I used to like cider a great deal until I was attacked by five pints of scrumpy over forty years ago in the George Inn on top of Portsdown Hill near Portsmouth. The events are strangely hazy but involved a night spent in a telephone box outside the post office in Cosham. Strangely comfortable though the telephone box was, it was decades before I could go near cider again.
I have finally recovered from my experience but become rather more discerning about which ciders I will drink. Nothing too murky, too dry, too flat or too sharp and certainly nothing which delivers flavours that are unexpected.
At the risk of suffering recriminations from cider aficionados I suspect there is a certain amount of bravado in cider-making and drinking circles, which maintains that the more undrinkable a cider is, the better it is considered to be. Perhaps I am being unkind, but I am not alone in my thoughts. The great writer and gardener John Evelyn, writing in 1670, wishes to ‘… prescribe a way to make a sort of cider pleasant and quick of taste, and yet wholesome to drink…For if this be Heresie, I must confess my self guilty.’
Most people are perfectly happy with the light, often sweet, ciders that are available commercially. Around my way scrumpy is the cider of choice and if you follow the path of least resistance in making cider, scrumpy is what you will end up with.
I clearly remember the first time I attempted cider-making. Everything seemed to go well – no off-smells were produced, it did not turn to vinegar and it cleared beautifully. However, when it came to trying the stuff I thought it was pretty awful – possessing a sourness surpassed only by a bucket of under-ripe sloes and my aunt Hilda from Lowestoft. I gave some to a friend who brews a very great deal of cider and she told me that this was what cider was supposed to taste like.
If this is the sort of cider you like you are very lucky because it is easy to make. But if you prefer something which does not require so refined and experienced a palate you can make this too, with just a little more effort.
Unlike beer-making, cider-making is relatively straightforward. Indeed there is a notion that if you squeeze the juice out of some apples into a bucket and leave it covered with a tarpaulin in the shed for a few months you will get cider. While in principle this is true, the fermenting process is uncontrolled and it is impossible to make any kind of sweet or fizzy cider this way; in fact, you may well end up with cider vinegar. However, while proper cider-making requires time and care, there is nothing particularly complicated about it.
Method
Making cider is straightforward and the main stages are illustrated opposite. The apples are crushed (pic 1), then squeezed to extract the juice (pic 2). This is collected in a fermenting bucket, yeast is added and the juice is allowed to ferment (pic 3). It is then racked into a new fermenting bucket or a cask and left to mature (pic 4). If a cask is used it can simply remain there; if racked into a fermenting bucket then the cider can be bottled. Most varieties of cider follow this process, at least in part.
Types of cider
It is possible to make four main types of cider: dry and still; dry and fizzy; sweet and still; sweet and fizzy. Dry and still is by far the easiest to produce. The others require some form of intervention in the fermentation process by such methods as limiting nutrients, bottling before fermentation is complete, killing the yeast or adding sugar. Perhaps surprisingly, sweet and fizzy is the hardest.
Dry and still This is what you will end up with if you let some yeast loose on a bucket of apple juice.
Dry and fizzy There are a few ways of making this cider, all of which do the only thing necessary to make a drink fizzy – introduce carbon dioxide (see here).
Sweet and still No cider is completely free of sugar because some of the fruit sugars are not fermentable by yeast and remain in the cider. However, few ciders fermented out completely will be sweet enough to satisfy the modern palate, and endless methods have been devised to produce sweet cider.
Sweet and fizzy You can easily make cider sparkly and it is fairly easy to make it sweet, but it is harder to make a cider that is both at the same time. To produce the carbon dioxide for fizzy cider, you need sugar and live yeast. The problem here is that the yeast will eat all the sugar, leaving you with either a dry fizzy cider or a flat, stronger cider. There is no easy answer to this. Most of the sweet fizzy stuff in supermarkets is passed through industrial-grade filters to remove all the yeast so that fermentation does not restart, and sugar is added. Carbon dioxide is then injected into the cider under high pressure. Since no one will have all the necessary equipment hanging around in their kitchen, a compromise must be reached.
There are several ways of making cider sweet and fizzy at home and, while none of them are perfect, an acceptable sweet fizzy cider is obtainable.
