I write about my own experience with cider brewing and answered relevant questions to help new and advanced brewers.
You may have heard of a method called “cold crashing” used for beer or wine brewing. For wine, this process has been used for centuries to precipitate out the yeast and tartaric acid crystals, but for most cider brewers, cold crashing has a slightly different function. Cold crashing is the process by which hard cider…
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…
Hard ciders, like other alcoholic beverages, comes in a variety of flavour pallets, and while some people love their ciders “bitter”, others would rather be without be without these somewhat hostile taste nuances. Most of the bitter tastes in cider comes from the alcohol and phenols – most of which are tannins. The tannic quality…
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.…
Brewing cider is a complicated process that requires a lot of attention. The temperature during fermentation, the type of yeast, and the fermentation time are some of the factors you will have to consider as it does affect the aromatic profile, appearance and alcohol percentage of your final product. Most yeast strains used for cider…
Making hard cider is a process that has been around for centuries, and the taste of hard cider has evolved over time. To make cider taste more to your liking, it is important to understand where the different tastes come from in the first place. You might want to reduce the beer taste or the…
If you’re totally new to home brewing it can seem confusing how cider and beer are different. And though there are many differences that separate them, in this article I will tell you how they differ but also how they can end up tasting quite similar to each other! Strictly speaking, hard cider is a…
If you’re curious about the differences between applejack and calvados, you’ve come to the right place. Both applejack and calvados are popular wines (brandies) distilled from fermented apples – applejack from the US (Pennsylvania) and Calvados is French (Normandy). The difference in origin naturally also implies a difference in the apple cultivars used, and whereas…
You might have heard that hard cider should be stored for a few months to improve its taste before drinking. The same is the case for whine, which is often stored for years before reaching its full potential! Here we are talking about the aging done in a separate container after fermentation and the effect…