If colonial Americans could brew their own cider without any knowledge of microorganisms or refrigeration, so can you. Making your own homebrew cider at home is insanely easy and a great way to get into home brewing.
How do you home brew your own cider? You’ll need the materials from my post Everything You Need to Start Homebrewing, such as the fermenter, airlock, and sanitizer, as well as a gallon of preservative-free apple cider, priming sugar, and a cider yeast, such as White Labs WLP 775.
Get all those materials and ingredients together, and follow along….
Start Your Yeast
You may need to activate your yeast ahead of your scheduled brew day. Too often, we bought a packet of yeast and got home, only to realize that we couldn’t pitch (fancy word for adding) the yeast the same day.
Dry yeast may need to be mixed into warm water and left to wake up for a considerable amount of time. We like using White Labs’ liquid yeast, or PurePitch, to add our yeast directly to the fermenter. Again, just follow the directions from the manufacturer.
Many parts of the brewing process depend on the temperature around you when you’re brewing and the temperature the fermenter is stored at while it’s fermenting.
Sanitize Your Equipment
I cannot stress enough how important it is to sanitize anything that comes in contact with ingredients. Even if you wash your fermenter with soap and water, there is still a risk that you might have bacteria in your tap water that could contaminate your brew.
While brewing beer and cider, you boil the ingredients. Boiling typically kills bacteria. For beer, this process helps with extracting malt from the grains. For your cider, we’ll just boil the cider to kill off any wild bacteria or yeast that exists in your preservative-free cider. You can skip this step if the cider you bought has already been pasteurized.
Even if your cider hasn’t been pasteurized, you could skip the boiling step, but be warned that there could be wild yeast in the cider that can impact the final flavor of your hard cider. We tend to find these types of ciders akin to a sour-style beer or “funky” tasting, but some people like it.
To sanitize your equipment, mix your Star San to the specified concentration. Use a spray bottle to spray down all your equipment, or fill a five-gallon bucket and dip all your equipment in the bucket. Depending on the sanitizer you use, the directions may call for the sanitizer to dry on the surface.
Mix your Ingredients Together
Easy as that. Pour your cider into the fermenter, and mix in your yeast. Pop the airlock into the hole.
Ok, yes, it’s that easy. One piece of equipment I did not include in my equipment post is a hydrometer. It’s a NICE to have, not a NEED to have, in my opinion. However, it’s really handy to use to understand the final alcohol content of your homebrew or to know when your brew is done fermenting.
The original gravity of your home brew tells you the “specific gravity” of your brew. Water, for example, as an SG of 1.0. Your brew will be higher than one, depending on how much sugar is in the liquid. If your yeast ate all the sugar and all the sediment ended up at the bottom of the fermenter, you could hit almost 1.0 with your final gravity. The difference between your original gravity and your final gravity will give you the alcohol content of your brew.
Several handy calculators online help you account for the room temperature around you when you measure or the temperature of your brew when you measure.
Record your original gravity somewhere handy.
Ferment
Your cider will ferment for a few weeks, possibly a month. Watch the airlock; when the bubbles start to slow, measure the specific gravity again with your hydrometer. Leave it alone for another week, then measure again. If the readings are mostly unchanged, then fermentation is done. If the reading differ, then leave it alone for another week or two and try again.
If you do not have a hydrometer, then you must rely on your own instincts… sort of. Once the homebrew cider stops bubbling, leave for another day or two, then taste. If the cider still tastes sweeter than you would like, then let it sit for a little longer.
Since the cider may still be fermenting, you may wish to add a stabilizer to stop fermentation. However, adding priming sugar will restart that process, or the stabilizer may prevent carbonization.
Carbonate
Carbonation is a bit tricky if I’m honest. You’ll need enough priming sugar to carbonate the volume you’re brewing, This priming sugar calculator help you figure out how much sugar you want to add for your batch of cider.
You can add a specific measured amount of sugar to each bottle you bottle, or mix it into your entire batch and then bottle. I prefer the second method to make sure it gets dissolved properly. Check out my post on How to Bottle Your Homebrew for supplies you might need.
In another week or two, your home brew cider should be adequately carbonated and ready to drink!
I hope this post encourages you to brew your own homebrew cider. Drop me a line if you have more questions or even suggestions!
I’ve always been a bit nervous about making my own homebrew, but I think I can do this, thanks to your instructions! Thank you so much!
Let me know if you try it out!
This is so fascinating to me because I have a 16 tree apple orchard and I was wondering what to do with all those apples. We can only eat just so much applesauce or pies. I had thought of taking them to a somewhat local grist mill to have them pressed into cider. I think that this may be a fun venture to embark on. Thanks for the idea!
Very informative. I always wanted try making cider. I am going to try your recipe. Thanks for sharing!
It’s so nice that we have access to cool tools and ingredients that make fermenting so much easier for the novice!
Thank you! This is super easy and I hope more people try it out!
This is really interesting! Thanks for sharing the process.
This looks so good and not so scary!! Great tutorial. A question on the sugar grams after its all fermented and ready to drink. I am having to pretty much limit all sugar which eliminates most of my wine. But maybe hard cider???
Thank you!
If you have to limit sugar in your homebrew, you would want a very, very dry final product. You can pick a yeast that can tolerate high sugars and hope that it ferments all out. When I was doing Keto a while back, though, I would avoid most ciders, even dry, because there are likely still carbs from the apple that eventually convert to sugar in digestion. Sorry!
You may try making your own hard seltzer, though, which is on my to do list! If I make some I’ll write up a post about it.
We tried our own home brew from a kit…. I wasn’t a huge fan. The cider was very tart and it wasn’t very good. After reading your post, I think we let it sit too long. Is there a set in stone, it has to set for this long? Like like a drier, but still sweet cider
Hard cider is my favorite drink! I will have to give it a try! Thanks!