Hard Cider is Easy

We went up to Oak Glen this weekend to pick up some apple cider from Riley's Farms. Its a very Julian-esq place, orchards and fields of fruits and vegetables all surrounded by mountan's, trees, cabin-esq and victorian-esq homes. One of the things on my list is to go there and pick fruit with my husband. They have raspberry, pumpkin, apple, pear, strawberry, watermelon, cherry, flower, peach and ollalieberrie(what?) fruit picking days. I think we may try to make another trip there before Thanksgiving to pick pumpkins (cooking pumpkins, not jack-o-lantern pumpkins). If anyone is interested in checking out the place, their website is here. We ended up bringing home a total of seven gallons of cider, five were just apple, one was cherry-apple and the last was raspberry-apple. I even got a small jar of pumpkin butter to share with the family on Thanksgiving, it tastes like pumpkin pie but with a more spreadable consistency - very yummy and I can't wait to try it on some toasted whole wheat or sweet bread!

The second half of our day consisted of "brewing" the cider into hard cider. I didn't know how simple it was. Basically in a nutshell you put the cider in a carboy (6-7 gal glass or plastic jug) and add a vial of yeast to it. Of course you have to be sure the temperatures are right and to leave out any contaminants.

These 5 gallons of apple cider went into a 6 gal carboy:

Pouring the cider into the carboy (we repeated the process with the other two flavors into two, one gallon glass jugs):

Then we pitched the yeast ("pitched" is a fancy way of saying "poured"). For the 1 gallon batches we split a vial of yeast for each, for the 5gal batch we used one whole vial:

Added the stoppers - which prevents foreign objects and bacteria etc. from entering the carboy as the cider ferments (the stoppers we had didn't fit in the 1 gal jugs so using foil works, it's just a bit risky). Then we placed the now fermenting cider into a freezer with a temperature controller set at 68 degrees:


All in all it took us about an hour to do everything, including pre-cleaning and post-cleaning. These should all ferment for about two weeks and then it's on to the next step of carbonating, kegging and bottling. The cost per gallon of cider was $9 for the apple (in the glass jugs) and $10 for the cherry and raspberry (in plastic milk jugs).

Today was a great day!