Crushing the apples in a scratter
Pressing the apples to extract the juice
Fermenting the apple juice in a fermentation bucket
Siphoning or racking the cider into a cask
Ingredients
By a very long way the principal ingredient is apple and many craft cider makers resolutely refuse to add anything else, viewing any such practices as crimes against nature. However, for those of us who have not reached this level of purity there are a number of ingredients that can be usefully added without too serious a damage to our karma.
Apples
Making cider is rather like making grape wine – ideally you only need one ingredient. With cider it is, quite obviously, apples. The question is which sort? In truth it should be one or more of the many varieties of specially developed cider apples and most of the cider makers I have spoken to view the use of any other variety with an incredulous shake of the head. While cider apples are easy to come by in West Dorset they can be a little scarce elsewhere, but it is perfectly possible to make a very acceptable cider with dessert apples provided that they are accompanied by cooking apples or, best of all, crab apples. Of course, if you are really keen and have the space in your garden it is possible to plant your own cider apple trees, although ideally they should be of more than one variety.
Crab apples
Clearly people did not go to the enormous and time-devouring trouble of developing special breeds of apple for nothing, so what do cider apples have that your average French Golden Delicious lacks? The really big difference is that cider apples are more fibrous and thus easier to press – they do not just squidge out of the press as apple purée. There is a little more to it, of course – cider apples contain a good balance of high sugar, high tannin and low acidity.
There are many, many varieties of cider apples and they are divided into four different types, depending on their balance of sugar, tannin and acid. These types are ‘sweet’, ‘bittersweet’, ‘sharp’ and ‘bittersharp’, each used and usually blended to provide a variety of ciders. The waters are muddied slightly by there being such fine distinctions as ‘mild bittersweet’, ‘medium bittersharp’ and so on. ‘Bittersweet’ is the most important of the cider apple types, having high sugar, high tannin and low acid levels.
The names of cider apples are charming: ‘Broxwood Foxwhelp’, ‘Captain Broad’, ‘Collogett Pippin’ and ‘Hangdown’ among them. I inherited what my neighbour told me was a Tom Putt when I moved into my house. Unfortunately it succumbed to my gardening expertise and is no more.
As I have indicated, you do not need to use cider apples to make cider – any apple will do the trick – but it is as well to use a blend of different varieties to balance out those three important components – sugar, tannin and acid. Any sweet dessert apple, such as Cox’s or Russet, will make a good cider but is best if balanced with 30% crab apples, which will provide the tannin and some of the acidity the dessert apples lack. Crab apples are also very fibrous, a characteristic which will help if you are using a press. Failing crab apples, then use 40% cooking apples, such as Bramley.
It is essential to do a ‘test juice’ using the apple or apples you have chosen in the proportions you intend to use them. This will give you an indication of the levels of sugar, tannin and acid you will achieve. A hydrometer will be needed to check the sugar level and a pH meter or testing strips for the acid. With tannin you will just have to taste it, see here.
Sugar
Generally speaking, sugar is not added to ‘proper’ cider even though there is a great deal of evidence that it was common practice among many cider makers in the past. According to William Ellis (The Complete Cyderman, 1754), it made ‘the best of cyder’. Many modern, commercially produced ciders are little more than fermented sugar syrups; cider can be sold as cider with as low as 35% apple content. The reason that proper craft ciders have no sugar added is that there is enough sugar in the juice to give them an absolute volume of alcohol of 8.5% (maximum). Any higher than this and the cider is classed as a wine with a much higher UK duty.
Sugar is frequently added to increase sweetness at the end of the fermenting process. Cider left in peace will normally lose all trace of sweetness over time, either in the fermenting vessel or, more dangerously, in the bottle (you get carbon dioxide as well from continued fermentation). If you add sugar to fermented cider it will just carry on fermenting and the desired sweetness will not be attained. For this reason, the sugar is usually added just before the cider is consumed.
Yeast
Many cider makers do not use a proprietary yeast – it is something that is freely available in the air, sometimes on the surface of the apples and often just everywhere inside the building in which cider is habitually made. However, I recommend pitching yeast into your apple juice to get fermentation off to a flying start. Cider yeasts, some of them rather expensive, are available but there is no reason why a white wine or Champagne yeast could not be used. For more information on yeast and fermentation.
Yeast nutrient
Some cider makers add yeast nutrients to ensure that fermentation is vigorous and continues until all the sugars are gone. However, they are not really necessary and other producers often go to considerable lengths to remove nutrients to stop fermentation early.
