I broke down the equipment used to make hard cider into the following three basic process steps. Fermentation Equipment Aging Equipment Bottling Equipment In this post, I’ll cover the Aging step. You can find PDF files of each step in The Shop. As I did with my other posts, I am taking the view of … Continue reading Cider Equipment: Aging
Tag: Filter
Cider Question: How to make sweet hard cider?
Cider or what some call hard cider is normally dry, which means it has little to no sugar remaining. This is because apple juice has about half the sugar that grape juice has and is often made with yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) used for wine. The result is that when fermentation completes, you are likely to … Continue reading Cider Question: How to make sweet hard cider?
Filtration Basics
Filtration is a process used to remove unwanted compounds from a hard cider. Those compounds can range from suspended solids that are relatively large to the smallest of particles like sugars and salts. Those smallest particles basically mean you will only have water remaining and would usually require an osmosis filter system. It is possible … Continue reading Filtration Basics
Experiments in Sweetness: Sweet Hard Cider
Being able to create a hard cider with some residual sweetness is often referred to as the holy grail of cider. The reason for this is because that sweetness can be used to balance the high acids often found in dessert apples and the tannins found in cider apples. This cider season I set about … Continue reading Experiments in Sweetness: Sweet Hard Cider
Cider Oxygenation – The Impact by Process
Cider Oxygenation: The amount of oxygen added to cider by processing It is often stated that you want to avoid oxygen exposure to your hard cider after fermentation begins. While this is a good practice, like most questions related to the production of hard cider, the answer often is it depends. With wine, micro-oxygenation can … Continue reading Cider Oxygenation – The Impact by Process
Hard Cider Tip #27: Clear or Cloudy Juice
I hope you are finding the information you need. Please don’t hesitate to leave me a comment or contact me if you have specific questions. To make the best hard cider, should juice be crystal clear or should it be cloudy? Have you even thought about it much? If you have read some of my … Continue reading Hard Cider Tip #27: Clear or Cloudy Juice
Hard Cider Tip #15: Pectic Enzyme
What is pectic enzyme and why would you add it to your juice or cider. Pectic Enzyme is also know as pectinase, which is an enzyme that breaks down pectin. In other words, it is a protein that acts as a catalyst to degrade the pectin naturally found in fruit. Pectin is a complex carbohydrate … Continue reading Hard Cider Tip #15: Pectic Enzyme