Notes from making a 1 gallon batch of hard cider (from scratch).

Following the instructions at How to Make Hard Cider, and the 1G Big Mouth jar and carboy, the wife and I (mostly me) started our experiment…

Picked up a gallon of apple cider (juice) at Market Basket, making sure it was only pasteurized and had no preservatives. Also a can of frozen concentrate apple juice, and some “Whole Earth Stevia and Monkfruit” sweetener.

Found a stash of Red Star “Pasteur Champagne” wine yeast in the fridge, which had a best by date of Dec 2016. Figured it would still work, just not quite as active initially.

Remember to look in the random homebrew stuff storage bin for the other stuff.

Primary Fermentation

Mix per the instructions,

• 1G bottle of juice.
• 1/2 can of frozen juice concentrate.
• 1/4 tsp of Wyeast yeast nutrient.
• whole packet of yeast.

Put the jug in the corner; wrapped it in a blanket to block light.

Secondary Fermentation

After 2 weeks, transferred into the carboy, with no special additions. We wanted to have a baseline flavor profile for this batch.

Bottling

After 3 weeks (the beer going in parallel wasn’t stable yet), prepped for bottling. (Note: didn’t take a hydrometer reading; just assumed.)

Put ~25 packets of the sweetener (2g per packet) for the 1G batch. This was done by scaling up a 1oz taste measurement to the full 1G.

Added 1/4 can of frozen juice contentrate for carbonation priming.

Afterward

After 4 weeks, tasting time! Okay, well we forgot about it for a bit… So after ~8 weeks, we cracked open a bottle. It had nice carbination, tart and not that sweet. And hazy.

Next time,

• add pectic enzyme to make it clear
• first mix the sweetener packets in hot water to dissolve better; will try this first instead of adding more sweetener