Pectic enzyme
Apples contain a hefty 1–1.5% pectin so it is little surprise that cider often fails to clear. Pectic enzyme added before fermentation will prevent the ‘pectin haze’, though to be honest not many people bother with it as most ciders clear with time. However, it is well worth using if you are making perry, which is notoriously difficult to clear.
Malic acid
If you have your blend of apples slightly wrong then you may find that the juice is not acidic enough. This will produce a cider that may be rather bland but, worse still, prone to infection. I strongly recommend rectifying this by adding some juice from very acidic apples. Adding the natural acid of apples, malic acid, will also work; it is just not something that craft cider makers do very often. Deciding on the level of acidity is something that can be done by taste with a little experience, but an accurate pH meter is a great deal of help here. Being terribly keen on filling the house with kit, I bought one and have not regretted the outlay – it is very useful in wine- and beer-making too. See Campden tablets (opposite), which covers this matter in more depth.
Tannin
Tannin provides bitterness to cider but also gives ‘bite’ or ‘mouth-feel’. The latter comes from its astringency. Tannin binds components of your saliva to increase the friction within your mouth – really. If you have chosen your apple varieties with care you should have plenty of tannin in your juice, but a juice made entirely from dessert apples is likely to be low in tannin and you will need to add some in powder form – 1 tsp tannin to every 4.5 litres juice is usually enough.
Campden tablets
Campden tablets (or more precisely the sodium metabisulphite from which they are made) release measured amounts of sulphur dioxide into wines and ciders and are more important in cider-making than in any other aspect of home brewing. Their primary purpose is to kill off unwanted yeasts and bacteria before fermentation with the desired yeast is started.
Unfortunately there is no simple way of knowing how many Campden tablets to use. Every 5 litres of juice will require from three tablets down to none at all. This depends on the acidity of the juice, as high acidity suppresses bacterial action on its own. If you have a pH meter it is easy:
| pH OF THE APPLE JUICE | NUMBER OF CAMPDEN TABLETS NEEDED |
| Below 3.0 | None (but your cider will be very acidic) |
| 3.0–3.3 | 1 |
| 3.3–3.5 | 2 |
| 3.5–3.8 | 3 |
This assessment relies on a good pH meter or narrow-range (2.8–4.4) pH-testing papers, which are much cheaper. For a pH above 3.8 you really need to increase the acidity with an acidic apple juice or some malic acid.
If you are worried about using sulphur dioxide in something you are going to drink then I must reassure you that very little will be left by the time the cider is consumed and the majority will have dissipated within 24 hours. It is also highly traditional – in the past cider barrels were invariably sterilised by placing sulphur candles in them before filling with the soon-to-be-fermented juice. Of course there are always other views and some cider makers I know refuse to use it at all, relying on the acidity alone. They seem to get by without it provided the pH is 3.8 or lower, so perhaps the home cider maker can too. However, the inadvertent manufacture of cider vinegar is a fate much suffered by home cider makers and I recommend the use of Campden tablets unless you have religious objections.
Equipment
If you take to cider-making you will probably want to buy all the kit – including an apple crusher or ‘scratter’ and an apple press (pictured), but for those starting out it is possible to make a gallon or two of cider using standard home wine-making equipment and a kitchen gadget or two.
For small cider batches
For basic, small-volume cider-making of a gallon or two (4.5–9 litres) you will need:
Electric juicer This can produce a stream of juice quite quickly. The really cheap models are not quite man enough but you will not need catering quality.
Two 10- or 15-litre fermenting buckets These come complete with lids, one of which should have a hole and grommet to accommodate an air lock.
Nylon straining bag This will enable you to squeeze the last drop of juice from the pulp left over from the juicer.
Hydrometer This is used for measuring specific gravity.
pH meter or narrow-range pH-testing strips Essential for checking the acidity level of the juice.
Siphon Used for transferring the juice or cider from one container to another.
Demi-john You will need a standard 4.5-litre demi-john. Most are glass, though plastic ones can also be found.
Air lock and cork This is standard wine-making equipment. The air lock fits securely into a hole in the cork. Air locks are available in a number of designs. Fortunately they are now made of plastic, not glass, the latter having resulted in many a trip to A&E.
