit crazy it looks like it's alive but yeah that's pretty normal it's just sediment getting filled up with co2 lifting up breaking apart doing its thing [Music] all right so a couple weeks has gone by probably longer than i really would have liked but hey you know what life gets in the way just proving it's okay to let them sit our final reading is 0.998 giving us a 7.3 abv for our cider pretty respectable so today we're going to rack this because it's ready there's some sediment in the bottom we just want to get it off of all that and move forward so as i was checking this and we were racking i noticed this is very gassy there's a lot of co2 in here that's not to be confused with carbonation even though technically it is carbonated that's kind of nasty tasting gases they're from full on fermentation not going to be the best tasting thing so i want to de-gas and for that i need my spoon of unusual size all right and all i do is i put in the spoon and i stir this around now this is very full you also want to be careful not to hit your microphone yeah i'm going to move this because there's a microphone right there and i don't want to hit it and this is all i do i just stir it up i break the pattern a little bit this is very full so i have to be a little careful but there it there is some bubbles coming out you might even be able to see them people always ask how long do you degas as long as you feel like doing it i mean technically you want to go until you don't see bubbles coming up anymore but that could take days so i mean i hate to give you a non-technical answer but that's the truth i just go till i feel comfortable that i've gotten enough out to not really be an issue anymore in this case it's probably going to be five or ten minutes so i'm gonna spare you the gory details of watching me stir a brew for five or ten minutes and once it's degassed i'm just gonna put a lid and an air lock back on it because this is gonna go sit on the storage fermentation shelf the fermentation station whatever you want to call it for probably another week or so so at this point just make sure you take notes of what you did and then we'll see you when we're ready for the next step okay we racked this five days ago and today it's cleared out as you can see and there's just a tiny bit of sediment at the bottom so we're going to rack it to a pitcher that way we can know how many bottles we need and we don't get some of that sediment in our bottles and we're going to put it in bottles all right so we have finished wrecking as you can tell by here and there was very little left as you can tell by here and while we were doing this i noticed little tiny bubbles floating to the top which means degassing so sanitize spoon at the ready i'm gonna degas a lot of time if you let it sit you don't need to it's just not it's the gas has come out on their own this has actually set for a couple weeks so much of it has come out so because we used our fancy schmancy pitcher with the raised numbers on the side i know we have 126 ounces which comes to just about a full gallon which is like five 750 ml bottles minus two ounces that last one will be our taster and it'll get drank quickly we have plans for the other four bottles to be released in a separate video but anyway we are going to now put our bottling wand on the end of our auto siphon and bottle these up we have videos on how to bottle and they'll be linked below and maybe in a card up here so if you're unsure of that topic you can go look those up too now something really cool about this is usually when you make a one gallon batch you end up with like four bottles we have almost five if you look this one's just a little bit lower than the rest really really cool and that's kind of awesome and that's one advantage to not using whole fruit so there's kind of always that you know give and take if you use juices versus using whole fruit but in this case it actually worked to our advantage so this will be our taster and then like i said these other four we have plants but for now these are going to go out of the way so we can do our tasting all right so i'm actually pretty impressed with this i'm impressed about a little bit of loss that we had because we almost came up to an exactly a gallon so go team um i'm impressed about how clear it is it is super crystal clear i am impressed that this only took three weeks no well three weeks or three months three weeks three weeks yeah we started on november 16th today is december 6th so it's about three weeks time yeah we're in that nebulous thing where what day it is who am i i don't know i don't care cause i'm gonna get to drink some cider now this came out to 0.998 at 7.3 percent abv so it is very very dry um it's also very very young in my experience ciders that are very very young and very very dry tend to not taste very good initially so this is an initial taste test and we'll go from there i'm getting some of the unpleasant aroma but i'm also getting apples so yeah yeah this doesn't smell as unpleasant as some yeah and for its age and because of our expectations with brewing with apples different juices will do different things we used a really good quality juice from publix so so good um yeah so i'm gonna just taste it wow that's actually not horrible it is super dry so up front yeah i'm getting that tarte acidic profile in my mouth yes definitely has it exactly i get almost like a cookie on the on the the exhale like a biscuity kind of thing that's pretty cool i don't think i've ever gotten that from a cider before yeah once i've got accustomed to that and i drink some more i'm more of the juicy apple flavors are coming through yeah green apple it doesn't come across as red apple comes across as green to me right right um [Music] this is probably the best young cider i've ever had i just have to say that based on its youth based on its ending gravity and based on its abv i would say that makes us really good now if i critique this on its own i feel like it's kind of watery it doesn't have a very um low abv anxious that's why i prefaced everything with all those parameters so within those parameters go team interestingly enough i could drink this now yeah yeah now this is borderline on a wine the reason why i wouldn't say it's wine because i didn't add any extra sugars to it but wines tend to start at around eight percent this is just a little bit below there i like it i'm having more it's a very easy thing to drink and this is just room temperature stilled yep uh if this was cold this would be lovely yeah if it was carbonated i think this would be even better and you know we just might be trying that stay tuned i know this is weird but it kind of reminds me of beer yes very much so ciders are like that yeah yeah they can very much remind you of a beer um that's not a bad thing i mean we're not huge beer people but we like beer enough that you know we can appreciate that if i was gonna just give a score on base like the way derek did where we know this is so young we know this is this is like a nine okay but that's not really where it is that's just like based off of other ciders that i've had that were young and isn't that that's not where we're going with that so i'm i pretty much have a number ready our true numbers are going to be much harsher so this is our enjoyment of this beverage in comparison to all the beverages throughout the nation and the world and the universe well the ones that we've tried at least the ones we've experienced so do you have a number i think so i'm ready i'm i'm waffling on my number just i am too you're aware uh i'm going to count oh you're gonna count okay one two three six point five i was lower i mean to me it's something i would drink there are other things we've made that i like that i would drink this first that's why i gave it a 6. couldn't see going much higher than that i bumped it up to the 6.5 just because it is so easy to drink and i know it's a weird thing to say but i'm enjoying it's lack of complication where normally i enjoy the complication of a beverage so it's kind of a dichotomy here right so i can just drink this and not think about it i can drink it with food i can drink it when i'm thirsty i can drink it when i yeah cold this would be super refreshing like after cutting the grass or working in the yard or something this would be great maybe not this time of year because it's a little chilly right now but you know um oh mold this might be really good so many things yeah there's so much you can do with this and that's the beautiful thing about ciders they're like the starting point for brewing many ways you can go with it stay tuned we have a follow-up video where we're going to do some other things to the other bottles of this cider and we'll uh let you know how that goes but in the meantime thanks for watching guys have a great day bye-bye but just suffice to say that at 1.052 i should figure it out before i say that to the camera because you know that makes more sense right yeah yeah yeah

Channel: City Steading Brews

Views: 1,475,053

Keywords: Hard Cider Process for Beginners, hard apple cider recipe, easy hard cider, hard cider recipe, apple cider, make hard cider, how to make hard cider, easy hard cider process, beginner cider, beginner hard cider process, beginner hard cider recipe, hard cider from juice, apple cider from juice, how to make hard cider from juice, make hard cider from juice, juice to hard cider, hard cider at home, hard cider proccess for begginers, Hard cider from scratch

Id: AVbhMldO0DI

Length: 21min 2sec (1262 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 19 2021