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Apple Cider 2025

It's been a while since my last fermentation experiment, about 15 years. I sold my homebrewing equipment when I moved out of the US a decade ago, and stopped thinking about it. However, my apple trees were very productve this year, so I made apple sauce, desserts, ate a lot of apples, and as I was contemplating different ways to use them, I remembered about the magic of yeast. And this is how I resumed my fermentation journey.

I bought most of my equipment from Brouwland in Belgium. Their delivery was fast, the items were well packaged, and everything was as advertised. I will continue to be a customer. As far as know-how is concerned, I spent quite a few hours on YouTube watching people doing cider. There isn't much to it, it's simpler than beer: make juice, ferment juice.

Ingredients and equipment

Here are all the things that ended up being helpful on this project, for those who plan on making cider for the very first time:

• Apple juice, obviously, if you have apples, you need a way to turn them into juice. I personally had a Nama J2.
• A 15 liter carboy, I picked a glass one because I don't like anything I eat or drink exposed for too long to plastic.
• A bubbler that fits on your carboy. You could get away with a sheet folded a few times attached with an elastic. The bubbler allows you to have a clearer sense of when the yeast is done.
• A 30 liter fermenting bucket, you could probably get away without it, but it's easier to mix things in a bucket.
• A big spatula/spoon, you'll need to lightly mix things at one point or another. You can probably get away without it.
• Fermentis SafCider AB-1 yeast, this was my first pick, just because it was mentioned in one youtube video, not a lot of thought went into this.
• Star San, you'll need something to sanitize all your things, I used Star San when I brewed beer, I just did the same thing. Don't Fear the Foam!
• Bottles, caps and bottle capper, make sure you pick the right cap diameter. I did not and had to make another order.
• Siphon tube, you'll want to filter out the dead yeast and whatever deposit is sitting at the bottom of your carboy.
• A 0.1g precision scale, I didn't use one for this cider, and ended up eye-balling my yeast. It's probably best not to eye-ball your ingredients.
• Beer hydrometer, not strictly necessary, but will allow you to estimate the alcohol content by measuring before and after fermentation gravity.

Step by step

There is nothing much to it, I strongly recommend people try fermenting fruits and make their own alcohol, it's quite fun. Here are the rough steps:

• Sanitize everything (a few minutes exposure to dilluted Star San)
• Pour the juice in the carboy, sprinkle the yeast on top (I put 3g of SafCider AB-1)
• Put the bubbler with clean water inside
• Store at the yeast's recommended temperature (16 degree Celcius in my case) for a couple of weeks
• Filter out the top and the bottom sediments, whatever doesn't look like cider with the siphon
• Mix some sugar into the mix based on sugar content
• Bottle and cap everything
• Wait a couple more weeks
• Drink!

Result

This is a dry cider, blurry since I used a juicer instead of a press and a lot of solids were left into the juice. But overall, I enjoy drinking it quite a bit, once chilled. Since I never measured the gravity before fermenting, I can't know for sure how much alcohol it has, but it feels quite strong for a cider, I would even say north of 5%. The cider is fizzy, but not bubbly, probably due to not enough sugar while bottling.

If I were to make another batch at some point, I would change the following things:

• Measure gravity before fermentation so I can calculate alcohol content
• Actually weigh the yeast instead of eyeballing it
• Experiment with another yeast
• Add more sugar at bottling, or at least measure sugar content and aim for sweeter cider, with more gaz
• Press the apples instead of juicing them