Bottles or a cask These are needed to store the end product. Strong swing-top bottles are the easiest to use if you want to bottle your cider. Although small and rather romantic wooden casks are available I suggest using the boring plastic variety despite their evident lack of authenticity. It is difficult to sterilise wooden casks and they sometimes allow air into the cider which can quickly spoil it. It is also possible to rack and leave your cider in a corked demi-john.
Apple crusher or scratter
For large cider batches
If everything has gone well with your attempts at making small batches of cider, or if you want to plunge straight in and start making oceans of the stuff, you will need some decidedly industrial equipment in addition to a few of the items listed above. The latter are repeated here.
Fruit masher Also known as an apple mill and, charmingly, as a scratter (pictured).
25-litre (or larger!) fermenting bucket This must be complete with lid.
25-litre wide-neck fermenting vessel This comes with a hole in the top to accommodate an air lock. The screw-on lid helps to protect your cider better than a standard fermenting vessel.
Apple press These range from small aluminium and steel presses, through cast iron and wood to agricultural constructions, which need their own shed. My friend Ross owns the largest ‘domestic’ press I know of. It is an ancient Somerset ‘mobile’ press made of oak and iron and is about the size and weight of a Ford Transit van loaded with used car batteries. He is very proud of it.
Siphon Used for transferring the juice or cider from one container to another.
Nylon straining bag This will enable you to squeeze the last drop of juice from the pulp, though one is generally not needed.
Hydrometer Required for measuring the specific gravity.
pH meter or narrow-range testing strips To check the acidity level of the juice.
Air lock You will need one that fits securely in the top of your fermenting vessel.
Barrel While wooden ones are available it is easier to use the plastic variety. These come most often in 10- and 25-litre sizes, ready fitted with a tap and a screw cap in which there is a very simple carbon dioxide escape valve. A wide-neck wine fermenter into which an air lock can be fitted may be used instead provided you only want a fairly still cider. You can also buy a ‘plastic bag in a box’ to keep still cider in. These desperately unromantic containers prevent air coming into contact with your cider and spoiling it. I have also seen a ‘plastic bag in a barrel’, which just about tackles the unromantic bit.
Apple press
Juicing apples for cider
You will need about 10 kilos of apples for every 7 litres of juice. The volume of cider produced will be a little less than the amount of juice. All the varieties of cider – dry, sweet, still, fizzy – start with the same juice.
Preparing the apples
Using clean apples is essential in making cider. First pick over the apples, removing bad bits (the odd, clean bruise is OK) and anything that you do not like the look of. Wash them thoroughly in cold water, then wash them again, this time with a crushed Campden tablet added for every 5 litres water. Drain the apples and rinse.
Juicing small batches
If you are making a small batch of a gallon or two, the simplest way to juice the apples is to use a domestic fruit juicer. These fiendish devices mash the apples and extract the juice in one noisy operation. They partially purée the fruit, throw the juice centrifugally through a sieve into one container while the (fairly) dry pulp is flung into another. The ordinary domestic ones are just about powerful enough to do this. Mine will produce juice for a gallon of cider (4.5 litres) in about 15 minutes, though it does start to complain a bit towards the end. The ‘waste’ pulp still contains some juice and I squeeze it through a nylon bag to extract as much as I can.
The juice should be collected in a fermenting bucket and kept covered.
Juicing large batches
To make much more than a gallon, you will need to crush and press the apples separately. Before you start, extract the juice from a few apples (a blender and nylon bag will do the trick) to test for specific gravity and acidity. The SG should be around 1050–1055; much lower and the resulting alcohol content will be too low for the cider to keep. If the SG is not high enough you must reassess the apples you are using and introduce a sweeter variety. Similarly test the acidity with your pH meter or testing strips and adjust as suggested here.
Milling, crushing or scratting apples has occupied many inventive minds over the years. Whatever you use, you should end up with a coarse pulp and not a purée, which would be impossible to press. The most primitive method is to pound the apples in a fermenting bucket with a substantial piece of wood until you get a coarse pulp. It is very, very hard work.
The method favoured by men with sheds is to put the apples into a fermenting bucket and use a homemade or proprietary (but always deadly) rotating blade attached to an electric drill by a shaft. You can even buy special lids with a bushed hole in the top for just this purpose. The trick is to ease the blade down, not plunge!
Apple juice running from the press
Garden shredders are occasionally pressed into service with varying degrees of success. But for pressing juice in large quantities you really need to move away from Heath Robinson devices and buy a proper apple mill. Mine is my pride and joy and it sits on top of my press so that the pulp goes straight in. Depending on your mill it can be worth passing the pomace (apple pulp) through the apple mill a second or even third time.
