I write about my own experience with cider brewing and answered relevant questions to help new and advanced brewers.
Cider is a type of alcoholic beverage that is made by fermenting the juice of apples. Hard cider, in particular, has higher alcohol content than its non-alcoholic counterpart, apple cider. The alcohol content of hard cider makes it taste slightly bitter and because the sugar has been fermented into alcohol, the acidity, bitterness, and astringency…
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…
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…
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…