There is an apricot tree at the apple orchard I frequent and it normally produces a huge crop of apricots. You can see where this is going. Sunrise Cider combines acidic culinary apples with fresh apricots. In my book, The Art & Science of Cider, I provided this cider recipe as a pairing for BBQ Pork Sliders on Garlic Cider Sourdough. Yes, it is as good as it sounds and besides my book giving you all the details on how to make hard cider, it also provides some great food recipes and lots of interesting information about apples and hard cider.
I did switch up this recipe version slightly from the original one in my book. Instead of fermenting the apricot juice as part of the primary, I did it in the secondary for this version. That will usually give you better color retention and can change the aroma and flavor notes. You can try both methods and see which you enjoy the most.
The apricots usually ripen before even Earigold apples so I recommend freezing the juice. This gives you the option of using early culinary apples or later ones like Granny Smith. It also lets you chose whether to include it in the primary or the secondary stage. The culinary apple will give this hard cider a nice acidic finish and the apricot will provide some fruitiness as well as coloring. It’s truly is like a Tucson Sunrise promising a warm day of blue skies.
Checkout the hard cider recipe for Sunrise Cider in my hard cider recipe section. Here is a direct link as well as a quick link to all my recipes.
PricklyCider.com 
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