With several gallons of pomace at your disposal you now need something to squeeze the juice out. If you just squeeze pomace all you will get is pomace, so some way must be found to leave dry pulp behind while allowing the juice to flow free.
Traditionally this was, and still is in my part of the world, done by making a ‘cheese’. The pomace is spread on the bed of the press and a layer of straw placed on top. Another layer of pomace is added then more straw, the straw layers being neatly tucked in each time. If you put an industrial hydraulic press on a cider cheese it would just burst, so the whole pressing process is done slowly over several hours, a turn of the screw being made at well-spaced intervals.
You might be pleased to know that you do not need to make a cheese, you just put your pomace into a press with slatted or perforated sides and turn the screw. You will still need to take your time as the juice can only be extracted slowly. A 5-minute rest between turns of the screw is about right.
As the pressed ‘cake’ will still contain sugar no matter how hard you squeeze, it is worth breaking it up and adding 1 or 2 litres of water to every 5 kilos of cake, then re-pressing and adding to the rest of the juice. Second-press juice will be a fairly thin liquor but, provided your apples are sugar-rich, worth the (considerable) effort. All the juice should be collected in a suitably sized fermenting bucket and kept covered. If your juice contains very much solid material then arrange a large nylon straining bag in the fermenting bucket to catch it. Keep the juice covered as much as possible. Always allow plenty of room – about 10cm – above the surface of the juice to provide space for the froth which comes with fermentation.
My most serious problem at this point is not drinking the juice. The stuff you get straight out of the press before it has oxidised has to be tried to be believed – it is wonderful. It is also surprisingly sweet; even crab apples produce a perfectly acceptable apple juice and with apples such as Russets it is almost syrupy.
Testing sugar level and acidity
Test the specific gravity using your hydrometer (see here) and make a note of it in your logbook. It should be at least 1050. If you have done a test batch you should not have any unpleasant surprises, but if you do there will be nothing for it but to find some sweet apples and add the juice from them.
Test the acidity of the juice using a pH meter or narrow-range pH-testing strips. Again make a note in your logbook.
Dry still cider
Whichever and however much cider you wish to make, you will need to follow the instructions for making a dry still cider up to at least partway through the fermentation. The exception to this is one of the processes used for making sweet cider – keeving – described here.
Ingredients
• Apple juice
• Campden tablets
• Pectic enzyme
• Yeast
Add crushed Campden tablets to the apple juice in the fermenting bucket (see here) according to the table, to kill off any unwanted yeasts and reduce the chance of bacteria infecting your cider. Now add ½ tsp pectic enzyme for every 5 litres of juice. Cover and leave for at least 24 hours.
Aerate the juice to the point of frothiness, cover, allow to settle for an hour or so, then pitch the yeast. Leave to ferment for 5 days.
By now the fermentation will be mostly complete and the specific gravity down to about 1005. For a small quantity, siphon into a demi-john and fit an air lock. For a large quantity, siphon the cider into a wide-necked fermenting vessel and fit an air lock if bottling, or siphon into a cask if not.
Cider is, unsurprisingly, usually made in the autumn and it is at temperatures typical of the season that it is fermented. A steady 15°C will do the trick, though it is a fairly forgiving process.
Some lees will continue to form but this can be a good thing as it will help to reduce acidity to palatable levels. A quite different type of fermentation may take place at some point over the next few months. It is called malo-lactic fermentation and is caused by a bacterium called Lactobacillus. It converts some of the malic acid into the considerably less potent lactic acid, making the cider much more palatable. It is an unreliable fermentation – sometimes it happens and sometimes not. The lees at the bottom can help because as the dead yeast cells break down (autolyse), nutrients are released to encourage malo-lactic fermentation.
There is very little unfermentable sugar in cider and the specific gravity will eventually go down to below 1000.
Your cider will be ready to serve from the cask or to siphon into bottles in about 4 months, though longer is better. If you are bottling, keep the air space at the top of the bottle to a minimum. Cider turns to vinegar for a pastime if it is exposed to air so casks too should be well sealed. Cider keeps pretty indefinitely but is generally consumed within a year.
