Anyone have a recipe handy ???

step one - buy cider

step two - freeze


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Let it sit long enough and when it gets tangy, you're there.

Show it cider porn?

Vague memory from childhood. From up-state NY, Polish side of the family.

They'd hold the cider until the first really hard freeze, then they'd put the jugs out for a good while. When all but the center was frozen they would drain off the core. I think they called it "apple jack".

May be bullshit as I heard a lot of "stories" when I was a kid.

Some history:

Hard apple cider: a history
During the Colonial Era, hard apple cider was the most popular alcoholic beverage in America yet has declined drastically in popularity since that time.
During the Colonial Era, hard apple cider was by far the most popular alcoholic beverage in America. There were many reasons for the immense popularity of apple cider at that time.

First of all, apple cider is relatively easy to make. In addition to that, the early English colonists in America brought a great quantity of apple seed with them to plant in the New World resulting in an abundance of apple trees. By as early as 1629 there were already many apple orchards in Virginia and the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The reason for all this growing of apple trees was not to eat apples but to drink them in the form of hard cider.

Apple cider had been popular with the people of Great Britain going back to the time of the Celts. By the time the English had settled in America, the art of cider brewing was very well known to them due to centuries of consumption of apple cider.

Unlike many other alcoholic beverages, apple cider could be consumed at any time of the day. In fact, John Adams, second president of the United States, drank it regularly at breakfast to soothe his stomach. The fermentation of apple cider killed the bacteria in that drink which made it preferable to drinking well water in that era because water was often contaminated and therefore less healthy than apple cider.

Apple cider continued in its popularity well into the 1800s due in part to the efforts of the legendary Johnny Appleseed who planted many apple trees in the Midwest. As a result, apple cider brewing spread into that area of the country. By mid century, beer was a distant second to apple cider in popularity. However, soon a series of events took place which was to diminish the consumption of apple cider and make beer the most popular alcoholic beverage in America.

As the settlers moved further west, it became more difficult to grow apple trees in those arid regions. Later, as more people moved from the country to the city, there wasn’t adequate transportation to deliver apple cider from the farms to the urban areas. Meanwhile, German beer with its faster fermentation process, was introduced into America. The German immigrants also set up large sophisticated breweries for producing beer in great quantities while apple cider production remained limited to the small farms.

What ultimately led to the demise in the popularity of apple cider consumption was the Temperance movement. Because the Temperance movement was religiously based, many of the church going farmers gave up their drinking of apple cider. Many of them even went so far as to chop down the apple trees on their farms.

When Prohibition finally became the law, this marked the death knell for apple cider. Although beer staged a quick comeback following the repeal of Prohibition in 1933, apple cider brewing was effectively destroyed and remained only on a very few family farms for many years to come.

With the growing popularity of microbreweries in the 1990s, alcoholic apple cider is once again enjoying a resurgence in popularity. Although apple cider is nowhere close to the popularity it enjoyed in the Colonial Era, the consumption of apple cider did double in just one year from 1995 to 1996 with renewed public interest in this brewing process considered to be so much a part of Americana.
Copyright 2002 by PageWise, Inc

Recipe

Hard Apple Cider #2714
by Dave | my other recipes | e-mail me
1 review

No photo posted yet.
Post a photo of this recipe.— Aug 16, 1999
4 1/2    liters fresh apple juice (no preservatives)  
1/2-1    lb sugar (not more than 2 lbs)  
1/2    teaspoon pectic enzyme powder  
1    teaspoon acid blend  
1/4    teaspoon grape tannin  
1/2    teaspoon yeast energizer  
2    campden tablets  
1    packet all purpose wine yeast  

10-16 servings 1 gallon Change size or US/metric | 2,784 hours 0 minutes

Change to:  gallon US Metric  
1.  crush and dissolve campden tablets in a cup of warm water and mix well with the FRESH apple juice in your primary fermenter.
2.  Let stand over-night. Mix in all other ingredients except yeast making sure everything is dissolved, then sprinkle yeast over top of juice and cover with plastic sheet and ferment 3 to 5 days.
3.  Rack (siphon) into secondary fermenter and attach air lock.
4.  Rack again in 3 weeks.
5.  When all fermentation is finished, rack into a clean vessel and add 2 oz of white sugar and gently stir well.
6.  (I usually put the sugar into a bit of water and dissolve it first by boiling it in the microwave) When sugar is well mixed, bottle and age 3 months.
7.  This will give you a crisp, carbonated hard cider.
8.  * the more sugar you add, the more alcohol you will get, but the longer it will take to ferment. I would recommend from 1/2 to 1 pound per gal/4.5 l and not more than 2 lbs.

