Craft Hard Cider: Recipes, Tips, and Ideas for Making & Enjoying Hard Cider
Spoiler Alert: If you haven’t taken Cider Quiz #1, click here to take it before exploring the answers. You will find some related links about apples, blending, and varieties at the bottom. These contain related and interesting information about apples that you may not have known. Question #7: What are the three main categories of apples based on … Continue reading Cider Quiz Answers: Question #7
Spoiler Alert: If you haven’t taken Cider Quiz #1, click here to take it before exploring the answers. You can tap or click on the picture in each answer to open a related article. Question #1: How can you create a cider with some residual sweetness? Let’s explore each answer. 1. Keeving: Yes, it can … Continue reading Cider Quiz Answers: Question #1
Musing: I believe yeast is the most important factor deciding whether a keeve will be successful or not. Let me explain. Keeving is a process that uses nutrient deprivation to create a naturally sweet hard cider. The main characteristic of a keeve is the formation of a thick cap. It is usually gelatinous but sometimes … Continue reading Cider Musings: Keeving
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?
This is the second article in my series on non-Saccharomyces yeast. In the first, I challenged the concept that Saccharomyces yeast is ideal for cider. While yeast is a critical element that defines the essence of cider, I asserted the view that we needed to break away from our current beliefs about yeasts. I proposed … Continue reading Non-Saccharomyces Yeast: Complexity & Sweetness
What is the right temperature to drink a cider? Should it be cold, chilled, warm, or even hot? Yes, you already know my answer, which is that it will depend! Hard cider is not a simple product. In fact, because it’s a relatively young and overlooked beverage in most places around the world, I propose … Continue reading Drinking Cider: Temperature Effect
The quest for a naturally sweet hard cider is like trying to find a four-leaf clover, something sought by many but only found by a few. There are a number of methods, like keeving and nutrient deprivation, that can be utilized. But, while these work, they are not always the simplest method and may not … Continue reading Cider and Natural Sweeteners
Red Pear-Sweet Apple Cider Label This is a cider with some natural residual sweetness. Actually, it’s a semi-sweet perry with some apple notes. That is because its 2/3 pear and 1/3 apple. For reference, I made made 3 gallons of this golden elixir of flavor, and I’m happy I opted for a larger batch. For … Continue reading Making Red Pear-Sweet Apple
Keeving is a process that seeks to remove nutrients needed for fermentation in order to create residual sweetness. Yeast need nutrients and vitamins to ferment and while they are good at finding or creating many of these nutrients, it only takes the loss of one to stop the process. Keeving is a process that removes … Continue reading Nutrient Deprivation: Keeving
Chaptalization… It sounds like a complex process with lots of things that could go wrong. However, it’s really quite simple. Chaptalization is the process of adding sugar to juice in order to increase the level of alcohol, %ABV, in the final fermented product. You may have noticed that I didn’t say it’s the process of … Continue reading Chaptalization and Hard Cider (errr… Apple Wine)
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