So Long, and Thanks for All the Apples: Making Cider at Home

Cider is what happens when apples are left alone with yeast and a little optimism. It is easier than beer, needs no boiling, and can be made from a kit or from a bottle of apple juice from the supermarket.

• DifficultyEasy
• Hands-on time30 min from a kit, 20 min from juice
• Ready inAbout 4 weeks
• Makes4 to 23 litres, your choice

An Apple a Day #

People have been fermenting apples for thousands of years, mostly because apples will happily ferment themselves if you turn your back on them for long enough. Brewing cider at home is simply doing this on purpose, with clean equipment and better results.

There are two roads. A cider kit is quick, consistent and comes in a range of flavours. Brewing from juice takes about twenty minutes and lets you make as little as 4 litres to try an idea. Both end with a cold glass of something crisp, and a mild sense of having outwitted an orchard.

Not Just Apples #

"Cider" has become a family name for almost any fruit that has met yeast. The main members of the family:

Type	What it is	How to make it
Apple cider	The original. Crisp, dry or sweet, clear or cloudy	Any apple kit, or 100% apple juice
Pear cider and perry	Made with pears. Softer, more floral and often a touch sweeter. Perry is the traditional name for cider made from pears alone	A pear kit such as the Mangrove Jacks Pear Cider, or 100% pear juice
Fruit cider	An apple or pear base with berries, stone fruit or tropical fruit added	A fruit kit such as Mixed Berry or Strawberry & Pear, or add fruit to a plain brew (see Make It Your Own)
Spiced and mulled cider	Warm spices such as cinnamon and cloves	The Mangrove Jacks Mulled Apple kit, or add spices yourself
Ginger cider	Apple with a ginger bite	Morgan's Cider Flavour Ginger, or fresh ginger
Hopped cider	Dry cider with citrusy hop aroma	Add hops for the last few days
Cyser	Apple and honey, halfway to a mead	Swap some of the sugar for honey

Everything in this guide works the same way whichever fruit you choose. Only the flavour changes.

Choosing a Kit #

A cider kit is concentrated apple (or pear, or berry) juice in a can or pouch. You dissolve it, top up with water and sugar, add yeast, and wait. Popular kits include:

• Coopers Apple Cider
• Morgan's Apple Cider (no yeast included, so pick one from the yeast table below)
• Black Rock Classic Apple Cider
• Mangrove Jacks Craft Series ciders, in flavours such as Apple, Pear, Mixed Berry, Strawberry & Pear and Mulled Apple. Most come with the dextrose included

Other brands work the same way. If you're after one we don't carry, ask us.

Want a twist without going off-road? Add a Morgan's Cider Flavour (Ginger, Lime or Strawberry) to a plain apple kit.

What you need alongside the kit #

Item	Why
A 15–30L fermenter	Somewhere for the yeast to work
Dextrose (H&S) 1kg	The sugar the yeast turns into alcohol and fizz. Use the amount on the kit label, unless your kit already includes it
Cider yeast	Only if your kit does not include one. See the yeast table below
Hydrometer	Tells you when fermentation has finished, so your bottles do not
A no-rinse sanitiser (we stock several)	Clean is good. Sanitised is better
Morgan's PET Bottles and Carbonation Drops	For bottling and fizz

Road One: Brewing From a Kit #

1. Sanitise the fermenter, lid, airlock and anything else that will touch the cider.
2. Dissolve the kit and the sugar in a few litres of hot water in the fermenter. Stir until nothing is lurking on the bottom.
3. Top up with cold water to the volume on the label, and stir well.
4. Check the temperature. Aim for about 18–22°C before the yeast goes in.
5. Take a gravity reading with your hydrometer and write it down.
6. Sprinkle the yeast on top, fit the lid and airlock, and leave it out of direct sun at a steady 18–22°C.
7. Wait about 10 days, then check the gravity. When it reads the same on two days in a row, fermentation is finished.

Cider ferments cooler than ginger beer likes to. Above about 24°C the yeast gets excited and makes harsh, hot flavours. In an Australian summer, a cool spot inside, a wet towel and a fan, or a fermenting fridge all help.

Road Two: From Juice #

This is the best way to experiment, because you can start with as little as 4 litres and try your own ideas. You need juice, a cider yeast, some yeast nutrient and a demijohn or fermenter.

