Making a great hard cider requires more than just good ingredients and technique. Yeast plays an important role in the final product, as it helps to create both flavor and alcohol content during fermentation. It can affect the taste, appearance, and alcohol percentage of your cider. Taste is perhaps the most important factor, and the…
A microscope is the perfect brewing tool for many home brewers. What could be geekier than looking at the microbes that produce our beer? But what is considered the best microscopes for home brewing? When it comes to choosing a microscope for your home brewing, a basic one with 10, 20, and 40X objectives, as well…
While you can in theory make cider with any fruit that contains juice and sugar, these will not be considered “real” ciders unless they contain a substantial amount of apples or pears! So, you can indeed make “cider” or sparkling fruit wine (Pet Nat) from any fruit type, it will just not be considered cider…
Hard cider storage containers come in a variety of materials. For the most part, the best option is glassware, typically bottles, which will be reusable, airtight, and not give off taste or odors to your cider. Typically glass bottles are chosen for cider storage due to their high-pressure tolerance and ease of cleaning, but there…
Cider making is not a complicated process, but it does involve a certain amount of waiting time. Especially if you make it from scratch – starting from the apples! The first steps of cider making are picking, washing, and crushing apples, which will take half a day or so. Some cider makers perform maceration, which…
Throughout history, many people actually drank, and still are drinking, their cider in the still form without carbonation. Hard cider that has not undergone secondary bottle fermentation or force carbonation is called still cider. It was the kind of cider that was made and consumed for hundreds of years before the glass bottle technology was…
Fermenting cider into hard cider is at one time a complex process but it is very simple to do. Mostly because you are not doing it, but the yeast cells are! You might be surprised to learn that you cannot actually let cider ferment for too long, as the process will stop when the sugars…
The foam on top of your apple cider and beer is sometimes called “krausen” and is normal during fermentation of especially gluten-containing beers and ciders made from the juice of high protein or pectin-rich apples. Foam forms as a result of aggressive fermentation where CO2 bubbles get caught in polymers of protein and carbohydrates present…
If you want your hard cider or just plain apple cider, to be sparkling there are only a few ways to do so. The most common way of carbonating cider is simply letting the yeast in your cider do the job after bottling, but this requires that live yeast cells are present in your cider.…
Beer storage containers come in a variety of materials. For the most part, the best option is glassware, typically bottles, which will be reusable, airtight, and not give off taste or odors to your beer. Typically glass bottles are chosen for beer storage due to their high-pressure tolerance and ease of cleaning, but there are…