A guide to making cider at home

This guide is a very simple summary of how to make cider at home, we wanted to get the posting up on the site to start the ball rolling on our series of ‘Home Made Brewing’ guides, which will be available FREE in a series of postings on this site.

However, if you want a complete idiots guide to brewing at home, there will soon be an easy to follow guide on how to make your own scrumpy from home - available to anyone who signs up to our newsletter.  The guide will include tips on how to source the right apples, how to achieve the right taste, how to make your own press and store your cider.

Brewing Cider from Home

Making home made cider is very, very easy.  James and I, sourced the apples, made our cider press, pressed the apples and started our brew in one afternoon!

Selecting the Right Apples

Mixed cider apples from High Vale Orchard

We chose our Apples from High Vale Orchard, which can be found just outside of Pickering in WA.  We brought two hundred (200) mixed apples.

Half of the apples were bitter/bittersweet and the other half were sharp apples.

Although all of the apples from High Vale are Bio-Dynamic, we gave them a quick rinse in a bucket, just to make sure that all of the soil and dirt is washed off the apples.

It is important not to wash the apples properly as the surface of the apples contain a lot of the natural yeasts needed in the brewing process.

James cutting apples

Slicing the cider apples into pieces

To kickstart the brewing process you need to release a lot of the natural yeasts and sugars in the apples. The only way to do this is to dice the apples into small chunks.  James here on the left sliced his apples into quarters and then halved them again.

All the apple chunks then went into a bucket where we gave them a furter dice by attaching a food processor blade to a power drill then running the blade over the apples. This helps to mash and mulch the apples into fine apple shreds.

This process takes ages - but the smaller you can get the pieces of apple, the better!

Making the cider press

James screwing plate to the press

We sourced all of our materials for the cider press from Bunnings.  Bunnings is a hardware store in Australia, where you can find everything from large buckets to wooden benches and clamps - everything you need for a cider press!

We brought a metal truss with a wooden top, much like the ones used to support lengths of wood when cutting.  On top of the wooden bar that spans the truss’ legs we screwed a ply wood plate, which would form the bottom of the press.

We found that we had to screw four (4) 300mm x 300mm plates to the tuss, so that the press was strong enough to take the pressure of the press.

BrayOak Apple Cheese Press

We also sunk a central bolt, which not only allowed us to guide the cheeses and plates down, but also maintain the tension of the other apple ‘cheeses’ and plates being pressed.

Instead of using a big central screw or framed press we used two ‘G’ Clamps to close the press together.  We used a central bar, then later a thicker top plate for the clamps to grip to.  Once we turned each G clamp, the top plate would squash the apple cheese to the bottom plate forcing out juices into the buket below.

Some designs press the apples through a central barrel, but we chose to use a scaled down version of an industral press, so that we could control how many apple cheeses we pressed at a time and make sure that all of the juices are filtered through the sacking.

Making Cider Apple Cheeses

Charlie checks the cider cheese

We wanted to emulate traditional cider making by pressing our apples through hessian sacking, filtering out all of the larger pieces of apple from the mix.

To make these cheeses we took 300mm x 300mm squares of sacking and placed the mulched apple in the centre.  We then wrapped them by closing the edges of the sqares and placing it over the top of the central screw (which runs through the centre of the press).

We made sure that the edges of the cheese was not as big as the plate it sat on, as when it is pressed, the cheese spreads outwards and any over-hanging piece would not be pressed properly.  Once the cheese was in place, in the centre of the press, we placed another 300mm x 300mm plate on top.

Brewing the cider wort

Cider wort

Like in brewing beer (and wine infact…) you leave the apple juice in the bucket for a few days.  The wort has to react with the air for the yeast and sugars to kick start, the brewing process.  You know when the process has started when the top of the wort starts to foam and you can start to smell alcohol being produced.  We covered the top of the bucket so that dust didn’t drop into the mixture.

Traditional scrumpy contains some apple pulp with the juice.  This helps to put some more natural sugars into the wort. To add the pulp we set aside some of the diced and mulch apples and zapped them through a blender, adding a little bit of water to thin the solution out.

Bottling the cider into Demijons

Bottling cider into demijons

Once the wort is ready and you can smell the alcohol being produced, you need to strain it into steralized demijons.

To steralize the demijons, we filled them with cold water and then placed two Milton capsules into the water.  After about 15mins the demijons would be steralized.

We used a large funnel with an inline filter, as well as a muslin cloth to strain the wort pulp.  We found that if we filled the cloth, then squeezed it, we’d drain out a few more drops of apple juice.

Once we filled a demijon we sealed it with an bunged airlock.  This helps all the gases produced by the brewing to escape, without letting any air in.  We added a little brewing sugar (sugar refined with dextrose) into our Turbo cider, to give it an extra ‘kick’!

Turbo Cider

Fermentation of an natural cider should take about three months.  It helps that you have the demijons in a warm room (about 24 degrees) to help with the brewing.  A colder room means that the brew will take longer to finish.  You’ll know when fermentation has stopped when there are no more bubbles in the air lock.

We have another two months left on our brews, once they are finished we’ll let you know how strong they are - we are aiming for an O.G. of around 1038 and a F.G. of around 998 - which is about 6%!! Any higher and it will be a bonus!!!!!!