Dry sparkling cider
I can’t think of a reason why anyone would make a dry sparkling cider; it is acidic enough already without adding the extra tang that carbonic acid provides. However, if sparkling dry cider is what you want, the usual method is the one also used in beer- and wine-making – bottle or cask conditioning. This is the process of adding more sugar and allowing the yeast to start fermenting again and produce carbon dioxide. If this fermentation takes place in a cask or bottle the carbon dioxide will be retained in solution and the cider will become fizzy.
Add sugar to the cider after a month in the fermenter or cask (see here), stirring it in with a long-handled spoon. You will need 7g to every 1 litre and I suggest caster sugar, which dissolves more easily.
If the cider is to be left in the cask there is nothing more to do, but if it is to be bottled leave it for 24 hours to settle, then siphon into Champagne bottles. There will be a small layer of dead yeast at the bottom of every bottle, so chill upright before serving and pour carefully.
Adding carbon dioxide
Artificially adding carbon dioxide is a second possibility if you wish to make a dry sparkling cider. Fitting a carbon dioxide cylinder to the top of a barrel of dry cider will fizz it up to some extent, with the added benefits of making it easier (or at least quicker!) to draw and filling the headspace with carbon dioxide rather than air which can spoil cider.
Sweet still cider
The time-honoured and simplest way to make sweet still cider is to add sugar or sweet apple juice to a dry still cider before serving. If you add sugar in any form to cider that is much less than a year old you risk setting off the yeast in it again. This will not only reduce the amount of sugar in the cider, which is what you are trying to increase, but will also produce carbon dioxide which could easily reach explosive levels in a bottle. This is why extra sugar should be added to cider at most a day or two before serving and the cider then preferably kept in the fridge.
Sweetening with sugar
Decant your dry cider (made to the method given here) into a jug and stir in some caster sugar until it achieves the level of sweetness you want. The effect this simple addition has on dry homemade cider is quite astonishing. Long before you taste any sweetness, you will notice a drop in acidity as the full, wonderful flavour of the cider emerges.
Sweetening with apple juice
Whenever I make cider I keep some fresh apple juice back to drink or to use for sweetening cider. In my opinion it is the very best way to sweeten cider. Apple juice does not keep very long in the fridge (2 weeks maximum) so it needs to be either frozen in plastic tubs or bottled. If you bottle apple juice then you will need to pasteurise it too, to prevent it fermenting – and turning into cider.
Pasteurising apple juice Fill some swing-top bottles with apple juice, leaving a 2cm gap at the top, and close the lids loosely. If you wish to be doubly sure, add about a quarter of a crushed Campden tablet for every litre of juice.
Stand the bottles upright on a tea-towel you are not fond of in a very large saucepan. If you are a beer maker you will have an industrial-sized stockpot, which is just the thing. Fill three-quarters of the way to the top of the bottles or the saucepan, whichever is the shorter, with cold water. If the pan lid does not fit on top, drape some more tea-towels over it and the bottles to keep the heat in. Put the pan on the hob and turn on the heat, making sure you don’t set fire to the tea-towels. Once it reaches a temperature of 70°C, lower the heat and maintain the temperature as best you can for 20 minutes. Turn off the heat, clip the lids shut, replace the lid or tea-towels and allow to cool.
Sweetening with non-fermentable sugars
Of course, fermentable sugars such as sucrose, fructose and glucose are not the only sugars; there are others that yeast cannot consume because they lack suitable enzymes. Chief among these is lactose, the sugar found in milk. If you add lactose to cider it will taste sweet, but it will not start fermenting again. Lactose is not quite as sweet as sucrose (the sugar you buy in packets) so you will need to use a little more than you might expect.
How sweet you want your cider to be is a matter of taste so you need to make a test sample. Weigh out 200g lactose. Take 500ml of your dry finished cider (see here) and stir in small quantities of lactose until you are happy with the level of sweetness. See how much lactose you have left. Do the maths for the quantity of cider you wish to sweeten and stir in the calculated amount to your cask or fermenter with a long-handled plastic spoon.
Unfortunately yeast is not alone in being unable to digest lactose: the majority of adults in the world are unable to do so either, having lost the enzyme (lactase) needed at weaning, though most northern Europeans do retain it. This issue may limit your use of lactose in cider; certainly, if you are lactose intolerant you can forget it, and if you are not then do warn people before passing round the bottle.
