Craft Hard Cider: Recipes, Tips, and Ideas for Making & Enjoying Hard Cider
Li’l Apple Cider - A cider crafted with manzanita berries. If you are ever near where manzanita trees grow, I encourage you to find one. They are a gorgeous tree. In southern Arizona you can find them on some of the mountains and they surround one of the orchards that I pick, which is around … Continue reading Making Li’l Apple Cider
Black & Gold Cider Label Black & Gold Cider is made from two of my favorite apples: Arkansas Black and GoldRush. I enjoy eating them, though I recommend cutting up the Arkansas Blacks as they can be a little hard. However, they both have a fair amount of tannins and acid as well as aroma. … Continue reading Making Black & Gold Cider
Winter: Lager yeast fermented hot and aged on hickory. One day I woke up with a crazy idea for a hard cider recipe. Okay, it’s more than one day but, sometimes they actually work. I had been reading about fermentation temperatures and whether hotter or colder fermentations are better. I noted that much of the … Continue reading Making Winter Cider
Tupelo Cyser Label One of my favorite adjuncts for cider is honey. It’s amazing how just a little honey can add unique aromas and flavors to a cider. It also turns it into a cyser, which is a cider made with honey. If you make mead, you might start calling it other names. For me, … Continue reading Making Tupelo Cyser
Heirloom Cider Label Every season, I seek to try something new. That usually always includes new apple varieties when I can find them. This year I also experimented with yeast and juice clarity. If you will recall from my earlier post on clear or cloudy juice, clearer juices can produce more fruity esters. I incorporated … Continue reading Making Heirloom Cider
Flamin’ Hops Cider Label This year, I embraced the organic Carolina Reaper pepper as part of my cider ingredients. I have used chipotle peppers before but when I saw the World’s Hottest Pepper was available as organic, I had to try it. My first plan was for my Ruby Reaper cider mistelle but since I … Continue reading Making Flamin’ Hops Cider
Ruby Reaper label There are many different types of fortified wines. The process consists of adding spirits to wine often during fermentation to stop the process by raising the alcohol level. In my book, I talk about three main style categories for hard cider: Traditional, Adjunct, and Dessert. This last category is where this recipe … Continue reading Making Ruby Reaper Cider Mistelle
If you are American or grew up in the US, you learned that cider doesn’t mean an alcoholic beverage. Cider meant this cold cloudy drink you would get with doughnuts when visiting an orchard or farm stand. It seem mystical or at least in your memory it is. There must be a special recipe for … Continue reading Making “American Cider” (a.k.a Apple Juice)
Sunrise Cider: Apricot and Apple 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 … Continue reading Making Sunrise Cider
I try to showcase how hard cider can pair with anything: seafood, pizza, vegetarian, spicy, and even dessert. However, sometimes you just want a nice hearty meal. Something that warms you not just from the food but from the memories or emotions. For me, that is food like macaroni and cheese and hamburgers but it … Continue reading Cider and Sloppy Joes
PricklyCider.com 