Choosing the juice #

Any 100% apple juice will do, from the supermarket or a farm stall. Read the label first: it must have no preservatives. Sorbate (202) and benzoate (211) stop yeast in its tracks, which is exactly what they are there for. Added vitamin C (ascorbic acid, 300) is fine.

Juice	What you get
Clear apple juice	A clear, classic cider
Cloudy apple juice	More apple flavour, with a gentle haze
Pear juice	Perry, the cider made from pears. Softer and more floral
Apple with a splash of berry or cherry juice	A fruit cider. Check this juice for preservatives too

Ingredients #

Two things worth knowing #

Yeast nutrient is food for the yeast: mostly nitrogen, plus vitamins and minerals it needs to grow. Malt and grapes are full of it, but apple juice, pear juice and honey have very little. Yeast without it is like a builder without lunch. It works slowly, grumbles (often with a rotten egg smell) and may down tools before the job is finished. A small dose of yeast nutrient gives you a faster, cleaner ferment that finishes properly. Use it at the rate on the packet.

Why one sachet, whatever the size? A sachet of yeast is not a dose like a spoonful of sugar. It is a starter colony of billions of yeast cells, and once they find the sugar they multiply many times over. Each sachet, whatever its weight, is made to get about 20–25 litres going properly, so one sachet does a 23 litre batch, and in a 4 litre batch it simply gets going faster. You can use half for a small batch and keep the rest sealed in the fridge for a week or two, but using the whole sachet does no harm.

Method #

1. Sanitise a 5L Demijohn with Swing Lid, or a fermenter, plus the bung, airlock and funnel.
2. Pour in the juice, leaving a gap of a few centimetres at the top for foam. If you are adding dextrose, dissolve it in a little warm juice first.
3. Take a gravity reading. Apple juice usually starts around 1.045–1.050, which ferments out to roughly 6%.
4. Stir in the yeast nutrient until it dissolves, then add the yeast the calculator chose for your style (or pick your own from Pick Your Yeast below). Fit a bored bung and airlock.
5. Keep it at 18–22°C and wait 1–2 weeks. Check the gravity, taking the sample with a sanitised Plastic Wine Thief rather than tipping the demijohn: two identical readings a day apart means it is done. Pop your first and last readings into our ABV calculator to see how strong it is.

It may smell faintly of rotten eggs for the first few days. That is the yeast complaining about the lack of food, and it fades. Using nutrient helps a lot.

Pick Your Yeast #

Yeast makes a bigger difference to cider than you might expect. Same juice, different yeast, noticeably different cider.

Yeast	Gives you
SafCider AC-4 (Crisp)	Fresh, crisp and clean. A safe first choice
SafCider AB-1 (Balanced)	Rounded, with a bit more body
SafCider AS-2 (Sweet)	Keeps more of the apple aroma, so it tastes fruitier and less sharp
SafCider TF-6 (Tutti-Frutti)	Extra fruity. Great for berry and fruit ciders
Mangrove Jacks Cider Yeast M02	Crisp and dry, letting the fruit lead
BrewMaster Champagne/Cider Yeast	Clean and dry, an easy all-rounder
Lalvin EC-1118	Very clean and very dry, and copes with stronger ciders

Dry, Sweet and the Great Fizz Problem #

Left to itself, cider ferments right down to bone dry, because the yeast eats every last bit of sugar. Many people like it that way. Many others like their cider sweeter, and this is where things get interesting.

The problem is simple: sweetness is sugar, and sugar is yeast food. Sweeten a cider and then bottle it with live yeast, and the yeast eats the sweetness and turns it into more fizz than the bottle was ever designed to hold. You have three ways around this:

You want	How to get it
Dry and fizzy	The easy one. Bottle with Carbonation Drops as normal
Sweet and fizzy, in bottles	Add Lactose 250g at bottling. It is a sugar yeast cannot eat, so it stays sweet. It is made from milk, so it is not for anyone avoiding dairy
Sweet and still	Stabilise the finished cider so the yeast cannot restart (see below), then back-sweeten to taste. No fizz, because the yeast is out of the game
Sweet and fizzy, in a keg	Stabilise, sweeten, then carbonate with CO2 in the keg. The yeast is not needed for the fizz, so the sweetness is safe

Never add extra sugar to bottles of cider that has not been stabilised, and never bottle-carbonate a stabilised cider: it will stay flat. Stabilising and bottle carbonating cancel each other out.

