I’ve only made hard cider once, but it turned out pretty good, so I’m going to post the recipe here before I lose it. When you ferment the cider, the yeast eats up all the sugar, so if you want it to be sweet, you have to “back sweeten” it. You can either add some sugar free sweetened like erythritol, or you can add sweetener to each glass before you drink it, which is the way I opted to go.
I have a 2.5 gallon brew keg that was part of a brew your own beer kit I bought on Amazon. I like it because it’s cone shaped, with a spigot on the side. The sediment falls into the tip of the cone, then you can drain your clean brew from the tap and not have to siphon it. I’d recommend watching some videos on brewing before you attempt to brew anything because I’m not an expert.
This recipe made 7, 32 oz bottles. I used plastic bottles with screw on tops. First you need some no-rinse sanitizer to sterilize your brewing container, bottles, anything that will come in contact with your cider.
Heat up two gallons of apple juice that is pure with no additives or preservatives that would keep the yeast from working.
Add 1 cup brown sugar and 1 cup corn sugar
2 tsp yeast nutrient
1 pack cider yeast
2 tsp pectin enzyme to clarify
Put that in the brewing container with an air lock and let ferment two weeks at 68 degrees
Transfer to bottles, adding sugar to prime. I’m still not sure how much sugar. I don’t want to blow up my bottles, so I’m going to try one teaspoon per 32 oz bottle. (I really think I’ll need 1.5 teaspoons, so I might get brave and go for it.) It doesn’t matter because we can always carbonate before drinking with a soda stream type home carbonation unit.
I take a can of apple juice concentrate and add a big scoop of brown sugar, heating until the sugar dissolves. Then I use this to back sweeten my cider. We seem to like about 3 Tablespoons of syrup to cup of cider, but you just sweeten to taste.