Fortunately, there are other sweetening agents such as sorbitol that can be used and these are available from home-brew suppliers.
Keeving
The most sophisticated way of obtaining a sweet cider is to employ the ancient technique of keeving. This limits the activity of yeast by simply starving it to death – not by allowing it to run out of sugar, but by reducing the amount of other nutrients instead.
Wild yeasts from the apples, air or, more commonly, the equipment begin to ferment the juice very slowly, forming a brown cap on the top of the juice which takes some nutrients with it. At the same time the pectin binds on to more nutrients and they sink together to the bottom. Because this method is popular in France, all these effects and processes have French names; the last one, unfortunately, is called défécation.
The following information comes courtesy of my friend Nigel from Bridge Farm Cider in Somerset (where else?), who tells me there is nothing to it. See what you think.
For keeving it is best to use bittersweet varieties of cider apple, preferably taken from mature orchards which produce fruit that is low in nutrients and high in tannin. If you are using dessert apples, they will need to be blended with around 30% crab apples though this is a difficult enough process already and using dessert apples at all is not going to help.
The process should begin on a cold day (when the temperature is about 5°C), and when it looks as though it will be succeeded by another 6 such days (or you clear out the fridge and use that).
Prepare the pomace as for dry still cider (see here) but instead of pressing it immediately, store it in a fermenting bucket for 24 hours. This enables the pectin to seep out of the apple cells and into the juice.
Press the pomace and run the juice into a fermenting bucket as usual. Add half the number of crushed Campden tablets that you would have used for a dry still cider (see here).
Cover the fermenting bucket for a week while the magic happens. You should see a brown cap forming on top of the juice within a day or so. If the fermentation becomes vigorous and the brown cap disappears to form a frothy white cap then all is not well and you will have to continue with this batch as a normal dry cider.
All being well after the week’s fermentation, you will be left with a nutrient-poor but sugar-rich juice. The juice is siphoned, carefully avoiding both sediment and froth, into a second fermenting bucket and allowed to ferment normally (see here), though fermentation will be slow because of the lack of nutrients. Fermentation will stop before all of the sugar has been metabolised due to lack of nutrients. The cider should be racked again to remove it from the sediment at about 2 months. The final gravity should be about 1015. Bottle or leave in cask. Over to you.
Sweet fizzy cider
The easiest and most reliable method for making sweet fizzy cider is to sweeten a dry fizzy cider, using sweet apple juice or sugar syrup (100g sugar dissolved in every 150ml water and brought to the boil). It is best to make the sugar syrup as adding sugar crystals would result in a rush of carbon dioxide from the cider. Adding sugar will normally have to be done immediately before serving by decanting the cider into a jug first.
Adding carbon dioxide to sweet still cider
You could do things the other way round and add carbon dioxide to cider sweetened by keeving or the addition of unfermentable sugar.
For a small quantity this will have to involve a domestic soda-maker, but it is possible to fit a carbon dioxide cylinder to a cask, which will fizz up the cider quite well (see here).
A more serious approach is to restart the fermentation of a cider that has been sweetened with non-fermenting sugar (see here) by adding sugar that will ferment. Stir 7g ordinary white sugar or glucose (fermentable sugar) for every 1 litre of cider into your cask or fermenting vessel of cider using a long-handled plastic spoon. With the cask there is nothing more to do, save keeping an eye on things. With a fermenting vessel, wait for a day or so to see if fermentation has restarted and then bottle immediately in Champagne bottles. There will be a small layer of dead yeast at the bottom of every bottle so chill upright before serving and pour carefully.
Things that go wrong with cider
If your sugar level (specific gravity) and acidity level are correct and you are careful about cleanliness, your cider will turn out healthy. Keeping it healthy is another matter. Exposure to air is the commonest cause of problems, cider vinegar being the end result. If you are siphoning into bottles, then do so carefully, not splashing the cider around and introducing air. If you are not bottling then the bag-in-a-box is ideal for allowing you to draw off cider without introducing air. A cask – where you need to let in air to draw out cider – is fine if you are going to drink the lot quite quickly, but if you want to keep it for several weeks I suggest fitting a carbon dioxide cylinder, which will fill the headspace with carbon dioxide, not air. It will make the cider a little fizzy, but that is not necessarily a bad thing.
I’ve never known a stuck fermentation in cider – apple juice seems to want to be fermented – but if you ever get one you will have a naturally sweet cider. Provided the specific gravity is not above 1015, it should contain enough alcohol to keep.