Stabilising and back-sweetening, explained #

Back-sweetening simply means adding sweetness after fermentation has finished. It is common in cider (most supermarket ciders are back-sweetened), in mead and in wine. The catch is that the yeast is not dead, only resting, and it will happily eat any sugar you add. Stabilising is how you stop it, and it takes two products working together (the same steps work for wine and mead):

Product	What it does	How much
Campden Tablets	Releases a small amount of sulphite, which stuns the yeast and protects the cider from oxygen and spoilage	Usually 1 tablet per 4.5 litres, crushed and dissolved in a little cider. Check the packet
Potassium Sorbate	Stops yeast from multiplying. It cannot stop a ferment that is still going, which is why the cider must be finished first	At the rate on the packet

1. Make sure it has finished: two identical gravity readings a few days apart. Racking it off the yeast first helps too.
2. Add both, stir gently and wait 24–48 hours.
3. Back-sweeten to taste with sugar dissolved in a little warm cider, or with more apple juice, which adds sweetness and fresh apple flavour at the same time. Wine Expert Wine Conditioner is a ready-made sweetener for the job.
4. Keg it, or bottle it still. A stabilised cider will not carbonate in the bottle.

Campden tablets have other jobs too. Winemakers add one to fresh fruit or juice 24 hours before the yeast, to knock back any wild yeast and bacteria. Shop juice is already clean, so for the cider in this guide you only need them for stabilising.

Make It Your Own #

Cider is a wonderfully patient canvas. A few ideas, all for about 20–23 litres (use about a fifth for 4 litres):

Add-in	How	What it does
Fresh ginger	50–100g grated, simmered in a litre of the juice, cooled and added at the start	A warming bite. Ginger and apple are old friends
Cinnamon and cloves	2–3 sticks and 3–4 cloves, steeped in a litre of hot juice	Mulled, Christmassy cider
Berries	500g–1kg frozen berries, thawed and added in the second week	Colour, aroma and a tart edge
Hops	20–30g of a citrusy hop such as Citra, added for the last 3–4 days	A hopped cider: dry, aromatic and very refreshing
Brown sugar	Swap some or all of the dextrose	A richer, slightly caramel cider
Malic acid	A little at a time, tasting as you go	Malic is the natural acid in apples. It brings back the crisp bite to a flat juice or a soft pear cider

Add honey instead of sugar and you are making a cyser, which is halfway between cider and mead. Our mead guide explains the rest.

Bottling, Kegging and Keeping Your Cool #

Do I need to rack it? #

Usually not. Racking means gently moving the cider off the layer of yeast at the bottom into a clean vessel. For a cider you will bottle within a few weeks, you can skip it: bottle straight from the fermenter and leave the sediment behind. It is worth doing when:

• You added fruit. Rack it off the fruit once it has done its job, or it starts to taste stewed.
• You want it really clear. A week or two in a clean demijohn, off the yeast, lets more haze drop out. Cold crashing helps too: see Haze Is Not a Crime.
• You are ageing it for more than a month before bottling. Sitting on old yeast for a long time can give it a yeasty, savoury taste.

To rack, siphon it with an Easy Syphon into a clean, sanitised demijohn or fermenter, keeping the end of the tube above the sediment. Fill close to the top so there is little air touching the cider, then fit a bung and airlock.

Bottling #

1. Wait for two identical gravity readings. Bottling too early is how bottles become fireworks.
2. Sanitise your Morgan's PET Bottles and caps.
3. Add Carbonation Drops at the rate on the packet for your bottle size.
4. Fill to about 3–4cm from the top, cap tightly, and keep the bottles at room temperature for about two weeks. A fermenter with a tap and a Bottling Valve makes filling easy; from a demijohn, use an Easy Syphon. Either way, leave the sediment behind.
5. Once the bottles are rock hard to squeeze, move them to the fridge.

Cider improves with a few weeks in the bottle. The first one will taste good. The one you forgot about at the back of the fridge will taste better.

Kegging #

Cider kegs beautifully, and kegging is the easiest way to have it sweet and fizzy at the same time. Follow our kegging and regulator guides. Cider is usually served a little fizzier than beer.

Exact PSI for your fridge: our keg carbonation calculator works it out.

Serving suggestion: very cold, over ice if it is a scorching Australian afternoon, with a slice of apple for anyone who needs convincing it is healthy.

Happy brewing, and may all your apples fall upwards.