2017 Hard Apple Cider

We just finished bottling our hard apple cider for this year. Last year turned out ok, just kind of dry for our tastes. This year we are trying a slightly different recipe and back sweetening in a different way as well.

Here are just some of "tools of the trade". Bottle washer, air locks, tubing. We also have gallon jars, food grade plastic buckets, bottle caps, bottle capper.

I'm not going to go through the entire process, but I'll touch on the highlights. We picked our apples this year from a local U-pick, Lehne Farms (about 80 lbs, half golden delicious, half red delicious). After juicing we added the yeast and put it in the big plastic bucket to start fermenting. After about a week we put the juice in the gallon jugs with the airlocks to continue until the yeast ate up all the natural sugars..

When the jars were no longer bubbling throught the airlocks we siphoned it back into the big bucket, added some stuff to totally kill any possible leftover yeast. We let it sit for a day or two. Now we're getting close to the end.

We did a taste test and it was incredibly dry! It was time to do the "back sweetening". Last year we added a bit of sugar to each bottle before filling and that helped to make it a little sweeter and made it "sparkling". This year the sparkling aspect was not so important to us. We wanted to make sure the flavor was more to our liking. 

We added three cans of frozen apple juice concentrate. Still too dry for me, so we ended up adding a cup of brown sugar. Finally it was not mouth puckering!

The next day we got all the equipment and bottles out. The bottles were soaked to remove the labels, then scrubbed with a brillo pad to get the remaining residue off. Then the bottles were placed in the dishwasher to be sterilized.

We got a new bottle filler this year which was really cool. It attaches to the end of the tube and once you have your siphon going as long as the filler is pushed against the bottom of the bottle the liquid flows. As soon as you lift the filler off the bottom of the bottle the liquid stops flowing. It made for a much less messy fill.

Once the bottles are filled and the caps were put into boiling water for five minutes it was time to cap. This year we got 29 full 12 ounce bottles and one almost full.

The bottles were wiped down and it was time for this year's label. This year's label features our Irish Dexter bull, Dakota. Did you know the "glue" to put the labels on the bottles is milk? Just a little trivia I learned during last years' bottling.