Perry
Even experienced cider makers find perry difficult to produce. Pears do not press well, clarity is very difficult to achieve and the pear juice can quickly become infected with Acetobacter, which produces acetic acid, in turn producing ethyl acetate. This is nail-varnish remover and the smell is overpowering. Unless the smell of ethyl acetate is only mild (ethyl acetate is the smell of pear drops so a little can only be a good thing), there is nothing to be done other than throw the whole batch away.
True perry, like true cider, is made from fruit bred for the purpose. As with cider apples these pears have interesting names, with ‘Late Treacle’ and ‘Dumbleton Huffcap’ leading a strong field in the silliness stakes. Unfortunately they are not so easily replaced with dessert varieties as cider apples are, because dessert pears lack sufficient acid and tannins to make a good perry. And, of course, they are pretty hard to come by in most parts of the country.
If you are using dessert pears you will need to use those that are fairly firm so that the juice may be extracted. It will also be necessary to add in the missing acids and tannin.
Although acidity can be increased by using malic acid, a more natural way is to use a proportion of crab apples in your perry. When using dessert pears to make perry, one-third of the pomace should consist of crab apple. However, you will need to experiment with the pears and crab apples you have to hand to achieve the correct level. Test for acidity using a pH meter or narrow-range pH-testing papers as for cider (see here). The bonus with crab apples is that they contain considerable amounts of tannin.
As anyone who eats pears will know, their sugar level is all over the place, from almost none at all to sickly sweet, so choosing your dessert pears and their degree of ripeness is important and more attention than usual is needed when testing the juice with a hydrometer.
The process for making a dry still perry is pretty much the same as for making a dry still cider and it can be sweetened and carbonated in the same way (see here). However, there are a few differences.
Whether using dessert or perry pears, it is important to double the number of Campden tablets you would normally use when sterilising a pomace for cider. This is because fairly high levels of acetaldehyde in pears inhibit the effect of sulphur dioxide, allowing Acetobacter to grow. Leave the pomace for 2 days instead of the usual 24 hours after the addition of the Campden tablets to give the sulphur dioxide time to dissipate.
Since the clouding effect of pectin is more of a problem with pears than with apples, make sure you do not forget to add pectic enzyme.
Adding other fruit or flowers to cider
If you like the flavour of certain fruits or the perfume of certain flowers there is no reason not to add them to your cider. Fruit-flavoured ciders have become quite popular, with several on sale in shops. Many fruits have been tried, from strawberry to pomegranate, raspberry to elderberry. The favourite, and the one I can heartily recommend, is blackberry cider. If you can make a sweet version, it is like blackberry and apple crumble in a glass. The only other one I have attempted is elderflower and I liked that too. For anyone who likes elderflower wine and cider, it is a delight.
Ending up with 25 litres of flavoured cider you do not like would be a minor tragedy, so start by making a small batch; just a demi-john will do. Even more cautiously you could add a little of the fruit juice or an infusion of flowers to a finished cider to see if it is likely to be worth making.
Blackberry cider Follow the recipe for cider here. Stir in 100ml blackberry juice for every 5 litres of the freshly made apple juice.
Elderflower cider Follow the recipe for cider here. Stir in the florets from 8 elderflower heads for every 5 litres of the freshly made apple juice.
Mulled cider
We cannot leave cider without mentioning this mainstay of Christmas, or more properly of Twelfth Night. Wassailing is still alive in my part of the world and you have not lived until you have stood in a circle round an apple tree singing…
Stand fast root, bear well top,
Pray God send a good howling sop:
On every bough, twigs enow,
On every twig, apple big.
Our ancestors employed any method that might encourage their apple trees to be fruitful – singing and banging drums is as good an idea as any. It would seem rude to have such a party without some of the fruits of the tree and, since Twelfth Night is in January, a warm drink is bound to be better than a cold one.
To make enough to serve 4, pour 1 litre still cider into a saucepan and add a glass of good apple juice if you like. Add 6 cloves and 4 cinnamon sticks, cover and bring slowly to the boil. As soon as it starts to simmer turn off the heat and add 200ml sloe gin (optional, but highly recommended) and 1 or 2 sliced oranges. Taste, and add a little honey or sugar if you want. Serve straight away... by a log fire.