A super easy way to get into home brewing

Making cider: Here are two gallons of Cider I started. One will be dry and the other sweet.
So you want to try home brewing, but you don’t want to spend a lot of money on something that you’re not sure you’re going to like? Well, here’s a super easy way to get started without spending lots of money.

I’m talking about making hard cider. Technically, this isn’t really “brewing” since you’re not actually cooking anything. And it really has more in common with winemaking, than beer brewing, but it will get you off on the right foot.

Here’s the list of ingredients/equipment that you’ll need:

• 100% Apple juice with no preservatives – 1 gallon
• Champagne Wine Yeast – 1 packet
• Airlock and stopper
• Fermentation vessel – 1 gallon glass jug
• Sugar – 1-11/2 cups
• Pectic Enzyme (optional)
• Hydrometer (optional)
• Lactose (optional)
• Bleach
• Bottling bucket and hose (optional)
• Vinyl tubing
• Champagne bottles
• Champagne corks/wires

To make this really easy, head to Whole Foods and buy a gallon of their 365 Organic cider that comes in the glass gallon jug. Doing this, you’ll get the juice and the fermentation vessel in one shot. I bought mine for $6.99. If you go this route, you’ll also have the gallon jug for future batches.

If you don’t have a Whole Foods near you or you can’t find apple juice in a glass jug, you’ll probably have to purchase the jug at your local home brew store and buy the juice separately. Any Apple Juice will work, as long as it’s 100% apple juice and doesn’t have any preservatives.

The next stop is your local homebrew store, where you’ll need to pick up an airlock and stopper to fit into the mouth of your glass jug. A No. 6 stopper works well. The homebrew store can help find one that fits.  

While you’re there, also look at hydrometers. A hydrometer measures the specific gravity of liquid. This is useful in telling you the potential alcohol content of your cider, as well as letting you know when it’s time to bottle. Although, it’s totally optional, you’ll eventually need to get one if you continue brewing.

Another optional ingredient is Pectic Enzyme. This will help clear the cider if you got an unfiltered variety. Finally, if you want to make a sweet cider, you might want to pick up some lactose. Lactose is an unfermentable sugar, which means that it won’t be eaten up by yeast and turned into alcohol.

So, now that you’ve got all your ingredients, the first thing you’ll want to do is find a nice quiet place where your cider can rest for about a month. Next, mix up a batch of sanitizer, by adding 1 ounce of bleach to a gallon of water. Soak anything that will come into contact with your cider (airlock, stopper, hydrometer) in the solution until you’re ready to use it.

Now comes the fun part. You’re going to want to add your sugar into the jug. You can either pour it in as it is, or dissolve it in some water first. Either way, you’ll need to remove a cup or so of cider from the jug so it doesn’t overflow. Once you’ve added the sugar, shake up the cider and let it sit. Then take a hydrometer reading (if you bought one). You’ll want the reading to be between 1.060 and 1.080. Mine came out about 1.080, which means if everything goes as planned, the cider will have an alcohol content of almost 11% by volume.

Once you’ve added your sugar and are happy with the gravity reading (more sugar will result in a higher gravity), it’s time to add the yeast. If you’re making just one gallon, you won’t need all the yeast. So you can either dump the extra, save it for another batch, or buy two jugs of apple juice and use it all. If the yeast is dry, you’ll want to add it to ¼ cup of 100-degree water and stir it up until it dissolves. Then pour half of it directly into your jug. This is also the time to add the pectic enzyme to your cider. I used ½ teaspoon per gallon.

Now that your yeast is in, it’s time to put on the airlock. Add water to your airlock until it’s about half full, put the top on and insert it into the stopper. Then insert the entire assembly into the top of the jug.

Now comes the hard part – waiting. Within 24 hours you’ll notice tons of little bubbles rising to the top of the jug, the airlock will also be bubbling up and down. You may also notice some sediment forming in the mouth of the jug. These are all normal signs of fermentation. The yeast is eating up all the sugar and turning it into alcohol!

Let it do its thing for the next 30 days or so. After a while you’ll notice that there are no more bubbles rising. At this point fermentation is finished and you can bottle it. You can also take a hydrometer reading. It will be ready to bottle when you get a reading of 1.000.

Hopefully over the last month, you’ve been able to gather some champagne bottles. You’ll probably need about four or five 750ml bottles. You can also use regular beer bottles, but this will require another purchase – A beer bottle capper. If you’re going to keep brewing, it’s a necessity at some point.

You’ll also need a couple feet of vinyl tubing which can be found at the homebrew store.

Now, you’ve got some choices. Do you want your cider to be still or sparkling? Do you want it to be dry or sweet?

If you want it to be still (without bubbles), you can skip to the bottle step.

If you want it to be sparking, you’ll need to add some sugar back into the fermented cider to create the carbonation. There’s still enough yeast in there to eat up the sugar and make bubbles.

To do this, take 1-ounce corn sugar and heat it in a cup or so of water. Pour the sugar water into a sterilized container and add the cider on top of it. I’ve also read the you can carbonate with apple juice concentrate, but have never tried that.

The important part here is that you want to siphon off the cider from the layer of sediment at the bottom of the jug. That sediment layer is made up primarily of spent yeast cells. There are lots of theories of how to make a siphon, but the easiest is to place the jug so the bottom is higher than the top of the container you’re siphoning into. I usually place the container on a chair and then the jug on the kitchen counter. Place one end of the hose into the jug and then suck on the other end until cider starts to flow, then quickly put that end into the container and the liquid should flow from the higher container to the lower. You can also fill the vinyl tube with water and hold both ends closed. But one end into the jug (while keeping your finger over the other end). Place the other end into the lower container and gravity should start your siphon. This takes a little practice.

Stop the siphon before it gets to the sediment at the bottom of the jug. Once you have your cider off the sediment it’s time to bottle it. Since you’re only doing a few bottles, you can probably get away pouring the cider into the bottles with a sanitized funnel. You want to make sure that you leave a few inches of headspace in each bottle. If you don’t leave enough space you won’t get proper carbonation. Too much space and your bottles will be over carbonated and may explode! If you’re curious as to the right amount of space, take a look at a commercial bottle of champagne or beer.

They make special buckets called bottling buckets that have a spigot at the bottom. You attach the vinyl tubing to the spigot and attach the bottle tube to the other end. This makes bottling really easy when you’re doing lots of it.

If you end up with a half bottle, you should put it in the fridge and drink it. It will be sweeter than what you just bottled because the yeast didn’t get a chance to convert the sugar.

If you want a sweet cider, you’ll need to add lactose to the cider before you bottle it. Ask you local homebrew store for advice on how much to add.

Now that your cider is in the bottles, go ahead and insert the bottle stoppers and wrap the wire cages on. Let the bottles sit in a cool, quiet place for at least two weeks for the carbonation to develop. It should be good enough to drink after a few weeks, even better in a month, and superb after 3-6 months.

If it’s too dry for your tastes, you can always add some simple syrup to each glass when you serve it.