If you’re only a beginner in the homebrewing community, choosing your first recipe can be very confusing. That is why this is the perfect place to start. When compared to beer, ciders are very beginner-friendly and simple to make. Not to mention that they taste delicious. If you are in a mood for another useful and easy recipe try How To Make Your Own Rose Water.

Equipment & Ingredients

For the equipment the list is very simple:

• clean and sanitized fermenter
• clean and sanitized spoon
• airlock
• bottles if you are going for bottling
• keg if kegging is your fun

Ingredients:

• 1 gallon of store-bought apple juice
• yeast nutrients (you can pick them up at any home brewing store)
• yeast (we are using Red Star Cote des Blancs)

The Recipe

We are starting out with our 1 gallon of apple juice. The thing with any bought juice is that you need to make sure it doesn’t have any preservatives. Take time to check the ingredients list on the bottle and if you see ingredients such as sorbate, sulfite or benzoate better skip it. These preservatives could inhibit the yeast growth and your fermentation will be less than successful.

To start with we add the juice into the fermenter. Have in mind that juice already has sugar added to it. Now it’s time to add yeast nutrients. We decided on 5 grams of DAP and 3 grams of FermaidO. They are to help with fermentation. Finally, we add the yeast. Make sure to mix all the ingredients well and this also provides more oxygen into the fermenter which is also important for the fermentation. Just have in mind that as soon as the fermentation starts we never want to expose the fermenter to oxygen. So oxygen before fermentation is fine and after is not. Simple rule.

We set the airlock on the top of the fermenter and set it at 69 degrees F. Try to keep it out of direct sunlight. Best in a dark room for a week.

Finishing Up

If you’re bottling you will transfer the cider into a bottling bucket with your priming sugar. Best to use a priming sugar calculator which you can find online. It will calculate for you the amount of sugar you need to use to get good resulting carbonation.

After you finish bottling place the bottles away for 10 days and the cider should be ready to drink. If you’re using a keg like us just add the cider into a sanitized keg and force carbonate it.