Homemade

Guide to Homemade Wine, Beer, Cider & Mead

Alcoholic beverages; commonly beer and wines and made at home. Most often brews are made from brewing kits purchased at shops specialized in spirits. Cheap Draft features homebrew recipes, equipment requirements, and best practices needed to deliver the perfect batch!

This is the easiest to make because if just enough sugar is added to make the amount of alcohol required, the cider will turn out dry when all the sugar has been used up in producing the necessary alcohol. Therefore, all you need do is to allow fermentation to go on until it ceases and the cider becomes clear. It may then be siphoned off the deposit into bottles or into jars and used as draught cider.

Medium Dry, Medium Sweet or Sweet Cider

These are not really any more difficult to make than dry cider, but it must be borne in mind that to add more sugar at the outset in the hope of leaving some unfermented to sweeten the cider will only result in this extra sugar being converted to alcohol so that the cider becomes a high alcohol dry cider or rather dry apple wine.

As will be seen by those who have read the chapter on mead making (p. 124), up to two and a half pounds of sugar per gallon will be fermented out by the yeast - and this amount will produce 14% of alcohol by volume; much too much for cider. Therefore, the only way to make a medium dry, medium sweet or sweet cider is to add just enough sugar to give the alcohol required and to finish with a dry cider and then sweeten it to taste. But because this sweetening will give rise to further fermentation, we must preserve the cider, or in other words, we must destroy the yeast so that further fermentation cannot take place.

Using Campden fruit preserving tablets for this is the easiest way out of the problem. Having made the dry cider with the amount of alcohol required this will result automatically when the right amount of sugar has been used - so much in the juice and so much added - the amount of cider must be measured after sweetening to taste. To each gallon, crush and dissolve two Campden tablets in a little warmed cider and then stir this into the bulk. Bung down and keep in a cool place. This should be enough to prevent further fermentation, but if after a week or two, the bung blows out of the jar, similar treatment with a further tablet per gallon will be necessary. Keeping in a cool place is a great help in preventing further fermentation. This is because yeast likes warmth - indeed, it must have warmth to ferment well. But a cool atmosphere, the amount of alcohol present in the cider, together with the preserving qualities of the Campden tablets is usually sufficient to prevent further yeast growth.