© 2004 Recipezaar all rights reserved http://www.recipezaar.com

Flanders: "You know, most people don't know the difference between apple cider  and apple juice, but I do. Now here's a little trick to help you remember.  If it's clear and yella',  you've got juice there, fella!  If it's tangy and brown, you're in cider town.  Now, there's two exceptions and it gets kinda tricky here..."      

Quoted: step one - buy cider step two - freeze

damnit, you stole my smartass answer..............

Thank you
TrickyVic

Wing-It Recipe:

3/4 Gallon Cider
2 lbs sugar
1 tsp. Champagne Yeast

Dissolve sugar into 16 ounces of boiling water and add to cider.
(Mix this up in a jar or bottle)
Make sure mixture isn't hotter than 102 degrees, and add the yeast.  Mix well.
Cover top, BUT DON'T SEAL!!!, using AL foil or saran wrap and a rubberband.

Let sit for several weeks until it is mostly done bubbling.  Siphon it into old beer bottles with twist off caps.  DON'T siphon the dead yeast at the bottom!  Twist off caps are great since they can be resealed over and over, and hold pressure well.  Make sure you fill the bottles almost all the way up.

Seal the beer bottles.  Let them sit bottled for another month.

Chill and enjoy.  It will be pretty hard, and be carbonated if you do it right.  (This is not fine wine or anything)

TrickyVic posted a recipe very close to what we use to make Apple Cider wine.

Quoted: Quoted: step one - buy cider step two - freeze damnit, you stole my smartass answer..............

No, thats how you make cider hard, not hoqw you make hard dicer..hehehehe  I just had to have a smart ass answer too!!

Quoted: Quoted: Quoted: step one - buy cider step two - freeze damnit, you stole my smartass answer.............. No, thats how you make cider hard, not hoqw you make hard dicer..hehehehe  I just had to have a smart ass answer too!!

Have you been sippin' a little hard dicer tonight?

Quoted: Show it cider porn?

Heheheheh

Quoted: Flanders: "You know, most people don't know the difference between apple cider  and apple juice, but I do. Now here's a little trick to help you remember.  If it's clear and yella',  you've got juice there, fella!  If it's tangy and brown, you're in cider town.  Now, there's two exceptions and it gets kinda tricky here..."

"Flanders?!!? What the hell are you doing here?"

"Lifetime pass!  Pays for itself!"

like with wine you can't let it get exposed to too much air.  If you put it in a sealed container with a tube stickng out of it witht he other end in water then the co2 can get out but air can't get in.  At least that's what you do wtih wine, maybe not cider.

I don't know how to make it, but I can tell you how NOT to drink it.

DON'T lay down beside a barrel and suck it through a short piece of garden hose.

It will make you "pissy drunk" then sick as all get out.

Yes, I was young once. I know.

Danny

From my childhood memories from high school:
1)Take a day off from school & make a trip to the local cider mill.
2)But a half gallon of unpastuerized cider, place on the floor in the back seat of the car, and forget about it until December or January.
3) Find said container when cleaning out the car and find the now distorted (pressurized) plastic container in which the contents now appear "foamy".
4) Drink & Enjoy!
X

I helped make a cask full about 8  or 9 years ago. Going from memory:

Hard Cider

1 wooden whiskey cask
40 gallons of fresh(unpasturized) apple cider
7 pounds of sugar
2 pounds of honey

1)Drain 4 or 5 gallons of cider into a large pot.

2)Heat up and disolve the sugar and honey in the cider, don't boil.

3)Put cider/sugar/honey mix back into the cask with the rest of the cider. Install bung.

4) Bury the cask 6 feet deep in the ground for 11 months*. This does 2 things- it keeps the cask at a constant temp and the dirt supports the cask equally around the outside of the cask. It also keeps you from messing with it! Checking to see if , maybe, perhaps, it will be ready now, no?, ok , maybe next week.

5)Syphon the cider up out of the cask with out removing it from the hole. There will be some sediment in the bottom of the cask. Use glass bottles to store it in, keep in a cool place. It will keep untill the next batch comes up from the hole. You WILL get drunk if you are doing the syphoning.

This stuff will have a good kick, the cider that I have had, 4 different batches from 2 different guys, went down like apple juice. It will ,however, make you forget how to walk after 2 or 3 glasses. It is approx 15 or 18% alcohol.



*Why 11 months? That gives you enough time to get everything ready for the next batch, for next year.

Quoted: Make sure it is unpastuerized... pastuerized cider will not turn hard without assistance.  NY requires all cider be pastuerized before sale to the public...

No it doesn't, we have several cider mills around us that sell straight from the press to the jug. I have a gallon in the fridge for 4 weeks so far. One year we collected apples and had 40 gallons pressed. Finished it in a month. The last several were getting zippy.

S.O.